Jefferson Hunt was elected representative. On January 18, after four days “residence” in Iron County, he went on with his party toward Great Salt Lake with his credentials in his pocket. The settlers immediately set to work building a combined town and fort, making roads to the mountains for timber, clearing land for cultivation, digging irrigation ditches, setting up workshops and mills. On April 10-12, 1851, Parley P. Pratt, on his way to the Pacific Coast, passed through the settlement and found it in a flourishing condition. By May, coal had been discovered in Cedar Canyon and its value in blacksmithing demonstrated. In the fall, after crops were harvested, a group of settlers moved from Parowan to the present site of Cedar City. The discovery of good coal deposits within a few miles of the iron ore aroused much interest among the Mormon leaders. The prospects for the development of an iron industry invited steps looking toward this. The word was dispatched to their representatives in Europe. Apostles Erastus Snow and Franklin D. Richards, then on missions in England, who organized the Deseret Iron Company in Liverpool in the spring of 1852, for the development of the Utah deposits.[28] Steel and iron workers as well as coal miners among the English converts were encouraged to migrate to Utah to help in the iron industry. Snow and Richards returned to Salt Lake City in August, and in November, Snow went south to arrange matters on the spot. By the spring of 1852, two foundries were in operation. E. H. Beale and G. H. Heap, California bound, passed through the settlements, August 2-4, 1853. Heap gives a vivid picture of that early life.[29] His party came by the Sevier River over the Old Spanish Trail to Paragonah, Parowan and Cedar City on its way to the coast. Paragonah had thirty adobe houses arranged in the form of a quadrangle to form a fort. Outside the fort was an area of fifty acres enclosed by a single fence and cultivated in common by the inhabitants, a practice soon discontinued when the lands were divided into individual farms. The Indian War under Chief Walker, which had broken out in July 1853, farther north, had spread southward. Walker and his band had been harassing outlying settlements and stealing cattle and horses. Brigham Young sent one hundred and fifty men into action against him, declared martial law and ordered the people to concentrate in large communities. This order came to Paragonah while Heap was there. He says the inhabitants quickly began to move. Houses were demolished, windows, doors and furniture loaded into wagons, and they were soon on the road to Parowan. Parowan was similarly organized but was much larger, having a hundred houses and a four hundred-acre field outside the fort. In describing Cedar City, Heap states that it was a place of even greater importance than Parowan, having extensive fields outside the fort abundantly irrigated. He writes: