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Show 26 short time after their arrival. After their calamities in the eastern states, the Mormons were determined to make a permanent home in the Rocky Mountains. They did this-and in great part on the Ute's land. The Mormons had the advantage of two years' grace before any difficulties arose. This was because the new Mormon Mecca, Salt Lake City, was founded on the borderlands of the Utes. It was a borderland area which had some disadvantages. The Great Salt Lake and the barren and bleak soil surrounding it lay to the west. The mountains to the east and easy access from the north from whence Utes were often attacked by the Shoshones made the site less desirable to these Indians than the more fertile area around Utah Lake, fifty miles to the south. In addition, the Utes had experienced no permanent interlopers in their land, except for the southern fringes on the far away New Mexican frontier- ' It seems natural that the Utes did not resist in the beginning for i\ was the pattern they had followed in the past. Their visitors had not previously come to stay. In spite of a revelation that instructed the Saints to include the Indians in the proselyting effort of their church, the pressures of frontier life probably caused the Mormon-Indian relationship to repeat in large measure the pattern that had been evidenced elsewhere in the United States, and the inevitable trouble developed. The Mormon invasion was very large; its expansion was a worthy counterpart. The settlements along the west front of the Wasatch |