Oh what a dreary place was this
          When first the Mormons found it
          The Indians here refused to live
          And the coyotes passed around it.
  
                  "St. George," by the contemporary, Charles Walker.
                  On Sam Hinton's The Song of Men; Folkways

The first wagons rolled into the St. George Valley, Utah on 11/25/1861. This was to be one of an intended chain of Morman settlements stretching to California - the "Cotton Mission" to take advantage of the Civil War cotton shortage. The city of St. George was chartered 1/17/1862.
                [thanx "Ranger Bart"]

The town was named for its organizer, the Latter Day Saint, Saint George (Smith), not the dragon-boy St. George and certainly not the George Smith that found & translated Gilgamesh. See Utah History Encyclopedia

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