CHAPTER Enterprising 1 Young Men W™ THE END of the Mexican War in 1848, the United States almost instantly acquired a vast new domain stretching from Texas on the east to the shores of the Pacific. By treaty with Mexico and Great Britain, the map of the great American West suddenly unrolled before an expansive nation. The curtain had opened on the most rambunctious conquest of undeveloped territory in the history of the world. Then, during that same year, news spread eastward of the discovery of gold in California. Over the next two years, some 100,000 adventurers flooded across the Great Plains in search of Eldorado. While the promise of easy riches eluded the large majority of them, they nevertheless formed a firm cornerstone in the building of the West. Among the first of these eager pilgrims was a twenty-one-year-old Englishman named Edmund Orson Wattis. Although he found only danger in the gold fields, his frontier journey marked the beginnings of one of the great stories in the annals of American enterprise. Wattis was born in London on January 20, 1828, and died in Uintah, Utah, sixty-three years later, on April 2, 1891. When he was twelve years old, his family converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints through the efforts of Mormon apostle (and later church president) Wilford Woodruff. In November 1841 Edmund, his older brother John, and his parents, Edmund and Hannah Compton and Wattis, left their comfortable home considerable parcel of land in Alfrick, Worcestershire, boarded the 5