A recent comment on Clark's blog made the following claim:
Brigham Young once commented on the weather in St. George with a statement something like this: "If I only had a house in St. George and a house in hell, I'd summer over in hell."I've heard similar quotes attributed to various people, mostly about Texas (because I live here) but also about various other places. I suspected the comment had been made about nearly every state and city in the Southwest, so I googled "live in * and rent out *" (because that's the way I've heard it most often) with interesting results.
My favorites:
"...I'd live in Hell and rent out Texas/Arizona/San Antonio/Houston/Brooklyn/Vegas/Arkansas/Oklahoma/South Africa/Memphis/Louisiana/New Guinea/etc."
"...I'd live in California and rent out Heaven."
"...if I were a UN peacekeeping force and owned Bosnia-Herzegovina and Tombstone, I’d live in Bosnia-Herzegovina and rent out Tombstone."
My limited research indicates that the original quote was about Texas and was first attributed to General Phillip Sheridan in 1866, but I'm open to argument.
UPDATE:
It appears the St. George quote is most often attributed to J. Golden Kimball (Jeffrey Holland cited it once in a 1974 speech), which makes sense. Kimball was a GA from the 1890s until his death in the 1930s, so he could have heard the Sheridan quote and adapted it to St. George during that time.
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