| Show The Covered Wagons' Treasure ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTEEN years on July a band of home travel-wom and half of them wheeled their and carta into the portals of Emigration Canyon and caught for the first time a view of sage-covered Great Salt Lake Valley with its glistening salt sea in the BK I AM THEIR suffering from a fever and lying in a covered propped himself up on one studied the landscape from East to West and from North to and with prophetic vision IS THE RIGHT place drive on TO THE HUNDREDS OF thousands who have followed after these sturdy this has been and still the right It is the right place because there was brought here by Brigham Young and his followers something far more precious than the wagons and carts with which they had made their amazing something more vital than the livestock they needed so badly with which to start a new something more precious than the seed upon which they were so utterly dependent to sustain WHAT WAS THIS priceless treasure of the covered wagon Let us transport ourselves back to the western plains in the summer of It is The sun slowly wheels its broad disc behind the horizon We come upon a circle of They form an improvised fort to protect the travelers from the AS WE APPROACH TIIE we detect the strains of a beautiful and soul-stirring We catch the should we die before our journey's through Happy All is We then are free from toil and With the we shall if our lives are spared again To see the saints their rest obtain how we'll make this chorus All is All is IN THESE SIMPLE LINES is found the key to the priceless treasure of the covered wagons the revitalized and intensified faith of the Mormon This faith was the strength of their strength and the life of their IT WAS THIS SUBLIME faith that enabled the pioneers to face unafraid the sneers of the to endure the brutality of the crazed to suffer the loss of homes and lands rather than to prove untrue to what they believed to be eternally It was this same undying faith that bolstered them with the courage to risk the dangers involved in a trek across the trackless American and to suffer the privations and hardships entailed in starting life anew in a barren a thousand miles from the frontier of A NOTED AMERICAN HISTORIAN once wrote of the persecutions which led to the journey of the Mormon pioneers across the He pointed out that persecution was like a fire in a crucible it separated the dross from the It forced the faithless to flee to safety and And then this writer the journey was only the faithful WHAT A MEANINGFUL the faithful There is nothing like adversity to prove the metal in a There is nothing like adversity to stir people to make up their minds about their The adversities of the pioneers were the crucible of affliction in which they were refined and made TO LEAVE WITHOUT to face a wilderness infested by to trudge miles into a country about which they knew absolutely nothing that required It was this same sturdy faith that empowered the Mormon pioneers to build this vast Mountain West empire to cause the desert to blossom as a as their prophet had |
