But the voice of their leader was heard. "The very place," said Brigham Young, and in his prophetic mind there rose a vision of what was to come. Not for a moment did he doubt the future. He saw a multitude of towns and cities, hamlets and villas filling this and neighboring valleys, with the fairest of all, a city whose beauty of situation, whose wealth of resource should become known throughout the world, rising from the most arid site of the burning desert before him, hard by the barren salt shores of the watery waste. There in the very heart of the parched wilderness should stand the House of the Lord, with other temples in valleys beyond the horizon of his gaze. Within a few hours after the arrival of the vanguard upon the banks of what is now known as City Creek--the mountain stream which today furnishes Salt Lake City part of her water supply--plows were put to work; but the hard-baked soil, never before disturbed by the efforts of man to till, refused to yield to the share. A dam was thrown across the stream and the softening liquid was spread upon the flat that had been chosen for the first fields. The planting season had already well nigh passed, and not a day could be lost. Potatoes and other seed were put in, and the land was again flooded. Such was the beginning of the irrigation system, which soon became co-extensive with the area occupied by the "Mormon" settlers, a system which under the blessing of Providence, has proved to be the veritable magic touch by which the desert has been made a field of richness and a garden of beauty; a system which now after many decades of successful trial is held up by the nation's wise and great ones to be the one practicable method of reclaiming our country's vast domains of arid lands. It was on the 24th of July, 1847, that the main part of the pioneer band entered the valley of the Great Salt Lake, and that day of the year is observed as a legal holiday in Utah. From that time to the present, the stream of immigration to these valleys has never ceased. CHAPTER IV