In fact, Bashore has concluded that for the Mormon pioneers, Salt Lake Valley's beauty lay "in its people and prophet — the real objective of their overland journey."

Orson Hyde, a LDS apostle who came across the Plains four times in just 18 months, had some key observations about the experience:

He wrote, "A trip across the plains is calculated to try any and every person to the very core. The good and bad qualities of the heart are most clearly and conspicuously developed."

Bashore found that another LDS apostle, Franklin D. Richards, recognized how people's true natures would be revealed during a journey overland:

"On the Plains, camping in the open air, dusty, tired, and travel-stained; the Saints will show more of their true dispositions to each other, and learn more of themselves than they ever did before in their lives," Richards wrote.

The handcart Mormon pioneer era, 1856-1860, included the Willie and Martin companies, who had some of the worst suffering of all along the trail.

Elizabeth Cumming, 46, of the prominent Adams family of Boston, traveled to Utah with her husband, both of them non-LDS. They were accompanied by Johnston's Army.

She wrote in November of 1857 during her journey west:

"Our animals are all dead and dying & we must stop here all winter, where there is wood and water. … The two or three last days of our journey here, our animals could just stand. We had no corn for them. "

She entered the Salt Lake Valley the next spring.

The Salt Lake Valley was envisioned as the promised land for LDS Church members 157 years ago. Probably 99 percent of the area's residents were LDS Church members well into the 1850s. That domination has steadily declined, as the valley has also proven attractive to non-Mormons. Today it is estimated that Salt Lake County is only 56 percent LDS, as compared to a statewide LDS population of 66 percent.

In Salt Lake City the LDS membership is now estimated at 45 percent, compared to 55 percent non-LDS residents. At 88 percent, Utah County has the highest LDS population among the state's 29 counties.

Yet statistics aside, Pioneer Day — July 24 — remains a state holiday and commemorates the pioneering spirit of Utah's early settlers, Mormon and non-Mormon alike.

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E-mail to: lynn@desnews.com