When they remembered their enthusiastic declaration of independence
only one year before, the warlike demonstrations which followed it, the
prophecies of Young that the Lord would smite the army as he smote the
hosts of Sennacherib, the fever of hate and apprehension into which they
had been worked, and contrasted that period of excitement with their
present condition, they must, indeed, have found abundant material for
meditation. By the emigration southward they had lost at least four
months of the most valuable time of the year. Their families had been
subjected to every variety of exposure and hardship. Their ready money
had been extorted from them by the Currency Association, or consumed in
the expenses of transporting their movables to Lake Utah. And more than
all, the fields had so suffered by their absence, that the crops were
diminished to at least one-half the yield of an ordinary year. To a
community the mass of which lives from hand to mouth, this was a most
serious loss.
Almost all agriculture in Utah is carried on by the aid of irrigation.
From April till October hardly a shower falls upon the soil, which
parches and cracks in the hot sunshine.
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