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Show Page 1 INTRODUCTION "Unto what shall I liken these kingdoms, that ye may understand?" He was the first one to see it, from the top of a mountain on July 21, 1847. At the sight of the hot, silent lake of America's inner desert, Orson Pratt gave a holy shout of "Hosannal" - at once a plea for salvation and a recognition that this was the anointed "right place." Ruts in the ground running before him marked the traces of the few half-mad seekers who had crossed the previous year into this valley. To them, this poisonous waste of salt had meant extinction. They had dropped wardrobes and wagons in the blinding sand, gathered dead grass to eat, and, ultimately, fed upon each other. But Orson Pratt saw in the Great Salt Lake Valley the very integument 1 of Paradise. Like Joshua, "full of the spirit of wisdom," he sought in words the praise of this land, the sworn inheritance, everything, to the going down of the sun, that God had promised his people. He searched in his mind the sayings of Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Isaiah, grasping with sudden and literal exegesis the references to exaltation in the high places 2 and "the precious things of the lasting hills." He was the first to see it, and also the first to understand. He stood at the front of a line stretching a thousand miles eastward, the whole train of Israel. His prophet, who had called the people into the mountains, clattered down a canyon three days back, and beyond him there were plodding congregations of tens, fifties, and hundreds blinking back the cloud rising 3 out of the West, which Christ had promised as a sign of his coming. In |