Home at Last…

After spending most of the summer on the Great Plains and crossing the Rocky Mountains, the Sorensen family finally reached that point in the trail… that point which you could look down and see for the first time, where home was to be.

After a short rest in Great Salt Lake City, as it was known at the time, most likely on the Pioneer Park block in downtown Salt Lake City of today, we moved south onto a rented farm and built a cabin with which to spend the winter.

It is from here that the next chapter in the saga of the Sorensen family begins, Life in Utah.

The Great Salt Lake Valley—

The route shown below was first blazed by the Donner-Reed party in 1846. Brigham Young and his vanguard group were the next wagon group to use this trail out of East Canyon, above present day Salt Lake City in 1847. Some ten years later the Nicolai Sorensen family followed this same route. So on September 13, 1857, the Sorensen family reached the valley of Zion, where we would call home for a short period of time.

— Entering the Great Salt Lake Valley —

Isaac Sorensen gives us the following—

We found Salt Lake City located on a beautiful spot of ground but was not in the least to be compared to Salt Lake City, 12 or 15 years afterwards, there was but few that could be called comfortable houses and they were all or nearly so constructed of adobes. We settled six miles south of the city on a rented farm of which we paid one third to the owner.

1. Isaac Sorensen, The History of Isaac Sorensen, Unpublished journal manuscript. Transcribed to typescript by Rodney J. Sorensen, 3-4 July 1987.