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Show their exodus. Church leaders quickly appropriated the Judeo-Christian concept of wilderness as a symbolic device. The formidable Great Basin offered the Mormon people sanctuary from a persecuting society and became the place where the faithful would be tested.11 These Latter-day Saints quite naturally felt no special concern for the preservation of wilderness. As the kingdom of God was erected in the mountains, the desert would give way to earthly paradise. The inherent conflict between the opposing ideas of wilderness and garden created a dichotomy readily exploited in Church rhetoric. The individual pioneers, however, saw such a conflict dramatically before them: The rugged mountains, endless skies, and semiarid valleys must have struck these dislodged Easterners as awesome indeed. From that first day in 1847 when the creeks of Salt Lake Valley were diverted for irrigation water, the struggle against the wilderness was joined. The village townscape (Fig. 47) which became ubiquitous in Utah, with its geometrically defined streets and overstated visual order, comforted the settlers by effectively drawing a boundary between man and nature.12 Domestication was the watchword. The Church's President, Brigham Young, instructed his followers not to ravage and despoil the land, but rather to subdue it and make it beautiful: There is a great work for the Saints to do; progress and improve upon and make beautiful everything around you. Cultivate the earth and cultivate your minds. Build cities, adorn your habitations, make gardens, orchards and vineyards, and render the earth so pleasant that when you look upon your labors you may do so with pleasure, and that angels may delight to come and visit your beautiful locations.^ The Edenic garden envisioned by the Utah Mormons would become the blueprint for the world of the future. Following the Parousia, the Millennium would be ushered in according to the plan which the Saints had established in Utah. In their efforts to realize the prophecy, the kingdom builders of the Great Basin sent nature reeling before them. The rejection of nature forms the first tenet of the folk architectural aesthetic. The conflict between garden and wilderness is not peculiar to Utah or to any particular religious group; this simple opposition is a persistent theme echoing throughout American history. Early colonists reached the shores of this continent confident that a true paradise awaited their arrival. The seventeenth century viewed America as a land of "fabulous riches, a temperate climate, longevity, and garden-like natural beauty."14 Greeted by the harshness of a "howling wilderness," these newcomers struggled valiantly to transform wild reality back into Edenic dream. Untamed land 40 |