In 1842 Joseph the Prophet wrote: "I prophesied that the saints would continue to suffer much affliction and would be driven to the Rocky Mountains * * * and some of you will live to go and assist in making settlements and build cities and see the saints become a mighty people in the midst of the Rocky Mountains." Why did Joseph Smith speak of the Rocky Mountains as a gathering place for his people? Was it simply because the place was far off and offered, apparently, good security? If so, he builded better than he knew. But what prompted Brigham Young to plant his cane by the shore of an alkali lake and say, Here we shall remain? That certainly was not for security only. Perhaps he was tired of wandering? Though he may have been so, yet he was not the man to give up when near something better. Perhaps he thought the valley fair, and the blue mountains may have rested his eyes? If that was the motive of settlement, he, too, builded better than he knew. Certainly it is that these two men who historically hold the responsibility for bringing the Latter-day Saints here, did not know, by the world's learning, that the valleys of Utah are filled with the richest soil, waiting only to yield manifold to the husbandman; for the world did not yet know, and had no means for predicting it. These men were not scientists. They had no laboratories in which, by long hours, over long drawn fires, and among a hundred fumes, to draw out for themselves the law of the fertility of arid soils, which has but recently become the property of modern science. It is not likely that the records of a lost learning, unknown today, taught them this fact. Though they had had such records, they were unlettered men, and the ancient tongues would have been dead indeed to them, had they attempted an interpretation by their own efforts. Why then, did they bring the people here? Was it a chance move? A blind effort, acting out the desperation that comes from long persecution? If an element of chance entered into the location in the valleys of Utah, it was akin to wisdom. _And it was wisdom_ of the highest kind; at which the world ever stands in reverent wonder; inspiration from the living God. The logic that science, itself, applies to facts in the deduction of its laws, makes it impossible to believe that the settlement of the pioneers in the Salt Lake Valley was a chance move. Nothing, from the point of view of human wisdom, encouraged the pioneers to remain in Utah--they were in the center of a desert; the leaders were urged by many of the company to go on, for there were fairer climes to the west or the south, or on the islands of the sea. But the leaders were possessed of a wisdom higher than that of men, and founded an empire on the wastes of the Great American Desert.