FW

Establishing Salt Lake Valley

After Brigham and the first group reached the Salt Lake Valley in July 1847 Brigham went back to meet up with the saints that were being led by Parley P. Pratt and John Taylor. Brigham ran into them in Wyoming at Ft. Bridger. He sees that they had brought way too many people with them. They were only supposed to have 100 wagons that consisted of the poor and the Mormon battalion families, instead there were 600 wagons and none of them consisted of the poor and the families of the battalion members. Brigham was furious and chewed out Parley P. Pratt.
There were now 1600 people in Salt Lake Valley because of Pratt. The first winter there was really hard on the saints, they had no food to feed their families. People would go up into the mountains to find dead animals to bring back to cook and eat. They were basically eating road kill. It was amazing that only 12 out of the 1600 people died that winter. If this was their only challenge in establishing the valley they would have moved along just great, but they had several other things to worry about like establishing relations with the Indians that occupied the area.
At the time there were four tribes that occupied Utah: the Gashiute, Paiute, Shoshoni, and the Utes. The Utes gave us the most problems out of the four and its ironic that they still do today. (LOL). The problem was that the Utes were stealing women and children from the other tribes around there and selling them to the Mexicans and also trying to sell them to us when we arrived. Brigham drives out the Mexican slave traders and the Utes get mad at this and say that the saints then need to buy the slaves. Brigham agreed to buy them, he thought it was a better idea to try and be friends with the Indians than try to argue with them. The Utes want to trade slaves with guns and ammo, but Brigham will only trade food and provisions. The Utes get angry over this and start a war, called the Walker War named after chief Wakara of the Utes.