Twelve Mormon Homes : Twelve Mormon homes visited in succession on a journey through Utah to Arizona.

Twelve Mormon Homes, page 138

fairly in the delicious climate with which our winter was to be blessed. One more ascent, leaving the gray stone factory behind, with its cottonwoods fringing the dashing torrent, and we began the final descent to St. George, seeing the Rio Virgen sparkle in the distance under the last rays of sunset. Twilight was falling, and the plain below us was in shadow as we came to the end of our journey. Smokes and trees softly intermingled in the evening air as we looked down from the bluff upon the little town, and the gay voices of children playing reached us clearly. We descended, noticing a factory, a court- house, or town-hall, wide, red, sandy streets, trees with grape- vines clinging to them on the sidewalks, pretty rows of small but comfortable-looking houses, each in its own vineyard among fig and peach trees. We stopped before a large house, where lights were already burning in our suite of rooms; 71 and I uttered a 71There is some dispute over the stopping place of the Kanes. It could not have been the Brigham Young winter home that is now a state museum, despite the claim of one writer. That home was not built until two years after the Kanes' visit. Albert E. Miller in his The Immortal Pioneers, Founders of the City of St. George, Utah ( [St. George:] A. E. Miller, Ig46), p. I 14, says "The home of Lucy B. Young, a wife of the President, was given over to the General and family for their use while they were here." However, Brigham Young's daughter, Susa Young Gates, states in her biography of her father "But when Gen. Thomas L. Kane brought his family down to St. George in the winter of 1873, father had to ask Uncle Erastus Snow to entertain the distinguished visitors at his own spacious home, the Big House, presided over by kind Aunt Libbie Snow." Gates, Life Story of Brigham Young, p. 352. Also disputing Miller's statement, Albert L. Zobell, Jr., in his Sentinel in the East, A Biography of Thomas L. Kane (Salt Lake City: Nicholas G. Morgan, Sr., Pub lisher, Ig65), p. 212, says, "While in St. George General Kane made his headquar- ters at the `Big House' or Snow Hotel, as it was known, located at the corner of First North and Main Streets. This establishment was kept by Elizabeth Snow wife of