Hidden Deseret:

 A Mormon World in the American West

Most Americans picture Mormon life beginning and ending in Utah, anchored in the Wasatch Front and symbolized by the Salt Lake Temple. But once you look past this surface image, one can discover a much broad social and cultural network across the American West. Built by generations of Latter-day Saint settlers who established farming colonies, trading posts, irrigation districts, and tight social networks from Idaho to Mexico.

The Meaning of Deseret

The word Deseret comes from the Book of Mormon and means “honeybee.” In early LDS thought, Deseret symbolized cooperative labor, unity, order, and collective purpose. For a brief period in the nineteenth century, Mormon leaders even attempted to create a political State of Deseret that would have encompassed most of the interior West. Although the State of Deseret never became a political reality, the idea survived. It remains a cultural one, refers to the Mormon world, both visible and hidden, made up of a distinct migration history, shared religious identity, kinship solidarity, unique settlement patterns, and a cohesive cultural tradition spread across thousands of miles.

The Mormon Beginning: A New Religious World in an Old American Landscape

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began in the 1820s in western New York, during a period of intense religious experimentation known as the Second Great Awakening. Early Latter-day Saints faced hostility and legal persecution almost immediately. From New York they moved to Ohio, then Missouri, then Illinois, where violence escalated until the murder of their founder, Joseph Smith, in 1844.

The experience of expulsion created a group that understood itself as a chosen but persecuted community, united by shared suffering, shared doctrine, and shared destiny. Over time these experiences shaped the Latter-day Saints not only as a religious group but as a distinct cultural and kinship group as well. Today scholars often describe Mormons in Utah as a distinct ethno-religious community, similar to Amish or Mennonites, with their own migration story, settlement patterns, and kin networks that reinforce cultural cohesion.

The Great Migration to Utah

After Joseph Smith’s death, Brigham Young led thousands of Saints westward in 1846 and 1847. This group migrated to what is now Utah, choosing the Great Salt Lake region as their new homeland. The mountains formed a natural barrier, and the basin allowed irrigation agriculture that mirrored their communal, orderly approach to settlement. Farm villages, social wards, and cooperative labor created a society that was generally communal, structured, and intensely unified. The result was a heartland stretching from:

• Salt Lake City

• Provo and the Wasatch Front

• Logan and Cache Valley

• Southern Idaho, including Idaho Falls, Rexburg, and Pocatello

This region is still the demographic and cultural center of the Mornom community today.

The Mormon Colonization of the West

Once the Salt Lake Basin was stable, the Mormons began a colonization effort across the West from the 1850s through the 1880s. This effort was intentional and centrally organized. Church leaders identified strategic locations for agriculture, trade, and regional influence, and then sent families to settle them.

These colonies extended into Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, California, and even northern Mexico. The pattern was consistent: farming villages laid out on a grid, irrigation systems dug collectively, and close-knit ward communities centered on the meetinghouse. The settlers married within a relatively small pool, lived communally, and maintained close ties to church leadership in Utah. This reinforced the LDS status as both a religious tradition and a distinct cultural lineage.

The Case of Southern Utah

Southern Utah is one of the clearest examples of Mormon colonization. Settlements like St. George, Cedar City, and Parowan were deliberately founded as part of what leaders called the Cotton Mission, an attempt to grow warm-weather crops that could not survive in the Salt Lake Valley. The region developed its own character, rooted in red rock desert, irrigation ditches, and closely related families.

Anyone who has spent time here recognizes the feel immediately. The small towns have their own cadence. Wards overlap with extended families. Church life structures the week. And generations of interrelated households create social networks that are both strong and stable.

This culture spilled southward into the Arizona Strip as well, forming towns like Colorado City and making the region functionally part of Utah.

Mormon Arizona: Mesa and Snowflake

Arizona contains some of the most important Mormon colonies outside Utah.

Mesa

Mesa began as a Mormon irrigation settlement founded in 1878 by families sent from Utah to build communities along the Salt River. The settlers constructed canals, established farms, and created one of the largest LDS communities outside the Wasatch Front. Today Mesa remains a center of Mormon life in Arizona, home to one of the state’s major temples and a large, visible LDS population.

Snowflake

Snowflake was founded the same year, 1878, by William Jordan Flake and Erastus Snow, both central figures in LDS southern colonization. Located in the high desert of Navajo County, Snowflake retains its origins as a tightly knit settlement shaped by ranching, family networks, and ward life. It remains one of the most culturally Mormon regions of the state.

Both Mesa and Snowflake show how far the reach of Deseret extended. These were not isolated outposts. They were part of an intentional migration system that carved out Mormon cultural landscapes far from Utah.

Mormon Communities Everywhere

Beyond major colonies, Mormon life spread through smaller, tightly connected communities embedded within larger non-Mormon towns and cities across the West.

One example is Nogales, Arizona. Although the city is overwhelmingly Mexican and Mexican American in culture, it contains a small but active LDS community. These families are often related to each other, attend the same meetinghouse, and maintain strong ties to extended families in Utah or Mesa. The social cohesion is striking. Even in a town defined by border culture, the Mormon community maintains its own internal structure, built on shared history and deep kinship ties.

You can find similar communities in Las Vegas, Bakersfield, central Wyoming, rural Colorado, New Mexico’s Rio Grande Valley, and the Snake River Plain of eastern Oregon and western Idaho. They form a dispersed but tightly connected cultural map, one that is easy to overlook unless you know how to see it.

Conclusion: Seeing the Mormon West

The LDS presence in the American West is not only religious. It is cultural, historical, geographic, and familial. It created an entire cultural sphere stretching from Idaho to Mexico, from St. George to Snowflake, from the Salt Lake Basin to the borderlands of Nogales.

Dedicated to my grandmother, Eleanor Duke,

originally of Yorkshire in the United Kingdom

and a resident of Nogales, Arizona for over sixty years.

Copyright © 2025 Ryan Badertscher. All rights reserved.