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Show Page 154 In this circuit of the north end, the brethren finally returned to the twin creeks, having found "no place equal to that." Orson moved the advance camp into the valley on July 23, and settled them on the banks of this pure cold water, which Orson judged sufficiently momentous for millsites and other machinery. With the urgency of planting on everyone's mind, Orson first called the company together to carry out the priestly obligation whch culminated seventeen years of wandering and thousands of miles of uncertainty. It fell to Orson as company leader and chief apostle present to dedicate the land to God, to consecrate the site of a city of Saints, and to express thanksgiving for their preservation. They would 40 wander no more. No time was lost in getting a dam started, ploughing several square rods of "exceedingly dry" soil (the legend holds that steel blades snapped like twigs against the ground - even after water was turned onto it). But a fresh shower in the afternoon cooled the dust. Turnips and potatoes were laid in, the first permanent seed of Mormon colonization which would within a few years flower into hundreds of cities and farms. Orson Pratt had chosen and dedicated the site of the new Nauvoo, and Brigham Young had not yet seen it. The President of the Twelve still lay abed in his white-top, moving gingerly down the track that Orson had graded with his advance crew, and shouldered around the mouth of Emigration Canyon around noon Saturday, July 24. The encampment bustled some three miles below him to the north as Brigham surveyed mountain blocks and the prairie with the distant oily glimmer of the lake. The new city creek probably showed a patch of green from his vantage point. "It is enough. This is the right place," he announced, no doubt approving Orson's choice of a site as well as affirming the revelatory preparations which had conducted him here. The Saints held & sacrament meeting "the next day. 41 |