Item Detail
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30653
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0
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14
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English
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"The People Cannot Conquer the River": Mormons and Water in the Arid Southwest, 1865-1938
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The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays on Mormon Environmental History
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Salt Lake City, UT
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University of Utah Press
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173-194
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This essay is about the Mormon settlement town of St. Thomas and the efforts made to reclaim it--"Historians have long held up Mormons as model irrigators, or 'the Lord's beavers,' for their proficiency at organizing themselves into colonies and overseeing the infrastructure to irrigate arid lands. What follows is a story that complicates that narrative by relating the struggles, hardships, and failures Mormons experienced in their attempts to subdue the Virgin and Muddy Rivers that flowed through southern Utah and southern Nevada. While Mormons were remarkably successful irrigators, particularly in and around Salt Lake City, they encountered greater difficulties and often failure int he more arid region to the south where they settled in large numbers....Writing in 1941, shortly after water forced the abandonment of St. Thomas, the historian Juanita Brooks perfectly captured the perpetual struggle between Mormons who settled this region and their environment...Brooks recounted: 'The people cannot conquer the river; it cannot shake them from its bank. It is like an endless war wherein first one side and then the other is victorious. The relationship is exactly as it was when the first settlers arrived.'"
[from author] -
'A Little Oasis in the Desert' : Community Building in Hurricane, Utah, 1860-1920
Colonizing the Muddy River Valley : A New Perspective
Defunct Mormon Settlements : 1830-1930
Erastus Snow : The Life of a Missionary and Pioneer for the Early Mormon Church
'I Was Called to Dixie' : The Virgin River Basin : Unique Experiences in Mormon Pioneering
Making Space on the Western Frontier : Mormons, Miners, and Southern Paiutes
Muddy Valley Reflections : 145 Years of Settlement
St. Thomas, Nevada : A history uncovered
Take Up Your Mission : Mormon Colonizing Along the Little Colorado River, 1870-1900
The Big Washout : The 1862 Flood in Santa Clara
The Lord's Beavers
The Mormon Cotton Mission in Southern Utah
The Red Hills of November : A Pioneer Biography of Utah's Cotton Town
Zion on the Muddy : The Story of the Saints of the Moapa (Logandale Nevada) Stake