Salt Lake Valley

The Salt Lake Valley is the clearest case in this atlas of a religious movement that did not settle into an existing society but built one.

The Latter-day Saints had been expelled from Missouri and then, after the killing of Joseph Smith at Carthage in 1844, from their city at Nauvoo in Illinois. Under Brigham Young a first company crossed the plains and entered the valley in July 1847, in territory then belonging to Mexico and outside United States jurisdiction. Tens of thousands followed over the next two decades, including companies from Britain and Scandinavia recruited by an unusually effective missionary and emigration organisation, some of whom crossed the plains pulling handcarts.

The settlement was planned rather than accreted. A grid was laid out from a designated temple block, land and water were allocated by ecclesiastical authority, and colonising parties were called by the church to found further settlements across a wide region, several hundred of them. Irrigation was organised communally in an arid basin where individual farming would have failed.

Salt Lake City remains the administrative and ritual centre of a church now reporting over seventeen million members worldwide, most of them outside the United States. The temple on the original block, begun in 1853 and completed in 1893, is used for ordinances rather than for weekly worship, and the tabernacle beside it and the conference centre nearby serve the general meetings held twice a year.

The Latter-day Saints keep records to an unusual degree, and the way that archive has been handled over the past few decades is itself part of the region's religious history.

Genealogy is a religious duty in this tradition, because ordinances are performed vicariously for the dead, and the church has therefore built the largest genealogical collection in the world, microfilming and later digitising civil and parish registers from dozens of countries and making them freely searchable. The practice of baptising the dead by proxy has caused repeated objection from Jewish organisations over the inclusion of Holocaust victims, and agreements limiting it have been made and reasserted.

The institution's own history has been a harder problem. Sensitive episodes, among them the origins and abandonment of plural marriage, the restriction of priesthood ordination from men of black African descent until 1978, and the Mountain Meadows massacre of 1857, were for a long time discussed more openly by outside historians than by the church. That changed with the Gospel Topics essays published from 2013, which address those subjects directly and are issued with the church's institutional authority, and with the Joseph Smith Papers project and the Saints narrative history.

The Hofmann forgeries of the 1980s, in which a dealer sold fabricated early documents to the church and to collectors before turning to murder, are also acknowledged in the church's own published account.