Even today the land in Utah's Four Corners region can be forbidding and treacherous. High, stony cliffs. Slickrock formations. Dry, dusty desert. It's not a place to be treated lightly, and even now must be taken on its own terms.

In the late 1870s, it was also virtually unknown.

By that time, numerous settlements had been established by the Mormon pioneers in what is now southern Utah, but none had ventured east of the Colorado River into what is now San Juan County.

LDS Church leaders were becoming increasingly concerned about the area. "It was being used by outlaws and cattle rustlers; there were conflicts with the Indians, and the church felt it needed a settlement there to bring peace to the area," author Gerald N. Lund says.

A call to the San Juan mission went out in 1878-79, and in the fall of 1879, an expedition of approximately 250 men, women and children, some 80 wagons and more than 1,000 head of livestock set out from Escalante. What was expected to take six weeks took one week shy of six months, as they had to cut and blast their way to their destination.

"No pioneer company ever built a wagon road through wilder, rougher, more inhospitable country," noted historian David Miller. "No one ever demonstrated more courage, faith and devotion to a cause than this group."

It is against this backdrop that Lund, probably best-known for his nine-volume novel series on LDS Church history, The Work and the Glory, has set his latest story, "The Undaunted: The Miracle of the Hole-in-the-Rock Pioneers."

Read the full story on MormonTimes.com.