SETTLEMENT
L arley P. Pratt was stunned when he first saw Utah's Dixie: "A wide expanse of chaotic matter presented itself, huge hills, sandy deserts, cheerless, grassless plains, perpendicular rocks, loose barren clay, dissolving beds of sandstone."1 Pratt's two-month journey along the western base of the Wasatch Range and Wasatch Plateau with his fifty companions in the winter of 1849 had taken them to each creek south of Provo as it exited from the mountains at about the 5,000-foot level. Those streams flowed out onto benchlands which gradually descended into broad valleys, often ten miles wide and twenty miles long. The vistas were everywhere inspiring, inviting settlement, farming, and grazing. The scouting company chose many sites for towns which later became known as Nephi, Holden, Scipio, Fillmore, Meadow, Beaver, Parowan, and Cedar City. A smaller party from the group ventured south of Cedar City. Its members reached the southern rim of the Great Basin near presentday New Harmony; they crossed the pass and there met the foreboding lava cliffs of the Black Ridge. Descending from 5,000 to 2,800 feet 13
