500 Little Known Facts

The name Paulina E. Phelps Lyman is a name unfamiliar to most Latter-day Saints, but she should be remembered as the source of the very first mention of the Rocky Mountains as a home for the Saints. She signed an affidavit many years later in Salt Lake City that as a young girl she had received a blessing in the home of Lyman Wight in Jackson County in 1832 in which the Prophet Joseph told her that she would live to go to the Rocky Mountains. Only two years later, according to Wilford Woodruff, Joseph told a group assembled in Kirtland Ohio that “This people will go into the Rocky Mountains; they will there build temples to the Most High.”

Christian, Lewis Clark, “Mormon Foreknowledge of the West,” BYU Studies, Fall 1981, p. 404