Mormon History, Jul 30, 1847 (Morning)

[Brigham Young Sermon] The land belongs to our Father in Heaven and we calculate to plow and plant it, and no man will have power to sell his inheritance, for he cannot remove it, it belongs to the Lord. I am glad I am come to a place where I feel free. I am satisfied and we are in a goodly land. My family is back, my teams are helping on several families and leaving ours. If my family was here I would not go over that road again. I believe in Brother Joseph, religion, and which he said was a key that would save every man or woman, and that it is for every man to mind his own business and let other peoples business alone. We will have a farm, and cultivate them, and plant vineyards, and if we are faithful, five years will not pass away before we are better off that we were in Nauvoo. If we had brought our families along, everybody else would have come and we have got to lose another year. We could not bring all the soldiers families for the same reason that we did not bring our own families. I thank the Lord that there are so many of the soldiers here, if they had tarried in winter quarters there would have been many more deaths among them. We brought many of these pioneers to save their lives, many of them were very sick, and were carried out of their beds and put into the wagons. They have mostly recovered their health, and we have been prosperous and have been permitted to arrive here alive, there has not one died on the journey nor an ox nor horse, nor anything except one of Brother Robert Crows oxen which was poisoned. We lost several horses by accident. And we shall be prosperous on our journey back again if we are faithful, those of us who go, and we shall see and enjoy the society of our families again. We will one day have a house built here and have the forts, and go into the house and administer for our dead. -- Salt Lake City [An Intimate Chronicle: The Journals of William Clayton. George D. Smith, ed. Salt Lake City: Signature Books-Smith Research Associates, 1991. 375-376]

[source: The Complete Discourses of Brigham Young, Ed. Richard S. Van Wagoner, Smith-Pettit Foundation, Salt Lake City (2009), http://bit.ly/BY-discourses]