Vision in the brush

The first Latter-day Saints into the Great Basin, Orson Pratt and Erastus Snow, looked out over the sweeping valley before them on July 21, 1847, and shouted for joy. After being hedged up in the mountains for weeks, they found the "grand and lovely scenery" overwhelming.Within three days all of the covered wagons of the first pioneer company had labored down the steep mountains and entered the brush-covered, mostly treeless valley. By the 24th when Brigham Young's wagon arrived, land had been plowed, water diverted from the stream they named City Creek to irrigate the land, and five acres of potatoes planted.

On the evening of Wednesday, July 28, Brigham Young, accompanied by the apostles in that pioneer company, walked to a site between and a little below the forks of City Creek.

He struck his cane on a certain spot of the sagebrush-covered earth and said, "Here will be the Temple of our God. Here are the forty acres for the Temple. The City can be laid out perfectly square, north and south, east and west." Afterward, Elder Wilford Woodruff marked the spot with a stake.

Later the entire body of pioneer settlers met at the "temple grounds" and sustained his plan by unanimous vote. This site quickly became the spiritual headquarters for the Church, where a bowery was built a few days later.

In 1853, speaking in the tabernacle (a predecessor to the present building) that had replaced the bowery on Temple Square, President Young recalled, "I scarcely ever say much about visions, but suffice to say, five years ago last July, I was here and saw in the spirit the temple we should build. Why? Because it was represented before me. I have never looked upon that ground but the vision of it was there. I see it as plainly as if it was in reality before me. Now don't any of you apostatize because it will have six towers to begin with instead of one, and Joseph only built one. It is easier for us to build sixteen than it was for him to build one."

In 1880, Wilford Woodruff acknowledged that he, too, had seen the temple in a dream: "I dreamed of seeing a large fine looking temple erected in one of those valleys." Elder Woodruff, one of the few at the site who lived to see the completion of the temple, was the Church president who dedicated the finished edifice. - John L. Hart

(First in a series leading to centennial of Salt Lake Temple on April 6, 1993. Source: History of Utah by Orson F. Whitney; conference address by Brigham Young, April 6, 1853. Illustration by Deseret News artist Reed McGregor.)