In the late winter of 1873, Brigham Young dispatched the first group of colonists sent south of the Colorado river in Arizona. After a few months, the group returned home, beaten and discouraged. The mission was tagged in Church history and literature as a “failure” with all the attention going to the later missions to the Upper little Colorado. This paper reviews both the reasons for the failure and the contributions to the success of the later missions that the 1873 missionaries made.

Kevin Folkman