Young sees the valley from a sickbed wagon: "This is the right place, drive on"

Brigham Young had spent months leading his people out of Illinois toward nowhere in particular, three years after a mob murdered Joseph Smith and split the church he founded. On July 24, 1847, Young's vanguard company reached the Salt Lake Valley after more than a thousand miles along the Mormon Trail from Winter Quarters, Nebraska. Young was too sick with mountain fever to ride upright, and from a wagon he told his driver, Wilford Woodruff, this was the place. The pioneers began digging irrigation ditches within days, planting a settlement in land still legally part of Mexico…