To Emma $4 $ 6 $9.40 19 40

"Gentlemen of the Congress: "I feel myself very thankful that I have lived in the flesh long enough in this Ter- ritory to behold the faces of such a con- gregation of gentlemen as I see here to- day. It is not my purpose to occupy your time or attention in arguing or talking or conversing particularly upon the subjects or at least those principles for which you have gathered together; but what I will say will be a few words concerning our arrival here, and upon the principal of irri- gation. Fifty-one years ago the twenty- fourth of last July, I entered this valley with one hundred and forty-three immi- grants, or in other words pioneers. We were led by President Young. This coun- try that we arrived upon was called the Great American Desert, and certainly as far as we could see it did not deviate from that in the least. We found a barren desert here. There was no mark of the Anglo-Saxon race, no mark of the white- man; everything was barren, dry and desert. "We pitched our camp a little distance to the southeast from here about eleven o'clock in the day. We had a desire to try the soil to know what it could produce. Of course all this company—nearly the whole of us were born and raised in the New England states, Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut—had no ex- perience in irrigation. We pitched our camp, put some teams onto our plows (we brought our plows with us) and undertook to plough the earth, but we found neither wood nor iron were strong enough to make furrows here in this hard soil. It was like adamant. Of course we had to turn water on it. We would have done anything. We went and turned out City creek. We turned over our ground. When we came to put our teams upon it, of course they sunk down to their bellies in mud. We had to wait until this land dried enough to hold our teams up. We put in our crops and we stayed here one month. During that time President Young laid out this city as you see it today in the midst of sage-brush with not a house within hundreds of miles of us. We built a fort around ten acres, three sides of adobe walls eighteen feet high, and one side with logs out of the canyon. We then returned home and some two thou- sand men followed us. President Can- non here was one of the company that came in after we did. "Now what I wish to say is this: You gentlemen come here today; you see the city, you go through the country. Here are a thousand miles, I might say, through these mountains filled with cities, towns, villages, gardens and orchards, and the products of the earth that sustain the people. Without this water, this irriga- tion for which you have met here to-day, this country would be as barren as it was in 1847 as we found it. This irrigation is what you have met to engage in and give your views upon. How I am satisfied it matters not. Whatever you decide upon in this matter and unite upon, I am satisfied it will prove a great blessing; not only to Utah but to every state and ter- ritory where these arid lands are, and whoever occupies these lands of course has got to have the water to perform the work. We have had to do the same. We have had to learn by experience and