In general, the Mormon (and the word will be used without quotation marks) always has been agricultural. The Church itself appears to have a foundation idea that its membership shall live by, upon and through the products of the soil. It will be found in this work that Church influence served to turn men from even the gold fields of California to the privations of pioneer Utah. It also will be found that the Church, looking for extension and yet careful of the interests of its membership, directed the expeditions that penetrated every part of the Southwest. There was a pioneer Mormon period in Arizona, that might as well be called the missionary period. Then came the prairie schooners that bore, from Utah, men and women to people and redeem the arid southland valleys. Most of this colonization was in Arizona, where the field was comparatively open. In California there had been religious persecution and in New Mexico the valleys very generally had been occupied for centuries by agricultural Indians and by native peoples speaking an alien tongue. There was extension over into northern Mexico, with consequent travail when impotent governments crumbled. But in Arizona, in the valleys of the Little Colorado, the Salt, the Gila and the San Pedro and of their tributaries and at points where the white man theretofore had failed, if he had reached them at all, the Mormons set their stakes and, with united effort, soon cleared the land, dug ditches and placed dams in unruly streams, all to the end that farms should smile where the desert had reigned. It all needed imagination and vision, something that, very properly, may be called faith. Sometimes there was failure. Occasionally the brethren failed to live in unity. They were human. But, at all times, back of them were the serenity and judgment and resources of the Church and with them went the engendered confidence that all would be well, whatever befell of finite sort. It has been said that faith removes mountains. The faith that came with these pioneers was well backed and carried with it brawn and industry. "Mormon Settlement in Arizona" should not carry the idea that Arizona was settled wholly by Mormons. Before them came the Spaniards, who went north of the Gila only as explorers and missionaries and whose agriculture south of that stream assuredly was not of enduring value. There were trappers, prospectors, miners, cattlemen and farmers long before the wagons from Utah first rolled southward, but the fact that Arizona's agricultural development owes enormously to Mormon effort can be appreciated in considering the establishment and development of the fertile areas of Mesa, Lehi, the Safford-Thatcher-Franklin district, St. David on the San Pedro, and the many settlements of northeastern Arizona, with St. Johns and Snowflake as their headquarters.