When President Brigham Young during the first days of
the California gold excitement, when men were dropping the
hoe to pick up the drill, uttered his famous saying: "Brethren,
don't leave your farms; the day will come when a barrel of
wheat will be worth a barrel of gold," he spoke with a prophecy
 that no one since the days of Moses has done.

As he stood on the bench overlooking Salt Lake valley on
that memorable 24th day of July, 1847; as he gazed below him
at the sage and alkali plane - the shimmering waves of heat
pulsating in the hot July sun, not even his prophetic eye, not
even his supreme faith in the Almighty, enabled him to grasp
the full significance of what was coming after him.

His remark about deserting the farms became a truth.
During the locust plague; during the heavy days and sombre
nights of drought, when men placed the floor in an agony of apprehension
and mothers soothed hungry, sobbing babes at
their own feeble breasts, then men and women remembered the
words of their leader.

As the days came and went and that mighty giant of empire
building saw the progress of a city, then of a state, even of
a vast intermountain domain, no weighty thoughts of self-
gratulation filled his mind. Imbued with his faith in the Almighty;
strong in his belief of the unconquerable and unquenchable
spirit of those who filled his lead and who subjugated
the barren wilderness, he went on and on, the empire
spreading under his masterful sprit, the souls of men made
strong under the sway of his strong guidance. And today
results of those efforts are being shown more and more.

From the barren alkali flat of Salt Lake valley, with a dead
sea glimmering on the edge of the sky where the sun dies,
Emerged a beautiful city, whose praises are sung from one
corner of the globe to the other; whose people - honest, energetic,
strong in their faith in themselves and their fellow men -
have unconsciously followed the tutorship of a giant of brains,
a man who never feared, who never considered obstacles.

And like the tiny tendrils that sweep from the parent vine,
sapping life and strength from the lusty parent root, so,
throughout the length and breadth of the state of Utah have
spring up hamlets, almost in the twinkling of an eye. Where
the setting sun shone down in lurid hue upon the decaying
carcass of the buffalo or was reflected form the sombre visage
of the austere Indian, the rising sun on the following morning
gazed upon implements of husbandry, saw signs of energy
and toil, witnessed the beginning of the subjugation of nature's
wildest forces.