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.