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Show The Ute-San Pitch presence in the Sanpete Valley lingered on, but it was not long before most of these people were instructed to remove to the 1 large reservation set aside in the Uinta~ Basin after 1872. I Despite persisting dangers, the Sanpete communities continued to grow throughout the decade of the 1860s. Church surveyors laid out grid-iron townsites, with settlers drawing lots for ownership of homestead lots on the city blocks. The transition from fort to town life was rapid in each of the communities for few of the Saints found fort living attractive. Joseph Hansen, a Danish immigrant, spoke for many when he wrote in his diary that ''to people throughout their lives that h~d had good, comfortable homes with plenty of the necessities of life this condition must have been very hard to bear. 1114 Manti residents had begun moving out onto their city lots as early as 1851, but the general occupation of the plat was not fully effected until the late 1850s. 15 Ephraim was surveyed in 1860 and the movement out into the city cccurred shortly thereafter. The shift from fort to city living came later to the communities in the northern valley, but most towns here were platted and occupied by the late-1860s. As soon as possible then families left the protective enclosures of their forts, an exposed condition that led one Church official to remark: "Truly this is a people of great faith; for they rely upon little else for protection. They settle out upon their city lots and farms with all the freedom and apparent sense of security that the people of Illinois and Iowa do upon . pra1r1es. . . 1116 Such concern was hardly justified, or at least, th e1r the comparison itself was inappropriate, for the concentrated Sanpete settlements themselves provided a degree of built-in protection that bore little resemblence to the scattered, vulnerable farmsteads of the 67 |
