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Show Page 192 suddenly realized his horses were missing, apparently stolen by the Omahas. Otherwise the crossing was uneventful. The pioneers who traveled with Orson made up one of the innumerable poor companies, emigrants from Britain, mostly, traveling on sheer promises of payment to the Perpetual Fund. The journey consumed a little over three months, and on October 4, 1851, Orson crept with his three families around the mouth of Emigration Canyon, giving them their first look at the promised land they had 12 waited four years on the Missouri to see. In the autumn of 1851, Great Salt Lake City was no longer merely an adobe outpost clinging to the edge of the greasewood desert; fortune-hunters had made Salt Lake prosperous as they re-fitted on their way to the Sierra gold fields, and ditches flowing with City Creek water fed stark saplings along the streets. A huge "bowery" roofed with brush sprawled over the temple block - Orson preached in conference there the day after his arrival. The vast basin empire envisioned by Brigham Young had already been mapped and sliced up by Congress into territories with unnatural boundaries, tying lines of latitude to the dry ground. Utah Territory was a hemisphere away from the damp soot air of England and its philosophical torments; here Orson could turn again to the observable, the measurable, and leave citified riddle-makers far behind him. Brigham Young watched his small eyes as Orson unpacked a crate of scientific instruments a few days after arrival. From England he had brought a new telescope, a microscope, and apparatus for chemical experiments, The new university's Department of Science had arrived, but the polymath of Mormonism was not to have much time for contemplation and experimentation. Within two weeks he was on his way with a committee of engineers to locate a new capital city of the territory, more central to its vast stretch - from the Colorado to the Sierra Nevada - and, in deference to the new 13 |