Mormons were more than men who were lucky enough to have several wives. They were a civilization, a religion, and a government completely misunderstood, living mainly within themselves and trying to keep their own against the outlaw West that grew up around them. Starting from here, Stegner fills in the facts and ideals, giving an objective study of the growth and decline of the Mormons in their promised land.

The land Brigham Young round wasn't promising. In fact it took a good deal of imagination and a lot of irrigation to grow anything more than sagebrush in the Utah desert. But Young was a prophet who revealed God's will to his group of Saints, and they took his word as they would God's, following him across the country to settle a land that was poor picking, even for coyotes. After a few years of settling and farming the great scheme began to grow, sending missionaries to all corners of the earth in search for more Saints to swell the ranks of the new Utopia.

Since Mormon history is a book in itself, Stegner has concentrated mainly on the civilization and the society that was built up on the banks of the Great Salt Lake. Polygamy played an unimportant part, contrary to popular opinion. The great ideal was a brotherhood and a sharing of worldly goods, built into a simple, ascetically Christian, agricultural life. This was the greatest strength of the Mormon colony. This is what attracted people from Europe and even Hawaii to walk in groups of hundreds and thousands across the country, pushing their few worldly possessions ahead of them in wheelbarrows. But the weakness lay there, too. The west that grew up around it was not agricultural or Christian.

Mormons didn't smoke and didn't chew and didn't go around with the boys that did. They didn't have to because they were almost always an overwhelming majority. Neither did they swear. But they were a great people for dancing, which was secondary only to a religion of revelation and thundering oratory on damnation and brimstone.

Stegner's first non-fiction work, part of the American Folkway series, takes Mormonism from all ican Folkway series, takes Mormonism from all points of view and up to the present day. The scholarship is amazingly thorough and the intimate details such as interviews with now-senile bandits and orators that colored the old West are nothing short of sensational. Wallace Stegner has spent most of his life in Mormon country so he can write their story in their language without any trace of a strained, scholastic note. The story is only vaguely organized; what it loses in form, it gains miraculously in interest. In fact, the personal, informal manner in which the book is written gives fiction along with fact and makes sociology a pleasure.