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128 Utah Historical Quarterly the exception of the lead mines near Las Vegas in 1857. ,s His efforts to develop the Colorado River as a freight and passenger route proved to be shortsighted and ephemeral; and when Brigham Young finally visited the lower Virgin River area in M a r c h 1870 he permitted the Saints there to abandon the mission. 9 I n nearly every instance, church leaders' judgments of the national scene and its implications for the Dixie Mormons were lacking. T h e Civil W a r was not the end. Dixie cotton production remained marginal at best, even in the St. George fields. For Mormons on the lower Virgin it wras less than that. Dixie wine prospered during the decade of Silver Reef but presented Mormons themselves with a multitude of problems. I n time the cooperatives gave way to direct capital merchandising such as the firm of Woolley, Lund, and J u d d ; and the United O r d e r was soon replaced with private enterprise. It should be noted also that although Brigham Young gave little support to promoting the Deseret Alphabet, he did through all these years defend tenaciously the principle and practice of polygamy which, along with Mormon theocracy, kept the Saints in an antagonistic political position with the federal government and the nation. These policies forced Mormons to do most of what they did on their own rather than seek natural alliances with the larger community. But then that practice seems to be in line with Young's concept that labor was the primary source of wealth anyway. Brigham Young's programs for early Dixie did not look forward to the twentieth century and certainly not to the twenty-first. Rather, they turned inward to Zion, not outward to integrate with the world. Whether or not what he did wras best for that time and for Dixie today is speculative. But there are some questions one should ask. Would it not have been better for Dixie settlers to have early developed livestock enterprises or at least other subsistance agriculture? Would not Mormons in the long run have prospered best by prospecting in Pioche, Panaca, and Silver Reef, if not individually, at least under the auspices of the Mormon church? And should not Mormons have worked both as laborers and entrepreneurs so that the wealth of those mines could have come into the kingdom? Why should the Gentiles have had all the good things anyway? Would not that approach have hastened Dixie's move to a modern, prosperous economy, such as it has today? "s Andrew Jenson, comp., " T h e Flistory of the Las Vegas Mission," Nevada State Society Papers, 1925-26 ( R e n o : Nevada State Historical Society, 1926), 5 : 2 7 0 - 7 6 . 58 James Liethead, "Journal," p. 9, typescript, Lee Library. Historical