Byron Sessions took charge of constructing the Sidon Canal after Church leaders chose to establish a colony in Wyoming's Shoshone Valley, where settlers could live in towns rather than on isolated ranches. After an exploring party led by Abraham O. Woodruff reached the region on February 9, 1900, examined land along the north side of the Shoshone River, and recommended a colony and canal following an earlier abandoned survey, Lorenzo Snow called Sessions to move his family there and oversee the work until it was finished. On April 24, 1900, thirty settlers with fifteen wagons left Woodruff, joined other groups at Hams Fork, and after a hard journey several hundred people reached the future head of the canal. Work began on May 28, 1900, while families lived in wagons and primitive tents and endured rattlesnakes, ticks, and blowing sand. Planned to run 30.48 miles and irrigate 17,715.28 acres, the canal was completed only in the spring of 1904 because settlers also had to earn their living. Workers received stock in the Sidon Canal Company rather than wages, paid cash for part of that stock to buy equipment, and many men also worked on a CB&Q rail link near Billings, Montana, to Cody, Wyoming, receiving half their wages in cash and half in canal stock so the colony could sustain canal construction. During work near a nearly perpendicular rock cliff below the canal head in late June or early July 1900, Sessions proposed scraping a deep hole beside a large rock lying in the canal's path and blasting it so it would roll aside. When the danger to men and horses became serious, the matter was taken up in prayer, and after Sessions declared that the rock would be down by the next day, it split from top to bottom just after the workers had been told to leave the hole, opening the way for the canal. This event became known as the miracle of Prayer Rock.