"Already Brigham saw the trees neat as marching soldiers serried across the land–long lines of Lombardy poplars grouped like pointed spears, cottonwood branches delicate as cobwebs against a winter sky. Already he saw the green of alfalfa checkerboarding sage–gray miles. Already he saw the colonies radiating out from Salt Lake City...Mormon villages trooping down the rivers and irrigable valleys, cuddling at the mouths of canyons under the stored snows. It came to be a landscape pattern as characteristic as a Mormon coat–of–arms."

Maurine Whipple, 1945