In 1857 Heber Kimball, a member of the original LDS Quorum of Apostles, described the Shanghi Plain (what we now call the Snake River Plain) as extending 150-200 miles westward from the north-south flowing part of the Snake in what is now Eastern Idaho, and reaching 90 miles from its bordering southern hills to the mountains of the north which complete the rim of the somewhat oblong basin. The Mormon parties that trailed from Utah to the unsuccessful outpost at Fort Limhi in the 1850s skirted the Shanghi Plain by first going north along the west side of the Snake and then turning through the Mud Lake area at the northern edge of the basin--cattlemen and sheepmen would likewise later choose this route, for the most part, to move their stock from one range to another or to market. Kimball emphasized its rocky nature and called it a sterile, barren area, one possessing mostly belts of rock and sand. He wrote it was "as desert a country as ever was brought together".
Journal of Discourses, Volume 4, 1857 page 323
There were several Mormon parties that headed from Utah to Limhi on the Shanghi's edge, many of them involving Lewis Shurtliff, who forty years later would be President of the American Falls Canal effort near the southern edge of the Plain. He and another man hauled nearly four tons of provisions to the near-starving Limhi colonists on one trip, he took mail in the dead of winter from Limhi to Salt Lake during a following winter, and he was rear guard in Brigham Young's party of over 150 that crossed at Ferry Butte on its way to Limhi. Young wasn't impressed by his members' locational choice, noting they might have been better off building at the area we now call Riverton. The Mormons did build an outpost, a sort of halfway house for the Limhi Mission, at Riverton not long after, expecting a war with the U.S. government, the two likely opponents both with designs of a western empire. The Civil War spared all from that encounter, taking the federal government's attention for several years.
The threat of impending warfare at that time, along with a period of drought, inspired the Mormon Reformation, the LDS Church's short-lived plunge into apocalyptic prophecy. Brigham Young had publicly "come out" as a polygamist, and fringe doctrines like Adam-as-God and Blood Atonement emerged--doctrines later denounced by the Church. The Blood Atonement doctrine provided good cover for the "Destroying Angels", a set of murderous Mormon vigilantes purportedly operating at Young's command.
The raising of polygamy and other radical (to many) ideas to the forefront set the stage for the Morrisites, a collection of anti-polygamy Mormons who followed Joseph Morris, who claimed hundreds of revelations and challenged Young's authority. A battle eventually ensued with numerous fatalities (including Morris) and the U.S. government had to escort the survivors to Nevada and Soda Springs. After a series of crop failures there many Morrisites moved to the Riverton area at the edge of the Shanghi Plain.
Many credit the Morrisites with building the first canals in southeast Idaho in the mid 1860s, and it wasn't much more than a decade before small ditches appeared on both sides of the Snake in the area eventually known as Bingham County. Bit by bit, settlers turned desert into cropland, each canal "jumping the line" by placing its inlet further upstream from the last irrigation works. While irrigation systems were few and water plentiful, this arrangement worked somewhat well, but eventually the government had to adjudicate water distribution so that downstream users, often those with earliest rights, weren't at the mercy of more adantageoulsy placed upstream irrigators.
The railroad's arrival in the late 1870s brought more entrepreneurs to the area and canal by canal the plain was claimed for agriculture, with the Carey Act in 1895 providing the big push that made the Peoples Canal and Aberdeen-Springfield Canal possible. Fifty years later, electricity and sprinkler irrigation allowed settlers to utilize another large chunk of the Shanghi Plain, with the federal government marking out a million acres of the area for its own use about the same time for the endeavor we now refer to as "the Site".
The Shanghi Plain: Bingham County's Early History, expands upon the century long extension of a frontier from the Snake River Plain's edges into its core. Purchase it locally at Kesler's Market and The Idaho Potato Museum, or online at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CCCS7XLR?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860
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