Howard Orson Spencer Pike Affair

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UTAH WINTER 2008 VOLUME 76 NUMBER 1 HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

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This is the court proceedings of the trial of Howard Orson Spencer, accused of killing a soldier, Pike. Howard Orson Spencer had his skull crushed and was left for dead. He was never the same afterwards. He was found not guilty.

Transcript of Howard Orson Spencer Pike Affair

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UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Department of Community and CultureDivision of State History

BOARD OF STATE HISTORY

MICHAEL W. HOMER, Salt Lake City, 2009, ChairCLAUDIA F. BERRY, Midvale, 2009

MARTHA SONNTAG BRADLEY, Salt Lake City, 2009SCOTT R. CHRISTENSEN, Salt Lake City, 2009

RONALD G. COLEMAN, Salt Lake City, 2011MARIA GARCIAZ, Salt Lake City, 2011

ROBERT S. MCPHERSON, Blanding, 2011CHERE ROMNEY, Salt Lake City, 2011

MAX J. SMITH, Salt Lake City, 2009GREGORY C.THOMPSON, Salt Lake City, 2011

MICHAEL K.WINDER,West Valley City, 2009

ADMINISTRATION

PHILIP F. NOTARIANNI, DirectorWILSON G. MARTIN, State Historic Preservation Officer

ALLAN KENT POWELL, Managing EditorKEVIN T. JONES, State Archaeologist

The Utah State Historical Society was organized in 1897 by public-spirited Utahns tocollect, preserve, and publish Utah and related history.Today, under state sponsorship,the Society fulfills its obligations by publishing the Utah Historical Quarterly and otherhistorical materials; collecting historic Utah artifacts; locating, documenting, and pre-serving historic and prehistoric buildings and sites; and maintaining a specializedresearch library. Donations and gifts to the Society’s programs, museum, or its libraryare encouraged, for only through such means can it live up to its responsibility of pre-serving the record of Utah’s past.

This publication has been funded with the assistance of a matching grant-in-aid from the National ParkService, under provisions of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 as amended.

This program receives financial assistance for identification and preservation of historic properties underTitle VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The U. S.Department of the Interior prohibits unlawful discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin,age, or handicap in its federally assisted programs. If you believe you have been discriminated against inany program, activity, or facility as described above, or if you desire further information, please write to:Office of Equal Opportunity, National Park Service, 1849 C Street, NW,Washington, D.C., 20240.

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY(ISSN 0042-143X)

EDITORIAL STAFF

PHILIP F. NOTARIANNI, EditorALLAN KENT POWELL, Managing Editor

CRAIG FULLER, Associate Editor

ADVISORY BOARD OF EDITORS

LEE ANN KREUTZER, Salt Lake City, 2009STANFORD J. LAYTON, Salt Lake City, 2009

ROBERT E. PARSON, Benson, 2010W. PAUL REEVE, Salt Lake City, 2008

JOHN SILLITO, Ogden, 2010NANCY J.TANIGUCHI, Merced, California, 2008

GARY TOPPING, Salt Lake City, 2008RONALD G.WATT,West Valley City, 2010COLLEEN WHITLEY, Salt Lake City, 2009

Utah Historical Quarterly was established in 1928 to publish articles, documents, andreviews contributing to knowledge of Utah history. The Quarterly is published fourtimes a year by the Utah State Historical Society, 300 Rio Grande, Salt Lake City,Utah 84101. Phone (801) 533-3500 for membership and publications information.Members of the Society receive the Quarterly, and Currents, the quarterly newsletter,upon payment of the annual dues: individual, $25; institution, $25; student and seniorcitizen (age sixty-five or older), $20; sustaining, $35; patron, $50; business, $100.

Manuscripts submitted for publication should be double-spaced with endnotes. Authors are encouragedto include a PC diskette with the submission. For additional information on requirements, contact themanaging editor. Articles and book reviews represent the views of the authors and are not necessarilythose of the Utah State Historical Society.

Periodicals postage is paid at Salt Lake City, Utah.

POSTMASTER: Send address change to Utah Historical Quarterly, 300 Rio Grande, SaltLake City, Utah 84101.

806457 WINTER 08 Inside Cover 12/5/07 12:57 PM Page 1

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U TA H H I S T O R I C A L Q U A RT E R LYWINTER 2008 • VOLUME 76 • NUMBER 1

2 IN THIS ISSUE

4 A Lion in the Path: Genesis of the Utah War, 1857-1858By David L. Bigler

22 And The War Came: James Buchanan, the Utah Expedition, and the Decision to InterveneBy William P. MacKinnon

38 The Utah War: A Photographic Essay of Some of Its Important Historic SitesBy John Eldredge

66 Sam Houston and the Utah WarBy Michael Scott Van Wagenen

79 The Spencer-Pike AffairBy Richard W. Sadler

94 BOOK REVIEWSReid L. Neilson and Ronald W.Walker, eds. Reflections of a Mormon Historian: Leonard J.Arrington on the New Mormon History

Reviewed by Charles S. Peterson

Jennifer Nez Denetdale. Reclaiming Diné History: The Legacies of Navajo Chief Manuelito and Juanita

Reviewed by Robert S. McPherson

Matthew C. Godfrey. Religion, Politics, and Sugar:The Mormon Church, the Federal Government, and the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, 1907-1921

Reviewed by Michael Christensen

Don Gale. Bags to Riches: The Story of I.J.WagnerReviewed by Eileen Hallet Stone

Patricia F. Cowley and Parker M. Nielson. Thunder Over Zion:The Life of Chief Judge Willis W. Ritter

Reviewed by Kenneth L. Cannon II

© COPYRIGHT 2008 UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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I N T H I S I S S U E

ON THE COVER: James Buchanan during his term as President of the United States—1857 to1861. NATIONAL ARCHIVES

One hundred and fifty years ago a federal army of nearly twothousand soldiers under the command of Col. Albert SidneyJohnston huddled in their makeshift quarters at Camp Scott nearthe ruins of Fort Bridger in southwestern Wyoming to wait out

the bitter winter and prepare to march into the Salt Lake Valley later in thespring of 1858. Meanwhile, Mormon spies kept watch on the soldiers fromthe heights of Bridger Butte a few miles west of Camp Scott while the territorial militia continued preparation of defense fortifications in EchoCanyon and elsewhere along the trail in anticipation of battle with the federal troops when they moved into the Mormon stronghold.

The year 1857 had been an eventful and difficult year for Utah and thenation. The fight over whether Kansas would be a “free” or “slave” stategenerated national attention to “Bleeding Kansas,”—a prologue to whatbecame a full-scale Civil War in 1861. At the same time the United StatesSupreme Court increased tensions in the landmark decision in the DredScott case, when it decreed that all African Americans were not citizens andthat the sanctity of property rights guaranteed by the United StatesConstitution included the human property of slaveholders. As Kenneth M.Stampp wrote in his classic study of the United States on the eve of civilwar, America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink, “1857 was probably the yearwhen the North and South reached the political point of no return—whenit became well nigh impossible to head off a violent resolution of the differ-ences between them.”

Tensions were no less severe in Utah as newly elected president JamesBuchanan acted in the spring of 1857 to replace Brigham Young as territor-ial governor with Alfred E. Cumming. Unconvinced that Mormons wouldaccept the new governor, Buchanan directed the United States Army toprovide a substantial and suitable escort for the newly appointed governorand in so doing precipitated what has long been known as the Utah War. Asthe Utah-bound expedition made its way along the well-traveled Oregon-California Trail toward Utah, approximately one hundred and twentyCalifornia-bound emigrants were killed by Mormons at MountainMeadows in southwestern Utah on September 11.

This special issue of the Utah Historical Quarterly examines the back-ground, issues, individuals, and consequences surrounding the Utah War.Not only did the North and the South stand on the brink of civil war in1857, but so did the East and West as the Mountain Meadows Massacre,political upheavals, and the Utah War exacerbated tensions and hostilities inUtah, California, and surrounding territories that were no less volatile thanthose of slavery and states’ rights in Kansas and the South.

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Our first two articles offer differing, yet complementary views on thecauses of the Utah War. They address such questions as how the decisionwas reached to send a federal army to Utah, and what roles United StatesPresident James Buchanan and Mormon leader and Utah TerritorialGovernor Brigham Young played in launching the impending conflict.

In an effort to give a visual understanding of important sites and eventsassociated with the Utah War, our third article illustrates the landmarksalong the more than eleven hundred mile journey undertaken by the federalarmy from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas to Camp Floyd, forty miles southwestof Salt Lake City. Less than a decade later, Civil War photographers likeMathew Brady, would use the medium of photography to convey the deathand horror of war to a shocked America.

Our fourth article, with its focus on Sam Houston, reminds us that states-men of all generations have the right and duty to speak out on controversialmatters and, as Sam Houston did with the Utah War, make their opinionsand recommendations a part of the public discussion.

Although the Utah War saw no actual battles and few deaths, our finalarticle, in recounting the thirty-year Spencer-Pike affair, instructs us that thethreat of violence was real and that hostilities and animosity took decades toease and disappear.

There is no doubt that the Utah War was a significant event in Utah andAmerican history.1 In 1858 Abraham Lincoln said in reference to the UnitedStates and slavery, “a house divided against its self cannot stand.” Just as thenation had to deal with the issue of slavery to insure its continuation, so didthe Territory of Utah have to come to an understanding and acceptance ofits relationship with the rest of the nation. That process was accelerated, ifnot begun, with the Utah War.

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1 The Utah War is a popular topic in the Utah Historical Quarterly. Nineteen articles and journals havebeen published beginning in 1941 with Richard Thomas Ackley’s “Across the Plains” in the July-Octoberissue of Volume 9, and the 1858-1860 Journal of Albert Tracy as the entire volume 13 in 1945. The otherarticles include: “Mormon Finance and the Utah War,” by Leonard J. Arrington, July 1952; “A TerritorialMilitiaman in the Utah War: Journal of Newton Tuttle,” edited by Hamilton Gardner, October 1954;“Journals of the Legislative Assembly,Territory of Utah Seventh Annual Session, 1857-1858,” by Everett L.Cooley, April, July, and October 1956; “Charles A. Scott's Diary of the Utah Expedition, 1857-1861,” edit-ed by Robert E. Stowers and John M. Ellis, October 1960; “The Buchanan Spoils System and the UtahExpedition: Careers of W M F Magraw and John M. Hockaday,” by William P. MacKinnon, Spring 1963;“Camp in the Sagebrush: Camp Floyd, Utah, 1858-1861,” by Thomas G. Alexander and Leonard J.Arrington,Winter 1966;“The Crisis at Fort Limhi, 1858,” by David L. Bigler, Spring 1967;“Fort Rawlins,Utah: A Question of Mission and Means,” by Stanford J. Layton,Winter 1974; “The Gap in the BuchananRevival: The Utah Expedition of, 1857-58,” by William P. MacKinnon, Winter 1977; “A Crisis Averted?General Harney and the Change in Command of The Utah Expedition,” by Wilford Hill Lecheminant,Winter 1983; “125 Years of Conspiracy Theories: Origins of The Utah Expedition, 1857-58,” by William P.MacKinnon, Summer 1984; “Thomas L. Kane And The Utah War,” by Richard D. Poll, Spring 1993; “TheNauvoo Legion and the Prevention of the Utah War,” by Brandon J. Metcalf, Fall 2004; “‘UnquestionablyAuthentic and Correct in Every Detail’: Probing John I. Ginn and His Remarkable Utah War Story,” byWilliam P. MacKinnon, Fall 2004;“‘I Have Given Myself to the Devil’:Thomas L. Kane and the Culture ofHonor,” by Matthew Grow, Fall 2005.

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In December 1857, two American armies confronted each other inthe snow on the high plains of today’s southwestern Wyoming. AtFort Bridger, some 1,800 officers and men, including volunteers, ofthe U.S. Army’s Utah Expedition, roughly one fifth of the republic’s

regular soldiers available for frontier duty, waited for spring to clear the wayto advance on Salt Lake Valley. Between them and the Mormon strongholdstood the hosts of latter-day Israel, also known as the Utah Militia, orNauvoo Legion, as many as four thousand strong, ready to stop them in thewinding Echo Canyon corridor through the Wasatch Mountains.

In Washington that month, the Secretary of War John B. Floyd said thegovernment could no longer avoid a collision with the Mormon commu-nity.“Their settlements lie in the grand path-way which leads from our Atlantic States tothe new and flourishing communities grow-ing up upon our Pacific seaboard,” Floyd

David L. Bigler is an independent historian in Roseville, California. He is an honorary life member of theUtah State Historical Society, a charter member of Utah Westerners, and author of books and articles onMormon history in the west, including Forgotten Kingdom:The Mormon Theocracy in the American West, 1847-1890, and Fort Limhi:The Mormon Adventure in Oregon Territory, 1855-1858.This paper was presented as theUtah History Address at the Annual Meeting of the Utah State Historical Society, September 14, 2006, SaltLake City, Utah.

“A Lion inthe Path”:Genesis ofthe UtahWar, 1857-1858 BY DAVID L. BIGLER

Brigham Young—Utah’s first territorial governor serving from1850-1857

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1 “Report of the Secretary of War,” December 5, 1857, S. Exec. Doc. 11 (35-1), 1858, Serial 920, 7, 8.2 Governor John B.Weller, Inaugural Address, January 8, 1858, California State Library, Sacramento.3 “More Volunteers for the Mormon War,” San Francisco Evening Bulletin, January 5, 1858, 5:74, 2/1.4 David McCullough,“Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are,” Imprimis, 34 (April 2005), 4.5 Brigham Young Remarks, September 13, 1857, in Deseret News, September 23, 1857, 228/1.6 Scott G. Kenney, ed., Wilford Woodruff’s Journal, 10 vols. (Midvale, Utah: Signature Books, 1983), 5:78.

said.They stand as “a lion in the path,” he added, defying civil and militaryauthority and encouraging the Indians to attack emigrant families.1

The lion in the nation’s path was Brigham Young, Utah’s first governor.And the grand pathway he stood in the way of was the overland line oftravel and communications between the nation’s eastern and western sec-tions.Although replaced as territorial governor, he had declared martial lawthree months before to stop all travel without a permit across an expanse ofwestern America that reached from the Rocky Mountains of today’s centralColorado to the Sierra Nevada, west of Reno. It was an act of defiance, ifnot war, that would affect Utah’s history for years to come.

The immediate impact of Young’s actions fell on California. There anewly elected fifth governor voiced alarm that winter over the effect of thetrails closure and “Mormons and Indians” on immigration. Governor JohnWeller said his people were “entitled to protection whilst traveling throughAmerican territory.”To secure it,“The whole power of the federal govern-ment should be invoked,” he said.2 As he spoke, volunteer militia companieswere forming in gold mining towns along the Sierra Nevada, ready tomarch on Utah from the west.3

Noted historian David McCullough has said that nothing ever had tohappen the way it happened. History could have gone off in any number ofdifferent ways at any point along the way.4 But how could it come to this?To make the picture even more bizarre, both sides justified their actions bythe U.S. Constitution.

President James Buchanan in May 1857 acted under his executiveauthority and power as commander in chief of America’s armed forces. Heordered the U.S. Army to escort a new governor to Utah and serve as aposse comitatus in enabling appointed officials to enforce federal law in aterritory he believed to be in a state of open rebellion. But his actiontouched off an armed revolt.

“God almighty being my helper, they cannot come here,” BrighamYoung roared and declared martial law.5 The United States was breaking theConstitution, he said, and “we would now have to go forth & defend it &also the kingdom of God.”6 He believed God had inspired framers of theConstitution to create a land of religious freedom where His kingdomwould be set up in the Last Days as foretold by the Old Testament prophetDaniel. Young and his people had established God’s Kingdom. The U.S.Constitution was its founding document.They were its true defenders, notcorrupt Washington politicians.

Meanwhile, a Nauvoo Legion lookout on Bridger Butte, eyeing the

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federal camp on Blacks Fork, may have thought that he had seen all thisbefore. He was now engaged in the nation’s first civil war, but it was alsothe third Mormon war within twenty years. And the causes of all three—the 1838 Mormon War in Missouri, the 1845-46 Mormon War in Illinois,and now the one in Utah — had a familiar look.

What could they have in common? The following quotes point to the answer:

They instituted among themselves a government of their own,independent of and in opposition to the government of this state.7

The Mormons openly denounced the government of the United Statesas utterly corrupt, and as about to pass away and to be replaced by the government of God.8

Their hostility to the lawful government of the country has at length become so violent that no officer bearing a commission from the ChiefMagistrate of the Union can enter the Territory or remain there with safety.9

Who spoke those words? All were elected heads of state; each sent troopsto put down a perceived Mormon rebellion; and they used the word “government” five times in three sentences to identify the problem. Inorder of mention, they were Lilburn W. Boggs, governor of Missouri;Illinois Governor Thomas Ford; and James Buchanan, our fifteenthAmerican president.What government did they refer to?

When the heavens opened in the early nineteenth century and Godspoke again to humankind as He did in the days of Moses, He reinstituteda system of rule, known as a theocracy, defined as divine rule throughinspired spokesmen. Theocratic rule bestows many blessings. No longerneed one bear the anguish of uncertainty and an endless quest to discoverwho he is, why she came to be at this point in time, and how one can besure of self-awareness hereafter.

With such blessed assurance, however, comes an unwelcome corollary.For prior to the millennium, a theocracy, ruled from heaven above, cannotco-exist with a republic, governed by its people from earth below, withoutcivil warfare. History has shown that the two governing systems are incom-patible and cannot live together in peace. Instead there will be a strugglefor supremacy until one compels the other either to bend or be gone.

Brigham Young knew of this incompatibility from experience by 1846

7 “Extracts from Gov. Boggs’ Message of 1840,” in Document Containing The Correspondence,Orders, &C. In Relation To The Disturbances With the Mormons; And The Evidence Given Before TheHon. Austin A. King (Fayette, Mis: Office of the Boon’s Lick Democrat, 1841; published by order of theMissouri General Assembly), 9-10.

8 Thomas Ford, A History of Illinois from its Commencement as a State in 1818 to 1847, ed. Milo MiltonQuaife, 2 vols., (Chicago: S.C. Griggs and Co., 1854; repr. R. R. Donnelley & Sons, Lakeside ClassicsEdition, Lakeside Press, 1945-1946), 2:158-59.

9 James Buchanan,“A Proclamation,” House Exec. Doc. 2 (35-2), vol. 1, Serial 997, 69-72.

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when he led his people west from Nauvoo toward the place that his prede-cessor had chosen before he was murdered in 1844.The Great Basin was avast region of interior drainage, outside the United States and hundreds ofmiles from the nearest outpost of rule by its professed owner, the Republicof Mexico. In this empty and isolated area,Young would do again what hadbeen done before in Missouri and Illinois.

In Missouri, land possession was volatile even before 1831, when theAlmighty named Jackson County as Zion, and Independence, its frontierseat, a booming jumping off place on the Santa Fe Trail, the site of NewJerusalem. The plan of Zion’s city was a picture of millennial order (theocratic government) and communal economic purpose. It resembled abeehive with a central square mile, or hive, of identical lots, where theworking bees of Zion lived, and plots on the outskirts for them to go outto and harvest. Everywhere else, people lived on the land they farmed andwere widely scattered outside smaller towns.

On paper, the planned urban center seems harmless, but a closer lookreveals its confrontational nature. The City of Zion was exclusive, even hostile toward outsiders for whom it held no room.The collective agricul-tural concept was intimidating to next-door farm families, whose landspelled their survival.The command to “fill up the world” with cities of thesame design bears the compulsion of divine rule to prevail over, rather thancoexist with, its neighbors.

All of which mattered little in the summer of 1847 when BrighamYoung laid out at the lowest eastern point of the Great Basin almost a truecopy of Zion’s City, today’s Salt Lake City, which became a model forfuture Mormon towns. Land belonging to the Lord would not be boughtor sold, he said, but assigned as inheritances. Having begun the task toestablish God’s Kingdom as an earthly dominion,Young headed back overthe trail to wave on a parade of wagons and prepare to return the next year.

And while he was gone, the earth moved. Events took place so momen-tous they would change forever Young’s vision of God’s western Kingdom,as well as the destiny of the nation itself, in ways still beyond our powers todiscern. Six months after Young’s 1847 company arrived in the Salt LakeValley, two Mormon Battalion veterans recorded the discovery of gold inCalifornia. A human tsunami was about to transform an isolated land intothe Crossroads of the West. And ten days later, an even more pivotal eventoccurred. On February 2, 1848, the United States acquired all or most offive present southwestern states, including Utah, plus parts of two others,under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the War with Mexico.

One cannot overstate the impact of these happenings on Utah history.No longer were Zion’s working bees, with a lot in the city and a plot onthe outskirts, trespassers on land claimed by Mexico. Instead, at a stroke,they became squatters on the public domain of the United States. To thefeatures that made Zion’s City unwelcome in Missouri was added an evenmore controversial one: the exclusive communitarian design on divinely

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10 Kenney, ed., Wilford Woodruff’s Journal, 3:515-16.11 Ibid.

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held property conflicted with both the land laws and policies of a republicthat transferred two-thirds of its public domain into private ownership dur-ing the nineteenth century. All it took for an outsider to acquire the rightto buy 160 acres of the Lord’s domain was clearance of the Indian claimand an authorized survey. For federal surveyors, life in early Utah would bean adventure.

Not yet ready to adopt a sovereign position, Mormon leaders now facedthe need to reach an interim accommodation with the nation they had justleft.Why at first they decided to seek a territorial form of government, theleast favorable for establishing a sovereign realm, is unclear. On May 3,1849, John Bernhisel headed to Washington with a memorial twenty-twofeet long asking Congress to create a territory named Deseret. If the regionstaked out by fewer than ten thousand settlers appeared extravagant—roughly twice the size of Texas—it reflected the expectation of futuregrowth.

At the same time, Mormon leaders created a “free and independent”state of the same name to stand until territorial status was granted. Thissoon evolved into a memorial for statehood. Two months after Bernhiselleft to request a territory,Almon W. Babbitt took off to seek full entry intothe Union. Deseret now had conflicting petitions. It would take months toget orders from the Great Salt Lake Valley, so Apostle Wilford Woodruff andJohn Bernhisel in November 1849 went to Philadelphia to seek counselfrom the faith’s faithful advocate,Thomas L. Kane.

Kane told them he had applied to President James Polk for a territorialgovernment at Brigham Young’s request, but that Polk had refused toaccept the condition that he would “appoint men from among yourselves,”probably referring to Young as governor.At this,“I had to use my own dis-cretion and I withdrew the Petition,” he said. “You must have officers ofyourselves, & not military Politicians who are strutting around in yourmidst usurping Authority over you,” Kane told Apostle Woodruff. “You arebetter without any Government from the hands of Congress than aTerritorial Government.”10

Kane next revealed his own prophetic powers. Under a territory,“corruptpolitical men from Washington would control the land and Indian agencies,”he said, “and conflict with your own calculations.”11 True to his prediction,President James Buchanan in 1858 handed Congress over sixty letters andreports over a six-year period to justify sending a military expedition toUtah.All but four were written by officials from the two agencies Kane hadput his finger on—the U.S. Land Office and the Office of Indian Affairs.

In the end, it mattered little. Obsessed with slavery, Congress created aterritory, took away its seaport, and gave it an unwanted name, Utah.President Millard Fillmore signed the bill on September 9, 1850, and it

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could be said the Utah War started on that date. One emigrant said heheard Brigham Young say, “If they send a governor here, he will be glad toblack my boots for me.”12 Thanks to Kane’s influence, President Fillmoreinadvertently handed the job of blacking Young’s boots to one of his wives.He named Young himself Utah’s first governor.

Other presidential appointments over the next six years were a mixedlot, but not noticeably different from those of other territories. Perhaps thebest was Franklin Pierce’s choice as Utah’s surveyor general. Fifty-two-year-old David H. Burr was nothing like the controversial figure he wouldbecome. One of the nation’s leading mapmakers, he had served as cartogra-pher for the U.S. Post Office and official geologist of Congress. Over a longcareer, he had surveyed and mapped most of the states and many cities andcounties and published the first map of North America incorporating thediscoveries of Jedediah Smith.

But as Kane predicted, Burr got no respect in Utah. Nor had he seenanything like it when he came in 1855. Patterned after Zion’s City,Mormon settlements were twice the size federal law allowed for preemp-tion entry on occupied town sites, a half-section, 320 acres. Great Salt LakeCity topped that limit by six times.13 The year before Burr arrived, settlersbegan to consecrate their holdings to the church through trustee-in-trustBrigham Young.14 And Utah legislators ignored Indian rights and grantedby law canyons, water and timber resources, and herd grounds to Mormonleaders as if to convey ownership. But these oddities hardly compared tothe hostility Burr’s crews met in the field. According to his deputy, localsettlers told native chiefs that “we were measuring out the land” to claim itand “drive the Mormons away and kill the Indians.”15 Burr was seen as “anenemy, and an intruder upon their rights.”16 In the past, his work hadopened the way for settlers elsewhere to own their land. He could notunderstand why they removed the mounds and posts that marked sectionand township corners and hoped they would realize “how important it isto them to perpetuate these corners.”17 When the day came, they wouldblame him for not setting them properly.

Thomas Kane’s prophetic powers in relation to land ownership alsoproved true when it came to the U.S. Office of Indian Affairs. In the housedivided that was Utah, the federal agency’s aim was to keep peace on the

12 David L. Bigler, ed., A Winter with the Mormons:The 1852 Letters of Jotham Goodell (Salt Lake City:TheTanner Trust Fund, J.Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, 2001), 50.

13 See “An Act for the relief of the citizens of towns upon the lands of the United States, under certaincircumstances,”The Public Statutes at Large of the United States,Vol 5, 453-58.

14 Report of the Commissioner, General Land Office, House Exec. Doc. 1 (34-3), 1856, Serial 893,210-11.

15 C.L. Craig to David H. Burr, August 1, 1856, “The Utah Expedition,” House Exec. Doc. 71 (35-1),1858, Serial 956, 115-16.

16 Ibid., David H. Burr to Thomas A. Hendricks, June 11, 1857, 120.17 Annual Report of Surveyor General of Utah, September 30, 1856, House Exec. Doc. 1 (34-3), 1856,

Serial 893, 543.

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18 Micah 5:8;The Book of Mormon, 3 Nephi 21:12.19 Brigham Young Remarks,August 2, 1857, in Deseret News,August 9, 1857, 188/1-4.20 Daniel H.Wells to William H. Dame,August, 13, 1857,William R. Palmer Collection, File 8, Box 87,

Special Collections, Sherratt Library, Southern Utah University, Cedar City.21 Kenney, ed., Wilford Woodruff’s Journal, 3:515.

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frontier. The mission of God’s Kingdom, on the other hand, was to teachthe Indians, or Lamanites, the gospel of their forefathers and become part-ners with them in building New Jerusalem on the American continent.Appointment of Brigham Young as ex-officio superintendent of IndianAffairs placed the Mormon leader in charge of conflicting objectives.

It is not surprising that Young, to the alarm of U.S. Indian agents, favoredone at the cost of the other. Nor would it have mattered, except whenZion was redeemed, said the prophet Micah in words repeated in TheBook of Mormon, the “remnant of Jacob,” or Lamanites, would be amongunrepentant Gentiles “as a young lion among the flocks of sheep, who, if hego through, both treadeth down and teareth in pieces.”18 People on thefrontier could figure out that the “remnant of Jacob” referred to theIndians, while the flocks of sheep this young lion would go through, tear-ing people to bits, if they did not repent, probably meant them. So it wasthat Mormon overtures to the tribes on the Missouri frontier had been asource of rumor, misunderstanding and conflict.

The same fear can be seen in Secretary of War Floyd’s 1857 report, aswell as in California Governor Weller’s inaugural address soon after.The callof hundreds of Indian missionaries to tribes west of the Mississippi River,starting in 1855, set off alarm bells in Washington, D. C., and across theWest. And true to Kane’s prediction, most of the documents Buchananhanded Congress to justify his ordering a U.S. Army expedition to Utahcame from the Office of Indian Affairs.

Aware of such fears, Brigham Young at times seemed to encourage them.“O what a pity they could not foresee the evil they were bringing on them-selves, by driving this people into the midst of the savages of the plains,” hesaid in August 1857.19 Even then, he was sending word to the tribes that“they must be our friends and stick to us, for if our enemies kill us off, theywill surely be cut off by the same parties,” referring to the U.S.Army.20

Whether a creature of federal imagination or real, the lion the WarDepartment saw in the nation’s path in 1857 was an alliance of Mormonsand Indians, Ephraim and Manasseh in the Mormon theological parlance.Lending credence to such fears had been attacks on small emigrant partiesthe summer before on the California Trail along the Humboldt River onthe line of today’s I-80 and a horrific atrocity at Mountain Meadows insouthern Utah.

Thomas Kane did not spell out a third source of friction between theGreat Basin theocracy and the American republic, but clearly referred to itwhen he said, “You do not want two governments with you.”21 In a theo-cratic system, God’s will renders obsolete the imperfect human covenants

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on which social order depends, such as the rule of law.In Illinois, Nauvoo’s municipal council took advantage of a liberal city

charter to create an exclusive court system for people who lived underhigher law. Illinois Governor Thomas Ford said they created courts to execute laws of their own making “with but little dependence upon theconstitutional judiciary.”22 Utah legislators did the same.To short circuit theterritory’s district courts under judges appointed by the president, they created county level probate courts and vested them with original civil andcriminal jurisdiction, powers not meant by Congress, to establish an exclu-sive judiciary.They further banned common law and legal precedent.23

Such practices had caused violent opposition in Illinois, but stirred littlecomplaint in Utah because its people accepted it as part of their faith.Passing emigrants were not so acquiescent. The first book copyrighted inCalifornia was an 1851 collection of emigrant grievances at random arrests,fines, punishment, and lawsuits.They called on Congress to institute militaryrule in Utah.24 And district judges bombarded Washington with protests atbeing stripped of their function. Of eight appointed from 1850 to 1856, fivefled out of fear or frustration, two died, and one was not reappointed.

By 1855, it had become clear to Mormon leaders that God’s Kingdomcould not live under territorial rule and fulfill its destiny as foretold by theProphet Daniel.25 They now opened the most determined bid for entryinto the Union, prior to the Civil War, when they would declare Deseret astate unilaterally. Repeatedly they had asked Congress for permission tohold a constitutional convention as the first step in the statehood process,but federal lawmakers had ignored their request.This time they would giveCongress a choice:Take us as a self-governing state or leave us alone.

Describing territorial rule as an “odious, tyrannical, and absurd system ofcolonial government,”Young in December 1855 called on Utah lawmakersto hold a convention to adopt a state constitution.26 The delegates whoassembled from across the territory in March 1856 had been elected unani-mously under a marked ballot system that disallowed the opportunity tovote in secret. Another carryover from Nauvoo, such voting practices hadcaused “bitter hatred and unrelenting hostility” in Illinois, as the QuincyWhig editor had predicted.27

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22 Thomas Ford, A History of Illinois, 2: 66.23 For similarities between Utah’s early probate courts and the county courts that evolved in New

Mexico, see Howard R. Lamar,“Political Patterns in New Mexico and Utah Territories, 1850-1890,” UtahHistorical Quarterly 28 (October 1960): 363-87.

24 See Nelson Slater, Fruits of Mormonism or A Fair and Candid Statement of Facts Illustrative of MormonPrinciples, Mormon Policy and Mormon Character, by More than Forty Eye-Witnesses (Coloma, CA: Harmon &Springs, 1851).

25 See Daniel 2:44.26 Brigham Young,“Governor’s Message,” December 11, 1855, in Deseret News, December 19, 1855.27 Sylvester M. Bartlett, Quincy Whig, January 22, 1842, repr. in John E. Hallwas and Roger D. Launius,

eds., Cultures in Conflict: A Documentary History of the Mormon War in Illinois (Logan: Utah State UniversityPress, 1995), 83-84.

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Completed in eleven days was the constitution of a new state namedDeseret that equaled in size, if not yet population, the sweep of BrighamYoung’s vision. Its borders enclosed an area exceeded only by today’s statesof Alaska and Texas. An alleged census counted nearly eighty thousandinhabitants, or about twice the true number, not counting Indians, an exaggeration Young would later elevate to nearly a hundred thousand. Inhigh spirits, he informed John Bernhisel of these preliminaries and dispatched Apostle George A. Smith to work with the Utah congressionaldelegate and Apostle John Taylor, editor of The Mormon in New York, inwinning the approval of Congress for the new constitution, which wouldbe tantamount to statehood.

But the 1856 drive for sovereignty through statehood proved ill timed.Deseret’s delegates found no interest in Washington even to consider thebid.The new Republican Party had won control of Congress on a platformto abolish slavery and polygamy. If this feedback was not bad enough,Bernhisel’s report cleared Young’s mind of any illusions Washington lookedwith favor on him or his desire for statehood. The Utah delegate toldGovernor Young “an effort was being made to procure your removal fromoffice.”28

Young got the bad news on August 28 and from that day forward hisposition was one of defiance toward the national government. “Let themrip and let them roll while the devil pops them through, for truly theirtime is short,” he exploded to Taylor, Smith and Bernhisel.29 “As the Lordlives, we are bound to become a sovereign State in the Union, or an inde-pendent nation by ourselves,” he told his followers. From the beginning,God’s Kingdom had been “a terror to all nations,” he said, but it would“revolutionize the world and bring all under subjection to the law of God,who is our law giver.”30

Less than three weeks after learning Deseret’s sovereignty aspirationswere dead on arrival, Young in a dramatic fashion made it apparent thetime had come to throw off Washington’s yoke. On September 14, heignited a flaming revival to cleanse Israel and present before the Lord agodly people worthy of divine favor in an imminent showdown with theUnited States, which he foresaw. Known as the “reformation,” it calledmembers to confess their sins and be rebaptized, clean up their lives andhomes, and flush federal officials, apostates, Gentile merchants, and othermanifestations of corruption out of the body of Israel. For sinners and therighteous alike, it was a fearful time.

In December, the Nephi bishop attended legislative sessions at Great Salt

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28 John Bernhisel to Brigham Young, July 17, 1856, CR1234/1, Box 60, Folder 20 (Reel 71), ChurchHistory Library, Family and Church History Department,The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.Hereafter the LDS Church History Library.

29 Brigham Young to George A. Smith, John Bernhisel and John Taylor, August 30, 1856, CR1234/1,Letterbook 3, 18-24, LDS Church History Library.The author is indebted to Ardis Parshall for this item.

30 Brigham Young Remarks,August 31, 1856, in Deseret News, September 17, 1856, 219/-4, 220/1-3.

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31 Jacob G. Bigler to John Pyper, David Webb, and counselors, December 23, 1856, Record of theNephi Mass Quorum of Seventies, 1857-1858, MSS SC 3244, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham YoungUniversity.

32 Kenney, ed., Wilford Woodruff’s Journal, 4:451.33 1Kings 18:17.

Lake City and signaled the purpose of thespiritual conflagration. “The fire of God isburning here,” he told the leaders of his set-tlement. “Prepare yourselves to stand by mewhen Israil is to be cleansed,” he said, “for this has got to be done that theGentile bands may be Broken.”The move to sovereignty also anticipated apossible military confrontation. “The Saints in Carson & Sanbernidino arecalled to Come Home Come Home Come Home,” he wrote. As early asDecember 1856, these outlying colonies were called back to defend Zion.31

As the reformation’s voice of Leviticus, Young chose Jedediah MorganGrant. At age forty-two, his second counselor stood over six feet, carriednot an extra ounce on his lanky bones, and looked a little like youngAbraham Lincoln. He loved his wives, all six of them, and was kindly bynature. But what made Grant exceptional was the fire that burned in hisbelly at the sight of uncleanliness, personal or spiritual, in God’s people. Hewas a hell-fire preacher who frightened the congregation into a rightstanding before God, and when he spoke of the shedding of human bloodfor the remission of certain sins, it “made the Harts of many tremble,” saidApostle Wilford Woodruff in an observation well below the truth.32

As other leaders turned to the handcart crisis on the Wyoming plains,Grant wore himself out preaching in unheated halls and rebaptizing in coldmountain waters. Suddenly this “troubler of Israel” was struck silent bytyphoid and pneumonia, probably brought on by exhaustion, but his passing on December 1,1856, only gave the reformation new life as otherleaders took up the torch he had laid down.33

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A detail of soldiers at Camp Scottbringing in a supply of wood dur-ing the winter of 1857-1858.

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34 Kenney, ed., Wilford Woodruff’s Journal, 4:520.35 “Memorial & Resolutions to the President of the United States, concerning certain Officers of the

Territory of Utah and Memorial to the President of the United States,” 1856-58, Memorials andResolutions, General Assembly, Utah Territory, 1852-59, MIC 3150, Reel 3, Utah State Archives. Utahlawmakers apparently based the power to nullify federal laws on Sec. 17, “An Act to establish a TerritorialGovernment for Utah,” in Statutes at Large of the United States,Vol. 9, 458.

36 Civil war was narrowly averted in 1832 when South Carolina threatened to secede from the Unionif the U.S. government tried to collect federal tariff duties in the state. President Andrew Jackson’s threat tosend troops to enforce the U.S. law eventually nullified John C. Calhoun’s nullification doctrine, whichheld that states had the power to declare federal laws null and void.

37 John Bernhisel to Brigham Young, April 2, 1857, CR1234/1, Box 61, Folder 1 (Reel 71), LDSChurch History Library.

38 The others were Perry Brocchus, Lemuel G. Brandebury, John F. Kinney, and William W. Drummond.Leonidas Shaver and Lazarus Reid died, and Zerubbabel Snow was not reappointed.

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During territorial legislative sessions on December 23 at Great Salt LakeCity,“the House was filled with the spirit of God almost to the consumingof our flesh,” Apostle Wilford Woodruff said.34 The lawmakers resolved aweek later to forsake their sins and be rebaptized.They did not say whethersuch sins included breaking into the offices of Judge George P. Stiles thenight before and pretending to destroy district court records. Some dismissedit as a prank. If so, it was one joke that had far-reaching consequences.Theapparent destruction of federal court records was a primary reason PresidentJames Buchanan acted to restore federal law in the territory.

Overcome by religious zeal, the lawmakers also drew up memorials toPresident-elect Buchanan to justify the nullification of federal law.Accusingformer presidents of sending officials, who “threaten us with death anddestruction,” they swore to “resist any attempt of Government Officials toset at naught our Territorial laws, or to impose upon us those which areinapplicable and of right not in force in this Territory.”35 The doctrine ofnullification had led South Carolina a quarter-century before to the brinkof civil war.36

Like the 1856 statehood bid, the memorial and resolutions were ill timedas well as confrontational. John Bernhisel delivered them to PresidentBuchanan two weeks after his inauguration in March 1857. He referredthem to Interior Secretary Jacob Thompson, who called them “a declara-tion of war.” The cabinet member rebuked Bernhisel and said he did notknow how the memorials would strike the president, but that they made avery “unfavorable impression on his mind.”37

Meanwhile, frightened and upset by the apparent destruction of hiscourt records, Judge George P. Stiles satisfied the mob’s intention in ransacking his office. He became the last of five district justices, appointedby Presidents Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce, who abandoned theirposts in Utah from 1851 to 1857.38 He was also the last of Pierce’s threejudicial appointees, who took to their heels and left justice entirely in thehands of the probate courts, which meant Brigham Young.

The first to flee had been John F. Kinney, who presided over the 1855Gunnison murder trial and saw the Mormon jury nullify his instructions.

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He drew the wrath of Utah lawmakers by opposing legislation to outlawcommon law jurisdiction.They retaliated by assigning him to preside over anew district in Carson Valley, five hundred miles west of Great Salt LakeCity, inhabited “by Indians, & destitute of the necessary comforts,” thejudge protested. For this “insult to me and my family,” he took off on April21, 1856, and went home to West Point, Iowa, where he came down with bilious fever.39

The last to come and next to go was William W. Drummond, who fullymeasured up to Utah opinion of outside judges. He left his wife in Illinoisand came to Utah with a Chicago prostitute on his arm and at times at hisside in court. After the lecherous judge told a Fillmore grand jury thatUtah lawmakers had no power to bestow original civil and criminal juris-diction on probate courts, he found himself indicted by the MillardCounty grand jury and arrested under a warrant issued by the probatejudge at Fillmore. It was a charade, like the burning of Judge Stiles’ courtrecords, but it scared the judge, who took off with his lady friend in May1856. He would be heard from again.

In the meantime, the cleansing fires of the reformation roared into 1857.In late January, David H. Burr looked up from his maps and saw territorialofficers, Hosea Stout, James Cummings and Alexander McRae standingbefore him. They showed him a copy of his letter to the General LandOffice months before and asked if he had written it. He said yes.They thentold the surveyor “the country was theirs, that they would not permit thisinterference with their rights, and this writing letters about them would beput a stop to.” Burr saw no reason for their visit except to intimidate him,he told the General Land Office Commissioner Thomas A. Hendricks.40

The surveyor began to fear for his safety. “For the last three months myfriends have considered my life in danger,” he said, but he thought threatsmade against him and disaffected Mormons were idle menaces until heheard in March 1857 that three men had been killed at Springville.Assailants from the town had ambushed William Parrish and his son,Beason, as they tried to get away. Burr said, “They were shot, their throatscut, and their bowels ripped open.” Killed in the dark by mistake was theirguide, Gardner G.“Duff ” Potter, the Judas who led them into the ambush.Everyone in town knew who did it, but no effort was made to arrest orpunish them. 41

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39 John F. Kinney to Jeremiah Black, undated, U.S. Attorney General, Records relating to the appoint-ment of Federal judges, attorneys, and marshals for the Territory and State of Utah, 1853-1901, PAM14082 and MIC A 527-540, Utah State Historical Society. Kinney complained, but learned his lesson.Again appointed chief justice in 1860, he did Young’s bidding and found himself elected, almost unani-mously, as Utah delegate to Congress.

40 David H. Burr to Thomas A. Hendricks, February 5, 1857, “The Utah Expedition,” House Exec.Doc. 71, 118-20.

41 For the story of the Parrish-Potter murders, see Polly Aird, “’You Nasty Apostates, Clear Out’:Reasons for Disaffection in the Late 1850s,” Journal of Mormon History 30 (Fall 2004): 129-207.

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Now thoroughly frightened, David Burr told the General Land Office“the United States Courts have been broken up and driven from theTerritory.” The fact was, he said, “these people repudiate the authority of theUnited States in this country and are in open rebellion against the general govern-ment.”42 The fear and desperation in these italicized words moved anAmerican president to take immediate action.

Burr’s cry of alarm reached Washington soon after the inflammatory res-ignation of Judge William W. Drummond, who wrote it almost a year after heand his mistress had taken off.Among other things, he charged that supremecourt records had been destroyed “by order of the Church,” that Indians hadmurdered Captain John W. Gunnison in 1853 under Mormon orders anddirection, and his predecessor, Judge Leonidas Shaver, “came to his death bydrinking poisoned liquors.”43 The absconded judge offered no evidence orwitnesses to support these accusations and his estimate of Utah’s populationas a hundred thousand, about twice the actual number, was overblown.

Even so, the territory’s top general made the most of the manpower hehad as he pushed preparations for the anticipated military confrontationwith the United States. On April 1, Lieutenant General Daniel H. Wellsannounced the militia’s reorganization into companies of ten, fifty, and onehundred to pattern it after the hosts of ancient Israel. All able-bodied menfrom eighteen to forty-five were ordered to sign up for military duty.44

Wells also divided Utah into thirteen military districts and appointed anofficer to enroll recruits in each of them.

As they began to march, spring opened the trails and allowed Burr,Judge George P. Stiles, Marshal Peter K. Dotson, and others to flee.“Nearlyall the gentile and apostate Scurf in this community left for the UnitedStates,” Hosea Stout said. “The fire of the Reformation is burning manyout who flee from the Territory afraid of their lives,” he went on, addingthe proverb,“The wicked flee when no man pursue[s].”45

But, as he said, not all the “scurf ” had flown. Perhaps less wicked thanthe rest or braver, U.S. Indian Agent Garland Hurt, known to the Ute tribeas “the American,” holed up on the Ute Indian training farm he had estab-lished on the Spanish Fork River, below the town of the same name.Before going to his sanctuary, he set a trap for Utah’s Superintendent ofIndian Affairs. In a confidential letter posted by private hands he toldGeorge Manypenny in Washington, D. C. that Brigham Young was gather-ing Indian goods for an “exploring expedition through the Territories ofOregon,Washington, and perhaps British Columbia.”46

42 David H. Burr to Thomas A. Hendricks, March 28, 1857,“The Utah Expedition,” House Exec. Doc.71, 118-20.

43 Ibid.,William H. Drummond to Jeremiah Black, March 30, 1857, 212-14.44 For the new organization, see Deseret News, April 1, 1857.45 Juanita Brooks, ed., On the Mormon Frontier:The Diary of Hosea Stout: 1844-1861, 2 vols. (Salt Lake

City: University of Utah Press, 1982),April 15, 1857.46 Garland Hurt to George Manypenny, March 30, 1857, Letters Received, Office of Indian Affairs,

Utah Superintendency, microfilm, Utah State Historical Society.

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Brigham Young’s northern expedition in the spring of 1857 was thelongest of his career in the west. Hurt suspected that it was no pleasurejunket, but he could not have known its purpose had to do with a possibleconfrontation with the United States. Young announced the journey lessthan a week after four half-starved riders, whose trail could be followed bythe blood from their horses’ legs, reached Salt Lake City in late Februaryafter a hazardous mid-winter journey of nearly four hundred miles fromFort Limhi, the Northern Indian Mission on the Salmon River.47

The news and map they delivered were riveting. In October 1856,Young had ordered Indian missionary Pleasant Green Taylor to contact theHudson’s Bay agent in Bitterroot Valley and investigate the purchase of FortHall on the Snake River, overlooking the Oregon Trail. The followingmonth, Taylor and Fort Limhi companions Benjamin F. Cummings andEbenezer Robinson crossed the Continental Divide by present-day LemhiPass on the 1805 Lewis and Clark trail, and rode north to the great valleyof the bitterroot, now in southwestern Montana.48

Young’s agents from the Great Basin were stunned by the magnificenceof the Flathead Indian homeland, guarded on three sides by high mountainranges.They were especially impressed by its agricultural potential.The val-ley was not only richly fertile, but a thousand feet below Salt Lake Valley inelevation. Streams of water rushed from every side and timber resourcesappeared endless. One of the agents, Nauvoo Legion Major Benjamin F.Cummings, learned that emigrants arriving by steamboats on the MissouriRiver could be transported from Fort Benton over a new wagon road tothe Bitterroot Valley.

“When considered with Mormonism,” Cummings and his companions“could not help thinking that some day Bitter-Root valley, as well as otherportions of the country over east of the mountains would become theabode of the saints.”49

Brigham Young apparently thought so, too. He announced he would gonorth to Fort Limhi, then in Oregon Territory, now in Idaho, and made pub-lic the names of a large number of the territory’s leading military, settlementand religious leaders to go with him. Later, with his prayer circle, he heardCummings’ journal read aloud and studied his map.“The price of freight willcome down when settlements are made in the Land,” Young said.50

On April 24,Young led a line of wagons, carriages and animals over amile long, north from Great Salt Lake City. The parade included 115 men,twenty-two women and five boys and numbered all three members of the

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47 Lewis Warren Shurtliff,“Life and Travels of Lewis Warren Shurtliff,” from a handwritten transcriptionby Constance Miller Flygare in July 1926, Idaho State Historical Society.The four were Thomas S. Smith,Lewis W. Shurtliff, Pleasant Green Taylor and Laconias Barnard.

48 Lemhi is a misspelling of Limhi, a Book of Mormon name.49 Benjamin Franklin Cummings, Autobiography and Journals, November 16-19, 1856, Harold B. Lee

Library, Brigham Young University.50 Kenney, ed., Wilford Woodruff’s Journal, 5:26.

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faith’s ruling triumvirate, the First Presidency of Brigham Young, Heber C.Kimball and Daniel H. Wells, and other top religious, military and settle-ment leaders. Especially noteworthy was the presence of Ute ChiefArapeen and his wife,Wispit. He could be counted on to recommend hishosts to northern native leaders.

Over the next thirty-three days, Utah’s superintendent of Indian Affairsmet with Indians of Oregon Territory outside his legal jurisdiction andgave them “many presents of blankets.” He inspected the Lewis and ClarkTrail that led from Fort Limhi to the waters of the Missouri River and anemerging wagon trace to Bitterroot Valley. He also selected a location onthe Salmon River’s east fork, now Lemhi River, for a second fort to expandthe colony near Salmon, Idaho. “The president felt well toward thebrethren in this place and said the settlements must go north instead ofsouth,”William Dame said.51

Young did what he set out to do,“rest the mind and weary the body,” hetold his followers on the eve of his fifty-sixth birthday, five days after hereturned on May 26. “I have renewed my strength, renewed the vigor ofmy body and mind.”52 He would need the entire strength of his mind andmuscle to meet the dangers gathering on the course he had charted. Twodays before, Apostle George A. Smith and John Bernhisel had arrived fromthe east to report that “all hell is boiling over against us,” said ApostleWoodruff.53

It was hardly an overstatement. While Young was in Oregon Territory,President Buchanan confirmed rumors in the east as early as mid-April andordered troops to Utah. On May 28, Lieutenant General Winfield Scottissued orders for not less than 2,500 men to make up the expedition. Heordered its commander, Brevet Brigadier General William S. Harney, andthe expedition was to act as a posse comitatus in aiding a new governorand federal officers to enforce the law in a territory considered to be in astate of rebellion.54 He was not to attack “any body of citizens whatever,except on such requisition or summons, or in sheer self-defence.”55

On July 24, 1857, the tenth anniversary of his arrival in Salt Lake Valleywith the first pioneer company, Brigham Young announced publicly anAmerican army was on its way. The news shocked a people emotionallystressed by the Reformation and murder of Apostle Parley P. Pratt. Excitedand fearful, they filled the bowery on Sunday, two days later, and anxiouslywaited to hear Young tell what it meant for them and their families.

Brigham Young began in a way he rarely, if ever, did. He opened his

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51 William H. Dame Journal, May 18, 1857, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University.52 Brigham Young Remarks, May 31,1857, in Deseret News, June 10, 1857, 107/1-3.53 Kenney, ed., Wilford Woodruff’s Journal, 5:53-54.54 A posse comitatus is a force representative of all citizens to enforce the law under the legitimate

authority of a political jurisdiction.55 George W. Lay to William S.Harney, June 29, 1857,“The Utah Expedition,” House Exec. Doc. 71, 7-

9.

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Bible and read aloud: “Inthe days of these kings shallthe God of heaven set up akingdom, which shall neverbe destroyed; and the king-dom shall not be left toother people, but it shallbreak in pieces and con-sume all these kingdoms,and it shall stand for ever.”56

They had established thekingdom Daniel envisionedin the Last Days, he told hispeople. It would never bedestroyed, and “that is mytestimony.”57 There wasnothing to fear.

As Amer ican troopsneared Utah, Young on September 6 sworethat if the nation sent an overwhelming forcein 1858, he would lay the territory in wasteand flee into the mountains. “Brother[Thomas] Smith is presiding at [Fort] Limhi [on] Salmon River,” hereminded his trusted associates, “Now do we not want a station about halfway from here say near Fort Hall?” he asked.“He said that the north is theplace for us & not the South,”Apostle Woodruff said.58

Two days later, a U.S. Army envoy interrupted such contingency plan-ning.As a lieutenant, Stewart Van Vliet had led the charge that won the dayat Monterrey during the War with Mexico, but he was better known as apeacemaker, who had established cordial relations with many Mormons hehad hired while serving as quartermaster at Fort Kearny on the OregonTrail.This was the reason General Harney chose the quartermaster, now acaptain, to go ahead of his command and arrange forage and supplies forhis expedition and find a suitable place for an army post.”59 To avoid a colli-sion, he bivouacked his dragoon escort on Hams Fork, near presentGranger, Wyoming, and traveled into the Great Salt Lake Valley withNathaniel V. Jones and Bryant Stringham, who were returning from theabandoned Mormon mail station at Deer Creek. He met that night withBrigham Young who gave his fellow Vermont native a cordial reception.

Over the next six days, the officer exercised all of his known diplomatic

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56 Daniel 2:27-49.57 Brigham Young Remarks, July 26, 1857, in Deseret News,August 5, 1857.58 Kenney, ed., Wilford Woodruff’s Journal, 5:90.59 Alfred Pleasanton to Van Vliet, 28 July 1857, House Exec. Doc. 2 (35-1), II, Serial 943, 27-28.

THE UTAH WAR, 1857-1858

Alfred Cumming, Utah’s SecondTerritorial Governor from 1857 to1861.

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skills. He had seen GeneralHarney’s orders, he told hisMormon hosts, and theyheld no intimation that U.S.troops “would or couldmolest or interfere with thepeople of Utah.” He assuredthem the government’sintentions “were of themost pacific nature.”

Further, he had seen Utah’s new governor, Alfred Cumming, and was convinced he had no orders “to interfere with the Mormons as a religiouspeople.”60 At the same time,Van Vliet warned “plainly and frankly“ of theconsequences of their present course.61

It was all to no avail. He was told “with the greatest hospitality and kind-ness” that the “troops now on the march for Utah should not enter theGreat Salt Lake valley.” The officer left six days later convinced the UtahExpedition would meet armed resistance.62 On his way east, he met its newcommander at the South Platte River crossing and gave him this word.Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston, Second U.S. Cavalry, had left his regimentin Texas in the hands of its capable second in command, Lieutenant ColonelRobert E. Lee. Van Vliet later told Secretary of War Floyd that BrighamYoung had said if Cumming entered Utah “he would place him in his carriage and send him back.”63

The day after the officer left the Great Salt Lake Valley,Young did whathe meant to do all along. Knowing that President Buchanan had appointeda new governor in keeping with the law—that his own appointment hadexpired three years before and he could claim the office only until replaced—and that U.S. soldiers were ordered to respect the rights of all citizens, actonly in self-defense, and serve only to assist federal officers in upholdingthe law—he declared martial law on September 15, 1857.

60 Stewart Van Vliet to John B. Floyd, November 20, 1857, “Report on the Utah Expedition,” Sen. Ex.Docs. (35-1), v. 3, n. 11, Serial 920, 37-38.

61 Ibid., Stewart Van Vliet to Alfred Pleasanton, September 29, 1857, 25-27.62 Ibid.63 Ibid., Stewart Van Vliet to John B. Floyd, November 20, 1857, 38.

Albert Sidney JohnstonCommander of the UtahExpedition from 1857 to 1861.Upon the outbreak of the CivilWar, he joined the ConfederateArmy and was killed at the Battleof Shiloh on April 6, 1862.

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“We are invaded by a hostile force, who are evidently assailing us toaccomplish our overthrow and destruction,” he proclaimed. He prohibitedarmed forces of every kind from entering the territory and ordered theNauvoo Legion to repel an imagined invasion. But his proclamation’s mostdangerous provision was that “no person shall be allowed to pass or repassinto or through or from the Territory without a permit.”64

It has been said that Young told Mormon troops just to burn grass, butshed no blood. But the Utah War was no game. Nauvoo Legion officers hadorders to attack American soldiers if they pushed beyond Fort Bridger orattempted to enter the Salt Lake Valley from the north.65 And when BrighamYoung stopped all travel and communications “into or through or from” anarea of the American West large enough to enclose New England, NewYork, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, he all but cut the nation in half and madebloodshed certain, if the lion in its path did not move off or back down.

In a blessing for both sides, Brigham Young chose the path of peace andallowed time to resolve the differences between the American republic andits theocratic territory, which it did over the next thirty years.

Today, the 1857-58 Utah War is largely forgotten, even in Utah. It shouldnot be. For not only was it what Daniel Boorstin called America’s first civilwar, but it was also a dramatic chapter in the history of Utah and thenation, filled with episodes of sacrifice for faith, heroic rides, desperate winter marches, courage and commitment on both sides, and an Indian raidon the Mormon Indian Mission in Oregon that would affect the course ofhistory in Utah.66

This unique conflict also holds many important lessons for our nationtoday. To benefit from them, the story of the Utah War must be a faithfulaccount of its causes and outcome. As we observe its sesquicentennial, thetelling of America’s first civil war should respect the motives and judgmentof the men and women on both sides, who waged it, and be as fair, and asbalanced and, above all, as honest, as flawed historians can make it.

64 Proclamation of Governor Young,“The Utah Expedition,” House Exec. Doc. 71, 34-35.65 See Daniel H. Wells to Lot Smith, October 17, 1857, Lot Smith Collection, University of Arizona

Library,Tucson, and the Daniel Wells reports, LDS Church History Library.66 For the full story of this conflict, see William P. MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point: A Documentary History

of the Utah War, 1857-1858, Part 1 (forthcoming by Arthur H. Clark, Norman, OK).

THE UTAH WAR, 1857-1858

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“No one has a r ight to grade a President—not even poor JamesBuchanan—who has not sat in his chair, examined the mail and informa-tion that came across his desk, and learned why he made decisions.”

– President John F. Kennedy to Professor David Herbert Donald,February 1962.

And the War Came: James Buchanan,The Utah Expedition, and the Decision to InterveneBy WILLIAM P. MACKINNON

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This article’s title springs from the text of Abraham Lincoln’s extra-ordinary second inaugural address and its recapitulation of theCivil War’s origins. In 1857, Lincoln’s predecessor—JamesBuchanan—had delivered an inaugural address oblivious to the

fact that the country then teetered on the brink of a precursor to Lincoln’sconflict—the Utah War. Significantly Buchanan’s inaugural speech men-tioned neither Utah nor Mormons. It certainly did not deal with eitherBrigham Young or polygamy.1 On the morning that President-electBuchanan took office, President Franklin Pierce met for the last time withhis cabinet. Pierce read aloud a letter summarizing the challenges andaccomplishments of their four years together. Missing also from this unpub-lished valedictory was any reference to matters Mormon, although twoyears earlier Pierce had tried unsuccessfully to replace Brigham Young asUtah’s governor—an important bit of unfinished business.2 So as theadministrations changed on March 4, 1857, Utah was not an issue of front-rank importance for America’s most senior political leaders. Instead, theywere preoccupied with the slavery issue, violence in Kansas, and preserva-tion of the Union.

If, on inauguration day, Presidents Pierce and Buchanan ignored theMormons, they reciprocated. On March 4, 1857, the Deseret News made nomention of the change in national administrations, although it did print thetext of Governor Young’s proclamation announcing an election for theNauvoo Legion’s new commanding general.The News was not to mentionBuchanan by name for another three months.3

Five days after the inauguration, the presi-dent granted an interview to Utah’s delegatein Congress, John M. Bernhisel.The delegatedescribed this session to Gov. Brigham Youngas “pleasant,” and noted, “The Presidentappeared free from prejudice himself.”Youngwas optimistic, having written to Thomas L.Kane two months earlier that “We are satis-fied with the appointment of Buchanan asfuture President, we believe he will be afriend to the good, that Fillmore was our

Copyright 2007,William P. MacKinnon.The author has adapted this article from At Sword’s Point, his doc-umentary history of the Utah War (forthcoming from The Arthur H. Clark Co., an imprint of theUniversity of Oklahoma Press), as well as from a paper of similar title presented at Mormon HistoryAssociation annual conference, Salt Lake City, May 25, 2007. The author thanks Professors David H.Miller, Cameron University, and Thomas G. Alexander, Brigham Young University, for their generosity insharing documents, Ardis E. Parshall for her research and administrative help, and Patricia H. MacKinnonfor her personal and editorial support.

1 James Buchanan, “Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1857, John Bassett Moore, ed., The Works of JamesBuchanan, Comprising His Speeches, State Papers, and Private Correspondence. 12 vols. (New York: AntiquarianPress Ltd., 1960), 10:105-13.

2 Franklin Pierce, Letter to Cabinet, March 4, 1857, J. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.3 “Proclamation,” Deseret News, March 4, 1857, and “The Inauguration,” June 10, 1857.

James Buchanan’s Cabinet.Proceeding clockwise from thepresident’s left are SecretariesJohn B. Floyd (War), Lewis Cass(State), Howell Cobb (Treasury),Joseph Holt (PostmasterGeneral), Isaac Toucey (Navy),Jeremiah S. Black (AttorneyGeneral) and Jacob Thompson(Interior).

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UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

friend, but Buchanan will not be a whit behind.”4

Why and how, then, did the Utah War come about? What catapulted“the Mormon problem” from a relatively low priority as Buchanan tookoffice into a burning national issue less than three months later? When didthe Buchanan administration decide to replace Young and to intervene inUtah with a large army escort? The answers are difficult, given the mythol-ogy and conspiracy theories that have encrusted Buchanan’s decision mak-ing. There was no diarist to help later generations plumb the depths ofJames Buchanan’s mind of the type who recorded decisions by bothPierce’s and Lincoln’s cabinets, but the Utah War’s sesquicentennial providesmotivation to probe again the murky matter of that conflict’s origins.Thistime we are able to do so through the discovery of revealing documentsheretofore unexploited by historians.

Perhaps the best foundation for such an examination is the proposition thatthe Utah War was not the result of a single critical incident that welled upshortly after Buchanan’s inauguration. It was rather the result of a complexchain of interrelated incidents, issues, and forces set in motion a few years afterthe 1847 Mormon arrival in the Salt Lake Valley. If the Utah War did not endabruptly on June 26, 1858, when Albert Sidney Johnston marched throughSalt Lake City, it surely did not just start spontaneously on May 28, 1857,when Lt. Gen.Winfield Scott issued orders to organize the Utah Expedition.5

In many respects, the Utah War was a conflict in the making for nearly tenyears. It was a long, tumultuous period during which Mormon-federal relations—already poor in Ohio, Missouri and Illinois—progressively deteriorated in Utah beginning in 1849. By March 1857 there were corro-sive disputes involving every aspect of the federal-Mormon interface. Theconflicts involved a wide range of secular issues: the quality of mail service,the evenhandedness of criminal justice, land surveys and ownership, the treat-ment of emigrants crossing Utah, the behavior of U.S. troops, responsibilityfor the 1853 Gunnison massacre, Indian relations and allegiances, GovernorYoung’s sometimes volcanic anti-federal rhetoric, his handling of territorialfinances and congressional appropriations, and even the accuracy of Utah’scensus.Above all else, there were severe disputes over the competence as wellas character of Utah’s federal appointees.There were perceptions of Mormondisloyalty to the federal government and a related independence thrust—allintertwined with the failure of Mormon efforts to gain congressional sanc-tion for a State of Deseret in 1849, 1852, and 1856.

Surrounding and compounding these bitterly contested federal-territorialissues were a series of even more volatile religious matters: plural marriage,

4 John M. Bernhisel to Brigham Young, March 17, 1857, and Brigham Young, Letter to Thomas Kane,January 31, 1857, both in Family and Church History Department,The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Hereafter LDS Church History Library.

5 William P. MacKinnon,“Epilogue to the Utah War: Impact and Legacy,” Journal of Mormon History 29(Fall 2003):186-248.

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the doctrine of blood atone-ment, and—most important-ly—Brigham Young’s vision ofUtah as a theocratic kingdom(anticipating the SecondComing of Christ) rather thanas a conventional terr itor ialward of Congress functioningthrough republican principlesof government.6 Small wonderthat during 1854-55 PresidentPierce worked actively butineffectually to replace Youngas governor. Nor is it surprisingthat by the summer of 1856, when the newRepublican Party adopted an anti-polygamycampaign platform plank, a violent struggleof some sort might possibly unfold. Thatsummer Utah’s Mormon U.S. marshal, JosephL. Heywood, even dreamt of one whilerooming with Apostle George A. Smith inWashington. In Marshal Heywood’s dream, the fighting was to be led byBrigham Young’s second counselor Jedediah M. Grant.7 Even while complaining about the inefficiences of W.M.F. Magraw’s monthly mail service between Salt Lake City and the east, Mormon leader Erastus Snowcommented, “If the Mormon boys rise in the mountains and conquer theworld, the fathers in Washington will know nothing of it until it is all overwith.”8

Since early in the twentieth century, the accepted theory of many historians has been that the catalyst for the Utah War—the match in thispowder keg—was the impact on the new Buchanan administration of threeletters written by some of Brigham Young’s harshest critics:W.M.F. Magraw,a disgruntled former mail contractor; Thomas S. Twiss, an alarmed U.S.

6 In addition to David L. Bigler’s article in this issue of Utah Historical Quarterly, the most recent andcomplete discussion of this long list of pre-1857 secular and religious points of conflict appears in fourother works by Bigler: Forgotten Kingdom:The Mormon Theocracy in the American West, 1847-1896 (Spokane:Arthur H. Clark Co., 1998), 1-199; A Winter with the Mormons:The 1852 Letters of Jotham Goodell (Salt LakeCity: University of Utah Tanner Trust, 2001), 1-19; “Sources of Conflict: Mormons and Their Neighbors,1830-90,” lecture delivered to the Salt Lake Theological Seminary, July 25, 2003, photocopy in my posses-sion; and “Theocracy Versus Republic: ‘The Irrepressible Conflict,’” paper delivered at the MormonHistory Association annual conference, May 2006, Casper,Wyoming. See also MacKinnon, “Loose in theStacks: A Half-Century with the Utah War and Its Legacy,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 40(Spring 2007): 53-54.

7 Diary of Joseph L. Heywood, entry for July 31, 1856, <http://contentsm.lib.byu.edu/Diaries/-image/4269.pdf> accessed April 16, 2007.

8 Erastus Snow to Orson Spencer, October 1, 1855, “Letter from Prest. E. Snow,” St. Louis Luminary,November 10, 1855.

William Miller Finney Magraw, disgruntled anti-Mormon formermail contractor mistakenly identi-fied as a catalyst for the Utah Warwho died in Baltimore in 1864 atage forty-six.

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Indian agent; and W.W. Drummond, the venomous, debauched associatejustice of the Utah supreme court.9 However this theory does not holdunder closer examination.

Although Magraw’s letter of October 3, 1856, was written to the president of the United States, the recipient was President Pierce, not then-private-citizen James Buchanan. Inflammatory as Magraw’s letter was, thereis no indication that Buchanan—elected November 4, 1856—was evenaware of it until January 1858 when it surfaced from State Departmentfiles.10 Twiss’s letter, dated July 13, 1857, and critical of Mormon encroach-ment on Sioux lands, did not reach the U.S. Commissioner of IndianAffairs until well after the Utah Expedition had been decided on and thetroops were on the march. Thomas S. Twiss was an eccentric former WestPointer—a classmate of Albert Sidney Johnston—who had resigned hisarmy commission, moved west, married bigamously into a Sioux band andset up his agency in the abandoned Mormon mail station at Deer Creek,Nebraska Territory. Historians of the Plains tribes and Indian relations ofthe period have viewed Twiss alternately as a brilliant advocate for Indianrights and a manipulative freebooter partial to his Sioux in-laws. GeneralHarney, a problem for the army in his own right, believed Twiss to be ahopeless liability in his pursuit of the tribes and urged Secretary of WarFloyd and President Buchanan to remove him.11 Because of long andgraphic descriptions elsewhere, Judge Drummond’s character needs nocomment here. His volcanic letter of resignation, written to AttorneyGeneral Jeremiah S. Black and dated at New Orleans on March 30, 1857,was indeed a bombshell when it received national press distribution in earlyApril. But the impact of Drummond’s resignation letter on cabinet deci-sion-making has been overblown in the absence of an understanding ofwhat had preceded it by several weeks.

The real catalyst for the change in the administration’s priorities and itsdecisions about Utah was not Drummond’s incendiary resignation letterand the untimely letters from Magraw and Twiss. Rather it was the substance and rhetoric in three other sets of material received quietly butin rapid succession in Washington during the third week of March 1857—

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

9 A classic case for the significance of these three letters appears in Leland Hargrave Creer, Utah and theNation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1929), 117-26. For the match/powder keg metaphor, I amindebted to Leo V. Gordon and Richard Vetterli, Powderkeg (Novato, CA: Lyford Books, 1991), a novelabout the Utah War. An even earlier use of this metaphor appears in Robert Richmond, “Some WesternEditors View the Mormon War, 1857-1858,” Trail Guide 8 (March 1963): 3. For an analysis of these threedocuments, see William P. MacKinnon,“The Buchanan Spoils System and the Utah Expedition: Careers ofW.M.F. Magraw and John M. Hockaday,” Utah Historical Quarterly 31 (Spring 1963): 127-50.

10 This letter had been filed with State Department records because in 1856 Secretary of State WilliamL. Marcy bore administrative responsibility for most territorial affairs. Even as astute a researcher as Dale L.Morgan mistakenly assumed that Buchanan was the “Mr. President” to whom Magraw wrote a monthbefore the election of 1856. Morgan, research notes on Buchanan and Utah Expedition, Madeline R.McQuown Collection, Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City.

11 William S. Harney to John B. Floyd, August 8, 1857, Records, Office of the Adjt. Gen., LettersReceived (Record Group 94), National Archives.

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weeks before the awareness in early April of Drummond’s resignation andaccompanying accusations. This material—largely unpublished—combinedwith the cumulative impact of nearly ten years of unremitting tension andthe anti-polygamy backwash from the 1856 presidential campaign, motivat-ed Buchanan’s cabinet to make two related decisions by early April: replaceBrigham Young as governor, and provide his as-yet-unidentified successorwith a large army escort of undetermined size.The die was cast, then, longbefore the late May cabinet meetings accepted by many historians as thecritical decision-making date. To assess the dynamics of how Buchanan’scabinet worked during this important period, one needs to understand thecumulative private-public impact of all of this material as early as Marchand its sequencing.

In summary, the first of these three sets of material consisted of twomemorials and accompanying resolutions adopted by Utah’s legislativeassembly on January 6, 1857. These documents—created with input fromBrigham Young—dealt with the all-important matter of federal appoint-ments.With the pending change in administrations the legislative assemblyhad acted to demand that any new appointees for Utah would either beLatter-day Saints or at least sympatico non-Mormons. Upon adoption,these remarkably verbose documents were sent from Salt Lake City to congressional delegate John M. Bernhisel via the Salt Lake-SanBernardino-Panama mail.12 This material arrived in Washington on March17 simultaneously with publication of a harsh, anti-Mormon New YorkHerald editorial that argued: “The Utah Mormon excrescence call[s] forimmediate and decisive action. That infamous beast, that impudent andblustering imposter, Brigham Young, and his abominable pack of saintlyofficials, should be kicked out without delay and without ceremony.”13

Ironically, this editorial was the work of the Herald’s driving force, JamesGordon Bennett, a man whom Joseph Smith had commissioned a brigadiergeneral in the Nauvoo Legion during the early 1840s.

Because of the relevance of the Utah memorials to the appointmentsprocess then preoccupying the new administration, Bernhisel promptlypresented them in person to Buchanan on March 18. He did so at a timewhen Buchanan was exhausted by the demands of filling the federalpatronage as well as by his own serious gastrointestinal illness. UnwittinglyBernhisel entered a scene that was an unseemly scramble for Utah positions, especially the governor’s chair. It was a bizarre group of applicants

AND THE WAR CAME

12 “Memorial and Resolutions to the President of the United States, Concerning Certain Officers ofthe Territory of Utah” and “Memorial to the President of the United States,” by the Utah TerritoryLegislative Assembly, January 6, 1857, holograph copies retained in Utah State Archives, Salt Lake City. Arough draft with editorial emendations is in the Brigham Young Collection, LDS Church History Library.W. A. Hickman was recommended by the legislative assembly to be appointed U.S. attorney for Utah. Inview of Hickman’s reputation as “notorious” and his later status as a self-confessed killer, it is interesting toconsider the legislature’s recommendation.

13 “Mr. Buchanan’s Administration and Our Foreign and Domestic Affairs,” New York Herald, March 17,1857.

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that included James ArlingtonBennet, an eccentric NauvooLegion major general turnedBrooklyn cemetery develop-er.14 Accordingly the belea-guered president chose not toexamine these documents inBernhisel’s presence. Insteadhe urged Utah’s congressionaldelegate to deliver them toone of his chief cabinet offi-cers, Secretary of the Interior

Jacob Thompson. Bernhisel did so later thatsame day.

When Bernhisel called again onThompson the next day, March 19, he foundto his horror that the provocative language ofone of the documents had alarmed the secre-tary (and presumably the cabinet) to a pointthat both memorials were interpreted to be a

de facto Mormon declaration of war. When Brigham Young and otherMormon leaders learned of this fateful Bernhisel-Thompson confrontationmonths later from Bernhisel, they immediately viewed this meeting andtheir petitions as the catalyst for the Utah War. Contributing to the obscu-rity of these petitions was the fact that in March 1857 Thompson hadwarned Bernhisel against publishing their text. The implication was thatBuchanan viewed them as politically volatile, the stuff from which anuncontrollable national anti-Mormon furor could spring. Even thoughBrigham Young wanted to publish these petitions, he and Bernhisel acqui-esced in Thompson’s demand for secrecy. And so, even in Utah, publicdescriptions of the offending documents were cryptic, incomplete, indirect,and soon forgotten.15 In the federal government, there was no public discussion, although word of the documents’ receipt by the administrationdribbled into a few low-profile newspapers without other notice until first

14 Ardis E. Parshall, “Brigham Young’s Support of Buchanan Proved Ironic as Utah War Unfolded,” SaltLake Tribune, March 25, 2007. For a discussion of the three Bennet[t]s whom Joseph Smith had commis-sioned as Legion generals and their colorful Utah War involvements, see MacKinnon, “Epilogue to theUtah War,” 213. See also Lyndon W. Cook, “James Arlington Bennet and the Mormons,” BYU Studies 19(1979): 247-49.

15 John M. Bernhisel, Letter to Brigham Young,April 2, 1857, Brigham Young Collection, LDS ChurchHistory Library. Neither Bernhisel nor the Buchanan administration ever submitted these documents toCongress, disregarding normal procedure and even the House of Representatives’ subsequent special year-end demand that Buchanan produce all materials shedding light on the extent to which Utah was in astate of rebellion.This treatment was in marked contrast to the wide and immediate publicity given to theeven more inflammatory memorial adopted by the Utah legislative assembly a year later on January 6,1858, and sent to the U.S. House of Representatives. A federal grand jury sitting at Camp Scott returnedan indictment of treason against every man who signed the 1858 memorial.

John F. Kinney was appointedUtah Territory Chief Justice in1854. He recommended replacingBrigham Young as Utah TerritorialGovernor and dispatching a mili-tary expedition to Utah to supporthis successor.

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16 W. W. Drummond, Letter to unspecified cabinet officer, “Utah and Its Troubles ...,” March 19, 1857dispatch from Washington, New York Herald, March 20, 1857. The text of this letter cannot be located in government files; our only awareness of it is through the excerpts reported by the Herald’s Washington correspondent.

17 Bernhisel’s April 2, 1857, report to Brigham Young remains unpublished. He wrote it too late to beincluded in the April mail to Salt Lake City, and so, ironically, this document traveled west in the samecoach with Bernhisel a month later. The letter arrived at its destination on May 29, 1857, just after thegovernor’s return from a five-week trek to Fort Limhi and the day following the release of General Scott’scircular initiating the Utah Expedition.

AND THE WAR CAME

the Deseret News and then the New York Herald published an incompleteversion of the memorials on October 7 and December 15, 1857.

What may well have stimulated Thompson’s fateful comments to delegate Bernhisel was the second batch of Utah materials received inWashington that week: a letter from Judge Drummond to an unidentifiedcabinet officer—presumably Attorney General Black—that appeared in thecapital on the same day as the Bernhisel-Thompson meeting. Drummondhad probably written this letter before boarding ship in California andbefore his resignation letter written on March 30 from New Orleans.Afterreciting a list of what he considered to be Mormon abuses, Drummondgrew prescriptive: “Let all, then, take hold and crush out one of the mosttreasonable organizations in America.”16

Stunned by Thompson’s unanticipated reaction to the Utah petitions, ifnot Drummond’s California letter, Bernhisel made what seems to havebeen both a strange and fateful decision. Instead of swinging into action tomoderate the administration’s alarmed reaction, Bernhisel withdrew fromthe fray, left Washington, and travelled to Pennsylvania to visit relatives. Hethen wrote a discouraging report to Brigham Young on April 2, and tookhis seat on the early May Salt Lake-bound mail stage from Independence,Missouri. His unfortunate departure from the capital created a vacuum inMormon representation at the very time when it was most needed.17

The day after Thompson informed Bernhisel of the cabinet’s explosivereaction, another shoe dropped in Washington—this time in the form oftwo letters written to Jeremiah Black, the U.S.Attorney General, by Utah’schief justice, John F. Kinney.The judge was then in Washington on leave ofabsence. His letters constituted the third wave of Utah-related materialsreceived by the administration that week.

In one of his March 20 letters, presumably hand-delivered, Kinneyreviewed at length the condition of affairs in Utah. This document wasremarkably like the resignation letter Drummond was then formulatingaboard ship in the Gulf of Mexico, and it urged Attorney General Black toshare Kinney’s views with the president and his cabinet just as Drummond’sCalifornia letter, received the day before, had asked. Kinney did not writespontaneously; Black had asked for his assessment of Utah affairs probably afterreading Drummond’s California letter and after Bernhisel had delivered thememorials of January 6 to Thompson on March 18. On March 20 Kinneynot only recited examples of what he believed to be Brigham Young’s perver-

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sion of Utah’s judicial system, he urged Young’s removal from office and theestablishment of a one-regiment U.S.Army garrison in the territory.18

The second letter that Kinney gave to Attorney General Black on March20 was a document transmitting an enclosed letter from Utah SurveyorGeneral David H. Burr. Burr was a long-time critic of Brigham Young’shandling of such disputed federal-territorial issues as disposition of thepublic lands and Indian affairs. Sandwiched among his new litany of allegedMormon offenses was Burr’s shocking assessment that, “The great dangerto a [new] Governor would be assassination.” Notwithstanding his identifi-cation of this risk, Burr argued for something other than a large armyexpedition to carry out his recommendations: “To carry out this plan thepresence of a small Military force might be necessary. I do not suppose thattheir services would be needed further than to show the leaders of thispeople a determination to enforce the laws.”19

Delivery of the Burr letter meant that within two weeks of taking officeJames Buchanan and his cabinet had a collection of stunning new inputs onUtah affairs from the territory’s truculent legislative assembly, its chief justice, an associate supreme court justice, and the surveyor-general. All ofthese documents were suppressed and never shared with Congress,although the full cabinet was surely aware of them.

From the cabinet’s viewpoint, Kinney’s inputs must have carried substan-tial credibility at face value, as would those of “General” Burr. Prior to hisappointment to Utah’s bench in 1854, Kinney had been a justice on Iowa’ssupreme court. His experience in Utah was relatively long and recent,credentials that Kinney believed qualified him to comment about the terri-tory, as he phrased it, “advisedly.” Both the U.S. Department of State andthe office of the U.S. Attorney General had files amassed during President

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18John F. Kinney to Jeremiah S. Black, March 20, 1857, photocopy of holograph in my possession,together with the typed transcription, courtesy of Professor David H. Miller, Cameron University.This let-ter is marked “Confidential & Private” in a hand other than Kinney’s.The only known published reference(but not the text) to this important document is a simple listing in the bibliography for James F.Varley,Brigham and the Brigadier, General Patrick Connor and His California Volunteers in Utah and along the OverlandTrail (Tucson:Westernlore Press, 1989), 309. Kinney’s relationship with the Mormons was highly ambiva-lent over an extended period of time. Starting in 1855 Brigham Young accurately suspected the judge ofjoining other disaffected federal appointees in writing anti-Mormon reports to Washington, behavior thatKinney vehemently denied while simultaneously courting Mormon approbation. Howard Lamar refers toKinney during this period as “busily playing the double game of cooperating with the Mormons on thelocal level while bombarding Washington with secret strictures against Young.” Howard Roberts Lamar,The Far Southwest, 1846-1912:A Territorial History (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1966), 331; MichaelW. Homer,“The Federal Bench and Priesthood Authority:The Rise and Fall of John Fitch Kinney’s EarlyRelationship with the Mormons,” Journal of Mormon History 13 (1986-87): 89-108.

19 The undated David H. Burr to Jeremiah Black letter may have been received by Kinney with thesame batch of mail that arrived in Washington (via the Salt Lake-San Bernardino-Panama route) yieldingletters for Black and Bernhisel from Drummond and Utah’s legislative assembly, respectively, on March 17and 19.To date, the only notice of the Burr to Black letter (transmitted on March 20, 1857 by Kinney)appears in Thomas G.Alexander,“Carpetbaggers, Reprobates, and Liars: Federal Judges and the Utah War,”unpublished paper for Mormon History Association’s annual conference, Salt Lake City, May 2007, 19note 49. Burr’s concerns about threats to his safety and mail security appear in David H. Burr to ThomasA. Hendricks, February 5, and June 11, 1857, “The Utah Expedition,” House Ex. Doc. 71 (35-1), Serial956, 118-21; Burr to Hendricks, December 31, 1856, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City.

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Pierce’s administration that bulged with “confidential” Kinney reports criti-cizing Brigham Young’s influence on Utah’s judicial and law enforcementsystems. Probably unknown to the Buchanan cabinet in March 1857 wasKinney’s 1855 indictment in Salt Lake City’s probate court on gamblingcharges, his ownership of a disreputable hotel frequented by young girlsand older men seeking companionship, and the extent to which he hadboldly but unsuccessfully maneuvered for appointment as Utah’s governortwo years earlier. David H. Burr would have been even better known tothe cabinet than Kinney. Although Mormon leaders would soon begin anintense attack on Burr’s character and professional performance, in Marchhe would have been known in Washington as a nationally famous cartogra-pher who had been employed by both the U.S. House of Representativesand the State of New York.

Once Judge Drummond became the center of national attention in earlyApril 1857, he stoked his now-famous anti-Mormon vendetta through aseries of similar letters. Some of these were written in April and May forpublic consumption by a nation unaware of his character flaws. In privateDrummond also wrote to both Attorney General Black and Sen. StephenA. Douglas to threaten destruction of the administration and the entireDemocratic Party if they failed to act on Utah as he wanted. On April 2—the day that he mailed his resignation from New Orleans—Drummondhad reported to a friend, “I have stirred the waters of the Saints and shallkeep up the war in all time to come ... A new Government and Militaryaid will be sent to Utah now mark it, and Brigham Young will starve fromunder the appointments of the Federal Government.... I may go to Utah asGovernor. If so look out for a merry time. I will take it with military aid.”20

Later, unsure if Buchanan would indeed take action, Drummond wrote toDouglas angrily, “I think I will make open war on this Admin. on thisdread question.... [I will] make it as hot as Judge Black and the Presidentcan well bear it ...”21 It is now known that Drummond met with Black andperhaps the entire Buchanan cabinet. Such threats may have had a signifi-cant impact on Senator Douglas’s decision to include an attack on theMormons in his now famous Springfield speech a few weeks later on June12.This was an address that stimulated a little-known rebuttal speech froma member of Douglas’s audience, lawyer Abraham Lincoln, and producedMormon enmity against Douglas lasting to this day.22

20 Quoted in Donald R. Moorman, with Gene A. Sessions, Camp Floyd and the Mormons:The Utah War(Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992; reprinted 2005), 12 and 284 note 23.

21 W.W. Drummond to Stephen A. Douglas, May 16, 1857, Stephen A. Douglas Papers, SpecialCollections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

22 Stephen A. Douglas,“Kansas, Utah, and the Dred Scott Decision,” Springfield, Illinois, June 12, 1857,11-15 (pamphlet in author’s possession). For a description of this speech and its reception, see Robert W.Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 566-75. For the enragedMormon rebuttal to Douglas’s speech, see “Comments Upon the Remarks of Hon. Stephen ArnoldDouglas,” Deseret News, September 2, 1857.These two Springfield speeches of June 1857 likely providedthe template for the Lincoln-Douglas debates that followed in 1858.

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In the midst of all this turmoil,Thomas L. Kane of Philadelphia, BrighamYoung’s oldest and best-connected non-Mormon friend, tried covertly tolobby President Buchanan to retain Young as Utah’s governor.23 He did so onMarch 21 at Young’s urgent request, but a pessimistic Kane reported to Younglater that month, “Mr. Buchanan is a timerous man, as well as just now anoverworked one.”24 Armed with very recent inputs from Drummond,Kinney, and Burr as well as provocative petitions from Salt Lake City,Buchanan rebuffed Kane’s request and would not even see him. Here was ademoralizing slight which, along with a myriad of personal and family prob-lems, drove Kane to withdraw from Mormon affairs until the next fall.

Kane’s departure from the fray was a devastating blow to the Mormoncause at just the wrong time. As he retired to the mountains of westernPennsylvania, Kane wrote to Young: “We can place no reliance upon thePresident: he succumbs in more respects than one to outside pressure.Youcan see from the papers how clamorous it is for interference with Utahaffairs. Now Mr. Buchanan has not heart enough to save his friends frombeing thrown over to stop the mouths of a pack of Yankee editors.”25 Thiswas a lobbying gap aggravated by delegate Bernhisel’s decision in April toleave the arena of Mormon-federal conflicts and Brigham Young’s ownincommunicado status during the five weeks of his unauthorized April-Maydeparture from Utah for the even more remote wilderness of southernOregon Territory.

By late May 1857 Drummond’s accusations were augmented by tele-graphic reports from Missouri sent to Washington by other returning fed-eral officers, nearly all of whom had fled Utah on April 15. The first ofthese departees to reach the Atlantic Coast was John M. Hockaday, U.S.attorney for Utah as well as a former business partner of letter-writerW.M.F. Magraw. Hockaday met for hours on April 27 with the shadowyJames C. Van Dyke, James Buchanan’s closest political advisor inPhiladelphia. After leaving Van Dyke, Hockaday moved on to visit, and presumably influence, Buchanan.26

Adding to the sensationalism of reports from Utah’s fleeing federalappointees was a series of graphic editorial attacks on Drummond’s charac-ter and credibility in the LDS church’s Manhattan newspaper, The Mormon.These attacks reflected the no-holds-barred style of its editor, Apostle JohnTaylor. Through his deputy editor, William I. Appleby—a former NewJersey judge—Taylor launched an intensive investigation and exposé of

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

23 Thomas L. Kane to James Buchanan, March 21, 1857, Kane Collection, L. Tom Perry SpecialCollections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University.

24 Thomas L. Kane to Brigham Young, ca. March 1857, Thomas L. Kane Papers, Stanford UniversityLibraries, Stanford, California.

25 Thomas L. Kane to Brigham Young, May 21, 1857,Yale Collection of Western Americana, BeineckeLibrary,Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

26 Hockaday’s visit to Philadelphia and the recommendation that he visit the president is described inJames C.Van Dyke to James Buchanan,April 27, 1857,The James Buchanan Papers,The Historical Societyof Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

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Drummond’s libertine behavior in Illinois, Washington, and Utah. Taylorand Appleby published the seamy results in a way that largely destroyedDrummond’s reputation. But they did so with the unintended consequenceof also fueling public fascination with Drummond’s accusations ofMormon misconduct.This was explosive material that had been requestedby and provided to Kane and that he privately transmitted to AttorneyGeneral Black.27 It was an approach that kept the pot of Utah controversyroiling rather than putting “the Mormon problem” to rest, especially afterDrummond became aware through leaks to him from the cabinet aboutKane’s efforts to advise Buchanan and Black. With this realization,Drummond publicly cudgeled Kane through pseudonymous letters tonewspaper editors.This intimidating counterattack by Drummond, in turn,also sapped a distracted Kane’s willingness to help the Mormons at thiscritical juncture.28

A parallel Mormon attack on Utah’s surveyor general, David H. Burr,focused on public accusations—some warranted—that his work was riddled with nepotism, incompetence, and corruption.These were chargesthat stained Burr’s otherwise sterling reputation, broke his health, and prolonged territorial-federal finger-pointing well into 1859 and beyond.

It was now clear that the old Pierce strategy of benign neglect—contin-uation in office for Young through presidential inaction—was no longerviable.The incendiary rhetoric of the documents received privately duringthe third week of March destroyed any vestige of presidential confidence inBrigham Young. In March Buchanan began to offer Utah’s governorship tomultiple candidates, all of whom declined the post.

Drummond’s March-April advice had been for a military as well aspolitical remedy, and Buchanan had received similar counsel for militaryaction privately in late March from Utah Chief Justice Kinney andSurveyor General Burr. In late April Buchanan also heard from RobertTyler, another close advisor in Philadelphia who was the son of formerPresident John Tyler. He advised Buchanan to use the army in an anti-Mormon “crusade” to divert public attention from the slavery conflict inKansas.29 The president made no response to such advice, but he created theappearance that he was first focusing on a political solution rather than

AND THE WAR CAME

27 Thomas L. Kane to Jeremiah S. Black, April 27, 1857, Black Papers, Manuscript Division, Library ofCongress.

28 “Verastus,” to Editor, May 24, 1857, printed as “Col. Thomas L. Kane on Mormonism,” New YorkDaily Times, May 26, 1857. Multiple historians view “Verastus” as the pen name adopted by W.W.Drummond.

29 Robert Tyler to James Buchanan,April 27, 1857, The James Buchanan Papers,The Historical Societyof Pennsylvania. For the text see also Philip G.Auchampaugh, Robert Tyler, Southern Rights Champion 1847-1866:A Documentary Study Chiefly of Antebellum Politics (Duluth, MN.: Himan Stein, 1934), 180-81; DavidA.Williams,“President Buchanan Receives a Proposal for an Anti-Mormon Crusade, 1857,” Brigham YoungUniversity Studies 14 (Autumn 1973): 103-105.Williams’ judgment was:“The fact that it could be seriouslyadvanced by a son of a former president to the incumbent President in and of itself makes it a significantdocument in the political history of Mormonism in America.”

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30 2d Lt. George Dashiell Bayard to Samuel J. Bayard, April 15, 1857, in Samuel J. Bayard, Life of GeorgeDashiell Bayard (New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 1874), 114-17.

31 Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict 1850-1859 (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1960), 63.32 W. W. Drummond to Stephen A. Douglas, May 16, 1857, Douglas Papers, University of Chicago

Library.

army intervention. Nonetheless, consideration of the military optionindeed bubbled below the surface.

It is likely that by late March or early April the notion of some sort ofarmy escort for Young’s successor had gelled in the cabinet along with thedecision to replace Young. Surely those men whom Buchanan approachedabout Utah’s governorship in March raised the question of military support.For example, Robert J. Walker had done so soon after the inaugurationbefore agreeing to become Kansas’s governor. Through such negotiations,Walker had obtained from Buchanan a commitment that General Harneyand the Second U.S. Dragoons would be in Kansas to help him maintainorder in that troubled territory. It is even more likely that candidates forUtah’s governorship also raised the matter of military backing with the presi-dent.To this point, we know that Alfred Cumming’s eventual appointment tosucceed Young was delayed until mid-July so that he could travel to FortLeavenworth to review arrangements for the Utah Expedition.

Precisely when and how the cabinet arrived at a firm decision to intervenemilitarily is murky.The mysterious, abrupt April 6 transfer of General Harneyfrom command of the Seminole War in Florida to Kansas for undisclosedreasons triggered rampant rumors. Newspaper editors and army officers alikespeculated that a campaign against the Mormons was taking shape.30

In 1960, without citing evidence other than the speculation of contempo-rary press accounts—many of them wildly inaccurate—historian Norman F.Furniss identified a cabinet meeting on or about May 20 as crucial. Furnissviewed that session as the one at which the administration decided uponmilitary as well as political intervention.31 More accurately, the basic decisionhad been made almost two months earlier, but the cabinet was nervously trying to get comfortable with such a decision in private while Buchananfrantically sought someone willing to take Utah’s governorship. Among theimponderables being weighed by the administration during this recruitmentwas the advice of Kinney and Burr for a relatively small force andDrummond’s conflicting demand for a far larger expedition. On May 16Drummond ranted to Douglas, “I have had an interview with Atty. Gen.Black today on Utah, and find him as ignorant as a man can be. Cannot forthe life of him appreciate the power of the Mormons. He says they willenforce the laws in Utah and intimates that 1,000 [military] men will do it.”32

At the end of May, a hulking, three hundred-pound Gen. Winfield Scottentered the fray. He did so very late in the game and without conviction.

Among the important but obscure documents created during this crucialperiod was an extraordinary memorandum that Scott wrote on May 26from his self-exile in New York to Secretary Floyd. In this document Scott

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argued that a campaign in Utah would be ill-fated unless postponed untilthe spring of 1858. He pleaded that if there was to be an expedition forUtah about four thousand troops were needed, but he conceded that hecould make do with as few as twenty-five hundred.33 Such a force wouldhave been several multiples beyond what Kinney and Burr had earlier recommended. It was more like the implied scope of the anti-Mormon“crusade” recommended on April 27 by Robert Tyler. Even though Scotthad traveled to Washington by May 27 and undoubtedly hand deliveredthis paper to the War Department, Floyd never acknowledged receiving it.Ten years later Buchanan pointedly denied even knowing of the Scottmemorandum, let alone rejecting its sound advice.34 Notwithstanding hiscounsel to Floyd for delay, on May 28, 1857, Scott announced to the army’sstaff departments that there was to be a twenty-five hundred man UtahExpedition and tasked them with its immediate support.What happened tounsettle General Scott’s world and overrule his advice during the two daysbetween May 26 and 28, 1857, is one of the remaining mysteries surround-ing the Utah War’s origins.

In his 1864 memoirs General Scott further clouded the issue of why andhow the Buchanan cabinet decided to launch the Utah Expedition byintroducing the notion of Secretary of War Floyd’s 1857 behavior. Scott didso in the midst of the Civil War—a time when he and former PresidentBuchanan were publicly jousting over their roles in the secession crisis of1860-61 and a time when it was well known that Floyd had gone south tobecome a Confederate brigadier general. With his 1864 comments, Scottgratuitously added fuel to a Utah War conspiracy theory that BrighamYoung had helped to launch in August 1857—the notion that at the heartof the Utah Expedition was the Buchanan administration’s corrupt desireto enrich commercial friends such as the western freighting firm ofRussell, Majors and Waddell. General Scott wrote:

The expedition set on foot by Mr. Secretary Floyd, in 1857, against the Mormons andIndians about Salt Lake was, beyond a doubt, to give occasion for large contracts andexpenditures, that is, to open a wide field for frauds and peculation.This purpose wasnot comprehended nor scarcely suspected in, perhaps, a year; but, observing the desperate characters who frequented the Secretary, some of whom had desks near him,suspicion was at length excited. Scott protested against the expedition on the generalground of inexpediency, and specially because the season was too late for the troops to reach their destination in comfort or even in safety. Particular facts, observed by different officers, if united, would prove the imputation.35

33 “Garrison for Salt-Lake City,” Brevet Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott, Memorandum for Secretary of War,May 26, 1857, Headquarters of the Army, Letters Sent (Record Group 108), National Archives.The onlypublished text of this remarkable memo appears in M. Hamlin Cannon, “Winfield Scott and the UtahExpedition,” Military Affairs: Journal of the American Military Institute 5 (Fall 1941): 109-11.

34 James Buchanan, Mr. Buchanan’s Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion (New York: D. Appleton &Co., 1866), 238-39.

35 Winfield Scott, Memoirs of Lieut.-General Scott, L.L.D.,Written by Himself. 2 vols. (New York: Sheldon& Co., 1864), 2:604. Scott, like Buchanan, wrote his memoirs in the third person.

AND THE WAR CAME

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Former President Buchanan believed with justification that Scott’s accu-sation was groundless, although defending Floyd in 1864 was difficultbecause of his wartime status as traitor. Also complicating a dispassionateview of Floyd’s 1857 decisions was the fact that his subsequent irregulari-ties in financing the Utah War had forced his resignation from the cabinetin December 1860.36 Within a few months of leaving office, Buchanan wasso skeptical of Scott’s memoranda and letters to newspapers that he toldone editor, “…[it]has been often said of the gallant general that when heabandons the sword for the pen, he makes sad work of it.”37

These yawning communication gaps between the most senior federalleaders were emblematic of conflict, indifference, and ineffectiveness atopthe U.S. Army.38 Notwithstanding periodic bouts of severe back pain, aninexperienced but highly confident Secretary Floyd intended to run mili-tary affairs during the Buchanan administration unaided by Scott. GeneralScott, who had unilaterally removed army headquarters from Washingtonto New York during the late 1840s in a fit of pique, lacked the interperson-al skills and even physical presence to bridge the polite but real chasmdividing him and Floyd. President Buchanan was temperamentally andexperientially ill-equipped to understand that these disconnects existed letalone deal with their consequences. For political reasons Buchanan andFloyd took another precious month after the late May 28 release ofGeneral Scott’s announcement of the Utah Expedition to name its com-mander and to draft his operational instructions.These orders—signed by alieutenant colonel acting for Scott—declared Utah to be in a state of rebel-lion, something that the president himself neglected to say publicly untilthe next December and even then only in confusing fashion. These wereinterpersonal relationships, communication behaviors, and timing insensi-tivities disastrous for the way in which the Utah Expedition was to beorganized and led.39

It is intriguing but unnoticed that when the critical decisions on Utahwere being made in the spring of 1857, James Buchanan, Brigham Young,Thomas L. Kane, General Scott, and Secretary of War Floyd were all menwith serious medical problems ranging from the life-threatening to themysterious. None of these key people were functioning at the top of theirgames. Even the Utah Expedition’s initial commander, General William S.Harney, had self-control and emotional problems so severe that by the

36 William P. MacKinnon,“125 Years of Conspiracy Theories: Origins of the Utah Expedition of 1857-58,” Utah Historical Quarterly 52 (Summer 1984): 212-30.

37 James Buchanan to Gerard Hallock, June 29, 1861, cited in William H. Hallock, Life of Gerard Hallock,Editor of the New York Journal of Commerce (1869 New York:Arno Press, 1970, rep.), 242.

38 For a more complete discussion of these leadership shortfalls and the points covered in summaryfashion in the balance of this article, see MacKinnon,“‘Lonely Bones’: Leadership and Utah War Violence,”Journal of Mormon History 33 (Spring 2007): 121-78.

39 See MacKinnon, “‘Who’s in Charge Here?’: Command Ambiguity and Cross Currents Atop theUtah Expedition,” unpublished paper, 55th Annual Utah State History Conference, September 7, 2007,Salt Lake City.

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spring of 1857 the army had court-martialed him four times and a civiliancourt in St. Louis had tr ied Harney a fifth time for torturing and bludgeoning to death a defenseless female slave. The nature of Buchanan’safflictions were so severe and communication lags so daunting that duringAugust 1857 Brigham Young and General Wells speculated amongst themselves that the president might be dead.40 In terms of communicationhe was. Buchanan’s first public discussion of the Utah War in any form camein a brief five-paragraph commentary in his December 8, 1857, first annualmessage to Congress, a silence stunning by its length and implications.41

Both James Buchanan and Brigham Young were highly capable leaders,but each was ill in the late winter of 1857 and lacked military experience.They reacted ineffectively to the powerful social, political, and religiousforces afoot by placing large numbers of armed men in motion undermurky, sometimes conflicting orders. The results were fateful as well asexpensive in terms of blood and treasure.There were also devastating repu-tational consequences.This damage lingers to this day in unfortunate wayson both Mormon and federal sides of the conflict.The LDS church as aninstitution still grapples with the stain of Mountain Meadows, the UtahWar’s greatest atrocity. Brigham Young’s personal reputation was tarnishedby his three Utah War-related indictments for treason and murder and theexecution for mass murder of his adopted son, John D. Lee.42 For its partthe U.S. Army still prefers to forget the embarrassment of the UtahExpedition and its uncomfortable winter spent in the charred ruins of FortBridger on half-rations. For James Buchanan the Utah War was, in manyways, the beginning of the destruction of his personal reputation, as hepresided ineffectively over the nation’s slide toward disunion. Feelingsagainst Buchanan ran so high during the Civil War that members of hisMasonic lodge stood guard over his retirement home in Lancaster,Pennsylvania.The damage to Buchanan’s reputation was so long-lasting thata monument to him was not erected in Washington until the 1930s,although his niece had covered the full expenses for such a tribute fortyyears earlier.

And the war came—first as an unprecedented, atrocious armed con-frontation between Americans in Utah Territory and then as a monumentalbloodbath in Virginia.

AND THE WAR CAME

40 Young and Wells quoted in entry for August 2, 1857, Scott G. Kenney, ed., Wilford Woodruff’s Journal,1833-1898. 9 vols. (Midvale: Signature Books, 1983-1985), 5:71-2.

41 James Buchanan,“First Annual Message,” December 8, 1857, Moore, ed., The Works of James Buchanan,10:151-54.

42 The texts for these three indictments are unpublished. They were quashed under unusual circum-stances described in MacKinnon, “Epilogue to the Utah War,” 245 note 14; Edwin Brown Firmage andRichard Collin Mangrum, Zion in the Courts:A Legal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,1830-1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 138, 144-47.

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Trouble between Brigham Young, Utah Territorial Governor

and Mormon Church President, and other federal territorial

officials began to brew in the early 1850s and by the spring

of 1857 a resolution to the troubles was needed. Late in

May 1857 Brevet Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, General-in-Charge of

the United States Army, issued orders to organize a force of up to 2,500 sol-

diers to march to Utah, secure law and order, and to escort newly appointed

territorial officials including the new territorial governor Alfred Cumming.

Accompanying the army expedition were hundreds of supply wagons

The Utah War:By JOHN ELDREDGE

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driven by civilian teamsters, livestock, and other camp followers, reminding

Mormons of Moses and the Jews fleeing before the army of Pharaoh.

By July first elements of the military expedition had begun the long and

difficult march from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to Utah.That same month as

Brigham Young and several thousand Mormons had gathered in Big

Cottonwood Canyon to celebrate their arrival to the Great Salt Lake Valley

ten years earlier word was received and announced to those gathered that a

military expedition was on the march to Utah on the well-used overland trail.

As the U. S. Army approached Utah Governor Brigham Young issued a

THE UTAH WAR

A Photographic Essay of Some of Its Important Historic Sites

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proclamation forbidding all armed forces from entering the territory. The

proclamation had no effect on the expedition’s commander, Colonel Albert

Sidney Johnston. However, weather and Mormon resistance did.The expe-

dition halted in November as winter snow and cold enveloped the moun-

tains of southwest Wyoming, and because of the destruction of much of the

expedition’s supplies by the Mormon militia.The expedition camped at the

new Camp Scott near the destroyed forts of Bridger and Supply.

In June, following negotiations between Brigham Young and Thomas L.

Kane, the Utah Peace Commission, and others, a pardon was issued by

President James Buchanan. Brevet Brigadier General Albert Sidney

Johnston led the Utah Expedition into the Great Salt Lake Valley and a

nearly deserted Salt Lake City. Within a few days, the expedition was

encamped at isolated Cedar Valley, located about forty miles southwest of

Salt Lake City.There at the newly christened Camp Floyd the army, with

the assistance of the Mormons, built a sizeable military post. There they

would remain until the firing on Fort Sumter and the outbreak of the Civil

War in April 1861.

The photographic essay which follows highlights some of the significant

locations on the last segments of the overland trail used by the Utah

Expedition from Devil’s Gate to the Great Salt Lake Valley.

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

John Eldredge is the author of The Utah War:A Guide to the Historic Sites South Pass to Salt Lake City (2007)and past president of the Utah Chapter, Oregon-California Trails Association.

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PREVIOUS PAGE: Charles DeSilver’s 1857 Map.Albert Browne, traveling with the Utah Expedition in 1857, wrote: “Theroute selected for the march was along the emigrant road across the Plains… It is,perhaps, the most remarkable natural road in the world.The hand of man couldhardly add an improvement to the highway along which, from the Missouri to theGreat Basin, Nature has presented not a single obstacle to the progress of the heavi-est loaded teams.” — Atlantic Monthly (Boston) 3 (March 1859): 365.

BELOW: From South Pass the U. S.Army followed the well-traveled over-land road to the Great Salt Lake Valley, arriving the last week of June 1858.

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Devil’s Gate, WyomingCol. Robert T. Burton of the Nauvoo Legion (Utah Militia) was orderedeast from Salt Lake City to offer “aid and protection to the incoming trains ofemigrants and to act as a corps of observation to learn the strength and equipment offorces reported on the way to Utah….There was no movement of the enemy fromthe time Col. Burton approached them at Devil’s Gate, on the Sweetwater that ourofficers were not speedily apprised of. Scouts and spies were with them continuallyexamining their camps, arms, equipment, etc., and reporting to headquarters.”— The Contributor 3 (March 1882): 179.

WILLIAM H. JACKSON PHOTOGRAPH, “SWEETWATER” (1870), JACKSON, W. H. # 288, USGS ARCHIVES

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JOHN ELDREDGE

Pacific SpringsLooking west from Pacific Springs located a few miles west of South Pass,the Mormon militia during the night of September 25, 1857, encounteredsome of “Uncle’s troops.” Mormon militiaman Hosea Stout recorded: “Iexpect an attack will be made the first opportunity perhaps by stampeding their animals.” — On the Mormon Frontier:The Diary of Hosea Stout 2: 638. Capt. Jesse Gove of the10th Infantry wrote of the Mormon harassment near Pacific Springs: “Thismorning about 2 o’clock several shots were fired immediately behind my tent, andimmediately the whole herd of mules stampeded with a terrific rush…. One man inH Co. … died of fright. He had the heart disease, hence the sudden fright killedhim….Their [Mormon militia] intention was to drive off the mules, nothing more.”— Jesse A. Gove, The Utah Expedition, 1857-1858, Letters of Capt Jesse A. Gove, 64. John I. Ginn, acivilian with the U. S.Army, recalled: “The mules ran about three miles, whentheir feet ceased to clatter on the hard, smooth road….Then Col.Alexander orderedthe buglers to sound the ‘stable call’ as loud as they could…. Directly they [the armymules] came dashing into camp in a bunch, together with six additional animals wearing saddles and bridles—the whole Mormon mount.” — John I. Ginn,

“Mormon and Indian Wars:The Mountain Meadows Massacre, and other tragedies and transactions

incident to the Mormon Rebellion of 1857” — Typescript, Utah State Historical Society.

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Simpson HollowSimpson Hollow located near Big Sandy and Wyoming Highway 28.Mormon militia under the command of Maj. Lot Smith set fire to a supplytrain. Upon hearing of the success of Smith, Gen. Daniel Wells wroteSmith: “I am glad to hear so good an account of your success on your mission…Furnish your men and as many others as you conveniently can with supplies ofclothing and food from any of the [wagon] trains when you have a good chance…Remain in the rear of the enemy’s camp till you receive further orders, not neglectingevery opportunity to burn their trains, stampede their stock, and keep them underarms by the night surprises, so that they will be worn out.” — Quoted in LeRoy R. and

Ann W. Hafen, The Utah Expedition, 1857-1858, 231.

Trail trace immediately to the left of the trail marker.

THE UTAH WAR

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Green River Crossing at Mountaineer’s FortLocated near Wyoming Highway 372 and on the banks of the GreenRiver. It was here that Richard Yates, a trader who had sold powder and aquantity of lead to the U. S.Army and was thought to be spying for thearmy, was taken prisoner in late October 1857.Yates was also accused oftrading liquor and other goods to the Indians on the Green River. Dayslater somewhere in Echo Canyon he was ordered killed. Bill Hickman laterwrote of the deed: “I delivered General Wells some letters…and told him who Ihad along, and asked him what I should do with my prisoner. He said: `He ought tobe killed; but take him on; you will probably get an order when you get to Col.Jones’ camp.’” — Bill Hickman, Brigham’s Destroying Angel, 124. It was near here that theMormon militia burned fifty-one military supply wagons in early October.

PHOTOS BY JOHN ELDREDGE

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THE UTAH WAR

Camp Winfield on Ham’s Fork of the Sweetwater River, WyomingLocated on U. S. Highway 30 near the junction with Wyoming Highway374, looking southwest. Captain Jesse A. Gove remembered how effectivethe Mormon spy and harassment campaign was. “It is astonishing to see howwonderfully the Mormons have their express and spy-system perfected.Their object isto stampede our animals and cripple our movement in that way.” — Jesse A. Gove, The

Utah Expedition, 67. While encamped near Camp Winfield, then commandingofficer Col. Edmund Brooke Alexander received a letter from Governorand Superintendent of Indian Affairs Utah Territory Brigham Young whowrote: “By virtue of the authority thus vested in me, I have issued, and forwardedyou a copy of, my proclamation forbidding the entrance of armed forces into thisTerritory…I now further direct that you retire forthwith from the Territory, by thesame route you entered.” — Quoted in Hafen and Hafen,The Utah Expedition, 1857-1858, 62.

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Junction of Black’s and Ham’s ForksCaptain Stewart Van Vliet, assistant quartermaster, was ordered to Salt LakeCity ahead of the army to locate a suitable location for a fort near Salt LakeCity, to secure supplies and building material for a fort, and gather any use-ful information useful to the general command.Van Vliet was accompaniedby military escort of thirty-one officers and soldiers as far as the junction ofthese two streams, where he left his escort and traveled with two Mormonsto Salt Lake City.After spending time with Brigham Young, and visitingRush Valley to locate a military post,Van Vliet returned to the forks of thetwo streams where he made his report in a letter to the Acting AssistantAdjutant General at Fort Leavenworth. He reported that the army wouldface resistance, that there would be a lack of forage and other needed supplies in the Salt Lake Valley.

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Fort SupplyLocated twelve miles southwest from Fort Bridger, the Utah Territorial legislature designated Fort Supply the county seat for Green River County,Utah Territory in 1852.When word was received that the army was on themarch, Brigham Young ordered Fort Supply to be abandoned, burnt, andcrops destroyed or cached. Mormon militiaman Jesse W. Crosby wrote: “Iwent to Fort Supply with a small company to help take care of the crops and tomake ready to burn everything if found necessary… We took out our wagons, horses,etc. and at 12 o’clock noon set fire to the buildings at once, consisting of 100 ormore good hewed houses, one saw mill, one grist mill, one threshing machine, andafter going out of the fort, we did set fire to the stockade, grain stacks, etc.” — On the

Mormon Frontier, 640, fn. 11. A reporter for the New York Times saw what was left ofCamp Scott: “On arriving at the spot [Fort Supply] I realized for the first time in my life what I had imagined of the appearance of a sacked, burned andabandoned village… There was a sense of desolation about those ruins of a recentlybeautiful settlement which was, to say the least, unpleasant.” — New York Times, January

21, 1858.

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Fort BridgerFort Bridger in 1857. Fur trapper and trader Jim Bridger established histrading post on Black’s Fork of the Green River in 1843.Along with hispartner Louis Vasquez, the two developed an important trading post on thewestern emigrant trail. In 1855 Brigham Young purchased the fort fromVasquez and Bridger. In October of 1857 as the army was advancing JohnPulsipher a former resident at Fort Bridger, reported that his brotherCharles and other Mormon militiamen, “are whipping them [U. S.Army]without killing a man having taken their stock burned their freight trains — & nowhave burned Fort Supply & Bridger to save them from falling into their hands.”— In Hafen and Hafen,The Utah Expedition, 205. Unable to be used as a winter encamp-ment because of its small size, Fort Bridger was used as a storage area.Col.Albert Sidney Johnston established his winter encampment at CampScott two miles from the burned out fort.

EckelsvilleLocated a few miles south of Fort Bridger on the bend of Black’s Fork andnear Camp Scott, Eckelsville, named for the newly appointed UtahTerritory Chief Justice D. Eckels, was a temporary community of Sibleytents, dugouts, log cabins, and other makeshift structures. Here the new ter-ritorial governor,Alfred Cumming, and his wife, Elizabeth, and othernewly appointed territorial officials and civilians resided from November1857 to April 1858 when the town was abandoned. Elizabeth Cummingwrote to her sister,Anne, in December, describing her accommodations inEckelsville: “We live in five tents—One a dining room. Second a store room oftrunks, boxes & so forth… Third a kitchen… Fourth—a sleeping tent for the younggirl. Fifth—a double wall tent divided into parlour & bed chamber—eight feet by10 each….You can hardly imagine how cosy & comfortable it looks. I quite enjoyit.” Ray R. Canning and Beverly Beeton, eds., The Genteel Gentile: Letters of Elizabeth Cumming, 1857-

1858 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Library, 1977), 23.

Camp ScottSince the Mormon militia destroyed most of Fort Bridger, the army of1,400 officers and men plus civilians established their winter quarters atCamp Scott, a short distance from Fort Bridger. Named for General-in-Chief of the entire U. S.Army, Major General Winfield Scott, Camp Scottserved as the temporary seat of territorial government. On November 21,1857, Governor Cumming issued his proclamation to the people of Utah:“…the President appointed me to preside over the executive department of thisTerritory… I will proceed at this point to make the preliminary arrangements for thetemporary organization of the territorial government….” — Hafen and Hafen, The Utah

Expedition, 297. By late May Governor Cumming prepared to abandon CampScott and Ecklesville and transfer the seat of territorial government back toSalt Lake City.

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Bridger Butte (Outpost Butte)Bridger Butte, located about fourmiles southwest of Fort Bridger,provided Mormon scouts an excellent location to spy on theactivities of Johnston’s army at itswinter encampment at Camp Scottand the nearby temporary civiliantown of Eckelsville. Lot Smith laterrecalled that he was ordered “not tomolest them if they wished to go intoWinter Quarters.” — Hafen and Hafen,

The Utah Expedition, 245.

Outpost ButteBelow, view from the top ofOutpost Butte looking toward Ft. Bridger

PHOTOS BY JOHN ELDREDGE

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Pioneer Hollow StationA number of temporary express stations or outposts were established by theMormon militia between Fort Bridger and Salt Lake City on or near theemigrant trail where express riders delivering reports and orders to andfrom Salt Lake City could recruit their horses, rest, and eat. Pioneer HollowStation located northwest of Piedmont,Wyoming, was such a station. PhiloDibble was under the command of Lot Smith in early October whenSmith’s command set ablaze the army’s supply wagons. Utah militiamanOrson P.Arnold was wounded at one of these harassment raids and asSmith remembered years later, the “heavy ball passed through”Arnold’s thigh,breaking the bone, and then struck “Dibble in the side of the head, went throughSamuel Bateman’s hat just missing his head…” — “The Utah War,”The Contributor 4

(1883): 28. A month later Dibble at nearby Pioneer Hollow Station, inscribedhis name and date for all to see.

PHOTO BY JOHN ELDREDGE

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Yellow Creek Lookout StationFrom the Lookout Station situated near the head of Echo Canyon onYellow Creek and near the overland trail, Lt. Gen. Daniel H.Wells of theUtah militia ordered Capt. John R.Winder in late November 1857 to takea ten man detail to “the heights of Yellow Creek” and there “watch themovements of the invaders…occasionally trail out towards Fort Bridger, and look atour enemies from the high butte near that place.”Wells’ instructions were to“Remember that to you is entrusted for the time being the duty of standing betweenIsrael and their foes, and as you would like to repose in peace and safety while othersare on the watchtower, so now while in the performance of this duty do you observethe same care, vigilance and activity, which you would desire of others when theycome to take your place.” — Head Quarters Eastern Expedition, Camp Weber, December 4, 1857,

in Edward W.Tullidge, History of Salt Lake City Part I (Salt Lake City: Star Printing Co., 1886), 197-98.

Cache CaveCache Cave is located a few miles from the head of Echo Canyon and onthe overland trail. For a few weeks in October 1857, Lt. Gen. Daniel H.Wells made Cache Cave his eastern command post. Later it served as animportant express station for messengers and spies of the Utah Militia. Dateof photograph is unknown.The individuals in the photograph are the Ballfamily.

Echo Canyon NarrowsEcho Canyon, the only feasible route through the Wasatch Mountains tothe Great Salt Lake Valley. Following the Mormon acceptance of PresidentBuchanan’s pardon, Johnston’s army followed the emigrant route to the val-ley by way of Echo Canyon.At various locations in Echo Canyon, the pas-sage was very narrow between steep canyon walls as seen in this photo-graph.At various locations the Mormon militia constructed stone fortifica-tions to prevent the advancement of Johnston’s army. In June 1858, CharlesA. Scott, a soldier in the army recorded some of his observations aboutEcho Canyon: “[The] road very good, taken in consideration that the Cañon isnot more than a hundred yards wide and in some places it is much narrower. [T]herocks on the right hand side rise in perpendicular cliffs of six or seven hundred feet inheight, and an enemy posted on them could soon obstruct the passage by tumblingdown loose rocks…” — Robert E. Stowers and John M. Ellis, eds.“Charles A. Scott’s Diary of the

Utah Expedition, 1857-1861,” Utah Historical Quarterly 28 (April 1960): 171.

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Rock fortificationsThe Mormon militia constructed several stone fortifications atop EchoCanyon’s northern walls from which to fire upon Johnston’s army. HoseaStout wrote of these “formidable [locations] high [on] perpendicular ledges of rockimmediately over looking the road” where it was “decided to erect batteries on thesummit of the rocky crags.” — On the Mormon Frontier, 639. At various strategic locations, Mormon militiamen constructed various types of fortificationsincluding water filled ditches, one measuring six feet wide and ten feetdeep.At another location the Mormon militia may have “mined” the road.— The Atlantic Monthly 3 (April 1859): 489.

PHOTO BY JOHN ELDREDGE

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Echo StationA writer for The Atlantic Monthly in 1859 described Echo Station as “huts”the Mormon militia occupied and were “constructed by digging circular holes inthe ground, over which were piled boughs in the same manner as the poles of anIndian lodge.” Many of the huts had chimneys built of sod and stones.Nearby was a protected glen to keep needed livestock.The reporter for theAtlantic Monthly estimated that there were as many as 150 huts that couldaccommodate as many as fifteen men each. — The Atlantic Monthly 3 (April 1859): 488.

In April 1858 when Governor Alfred Cumming accompanied by a smallMormon escort made his first trip through Echo Canyon at night to theSalt Lake Valley to meet Brigham Young, numerous fires were lit along thetrail at these posts to give the impression that hundreds of Mormon militiawere in the canyon. Mormon militiaman Lorenzo Brown wrote: “In theevening [we] went up to the batteries to make fires & fire guns to salute the NewGovernor as he came past.The Camp was lighted conspicuously with a fire in eachhut so that ever thing seemed alive with me.The Gov. seemed awe struck.”— Lorenzo Brown Journal,April 29, 1856 to February 9, 1859,Typescript, LDS Church History Library.

Weber StationThe Weber Station, located a “mile below the mouth of Echo [Canyon] and onthe Weber bottom,” was one of several commissary posts established betweenYellow Creek and Fort Wells at Big Mountain.At these posts members ofthe Mormon militia were re-supplied with food and equipment during thewinter campaign. For a brief time Weber Station was headquarters for Lt. Gen. Daniel H.Wells, commander of the Mormon militia’s eastern campaign.

Lost Creek Fortification SiteLost Creek, a branch of the Weber River, looking downstream (south).At the point of the small knoll (middle of photograph), a fortification wasbuilt to guard against the U. S.Army using Lost Creek to bypass Mormonfortifications in Echo Canyon.According to Henry Ballard, as many as“200 [men] moved 12 miles up Lost creek to gard [sic] the kanyon [sic] and buildsome Batteries.” — Henry Ballard Journal,April 15, 1858, Utah State Historical Society.

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BELOW: Spring Creek StationThe main emigrant trail turned south from Henefer Valley and followedMain Creek Canyon. Spring Creek Station was one of a string of Mormonmilitia stations where commissaries were established and where both menand animals could recruit.

RIGHT: Fort Wells and Eight Crossing Fortification in East CanyonAt Mormon Flat, located on East Canyon Creek and the east side of BigMountain and Little Emigration Canyon, the Mormon militia constructedtwo stone breast works (left bottom) to guard the important overland trailup Little Emigration Canyon and Big Mountain.A private in Johnston’sarmy, Charles Scott wrote in June 1858: “Started at six, the road good [alongEast Canyon Creek] for the first four miles. Came to two breast works of stone dig-nified with title of Fort Wells…” — Robert E. Stowers and John M. Ellis, eds.,“Charles A. Scott’s

Diary of the Utah Expedition, 1857-1861,” Utah Historical Quarterly 28 (April 1960): 172.

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Big Mountain Looking west from the summit of Big Mountain. In the far distance are theGreat Salt Lake Valley and the Oquirrh Mountains. In the dead of wintersnow depths at the summit frequently reaches more than three feet, makingtravel by any wheeled vehicle impossible.The U. S.Army found it extremelydifficult to ascend and descent Big Mountain as did most who traveled bywagon. Captain Albert Tracy wrote on June 25, 1858: “We got off as early asfive in the morning, and after a long and toilsome ascent in the course of which wepass additional fortifications of the Mormons, reach at last the bald and rock crest of‘Big Mountain.’The view from this point is little less than magnificent—opening outbetween rocky and snow-clad peaks and ridges, to the veritable valley of Salt Lake inthe distance, with even a partial glimpse of the lake itself, at the right…. So steep, sosmooth, and so rocky was this descent, that a mule or horse might scarcely keep hisfooting going down….” Capt Tracy and others faced additional hazard furtheralong, “we found, going down the farther side of Big Mountain, such clouds anddensity of dust as well nigh brought us to an open suffocation. Neither was the condition of things improved by a drove of the Commissary’s cattle, which had preceded us, leaving in the air a mass of itself sufficient to our keenest fixation andmisery.” — “Journal of Captain Albert Tracy, 1858-1860,” Utah Historical Quarterly 13 (1945): 25-26.

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Mountain DellLooking northeast towards Little Dell Reservoir. Mountain Dell was thelast camp for Johnston’s army before entering the Salt Lake Valley on June26, 1858. Charles A. Scott wrote on June 25: “Orders were published to theCommand for no man to leave the ranks in passing through the city to morrow and also the Articles of War, about injuring the property of Citizens [etc.] and aproclamation of the Governors congratulating the people on peace being establishedwithout bloodshed. June 26th Started at six, a long pull up for a commencement.At the top we found Ash Hollow No. 3, to descend, or Little Mountain as it isnamed—one of the lock chains of the forge (which I was driving) broke and if theother had done the same I would have gotten to the bottom in less than double quicktime...” — Robert E. Stowers and John M. Ellis, eds.,“Charles A. Scott’s Diary of the Utah Expedition,

1857-1861,” Utah Historical Quarterly 28 (April 1960): 172-73.

PHOTOS BY JOHN ELDREDGE

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Salt Lake City, 1857On June 26th, two weeks after peace commissioners L.W. Powell and BenMcCulloch met with Brigham Young, the U. S.Army under the commandof Brevet Brigadier General Albert Sidney Johnston passed through SaltLake City and encamped temporarily on the banks of the Jordan Riverbefore establishing Camp Floyd in Cedar Valley. Jesse A. Gove wrote of thecity when he marched through: “we were particularly struck by its quietness….The streets were deserted, the houses were deserted, the city was deserted…. Thequietness of the grave prevailed….” — Otis G. Hammond, ed., The Utah Expedition, 1857-1858,

344. William Drown, chief bugler for the Second Dragoons, when firstviewing the valley from the mouth of Emigration Canyon wrote: “WhenBrigham Young called this place a Paradise, I think he did not exaggerate at all; forit is truly the most lovely place I ever saw.” Then as he and the other soldiersmarched down South Temple, he commented: “We saw about 100 men inpassing through the city, but no women or children, they have gone with their leader,Brigham, to a place about thirty miles from here, called Provost….” — William Drown,

“Personal Recollections—A Trumpeter’s Notes (’52-258),” in Theophilus F. Rodenbough, comp., From

Everglade to Canyon with the Second United States Cavalry, 1836-1875 (1875; Norman: University of

Oklahoma Press, 2000), 230. As several of the army units paraded in front of theBeehive and Lion Houses, one of military bands played a popular tune“One-Eye Riley.”

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LONDON ILLUSTRATED NEWS, JANUARY 2, 1858

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Sam Houston and the Utah WarBy MICHAEL SCOTT VAN WAGENEN

Michael Scott Van Wagenen is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Utah.

The “Utah War” of 1857-58, grew out of rumors that the UtahTerritory was embroiled in open rebellion against the UnitedStates government. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ ofLatter-day Saints, commonly called Mormons, did in fact distrust

federal, state, and local governments after being driven from their homes inOhio, Missouri, and Illinois. In the isolation of the Utah Territory they created their own theocratic judicial and legislative bodies. To outsiders,there appeared to be sinister motives behind Governor Brigham Young’skingdom in the West.1

This conflict came to a head in 1857, when federal Judge W. W.Drummond in Utah relayed exaggeratedreports to President James Buchanan that theMormons were engaged in sedition against

1 For additional background of the tension between the federal government and Utah’s theocracy, seeNorman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict, 1850-1859 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 1-20;Donald R. Moorman, with Gene A. Sessions, Camp Floyd and the Mormons:The Utah War (Salt Lake City:University of Utah Press, 1992), 8-9.

Sam Houston, Senator fromTexas c. 1860

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the United States.2 Garland Hurt, a territorial Indian agent, further report-ed that the Mormons had joined forces with Native Americans to retakeUtah from the United States.3 In spite of these rumored separatist leanings,the Mormon leadership made a second petition for statehood in 1856.4

While congressional rejection of that petition contributed to a deepeningresentment of the federal government, the Mormons were far from imple-menting any formal plan of secession.

Mormon appeals for an investigative commission of the Utah situation fellon deaf ears, and the president sent the United States Army westward to sup-press the Mormon uprising in the summer of 1857.5 Church leaders met thefederal challenge with a scorched earth policy. The Nauvoo Legion (Utah’sterritorial militia) implemented the plan, burning critical grazing areas on thewindswept plains of Wyoming, and setting the torch to Fort Bridger and FortSupply before they could fall into the hands of the approaching troops.6

During the early weeks of the campaign, Mormon guerillas attacked militarysupply trains and destroyed more than three months worth of provisions.Theunexpected resistance forced the expedition of 2,500 infantry, dragoons, andartillery to winter near the ruins of Fort Bridger.7

As word of Mormon resistance reached Washington, D.C., Buchanan for-mulated a plan to increase the size of the standing army by five regiments tohelp meet the threat posed by the Mormons.8 The president’s “Army Bill,”as it was called, easily passed the House of Representatives, and in February1858, after weeks of debate, the Senate prepared to vote on the Army Bill.

In the midst of this federal warmongering, an elderly statesman whittledat his desk.9 Going back fourteen years, Texas Senator Sam Houston hadhad dealings with members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-daySaints. As President of the then Texas Republic Houston had negotiatedwith Mormon officials for the settlement of the church in his southernborderlands.10 Some 250 of the church’s adherents currently lived in hisstate, where they had proven themselves to be an important part of the

2 William P. MacKinnon, “Utah Expedition of 1857-58, or Utah War,” in The New Encyclopedia of theAmerican West, ed. Howard R. Lamar (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1998), 1149-51; and William P.MacKinnon, “And the War Came: James Buchanan, the Utah Expedition and the Decision to Intervene”in this issue.

3 MacKinnon,“Utah Expedition,” 1149.4 In addition to these first two attempts at statehood, five other petitions were made to Congress, the

last in 1894 resulted in Congress passing the enabling act to allow for a constitutional convention in Utah.5 Moorman, Camp Floyd, 3-24. This introductory chapter gives an excellent overview of the events

leading to Buchanan’s decision to send the army to the Utah Territory.6 Gordon B. Dodds, “Bridger, James,” in The New Encyclopedia of the American West, ed. Howard R.

Lamar, (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1998), 125-26. The Mormons claimed to have bought theseoutposts in 1855, although Jim Bridger disputed this purchase. See Moorman, Camp Floyd, 48.

7 William P. MacKinnon, “Utah Expedition,,” 1149; Richard D. Poll and Ralph W. Hansen,“‘Buchanan’s Blunder’The Utah War, 1857-1858,” Military Affairs 25 (Autumn 1961): 124.

8 A force as large as five thousand.9 James L. Haley, Sam Houston (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 354.10 These obscure and ultimately unsuccessful negotiations are explored in Michael Scott Van Wagenen’s

The Texas Republic and the Mormon Kingdom of God (College Station:Texas A & M University Press, 2002).

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Texas frontier economy.11 Perhaps most important, Houston had friends inthe Utah Territory he hoped to protect.

A combination of politics, economics, and intolerance on both sides pitted the Mormons against their more numerous “gentile” neighbors.12 In1844 the church’s founder Joseph Smith Jr. began searching for a place ofrefuge for his people. The Oregon Country, Alta California, and the TexasRepublic all provided possible solutions.13

To explore the Texas option, Smith sent three political ministers: LucienWoodworth, George Miller, and Almon Babbitt to meet with TexasRepublic President Sam Houston.14 These emissaries carried instructions topurchase land from President Houston in the disputed western and south-ern borderlands of Texas. The details of these negotiations remain vaguealthough it is clear that Houston and the Mormons had reached some pre-liminary agreements in the spring of 1844.15 According to one account,Houston outright rejected the original offer. Instead he agreed to sell theMormons a small strip of land between the Nueces and Rio GrandeRivers.16 To complicate matters, this area, a geographic no-man’s land calledthe Nueces Strip, was also claimed by Mexico.The dispute over this fron-tier had prompted intermittent warfare between Mexico and the TexasRepublic for several years. But before any firm actions could be taken bythe church, a mob killed Smith in June of 1844, putting an end to thenegotiations with Houston.17

Prior to his death, Smith had appointed Lyman Wight, one of thechurch’s Twelve Apostles, to lead a preliminary mission into the TexasRepublic. While fellow apostle Brigham Young consolidated his power and prepared for a westward exodus, Wight led a group of 150 Mormonsto the Texas Republic. The group established their original settlement inAustin shortly after the United States annexed Texas. This small colony of Mormons immediately set to work building a mill on the outskirts of town.“Mormon Springs,” as it came to be known, was the first gristmill

11 For a complete treatment of the early Mormon-Texas experience see Melvin C. Johnson’s Polygamyon the Pedernales: Lyman Wight’s Mormon Villages in Antebellum Texas, 1845 to 1858 (Logan: Utah StateUniversity Press, 2006).

12 Reports of Mormon “outrages” were popular in the major eastern newspapers during this time.While these were mostly sensationalized, popular accusations of Mormon polygamy later proved to betrue. The New York Herald in particular printed and reprinted many inflammatory articles about theMormons. See: “Highly Important from the West – Arrest of Joe Smith, the Mormon Chief,” June 26,1841; and “Highly Important from the West – Progress of the Mormons,”August 10, 1841.

13 Van Wagenen, The Texas Republic, 29, 34-63.14 George Miller, Correspondence of Bishop George Miller With The Northern Islander From his first acquain-

tance with Mormonism up to near the close of his life.Written by himself in the year 1855 (Michigan:WingfieldWatson, 1916), 21. Miller’s account actually lists A.W. Brown, which is a misprinting of Almon W. Babbitt,a member of the Council of Fifty who was deeply involved in Mormon politics at the time.

15 Miller, Correspondence, 20-21.16 Journal History,The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, April 2, 1847. Family and Church

History Department, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah. Hereinaftercited as LDS Church History Library.

17 Van Wagenen, The Texas Republic, 53-54.

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in central Texas.18

After the Mormon’s firstpublic meeting in Austin,one Texan observed thatthe townspeople felt thatthe Mormons “were a law-less band, and the subject ofrising up and driving themfrom the country wasstrongly advocated.” WhileWight’s practice ofpolygamy raised the ire ofhis neighbors in the newTexas capital, they toleratedthe Mormon apostle oncethey realized the value ofhis milling services.19 Soonthe Mormons were grind-ing corn and constructingbuildings for the residentsof Austin. They even wonthe contract to buildAustin’s first jail.20

During the next twelveyears, Wight’s colony ofMormons would movethroughout central Texas.They mainly engaged inthe milling industry,although they also farmed,ranched, and made shinglesand furniture to supplement their “commonstock” economy.21 (Their contributions to theTexas frontier, while largely forgotten today,were well known in central Texas during themid-nineteenth century.)

There is little historical evidence to indi-cate that Houston had any personal contactwith the Mormons in Texas. He did, however, have several friends and

18 Ibid., 54-59.19 Noah Smithwick, The Evolution of a State: Recollections of Old Texas Days (Austin, 1900), 235-36.20 Heman Hale Smith, “The Lyman Wight Colony in Texas,” unpublished manuscript, (ca. 1900), 12.

The L.Tom Perry Special Collections of Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.21 Van Wagenen,The Texas Republic, 60-62.

George A. Smith, who, with JohnM. Bernhisel, met privately withSenator Houston in 1856 in aneffort to secure statehood forUtah.

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acquaintances in the Utah Territory.These friendsproved most important in influencing the senatorduring the Utah War.

As a result of his negotiations with the Mormonsin 1844, Houston had come to understand theunusual practice of the church sending politicalambassadors to lobby world governments on various issues. In 1856, when the Mormon-domi-nated constitutional convention again consideredpetitioning Congress for statehood, Mormon leaders George A. Smith and John M. Bernhisel metprivately with Senator Houston.22 In this meetingHouston expressed great interest in BrighamYoung’s polygamist lifestyle. Like many Americans,Houston seemed filled with an odd combination ofcuriosity and moral indignation at the unusualMormon marr iage practices.23 Nonetheless,Houston expressed sympathy for the Mormondesire for statehood.24

An oral tradition has persisted among some Latter-day Saints about SamHouston’s meeting with George A. Smith and John M. Bernhisel.Althoughsome facts seem exaggerated, the basic story possesses a note of truth.According to one version of the story, Smith and Houston became fastfriends:

The two old men then laid down on the floor with a pillow under their heads and laidon the back of chairs and went on talking . . . After General Houston and PresidentSmith had been talking a little while President Smith became cold . . . whereuponGeneral Houston got a parcel which he had and took a Navajo Blanket out of the par-cel and put it over his shoulders and again went on talking . . . General Houston wasalways a great friend to the West and remained a friend to the Mormon people up tothe time of his death.25

While such meetings with Mormon leadership proved amiable, Houstonresponded best to the Mormons who had fought alongside him in theTexas Republic. Early Mormon missionary efforts in the state yielded someone thousand Texan converts who eventually moved west to the UtahTerritory. Records show that some of these individuals had in fact foughtwith Houston in the Texas War of Independence.26 The bond of allegiance

22 The quest for Utah statehood proved a long, politically-charged process that was not completed until1896.

23 Houston had been married three times. His apparent difficulty in obtaining divorces from his firsttwo wives led to rumors that Houston was himself a bigamist. See Haley, Sam Houston, 90, 98-99, 202.

24 George A. Smith to Brigham Young, July 23, 1856, LDS Church History Library.25 George Henry Crosby, (1872-1938) Papers [ca. 1929-1936] Typescript. LDS Church History Library.

Some details are clearly confused as the letter is the recounting of a story passed through several peopleand generations. The blanket is Houston’s famous Cherokee cloak. Utah Mormons might easily mistakethis for a colorful Navajo blanket with which they themselves were acquainted.

John M. Bernhisel

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forged between veterans of Texas’ most venerated conflict seemed to transcend the difficult political and theological divide between Houstonand his Mormon friends.

The most influential of Houston’s Mormon friends was Seth MillingtonBlair. Born near New London, Missouri, in 1819 Blair was five years old,when his parents pulled up stakes and moved the family to Tennessee. In1836, Sam Houston sent out a call for volunteers from the United States tohelp fight against Mexico in defense of the fledgling Texas Republic, andseventeen years old, Blair joined hundreds of volunteers from Tennessee tofight in the Texas War of Independence.27

Joining the Texas Rangers, Blair made the acquaintance of Texas PresidentSam Houston. Blair must have been an impressive young man, for in spite ofhis youth, he achieved the rank of major—a title he would carry proudlywith him for life. As a member of the Texas Rangers, he campaignedthrough the end of the war. Blair settled near Austin, but eventually movedabout seventy-five miles southeast of San Antonio to De Witt Countywhere he practiced law and worked as a land agent for the Texas Republic.28

A year after arriving in the Great Basin, Brigham Young sent PrestonThomas and William Martindale on missions to Texas. Their mission wastwofold: to make converts among the Texans and to persuade Lyman Wightand his group to join the main body of the saints in Utah.While the lattercharge proved a failure,Thomas and Martindale were successful missionar-ies.29 Blair encountered the Mormon elders when they came through DeWitt County, looking for a place to preach. The Major found them a suitable location, and the missionaries gave him a Book of Mormon. Afterreading the book, Blair became convinced of the truthfulness of theMormon gospel. He was soon baptized, and prepared his family to move tothe Utah Territory to join the saints.30

In Utah,Young apparently knew of Blair’s connection to Houston andmade ready use of the Texas attorney.31 In spite of Blair’s obvious devotionto Mormonism,Young intentionally withheld him from the church hierar-

26 Melvin C. Johnson,“Lone Star Trails to Zion: Mormon Narratives of the Republic and State of Texas1844-1858,” 5, unpublished manuscript presented at Sunstone Symposium, Salt Lake City, August 1998,copy in possession of the author. See also Deseret News, July 29, 1874. Nearly forty years after the Texas Warof Independence, the Texas Legislature passed a law allotting an annual pension to veterans of the cam-paign.At the time, only three known veterans were still living in the Utah Territory.All three were formerofficers in the Texas military.This total does not take into account how many had died or previously leftthe territory.

27 Seth Millington Blair,“Reminiscences and Journal, 1819-1875,” LDS Church History Library.28 Ibid. See also Blair’s obituary in the Deseret News, March 24, 1875.29 Preston Thomas, Preston Thomas: His Life and Travels, ed. Daniel Thomas, unpublished manuscript, LDS

Church History Library.30 Blair,“Reminiscences.”31 Blair’s service in this capacity began as early as 1850, when he wrote a letter of introduction for

church apostle John Taylor to Sam Houston. It is unclear if Taylor and Houston ever met. See Seth M.Blair to Sam Houston, February 17, 1850, John Taylor Collection, LDS Church History Library.William P.MacKinnon provided a copy of the letter to the author.

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chy.32 This allowed Blair to deal with Houston and other outsiders whilemaintaining an apparent independence from the church. The strategyworked, and Blair received appointment as Utah Attorney General fromPresident Millard Fillmore.33

As the army approached the Utah Territory,Young called upon Blair topersuade Senator Houston of the futility of the military campaign.34 OnDecember 1, 1857, Blair sat down to write a letter to his old friend inCongress.35 In his letter, Blair appealed to Houston as the Mormons’ lasthope. “In my heart I believe you the only Senator who sits in Congress ofthe United States who dares lift up his voice in opposition to public opinion.” He continued to explain that being,

unheard we are condemned, without cause we have been disfranchised, as traitors we arebranded, as fanatics we are cursed, as dogs we are to be hung! Our wives ravished by themercenary soldiers under the stars and stripes, our daughters seduced by the UnitedStates officers, our cities pillaged, our fields laid in ashes, our altars and temples polluted.

He then recounted the defensive measures currently being made in theterritory, warning that the Mormons would destroy their property ratherthan have it fall into the hands of the military. “As Forts Bridger andSupply have gone, so will each city, town, hamlet, village, settlement,habitation, field, altar, temple, all and every trace of civilization in thesemountains go at the approach of the invading army.” He continued, “Ournumbers, you ask, what are they? Enough! Our resources, true patriotism,which asks no reward save equal rights. Our hope, victory or death.”36

Blair no doubt struck a chord with Houston when he warned the senator that the Utah campaign would “drain the treasury and accomplishbut one object—the dissolution of the Union.” In spite of being a south-erner, Houston defended the Union above all else and remained sensitiveto threats against it.37

Blair concluded his letter with an impassioned appeal to his old friend:I beseech you, then, as one who loves the Union and despises the life that would tame-ly submit to a tyrannical rule, to raise your voice to stop the bigoted crusade of theadministration against Governor Young and this people, and ask Congress to counter-

32 See Seth M. Blair to George A. Smith, June 3, 1858, George A. Smith Papers, 1834-1875, LDSChurch History Library. Blair wrote:“I . . . felt that the good sense fine judgment & Statements like courseof Bro Brigham would suffer if for a moment it was believed that I ‘held a high place (or low one) in hisCouncil.’”

33 Blair Obituary, Deseret News, March 24, 1875.34 This was part of a larger campaign to solicit the aid of Eastern politicians in the coming war.35 Blair’s obituary in the Deseret News, March 24, 1875, states the letter was printed “first in the

Washington Star, and subsequently in many journals throughout the Union.” A search of the WashingtonEvening Star and other newspapers failed to produce the letter.William P. MacKinnon located the letter inthe New York Herald, March 2, 1858, and graciously provided me this important part of the Blair–Houstonstory.

36 Ibid.37 When the Union did in fact dissolve at the outbreak of the Civil War, Houston refused to swear alle-

giance to the Confederacy and was removed from his position as Governor of Texas. See Haley, SamHouston, 390-91.

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38 New York Herald, March 2, 1858.39 John M. Bernhisel to Brigham Young, January 17, 1858, LDS Church History Library.40 Sam Houston, The Writings of Sam Houston, 1813-1863, ed.Amelia W.Williams and Eugene C. Barker

(Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1941) 6:471. The entire speech can be found in the CongressionalGlobe, 35th Cong., 1st sess., Part 1, 1857-1858, pp. 492-97.

41 Houston, Writings, 483.

mand the exterminating orders of the administration, stay the floodgate that traitors,highwaymen, public robbers (who thirst for gold), although crimson with the blood oftheir fellow men, have raised to drain the treasure in sending soldiers to murder aninnocent and law abiding people.38

Houston received Blair’s letter the second week of January 1858.Unsettled by the correspondence, Houston asked for a meeting with hisold Mormon contact in Washington, D.C., John M. Bernhisel.39 On January18, 1858, the two men met in the Senate chamber when Houston assuredBernhisel he would speak personally to the president about the Utah cam-paign and would recommend a commission be sent to investigate the stateof affairs in the territory. Whatever Houston may have said to Buchananseemed to have no effect as he continued with his plan to raise five addi-tional regiments for the Utah campaign.

Given Buchanan’s refusal to act on his advice, Houston carefully plannedhis next step. On February 1, 1858, Buchanan hoped to have a favorablevote for his Army Bill in the Senate. During the debate over the bill,Houston sat at his desk whittling and feigning disinterest. Finally, laying hiscarving knife aside, he rose to address his fellow senators.

If it is necessary on this occasion, for the Mormon war or any other purpose, I care notwhat, to raise an additional force, of what description should that force be? Is it to becomposed of active and efficient men? Are they to be such men as could be raised inthe United States? No, sir.40

While Houston believed that the Mormons needed to accept federalauthority, he doubted they intended rebellion. He claimed that theimpending war against the Mormon rebellion was a thinly veiled effort to build up a large, standing army. He adamantly persisted in his opinionthat a large standing army could not conquer Utah, and suggested that avolunteer force could better deal with the Mormon situation.41

While such language seems to infer that Houston wanted to invade theUtah Territory, his call for volunteers would actually derail the president’sbill by denying him the authority to recruit additional regular troops. Anyfurther action would require the bill to return to the House ofRepresentatives.This would provide an important delay which could allowthe organization of a commission to investigate the extent of Mormonrebellion in the territory. This was in keeping with his discussion withBernhisel two weeks earlier, when he voiced support of such a commis-sion. Rather than seem too sympathetic towards the Mormons, however,Houston focused his attack on the raising of additional troops for the Utahcampaign.The day ended without a vote.

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On February 10, 1858, President Buchanan again hoped for a positivevote on his Army Bill. As the debate ensued, Houston was accused of notonly trying to defeat the bill, but also attempting to reduce the ranks of theexisting military. The old Texan rose to his own defense, claiming onceagain that he preferred volunteers be recruited rather than regular troops.42

For the first time though, he raised the issue that the president’s appointeesmay have actually started the whole affair.43 While discussing the efficiencyof using volunteers for short campaigns, he added:

if war be necessary; but I doubt whether, unfortunately, men have not been there informer times who were worse than the Mormons themselves, and whose moral textureand complexion might reflect disgrace upon the Mormons. It may be that such personsincited these men to desperation, and led to the statements which have induced thepresent Executive to act as he has done, when, perhaps there would not have been anecessity for that action if the truth had been before him.44

Houston’s attack now focused on President Buchanan, creating quite astir in the Senate chambers. This, along with Houston’s poor characteriza-tion of the standing army, continued to make him the target of considerablecriticism.

The following day, Senator Jefferson Davis rose in an angry invectiveagainst Houston. Once again, Houston was on the defense. He tried toexplain his position on volunteers yet another time. Then turning to hischaracteristic use of levity to diffuse hostile situations, he made a jokeabout the Utah campaign.

These are my views in relation to this emergency, and I am as anxious to see the coun-try quiet as any one. I think that volunteers, actively, sprightly, animated young men,going to that country, would be the best means of breaking up the Mormons. Whenthey get there they will feel that they are cut off from the rest of the country, and bepleased to settle there.They will take wives from amongst the Mormons, and that willbreak up the whole establishment; it will take away their capital.45

The Congressional Globe made note of the laughter that filled the Senatefollowing Houston’s remark.

As far as charges that the Native Americans were collaborating with theMormons, Houston chastised his fellow congressmen. Referencing thebrutal military policy toward the Native Americans, he claimed:

. . . it has driven them to the Mormons; they are their allies.Why? Because they werekilled when they wanted peace. Because the Mormons have not committed a corre-sponding wrong on them, they are the allies of the Mormons. They will always gowhere friendship and justice are accorded to them.46

42 Ibid., 492. Sam Houston’s speech can be found in its entirety in the Congressional Globe, Part 1, 1857-1858, pp. 646-47.

43 For examples of federal officials giving misinformation to President James Buchanan see William P.MacKinnon, “The Buchanan Spoils System and the Utah Expedition: Careers of W. M. F. Magraw andJohn M. Hockaday” Utah Historical Quarterly 31 (Spring 1963): 127-50.

44 Houston, Writings, 492-93.45 Ibid., 504.This speech can be found in its entirety in the Congressional Globe, Part 1, 1857-1858, pp.

669-73.

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46 Houston,Writings, 507.47 Both Houston and the Mormons had an inconsistent record in dealing with Native Americans.

Houston had brutally fought the Creek Nation during the War of 1812, but lived among and was adoptedby the Cherokee Nation. For the complex relationship between the Mormons and Native Americans seeHoward A. Christy, “Open Hand and Mailed Fist: Mormon-Indian Relations in Utah, 1847-52,” UtahHistorical Quarterly 46 (Summer 1978): 216-35; Sondra Jones,“Saints or Sinners? The Evolving Perceptionsof Mormon-Indian Relations in Utah Historiography,” Utah Historical Quarterly 72 (Winter 2004): 19-46;and Ronald W. Walker, “Toward a Reconstruction of Mormon and Indian Relations, 1847-1877,” BYUStudies 29 (Fall 1989): 23-42.

48 Houston, Writings, 521. The speech can be found in its entirety in the Congressional Globe, Part 1,1857-1858, pp. 873-75.

49 Ibid., 522-23.50 Ibid., 525.

Houston, an advocate for indigenous rights, believed that the Mormonsshared his favorable view of Native Americans.47

Two weeks later, on February 25, 1858, Houston returned to the Senatefor the final confrontation with President Buchanan over the Army Bill.While he once again stressed his preference for the raising of volunteers foremergency actions such as the Utah War, he overtly took to the defense ofthe Mormons for the first time. In a long and impassioned speech, Houstonfocused on the Mormon problem. He warned:

If they have to be subdued – and God forfend [sic] us all from such a result – and thevalley of Salt Lake is to be ensanguined with the blood of American citizens, I think itwill be one of the most fearful calamities that has [sic] befallen this country, from itsinception to the present moment. I deprecate it as an intolerable evil.48

Houston continued to detail the massacre that the United States Armywould likely face against the Mormon guerillas, who were well-accus-tomed to the mountainous terrain. Once again, he saved his most pointedcriticism for the president.The debate allowed Houston the opportunity toattack his old political rival. He accused Buchanan of abusing his power bylaunching the Utah Expedition without fully investigating the veracity ofthe claims of Mormon sedition.

I am satisfied that the Executive has not had the information he ought to have had onthis subject before making such a movement as he has directed to be made. I am con-vinced that facts have been concealed from him. I think his wisdom and patriotismshould have dictated the propriety of ascertaining, in the first place, whether the peopleof Utah were willing to submit to the authority of the United States.Why not send tothem men to whom they could unbosom themselves, and see whether they would say,“we are ready to submit to the authorities of the United States…”49

To support his criticism of the Utah campaign, Houston referred directlyto the Seth Blair letter.

I received the other day from a very intelligent Mormon whom I knew in Texas, and avery respectable man he was, once I believe the United States district attorney forUtah, a letter of seven pages. In that letter he takes a comprehensive view of this sub-ject. He protests most solemnly that there never would have been the least hostility tothe authorities of the United States if the President had sent respectable men there. Hesays that Governor Brigham Young has been anxious to get rid of the cares of office,and would freely have surrendered it and acknowledged the authority of the United

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States; but that men have gonethere, who have made threats thatthey would hang them . . .50

Houston then laid out indetail the defensive mea-sures undertaken by theMormons in the territory.Brigham Young and muchof the leadership of thechurch had gone into hid-ing in the mountains,canyons, and smaller settle-ments far to the south ofthe capital. Thousands ofMormon troops armedthemselves with weapons

carried in from Mormon settlements in California and Nevada.51

Predicting the army faced a bloodbath, Houston tried to convey thefoolishness of the venture by comparing the imminent battle to the crush-ing defeat of Napoleon at Moscow:

They will find Salt Lake, if they ever reach it, a heap of ashes . . . Just as sure as we arenow standing in the Senate, these people, if they fight at all, will fight desperately.Theyare defending their homes. They are fighting to prevent the execution of threats thathave been made, which touch their hearths and their families; and depend upon it theywill fight until every man perishes before he surrenders . . . I say your men will neverreturn, but their bones will whiten the valley of Salt Lake. If war begins, the verymoment one single drop of blood is drawn, it will be the signal of extermination.52

Ironically, the man leading the United States forces was Colonel AlbertSidney Johnston, a former Secretary of War of the Texas Republic underHouston. In spite of their previous association, Houston had no love forJohnston and finished his discourse by openly questioning the Colonel’sabilities to successfully lead the army against the Mormons.53

51 For details related to the Mormon military operations in the Utah War, see Leonard J. Arrington,Brigham Young:American Moses (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 250-71.

52 Houston, Writings, 524-25.53 Ibid., 526-27.

Jefferson Davis c. 1860. As UnitedStates Senator from Mississippi,Davis denounced Sam Houston’sposition on the Utah War. Davisserved as President of theConfederate States of Americaduring the Civil War.

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Houston’s speech proved a success.Writing to his wife the following day,Houston claimed credit for the defeat of the Army Bill.54 While the failureof this legislation had little impact on the force already on the Utah fron-tier, it signaled Buchanan’s failing support within his own government.Ultimately, Houston undermined the goals of the president’s UtahExpedition, and helped turn it into what was popularly called “Buchanan’sBlunder.”55

In an attempt to salvage some dignity from the fiasco, Buchanan offereda full pardon to the Mormons on April 6, 1858. The negotiated peacerequired that Brigham Young step down as governor. Young allowed theinvading force to march through Salt Lake City on the condition that theynot attempt to occupy the city. To ensure that the army would honor itspromise, Mormon militia filled the buildings of the city with straw andstood ready to apply the torch if the army dared stop within city limits. Forall intents and purposes, the Utah War was over. 56

Was Houston’s defense of Brigham Young and the Mormons merely pol-iticking, or was he sincere in his desire to bring a peaceful resolution to theUtah War? Certainly he had personal reasons to oppose both PresidentBuchanan and the growth of the regular army, but the tenacity of his attackon the Utah campaign points to other factors.57 His friendship with SethBlair, George A. Smith, and John Bernhisel along with his willingness torisk his reputation in defending the Mormons, suggests that Houston actedout of compassion for a people who he felt faced undeserved violence atthe hands of the United States Army.

A final piece of evidence comes in the form of a private letter Houstonwrote to his wife Margaret. With no expectations that this letter wouldbecome public record, he bore his soul to his wife.

I am no Mormon, & the evil of the difficulty has grown out of the policy pursued byPierce, and kept up by Mr. Buchanan. Men were sent there of worse morals, than theMormons. For instance, a man by the name of Drummond, who left a wife, & family inIll. starving, & from this place took a hussy (I will not call her a woman) and intro-duced her at various places, Independence, Mo, & Santa Fe, and San Francisco as hiswife, and at Salt Lake lived with her as such. Others were men [of] dissolute habits, andthese facts were known to the Mormons. Now my Dear, this Mormon war has, beenpredicated, on the reports of such men, and the Mormons have never refused to receiveFederal officers, and respect them. So upon these premises, the President has sentTroops to subdue them, and Genl A. S. Johns[t]on is sent to the work, and of all menliving the least qualified for such business. If the Mormons chuse [sic] to do it, they candestroy the whole command. If blood is drawn, the Troops will be annihilated…58

54 Sam Houston to Margaret Houston, February 26, 1858, in Sam Houston, The Personal Correspondenceof Sam Houston,Volume IV: 1852-1863, ed. Madge Thornall Roberts (Denton: University of North TexasPress, 1996) 4: 286. See also New York Times March 3, 1858, and Washington Evening Star, March 26, 1858.

55 Poll and Hansen,“Buchanan’s Blunder,” 131.56 MacKinnon,“Utah Expedition of 1857-58,” 1150; Moorman, Camp Floyd, 38-50.57 Houston, Writings, 466, and the Congressional Globe, Part 1, 1857-1858, pp. 492-97.58 Sam Houston to Margaret Houston, March 1, 1858, in Houston, The Personal Correspondence 290.

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While Houston struggled with the morality of Mormon polygamy, henonetheless recognized that the federal government had treated themunfairly. Understanding the precarious situation, he sincerely sought tocurb the loss of life on both sides.

Following the end of his term in Congress, Houston successfully ran forgovernor of Texas. He occupied this unenviable position as the nationcrumbled in 1861. A unionist to the end, Houston refused to swear alle-giance to the Confederate States of America and resigned his office. Heretired to his farm in Huntsville under a cloud of controversy. A fighter tothe end, Houston never feared supporting unpopular causes.59

Perhaps as an ultimate irony, Houston’s son, Sam Jr., joined the SecondTexas Infantry at the outbreak of the Civil War, and was led into battle byConfederate General Albert Sidney Johnston—a man with whom hisfather had little faith as a commander. At the Battle of Shiloh bothJohnston and the younger Houston received serious arterial leg wounds.Johnston died quickly, while surgeons gave Houston up for dead. Againstthe odds, Sam Jr. survived his wound and was taken a prisoner of war.Paroled as an invalid, he was able to return to join his grateful father beforethe elderly statesman passed away in 1863.60

Visitors to Houston’s final resting place in Huntsville will find a marblemonument befitting the first President of the Republic of Texas. Aninscription on the tomb reads:

A Brave Soldier.A Fearless Statesman.A Great Orator – A Pure Patriot.A Faithful Friend,A Loyal Citizen.A Devoted Husband and Father.A Consistent Christian – An Honest Man.

Such tributes are often rhetoric for the memorials of mediocre politicians.Indeed, these words mask the contradictions and complexities of Houston’stumultuous life. Nonetheless, for the Mormons of the Utah TerritoryHouston’s epitaph rang true. At a time when Mormons had few allies inCongress, Sam Houston risked his political career to fight for the lives ofhis friends in what he believed to be an unjust war.

59 Haley, Sam Houston, 365-94 covers his short term as Texas governor.60 Ibid., 403-405.

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1 Histories deal briefly or not at all with this incident. Other coverage of this incident can be found inCharles P. Roland, Albert Sidney Johnston, Soldier of Three Republics (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964);Harold Schindler, “Is that you Pike? Feud Between Settlers, Frontier Army Erupts and Simmers for ThreeDecades,” The Salt Lake Tribune, July 2, 1995; Lance D. Chase,“The Spencer-Pike Affair, 1859-90: Methodin Madness,” in Temple, Town, Tradition, The Collected Historical Essays of Lance D. Chase, (Laie: HI: TheInstitute for Polynesian Studies, 2000).

The Spencer-Pike AffairBY RICHARD W. SADLER

At noon on August 11, 1859, an assailant shot and mortallywounded U. S. Army Sergeant Ralph Pike on a crowded SaltLake City street. Thirty years later, Howard Orson Spencer, thevictim of a brutal attack by the Camp Floyd soldier was tried

and found innocent in a civilian court of the murder of Pike. Known as theSpencer-Pike affair, the events of 1859 were part of the larger Utah Warthat began in1857 when United States President James Buchanan orderedfederal troops to Utah to escort Alfred Cumming, Brigham Young’sreplacement as territorial governor.1

After spending a cold and difficult winterat Camp Scott in western Wyoming, the sol-diers, under the command of Col. AlbertSidney Johnston, marched through Salt Lake

Richard W. Sadler is a Fellow of the Utah State Historical Society and Dean of the School of Social andBehavioral Sciences,Weber State University.

Daniel Spencer, uncle to HowardO. Spencer and on whose RushValley ranch the encounter withRalph Pike took place.

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City and established Camp Floydin Cedar Valley, forty miles south-west of Salt Lake City in lateJune 1858. Mistrust and animosi-ty defined relations betweenMormons and the army andsparked the confrontationbetween Howard Orson Spencerand Sergeant Ralph Pike. Theresulting injury and deathdemonstrated that the Utah terri-tory was infected by the propen-sities for violence that permeatedmid-nineteenth century America.2

At the same time, while the ten-sion and animosity betweenMormons and the U.S.Army andits suppliers kept the prospect ofviolence boiling near the surface,very few physical altercationsactually occurred.

The Spencer-Pike affair was anexception as confrontation andanger resulted in bloodshed anddeath in the spring and summerof 1859. The week-long trial ofHoward O. Spencer in 1889, a

year before Mormons capitulated to anintense and sustained congressional anti-

polygamy crusade, demonstrated that the animosity and bitter feelings ofthree decades earlier remained.

Howard Orson Spencer was born to Orson and Catharine Curtis

2 An 1859 case of violence that had some relationship to the Spencer-Pike affair was the murder com-mitted in February of 1859 by Congressman Daniel Sickles of New York State who shot Philip BartonKey, U.S. District Attorney for the District of Columbia and the son of Francis Scott Key. RepresentativeSickles suggested that he was in a jealous rage over the illicit affair in which Key and Sickle’s young wifeTeresa were involved. In the subsequent sensational trial, in which Sickles plead successfully temporaryinsanity, he was acquitted. He went on to be a successful soldier in the Civil War including losing a leg atGettysburg and being awarded the Medal of Honor.W.A. Swanberg, Sickles the Incredible (Gettysburg: StanClark Military Books, 1991); Nat Brandt, The Congressman Who Got Away With Murder (Syracuse: SyracuseUniversity Press, 1991).The middle of the nineteenth century also saw political violence (Bleeding Kansasand the Christiana Affair), economic violence (the Squatters’ Riots in California), racial violence (the NatTurner Rebellion and the Texas Slave Insurrection of 1860), race riots (in Cincinnati, New York, and NewOrleans), religious and ethnic violence (the murders of Joseph and Hyrum Smith and the MountainMeadows Massacre), personal violence (the assault on Charles Sumner in the United States Senate), assassi-nations and political murders (Elijah Lovejoy and Abraham Lincoln), and group violence (the vigilantemovements in the West).

Howard O. Spencer c. 1910

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3 Andrew Jenson writes that Howard Spencer was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, which dif-fers from family accounts. Andrew Jenson, Latter-day Saint Biographical Encyclopedia: A Compilation ofBiographical Sketches of Prominent Men and Women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Salt LakeCity:Andrew Jenson History Company, 1901), 4:503-504.

4 Orson Spencer (1802-1855) received a degree from Union College at Schenectady, New York, in1824 and a second degree from the Theological College at Hamilton, New York, in 1829. Orson servedfor a time as mayor of Nauvoo, LDS church mission president in Great Britain, and chancellor of both theUniversity of Nauvoo in Nauvoo and the University of Deseret in Utah. Catharine Curtis Spencer diedon the plains of Iowa in 1846. On Orson and Catharine Spencer and their family see: Aurelia SpencerRogers, Life Sketches of Orson Spencer and Others and History of Primary Work (Salt Lake City: George Q.Cannon and Sons, 1898); Richard W. Sadler, “The Life of Orson Spencer,” (masters thesis, University ofUtah, 1965); Seymour H. Spencer, Life Summary of Orson Spencer, (Salt Lake City: Mercury PublishingCompany, 1964.)

5 Daniel Spencer (1794-1868) converted to Mormonism in 1840 along with his brothers Hiram andOrson. Daniel was also mayor of Nauvoo for a time, was the first president of the Salt Lake City LDSStake (1849-1868) as well as being involved in the Utah Territorial government and the British Mission.

Spencer in Middlefield, Massachusetts, on June 16, 1838.3 Orson was aBaptist minister, but in 1840, the Spencers converted to Mormonism,moved to Nauvoo, and eventually to Utah.4 For Spencer, church callings,including missionary service abroad, required lengthy absences from hisfamily. When Catharine died in 1846, Howard, his brother, and six sisterswere raised by neighbors and relatives in particular Orson’s brother Daniel.5

A successful businessman first in Massachusetts then in Illinois, DanielSpencer arrived in Utah in 1847, and acquired residential property andfarm land in the Salt Lake City area. He also owned two substantial rancheslocated west of the city.The first was located in Salt Lake County about amile west of what was called Millstone Point on the flat Bonneville Lakebottom north of the Oquirrh Mountains.This ranch, often called the ranchat the point of West Mountains, served as a way station for travelers goingto and from Tooele and Rush Valleys. The second ranch was located inRush Valley, south of the Tooele settlement, and on the south shore of RushLake. Spencer employed young farm and ranch hands including hisnephew, Howard Orson Spencer. The Utah frontier, his uncle’s ranch, theMormon faith, and his family were cornerstones for the young Spencer.

When Utahns learned that a federal army was on its way to Utah, theyprepared to resist. Nineteen-year-old Howard Orson along with his broth-er-in-law Hiram B. Clawson joined the territorial militia and went to EchoCanyon, a key strategic location for blocking the entrance of federal soldiers into the territory. Spencer served for a time under Lot Smith, aseasoned frontiersman whose exploits in burning army supply wagons andharassing the Utah-bound troops on the high plains of Wyoming are awell-known element of Utah War lore.

Lot Smith wrote his Utah War reminiscences a quarter of a century afterthe event and recalled taking a group of young men into Echo Canyon thatincluded Howard O. Spencer and his brother-in-law, Brigham Young Jr. Onone occasion Joseph Rich and Howard Spencer, who was nursing awound, were ordered to remain in camp. Lot Smith recorded: “The latter

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6 The narrative of Lot Smith is found in LeRoy R. and Ann W. Hafen, Mormon Resistance, ADocumentary Account of the Utah Expedition, 1857-1858 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 220-46. For accounts of the Utah War see Donald Moorman and Gene A. Sessions, Camp Floyd and theMormons,The Utah War (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992); Norman F. Furniss, The MormonConflict, 1850-1859 (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1966); Harold D. Langley, ed., To Utah with theDragoons and Glimpses of Life in Arizona and California, 1858-1859 (Salt Lake City: University of UtahPress, 1974); Eugene E. Campbell, Establishing Zion, the Mormon Church in the American West, 1847-1869(Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1988).

7 Information on Ralph Pike comes from correspondence with William P. MacKinnon in the author’spossession.

8 Rush Valley, located south of the city of Tooele and Tooele Valley, is thirty miles long from north tosouth and seventeen miles wide at the widest point. It is distinguished by the presence of Rush Lakewhich was formed when Lake Bonneville laid down a lake bar which interdicted any natural drainagefrom Rush Valley to the Tooele Valley. Rush Lake in the 1850s was about 1.5 miles in length and with itssurroundings provided a supply of water and good grazing ground. Ouida Blanthorn, A History of TooeleCounty (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Tooele County Commission, 1998), 15-16.

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had a fever sore on his leg, and to his disgust at being kept in camp, heremarked to his comrades: ‘Boys, if you want to get out of doing anything,just scratch your leg a little.’ He then rolled up his pants and filled the gap-ing wound with hot embers. I thought him then the right kind of stuff tomake a soldier.”6

Ralph Pike, a native of Hebron, New Hampshire, whose brother haddied serving in the Mexican War, came west as a corporal in the 10thRegiment’s I Company. In November 1857, Pike volunteered to go with agroup of soldiers under the command of Captain Randolph B. Marcy toNew Mexico to purchase much needed mules, sheep, and salt for the Utahbound expedition then wintering at Camp Scott near Fort Bridger inwestern Wyoming. The mid-winter march of the Marcy expedition wasparticularly grueling and Pike’s participation in this journey may have ledto his promotion to sergeant in 1858.7

In late June 1858, after a truce had been negotiated with Brigham Youngensuring that the federal army would not meet with armed resistance,Ralph Pike and his fellow soldiers under the command of recentlyBrevetted Brigadier General Albert Sidney Johnston marched throughEcho Canyon, the abandoned streets of Salt Lake City, and on to CedarValley forty miles to the southwest where they established Camp Floyd—named in honor of President Buchanan’s Secretary of War John B. Floyd.

Rush Valley, located north and west of Camp Floyd, had been explored byCaptain Howard Stansbury in 1849 and 1850, and by Lt. Col. Edward J.Steptoe in 1854 and 1855.8 Steptoe had designated Rush Valley as a reservefor federal grazing and in doing so set up some tensions between the federalgovernment and Mormons who viewed the areas as theirs to use by priorappropriation.When Steptoe and his troops left the Utah Territory in 1855,Mormons, including Daniel Spencer, moved in to utilize the land andresources in Rush Valley. In 1858, following the establishment of CampFloyd, the army began to use Rush Valley as grazing ground for its livestock.

At the same time Daniel Spencer asked Governor Cumming for permis-sion to continue to graze his cattle and sheep in Rush Valley as he had

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9 Letters from Alfred Cumming to Albert Sidney Johnston, October 8, 1858, and March 24, 1859, inthe Mrs. Mason Barret Collection of Albert Sidney and William Preston Johnston Papers, ManuscriptsDivision, Howard Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana. Copies of theseletters are in the Donald R. Moorman Collection, Stewart Library,Weber State University, Ogden.

10 Scott G. Kenney, ed., Wilford Woodruff’s Journal,1853-1898 (Midvale: Signature Books, 1984), 5:312-13.

done for more than three years. Cumming wrote Johnston in October1858, asking that Spencer be allowed to continue his grazing rights inRush Valley, an arrangement to which the general apparently agreed.9

Conflict intensified between the army and the Mormons as both grazedtheir herds in Rush Valley during the winter of 1858-59.With the approvalof both Cumming and Johnston to continue to graze his livestock in RushValley, Spencer added animals owned by Erastus Snow, Jacob Gates, and J.C.Little to the Rush Valley herds. He also, without approval, enlarged struc-tures and corrals. Furthermore, George Reeder, Spencer’s chief herdsman,was accused of illegally selling locally produced whiskey, known as “ValleyTan,” to the soldiers. These alleged misdeeds may have been reasons thatSpencer was ordered to remove his herds from Rush Valley by mid-April1859. As spring approached, soldiers began to move throughout RushValley to encourage Mormons to remove their animals before the mid-April deadline.As the troops pushed, Mormon herders resisted.

On March 21, 1859, Howard Spencer and Al Clift left Salt Lake Citywith directions to begin to move the Mormon owned animals north out ofRush Valley. Clift and Spencer spent the night at Daniel Spencer’s ranch atthe point of West Mountain, and reached the Spencer ranch in Rush Valleythe following afternoon where they were met by soldiers who orderedSpencer and Clift to move their herds from the valley that very afternoon.When Howard Spencer maintained that three weeks remained before theywere obligated to remove the livestock, the argument intensified and angrywords gave way to violent action.

Al Clift, an eyewitness to the event, recounted to Brigham Young andothers what transpired. His report was recorded by Wilford Woodruff in hisdiary:

...They [the soldiers] told Spencer He Could not stay there over night.This appeared tobe an officer. Howard Spencer told him that the House belonged to him & he shouldstay there over night.The soldiers then went away & returned with about a dozen menin all. The officer told Spencer He should not Stay there over night. Spencer said Hewould & got off his horse & went through the first Carall into another Carrall wharehis food was & the man that seemed to Command the soldiers rode up to him onHorse back & took the gun by the brich & struck him over the Head by the barrelwith all his might across the side of the head and laid his [head] open and he fell deadto all appearance. He straitened himself out as he fell.10

Ralph Pike attacked Howard Spencer with the butt of his musket, whichshattered the pitchfork in Spencer’s hands and fractured Spencer’s skull.Bleeding and unconscious, Spencer collapsed to the ground. Mormon

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11 Aurelia Spencer Rogers suggests that Brewer tried to poison her brother, see Rogers, Orson Spencer,182-84. Luke Johnson had been an early Mormon convert and one of the original Mormon TwelveApostles. He was excommunicated from the church in 1838, and later rejoined the church in Nauvoo, andin 1858 settled St. John. Johnson died in 1861 at the Salt Lake City home of his brother-in-law, OrsonHyde. Sgt. Charles E. Brewer penned a description and analysis of Howard Spencer’s injuries and the con-frontation in a two page letter to Colonel Charles F. Smith, 10th Regiment Infantry Camp Floyd, U.T.Copy of the Brewer letter is in the Moorman Collection, Stewart Library,Weber State University. March23, 1859.

12 Brewer to Smith, March 23, 1859. Wilford Woodruff reported that he was with Brigham Youngwhen the news of the Spencer-Pike altercation reached him on March 23, 1859. Kenney, Wilford Woodruff’sJournal, 5:312-15.

13 Kenney, Wilford Woodruff Journal, 5: 313.

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herders, Bishop Luke Johnson from nearby St. John, and army physicianassistant Sergeant Charles E. Brewer rendered assistance.11 Spencer was carried to a nearby shelter where throughout the night he drifted betweenlife and death. In his report about the incident Brewer wrote:

In being called to see him I found that a small part of his skull had been fractured by asevere blow.When first seen his symptoms were those of conprelsion [sic] of the hair,his pulse full slow and irregular accompanied by jactitation and spasms of the limbs, hisbreathing deep and slow with puffing of the cheeks. Indicative of threatening paralysis;no part of his body was however paralysed and he was perfectly conscious. On a moreminute examination I found a small fragment of the cranium pressing upon the brain;this fragment being cut down upon and elevated by proper instruments, the pressurewas removed and he almost immediately felt relieved, both heard his friends expressinggreat satisfaction at the relief afforded.12

Brewer recommended that Spencer be moved to Camp Floyd, but theMormons refused. Shortly after the altercation, Al Clift rode to Salt LakeCity to inform Daniel Spencer, Brigham Young, and others about the seri-ousness of Howard’s injuries. Brigham Young sent his carriage to retrieveHoward. George Boardman Spencer, Howard’s younger brother, his uncleDaniel Spencer, and Dr. S. L. Sprague hurriedly traveled to the Rush Valleyranch to recover Howard. On March 23, the party reached Rush Valley andtransported Howard that evening to the Spencer ranch at the point of theWest Mountain.The following day Margaret Spencer, married to Howard’scousin Charles, rode in the wagon in an effort to comfort Howard duringthe day-long rough and difficult journey to Salt Lake City.

Mormons, the army, and civilian officials responded to the news of theattack differently. Wilford Woodruff ’s reaction to the altercation in RushValley mirrored the feelings of most Mormons. On March 21, following dis-cussions with Brigham Young,Woodruff noted in his diary that the troops atCamp Floyd were being “sent into our Cities to slay the People” and notedthat Howard Spencer’s injuries seemed a fulfillment of prophecy.Woodruffadded that the situation might lead to further bloodshed. “Unless the Lordwards off the blow it looks as though we were to have war & Boodshed.[sic] Our Enemies are determined on our over throw as far as possible. But Ihave faith to believe that the Lord will protect us as he has done.”13

The Spencer-Pike altercation brought different responses and assessments

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14 Cumming to Johnston, March 24, 1859, Moorman collection.

of blame. Soldiers at Camp Floyd justifiedPike in his actions as the camp newspaper,The Valley Tan, maintained that Spencer hadrushed Pike with a pitchfork, and Pike had todefend himself with his musket. Mormons inSalt Lake City saw the attack on Spencer asbeing unprovoked. Governor Cumming, whowas a distant observer to the events in RushValley, noted in a letter to General Johnstonthat he had been informed of the March 22altercation at the Spencer Ranch and that,Howard Spencer was “violently assailed andperhaps mortally injured by a soldier…endeavoring to eject the occupants of a herd-ing ranch whose right to occupy the placefor herding their own stock has been acqui-esced in by you.”14 To Johnston, it appearedthat the governor was taking the side of theMormons against his soldiers.

Over the course of the next several weeks,Howard Spencer received medical treatmentin Salt Lake City. Doctor W. F. Anderson and a Doctor France of Salt LakeCity performed several operations removing pieces of bone and placing asilver plate in Howard’s head to protect his brain as pieces of the skull wereremoved. Howard was sometimes delirious, but, in time, began the longprocess of recovery.

At Camp Floyd a military inquiry into Pike’s role in the altercationcleared the sergeant of any wrong doing in the affair. However, shortlythereafter, Pike was indicted by a Salt Lake City grand jury on a charge of“assault with the intent to kill” and ordered to appear in associate justiceCharles R. Sinclair’s District Court on August 11, 1859. With a militaryescort of four soldiers, Pike traveled to Salt Lake City, secured lodging inthe Salt Lake House, and attended the court’s morning session whereMajor Fitz John Porter represented the camp commander.

During the noon recess, as Pike and his escort walked down Main Streetbetween 100 and 200 South Streets, a man came from behind Pike andsaid, “Is that you, Pike?” And when Pike turned around, the man shot himin the side. The shooter quickly disappeared into the crowd of perhaps ahundred or more people, mounted a horse, and made his escape.

At Camp Floyd, Captain Albert Tracy wrote in his journal:At sundown on this date, an express rider arrives in camp, but two hours and a halffrom Salt Lake City, with intelligence of the shooting of Sergeant Pike….An army sur-geon started for the city to attend upon Pike, but was halted until an escort could join

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George Boardman Spencer,brother to Howard O. Spencerand witness at the 1889 trial.

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15 “The Utah War Journal of Albert Tracy, 1858-1860,” Utah Historical Quarterly 15 (1945): 72-73.16 The Valley Tan,August 17, 1859, quoted in Moorman and Sessions, Camp Floyd, 256. Harold Schindler

also quotes the newspaper article and makes the assertion that Bill Hickman, noted Mormon gunman, wasinvolved in helping Spencer get away on the day of the shooting. Hickman in his Confessions mentionsnothing about this Spencer-Pike affair. Schindler also suggests that Spencer’s close friend GeorgeStringham was nearby at the time of the shooting, see Schindler,“Is That You Pike?”.

17 “Journal of Albert Tracy,” 73.18 Not all relationships between Mormons and the military were tense. Patience Loader, a Mormon

woman who arrived in Utah in the Fall of 1856 with the Martin Handcart Company, married SergeantJohn Rozsa of the Tenth Infantry from Camp Floyd in the summer of 1858 as he converted toMormonism. Sandra Ailey Petree, ed., Recollections of Past Days,The Autobiography of Patience Loader RozsaArcher, (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2006) 98-106. John Nay and his wife Thirza were earlyMormon settlers of Cedar Fort. In the Fall of 1858, Corporal James Haven (age twenty-six) began to reg-ularly visit Thirza Nay (age forty-five) who had been married to John Nay for twenty years and had bornenine children in their relationship. Thirza after becoming involved in “familiar intimacy” with CorporalHaven, ran off with and married him.The family relationships are described in Joan Nay, Beth Breinholt,and Joy Stubbs, The Nay Family in Utah and the West, A History of John Nay Jr., and His wives and children,(Salt Lake City: privately published, 2002).

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him, it being the fact that armed bodies of the Mormons stand prepared to dispute thepassage of any minor party or individual not desirable to them to have enter the city.”15

Attempts to capture the shooter were unsuccessful. Pike was carried intothe nearby Salt Lake House and operated on in an unsuccessful attempt tosave his life. Pike clung to life for three days, but before he died on August14, he identified his assailant as Howard Spencer.

Pike’s body was returned to Camp Floyd where hundreds of his fellowsoldiers attended a funeral Mass conducted by Father Bonaventure Kellerand was buried in the Camp Floyd cemetery. The Valley Tan, labeled theincident “Another Assassination.” In his announcement of Pike’s death,Brig. Gen. Johnston wrote,“It is with much regret the commanding officerannounces to the regiment the death of that excellent soldier, FirstSergeant Ralph Pike of Company I, late last night, the victim of Mormonassassination, through revenge for the proper discharge of his duty.”16

Capt.Tracy named Spencer as the assailant and recorded the mood of thesoldiers and officers and the measures their leaders undertook to avoid fur-ther violence.

The command, officers, and men, seem to be simply exasperated, and were it not fordiscipline itself, much more might be said or done by the former.To that pitch, indeed,have things gone, that extra details of guard have been ordered to prevent the men fromleaving in squads at night, to wreak their vengeance upon whatsoever in the form ofMormon, or the property of such, may come in their path.The officers, moreover, arecautioned to more than ordinary vigilance, to see that no breach of order take place.17

Measures were taken to calm Camp Floyd but were not entirely success-ful as soldiers from Company I, angry and bitter over the murder of theircomrade, raided the nearby Mormon settlement of Cedar Fort and burnedsome haystacks. Fortunately, no civilians were injured. Relations betweensoldiers and civilians remained strained, especially in Provo and northernUtah County communities.18

The broad daylight shooting of Pike on Thursday, August 11, 1859, and

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19 Lorenzo Brown, Journal I, 347 in Juanita Brooks, ed., On The Mormon Frontier, the Diary of Hosea Stout(Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press and the Utah State Historical Society, 1964), 2:701, fn. 62.

20 Ibid. 701-70221 The couple had five girls and one boy. In 1875, Spencer married twenty-year old Persis Ann Brown

and they had two sons and three daughters. In 1877, Howard married twenty- year old Asenath EmmelineCarling and they had five sons and twelve daughters. Elda P. Mortensen, compiler and editor, Isaac V.Carling Family History (Provo: Printed by J. Grant Stevenson, 1965).

22 Kenney, Wilford Woodruff, 5:573. On the Salt Lake Stake and its organization see Lynn M. Hilton, ed.,The Salt Lake Stake, 1847-1972 (Salt Lake City: Utah Printing Company,1972). Howard Spencer is listedas serving fourteen years on the stake high council. His cousin Claudius Spencer and his brother-in-lawBrigham Young Jr. who had married his sister Catharine Curtis Spencer in 1855 also served with him partof the time.

his death the following Sunday, raised questions as to how the shootercould commit the deed and could get away. Lorenzo Brown reflected someof the Mormon point of view: “12 August, 1859, Yesterday a U.S.A.Sergeant Pike was shot while standing in a crowd by some personunknown who deliberately made his escape although persued [sic] by ahost & strange to say although seen by hundreds no one knew him and notwo gave the same description of him.”19

Hosea Stout commented in his diary about the murder of Ralph Pikeand concluded that it was Spencer who shot Pike because “Pike struck himover the head with a gun and broke his skull near killing him.”20 A Salt LakeCity grand jury issued a warrant for the arrest of Spencer for the murder ofPike; however, he was not taken into custody until 1888. The delay ofSpencer’s arrest was the result of the threatening Civil War in the East, thesubsequent abandonment of Camp Floyd by the army in 1861, and publicsupport for Spencer that allowed him to live a quiet but not hidden life inSalt Lake City.

Nearly a year after the killing of Pike, Howard married Louise LucyCatherine Cross in the Salt Lake Endowment House in April 1860.21 Ayear later Howard along with three other men were called to becomemembers of the high council of the Salt Lake Stake presided over by hisuncle Daniel Spencer.Wilford Woodruff recorded the setting apart of thesefour men to the Salt Lake Stake high council:

12 Sunday....We met at the Historians Office at ? past 5 oclok & ordained 4 men to theHigh Priesthood & High councillers of this Stake of Zion. Presidet young BlessedBrother Long. Brother Kimball Blessed Brother [ ]. John Taylor Blessed BrighamYoung jr.W.Woodruff Blessed Howard Sp [enser?] President Young said yes & I ordainyou to kill evry scoundrel that seeks your life & when you Come across such men usethem up.22

Howard Spencer also spent much of 1862 with Lot Smith in Wyominghelping to guard the overland mail and telegraph routes. He fought Indians,worked as a night watchman in Salt Lake City for ZCMI, and workedbuilding the Union Pacific Railroad in Echo Canyon. In 1869-70 andagain in 1877-78 he served LDS church missions to England, spendingmuch of the time in the London area.

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23 On the settlement and development of Orderville, Long Valley and Kane County, see, MarthaSonntag Bradley, A History of Kane County, (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and KaneCounty Commission, 1999) 103-29. Howard Spencer’s role in the Long Valley settlements is also dealtwith in Leonard J. Arrington, Feramorz Y. Fox and Dean L. May, Building the City of God, Community &Cooperation Among the Mormons (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1976). Spencer was proud of thesuccess of the United Order in the Long Valley settlements and in 1875 and 1876 he attended a number ofmeetings in St. George where he often spoke about the success of the United Order in the Long Valleysettlements. See A. Karl Larson and Katharine Miles Larson, editors, Diary of Charles Lowell Walker (Logan:Utah State University Press, 1980), 1: 409, 422, 433.

24 President Grover Cleveland appointed John Walter Judd an associate territorial Supreme Court judgeof the Utah Territory where he served from 1888 to1893. Judd was born in 1839 in Gallatin, SumnerCounty,Tennessee, and during the Civil War he served as a cavalryman in the Confederate army. In 1893Judd was appointed as a U.S. District Attorney for the Territory of Utah and served until Utah became astate. In 1896 he returned to Tennessee where he taught law at Vanderbilt University until his death in1919. Clifford L. Ashton, The Federal Judiciary in Utah, (Salt Lake City: Utah State Bar Foundation, 1988),45-46.

25 LeGrand Young was born in Nauvoo, Illinois, December 27, 1840, the son of Joseph and Jane AdelineYoung. He attended the common schools in Salt Lake City, later graduated from the law department ofthe University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and was admitted to the Utah Territorial Bar in 1870. Joseph L.Rawlins was born in 1850 in Mill Creek, Salt Lake County, and attended Dr. John Park’s school at Draper.He later attended the University of Deseret from 1869 to1871, and the University of Indiana from 1871 to1873. Joseph L. Rawlins was professor of mathematics and Latin at the University of Deseret. He studiedlaw in Salt Lake City and was admitted to the Utah Bar in 1874. A year later, he formed a partnershipwith Ben Sheets. Rawlins served as a delegate from the Utah Territory to the House of Representativesfrom 1892 to 1895. He introduced and helped to procure the passage of the bill under which Utah wasadmitted to statehood in 1896. He was elected U.S. Senator from Utah in 1897, serving from 1897 to1903. Arthur Brown was a non-Mormon attorney from Nevada who later became a leader in theRepublican Party being elected along with Frank J. Cannon, as Utah’s first United States Senators.

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In September 1874, Howard Spencer was called by Brigham Young tomove to Mt. Carmel, a southern Utah settlement in Long Valley near thepresent east entrance to Zion National Park. As bishop, or the ecclesiasticalleader in Long Valley, Spencer was charged with ending contention in Mt.Carmel, most of which centered on issues relating to the United Order.Under Spencer’s council, one faction moved two miles north of Mt.Carmel in 1875 to establish the community of Orderville.23 Following hissecond mission to England, Spencer served as a counselor in the KanabStake Presidency from 1877 to 1884.

In 1888, at the age of fifty, Howard Spencer was arrested in Salt LakeCity’s Liberty Park on the charge of unlawful cohabitation as federalauthorities vigorously prosecuted Mormons under the Edmunds-TuckerAnti-Polygamy Act. At the time of Spencer’s arrest territorial prison war-den and U.S. Marshal Arthur Pratt remembered the murder of Ralph Pikeyears earlier and arraigned Spencer on that charge. Spencer posted a sixthousand dollar bail and waited for his murder trial to begin in May 1889.

George Stringham, a close friend of Spencer, was also charged with Pike’smurder. At the beginning of the trial prosecutors intended to try Spencerand Stringham together in Judge John Walter Judd’s Salt Lake City court.However, the first year judge granted a defense motion for separate trials.24

Howard Spencer was tried first. District Attorney George S. Peters andhis assistant named Hiles prosecuted the case. Spencer was defended by an

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effective and high-powered team of fourattorneys—Joseph L. Rawlins, LeGrandYoung, and Ben Sheets who were Mormon,and Arthur Brown a non-Mormon attorneywho had practiced law in Nevada.25

The week-long trial began on MondayMay 6, 1889. The Third District Court waspacked with onlookers, witnesses, and jour-nalists who wrote daily articles for the citynewspapers. During the first day and a half ofthe trial several dozen potential jurors wereexamined by the prosecution, defense, andjudge before twelve men—three Mormonsand nine non-Mormons—were selectedThey were Frank Van Horne, E.B. Kelsey,John McVicker, William J. Lynch, H.C.Reich, T.P. Murray, J.B. Cornwell, OwenHogle, J.L. Perkes, Frank Shelton, J.M.Young,and A.W. Caine. Judge Judd admonished thejury to be extremely cautious and to hold nocommunications with anyone outside of theirnumber.

It was clear from the onset that not only was Howard Orson Spencer ontrial for murder, but that the trial would examine the treatment ofMormons by U.S. soldiers three decades earlier as well as the interactionbetween federal government officials and Mormons in the territory duringthe troubled years after 1858.

The trial began in earnest on Tuesday afternoon, May 7, as assistant district attorney Hiles told the jury that the government expected to provethat Sergeant Ralph Pike was mortally wounded by the defendant HowardOrson Spencer. Hiles recalled the events on August 11, 1859, in Salt LakeCity leading to Pike’s death including Pike’s deathbed confirmation ofSpencer’s guilt. He then called ten witnesses for the prosecution includingLewis Smith, James Gordon, Mrs. Elizabeth Townsend, Stephen Taylor,William Alma Williams, William Appleby, Henry Heath, Lehi Daniels,Leonard Phillips, and Henry Q. Cushing. Based on the testimony of thesewitnesses that placed Spencer at the crime scene, the prosecution askedJudge Judd to increase the amount of Spencer’s bond from six thousanddollars to a much higher amount. Spencer’s defense attorneys objectedstrenuously and were successful at keeping the bond at the six thousanddollar amount.

Cushing testified that just prior to the shooting he had observed HowardSpencer, Bill Hickman, George Stringham, and a man named Luce in theyard near the rear of his shoe shop examining pistols and conversing atsome length. Cushing noted that a little later following the “report of a

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Brigham Young Jr. brother-in-lawto Howard O. Spencer and witness at the 1889 trial.

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26 Deseret Evening News, May 8, 1889, Salt Lake Tribune, May 9, 1889, and Salt Lake Herald, May 9, 1889.27 Claudius V. Spencer, son of Daniel Spencer, was Howard Spencer’s cousin. George Reeder was the

Spencer’s herdsman on the Rush Valley ranch in 1859. Mrs. Margaret Spencer was the wife of Howard’scousin Charles Spencer, son of Hiram Spencer. Margaret was born in England in 1830, married Charles inSalt Lake City in 1857, resided on Daniel Spencer’s ranch at the north end of the Oquirrh Mountains. Sheheld Howard Spencer’s wounded head during the trip from the ranch to Salt Lake City in March 1859.

28 Hiram B. Clawson was a substantial businessman in Salt Lake City and husband to Howard’s sisterEllen (Mrs. Ellen S. Clawson, who also testified). Katherine S. Young was Howard’s sister and wife ofBrigham Young, Jr. who was at this time a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Churchof Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

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pistol,” he saw Spencer run from the area of the Salt Lake House wherePike had been shot. Phillips testified that Spencer and his friends Hickman,Stringham, Luce, and Steve Taylor had planned the shooting and that thefour friends had acted to cause confusion following the shooting in orderfor Spencer to make his escape.The prosecution produced no eyewitnessesto the shooting but relied principally on Pike’s deathbed statement namingSpencer as his assailant to carry its case with the jury.

Arthur Brown made the opening statement for Spencer’s defense duringthe Wednesday afternoon session of the trial. While the prosecution hadavoided discussion of the earlier events in Rush Valley, Brown gave anextensive recounting of the March 1859 attack on Spencer by Pike inRush Valley. Spencer had been “rendered partially insane” by the blow fromPike and “his skull was crushed in and his brains oozed out.”26 Brown’sopening statement outlined the defense strategy—neither Spencer nor anyof his friends were the shooter, Spencer was not in the area during the dayof the shooting, Spencer was not the same person he had been before theattack by Pike, and if he had shot Pike it was not premeditated but a rashact by an insane victim.Ten witnesses, all family, friends, and medical doc-tors testified that Spencer had become unstable following the altercation inRush Valley with Pike, that he had not fully recovered from the beating.Defense witnesses presented on Wednesday afternoon included Claudius V.Spencer, George Reeder, Elijah Seamons, Mrs. Margaret Spencer, Dr. W.F.Anderson, Mrs. Martha Spencer, Dr. Benedict, Dr. Hamilton, Dr. Joseph F.Richards, and Dr. Bascombe.27

The next day George Boardman Spencer, brother to the defendant, testi-fied that he was with his brother Howard all day on August 11, 1859, andthat Howard was not and could not have been involved in the shooting.George noted that after the Rush Valley incident Howard became irritableand brusque and that he never fully recovered from the attack. Otherdefense witnesses included Orlando F. Herron and William Brown whotestified as eyewitnesses to the Pike shooting that Howard was not theshooter but instead was someone they did not know. Further defense witnesses on Thursday included Vincent Shurtliff, Hiram B. Clawson,Thomas Jenkins, Mrs. Katherine S.Young, and Mrs. Ellen S. Clawson.28 Alltestified to Howard’s weakened condition following the Pike attack andthat he never fully recovered mentally from the beating. Howard Spencer

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29 Salt Lake Herald, May 11, 1889. For additional coverage of the trial, see Deseret Evening News, May11, 12, 1889, and Salt Lake Tribune, May 11, 1889.

did not testify in his own behalf as his attorneys maintained that he did notrecall any subsequent events following the brutal beating by Pike.Thedefense then rested its case.

The prosecution called two medical doctors—Dr. J.M. Dart and a Dr.Ewing—as rebuttal witnesses to counter the defense testimony thatSpencer suffered a permanent diagnosable weakened mental conditioncaused by Pike’s blows.

Beginning Thursday afternoon and continuing Fr iday morning,Spencer’s three attorneys offered their closing arguments. Joseph Rawlinsasserted that the prosecutors had not proven their case and that the testi-mony of prosecution witnesses could not be reconciled. LeGrand Youngfollowed Rawlins and recalled the tense and violent years of 1858 and1859.

It had been said that Pike was under arrest but who were his custodians? His ownunderlings. He was an armed prisoner in the custody of men under his own command.What a satire on the law to say that he was in the hands of the law! Is it any wonderthat the people said justice would not be done? Would it be strange if Spencer was firedby the torture of his wound and in his demented condition grew frenzied and broughtretributive justice to the boastful sergeant who had committed the cowardly assault.Usually villains have some soft spot, but this dog did not even have that.The cowardlywretch had Spencer thrown on the damp ground until a more humane officer ordereda change. And then when Pike was brought in he was permitted to go on parade withhis subordinates, an armed man, flaunting in the face of his victim the position he wasin, and boastful of what he had done.Would not a sane man have become uncontrol-lable under such circumstances? In those days men carried pistols because the law didnot afford them protection...Men were justified in defending themselves if the law didnot protect them. 29

At this juncture Judge Judd asked Young: “Do you say the revolver wasabove the law?” Young with great enthusiasm and standing before JudgeJudd responded: “In those times and under those circumstances, yes.” Thejudge ordered Young to restrain himself, and Young obediently took hisseat.At this emotional climax in the trial, the judge recessed the court untilthe afternoon.

Arthur Brown began the Friday afternoon session with his summation.He maintained that the prosecution had proven neither murder normanslaughter.They had also tried to stir up a conspiracy with references toBill Hickman in the hope that his name and association with violence inthe territory would influence the jury against Spencer. Brown argued thatthe defense’s presentation was superior to that offered by the prosecutionand that the prosecution failed to show that Spencer had killed Pike. Heconcluded his statement that Spencer experienced periods of temporaryinsanity brought on by the blows from Pike’s musket and these periods ofinsanity were substantial and real.

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30 Ibid.31 Salt Lake Tribune, May 12, 1889.32 Salt Lake Herald, May 12, 1889.

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District attorney Peters made the closing argument for the prosecutionnoting that there was a conspiracy to kill Pike and that Spencer wasinvolved in the conspiracy. Peters closed by stating that there was indeedconflict between the testimony of the prosecution and the defense witness-es, but that he believed the prosecution witnesses were more credible.

Following Peters arguments, Judge Judd gave meticulous and lengthyinstructions to the jury.They were to be the exclusive judges of the testi-mony, but should not allow the statements about Howard Spencer’s insanityto influence the case.With those instructions fresh on their minds, the juryretired from the courtroom at 3 p.m. After the jury left the courtroom,Arthur Brown, speaking for the defense, made numerous objections to thejudge’s instructions to the jury—especially those relating to the issue ofSpencer’s sanity.

At nine o’clock on Saturday morning, May 11, 1889, John M.Young, thejury foreman, informed the judge that they had reached a verdict. A half-hour later the jury members filed into the courtroom and took their seats.When the clerk read the verdict of not guilty applause erupted in thecrowded courtroom. Judge Judd promptly checked the demonstration andthen voiced his displeasure to the jurors:

Gentlemen of the jury. In the verdict that you have rendered you have doubtless done ithonestly. But if this is not a case of murder speaking from a practice of over twenty-fiveyears I have never seen one in a court of Justice. I am now of the opinion that BrotherYoung was exactly right in his opinion in argument to the jury when he said that thelaw in courts of justice in this country, was no protection.You may now be discharged.30

In a lengthy Sunday morning editorial under the headline “FarceFollows Tragedy,” the Salt Lake Tribune concluded that although insanityhad been presented as a major factor in the case, it was a screen to hideSpencer’s guilt. “The facts of the case were that Spencer was an old timeblood-atoner. He was in perfect accord with those other lambs HICK-MAN, LUCE, STRINGHAM,TAYLOR, and the rest.”To the Tribune thereal villain in the case was the Mormon church and its leadership and itsteachings in the decade of the 1850s.31

With an alternate view, the Sunday morning Salt Lake Herald noted:We doubt that there is more than one fair-minded and honest man in the territory whodoes not agree perfectly with the jury in the HOWARD SPENCER case.The solitaryexception seems to be Judge Judd, and we think the reasons why he occupys the lonelyposition is because he doesn’t understand the case...Killings are not always willful mur-ders. They are sometimes excusable, sometimes justifiable, and sometimes praiseworthy.This assertion is based on law, justice, and common sense. It seems to us that if therewere ever an instance of justifiable or excusable taking of human life that was the casewhen HOWARD SPENCER shot Sergeant Pike...all the jurors will know that thepublic, almost without exception, are with them in acquitting the defendant.32

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33 As noted, Hiram Clawson and Brigham Young Jr. were both married to Howard Spencer’s sisters.Hiram Clawson was also married to two of Brigham Young’s daughters and had served as Brigham Young’sprivate secretary. Both Clawson and Young had access to money and influence and both were very inter-ested in seeing Spencer found innocent.

The Spencer-Pike affair and the events surrounding it from Rush Valleyto Salt Lake City in 1859, and then the trial of Howard Orson Spencerthirty years later provides a glimpse of attitudes and actions that character-ized Mormon-Federal relations during the difficult years of the Utah Warand its aftermath. Furthermore, the 1889 jury decision finding Spencerinnocent reveals an ambivalence about law and order that existed in manyparts of the country as well. Brigham Young’s 1861 statement recorded byWilford Woodruff in the 1889 Salt Lake Herald indicate that Spencer didkill Pike. However, two questions remain—who posted Spencer’s six thou-sand dollar bail, and who financed the first-rate set of four lawyers whodefended Spencer in his May 1889 trial? It appears that Mormon churchleaders and members did not want Spencer to be convicted of murder.33

Vindicated, Howard Spencer quietly returned to beautiful and isolatedLong Valley where for the remaining three decades of his life he farmedand ranched while render ing community and church service. He died at the age of seventy-nine on March 4, 1918, after an accidental fall from a bridge over the Virgin River in Glendale—nearlysixty years after the encounter with Ralph Pike in Rush Valley.

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Reflections of a Mormon Historian: Leonard J.Arrington on the New Mormon

History. Essays by Leonard J.Arrington, edited by Reid L. Neilson and Ronald W.Walker.

(Norman:The Arthur H. Clark Company, 2006. 360 pp. Cloth, $36.95.)

NEARLY A DECADE after his death comes another book of Leonard Arringtonessays. Offered fondly and optimistically by editors Reid Neilson and RonaldWalker Reflections of a Mormon Historian is composed mainly of Arrington articles;two previously unpublished, and twelve that have done earlier service.An extraor-dinary collection of photos is offered along with a “chronology” of Arrington’s lifeborrowed from the Arrington Papers Register at Utah State University Library.Joining the editors in the prefatory material are Susan Arrington Madsen whose“foreword” is brief but intimate, and David Whittaker. The latter’s “ArringtonBibliography” runs to thirty-five pages, and lists approximately fifty-eight books,monographs and pamphlets, three hundred forty-three articles and chapters inbooks, as well as forty-nine reviews, and eighty addresses and duplicated papers.Aquick glance at the articles suggests that a large portion of them are on Mormontopics but that quite a number of important titles are in economic, agricultural,and state and regional history; other fields upon which Arrington’s reputation rest-ed. The book and monograph titles appear to be about equally divided betweenMormon history and his other interests. Here, however, the more important titlesfall in the religious history category, yet, considering the peculiarities of Mormonculture, Arrington’s approach might simultaneously be considered to have beensecular if not indeed general history as suggested by Dale Morgan’s comment in a1959 review that Great Basin Kingdom went a fair piece “on the road toward beinga ‘general history’” of Utah.

The editors’ input also includes Walker’s nostalgic salute,“Mormonism’s ‘HappyWarrior.’” This essay summarizes Arrington’s role in jump-starting the NewMormon History movement, a professionalized and vastly invigorated Mormoninterest in historical scholarship, and the LDS church’s experiment with profes-sionalized history in the 1970s and 1980s. It also notes the rise of a modest critique of Arrington’s work within the movement.The editors’ “preface” focuseson the New Mormon History elements of Arrington’s career and notes his“determination” to substitute a “middle way” for the defensive institutionalism ofmuch previous Mormon history. They also note a “less parochial…[more] inter-cultural spirit” in the current development of “Mormon Studies programs” and“conferences,” and in mounting interest at “prestigious presses” which lead themto offer these essays because they address the “how” of Mormon history and especially because they are “prologue” to “challenges” inherent in this broadeningapproach. (16-17)

Like the title, the organization of Arrington’s essays reflects the editors’ primaryinterest in Mormon studies. They arrange them in three parts: (1) biography,

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allowing Arrington to reflect on his development as a historian; (2) essays on theformatting and meaning of professionalized Mormon history; (3) Mormon histo-riography’s need for sweeping generalization, biography, and intellectual tradition.While these directions hold the essays on the New-Mormon-History-track thecareful reader will be moved by their autobiographical aspects. Appearing againand again is Arrington the regionalist, the economist, and the state historian (particularly for Utah and Idaho).And gratefully, there in full force also is the affa-ble organization man whose work was often superlative, but not always; pullingtogether, pointing, advocate of the record turned to written word.

As one reviews this book for readers of the Utah Historical Quarterly one is espe-cially aware of Arrington’s role in the seismic re-organization of history’s profes-sional structure that came as result of World War II and the G.I. Bill’s impact. Morethan any other scholar in the Intermountain West he was part of the process thatchanged the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, (in place since the turn-of-the-twentieth-century-decades), into the Organization of American Historians onthe one hand and on the other created the Western History Association of whichArrington was one of the earliest presidents. He was also a prime mover in thePacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, the AgriculturalHistory Association, of which he was also president, and particularly active in theUtah and Idaho state historical societies, both of which were revitalized during histime. His role was paramount in getting journals up and running in both theMormon History Association and the Western History Association and no man’slist of friends was larger nor more widely spread.

For years his colorful ties and happy banter were standard fare as he talked fromtable to table while chairs filled at the Utah State Historical Society’s annual banquets. Long before he joined Ray Billington, Howard Lamar, and MartinRidge to organize the Western History Association or with Davis Bitton, RonWalker and Eugene England breathed life into the New Mormon History theUtah Historical Quarterly was his outlet and the Utah State Historical Society hislaunching pad. Indeed, for a time its directors, preservation officers, historic sitecommittee members and at least two editors were people he helped bring overfrom academia and the Chairman of the Board of State History, Milton Abrams,was his close friend and ally at Utah State University.

CHARLES S. PETERSONSt. George

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Reclaiming Diné History:The Legacies of Navajo Chief Manuelito and Juanita.

By Jennifer Nez Denetdale. (Tucson:The University of Arizona Press, 2007. xiv + 241 pp.

Cloth, $45.00; paper, $19.95.)

BY DEFINITION, the word “reclaim” means to restore, turn from error, or takeback. Jennifer Denetdale proclaims,“as the first Diné with a Ph.D. in history” (xi),that her mission is to “critiqu[e] works that refuse to acknowledge the colonialnature in which we continue to live and then advanc[e] studies that privilegeDiné worldview” for the betterment of Navajo communities and a true restora-tion of their history.(45) In this book, a result of her doctoral studies, she has twoobjectives: “I intend to examine existing histories that focus on Manuelito [hergreat, great, great grandfather] and pay little attention to Juanita [Manuelito’s wife]in order to demonstrate that much of what has been written about Navajos bynon-Navajos reflects American biases . . .” and “second[ly] to demonstrate thatNavajos perceive their own past differently” because of a cultural belief systembased on oral tradition.(7) This “anti-colonial” theme, constantly restated through-out, is the axe being ground.The question then becomes how sharp the blade andwhat is going to be chopped.

The bulk of the book’s content is actually a review of the literature surround-ing who should write about Native people. The author provides an exhaustivearray of authors who feel that one has to be a native (not necessarily from thesame culture) to be successful.While “Western cultural constructions have servedto keep structures of inequalities and injustices entrenched....Native scholars havedeclared our intellectual endeavors should support Native sovereignty.”(14,18) Anhistorian walks a fine line when writing history for contemporary political pur-poses. The underlying assumption is “genetic determinism” or the idea that onehas to be of a certain race or a Native-of-some-type in order to really understand.Consequently, non-Native historians have missed the canoe and are floundering inthe waters of misunderstanding. There are a few clinging to the side that meetDenetdale’s approval, but none are totally on board.The reason: they do not comefrom an oral tradition; therefore, they can’t “get it.” No mention is made of ethno-history, which has been in full bloom for more than thirty years, during whichscholars from all walks of life have been extremely fruitful in combining cultureand history for clarity of understanding.To recognize this is to remove one of thestraw men.

There are other straw men neatly hewed by the ax.Who is going to argue withthe idea that there should be more Native scholars writing about their culture orthat understanding a people’s religious teachings and cultural metaphors advancesinterpretation of historical events or that history written in the past has not beenas culturally sensitive as it is today or that the U.S. government has been less thanstellar in its treatment of Native Americans? These are all handy targets that illus-

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trate Western writing has “been projects of imperialism,” but it also ignores thetremendous contribution provided by the evil “colonials.”

How big this contribution has been is found in the book’s endnotes and bibliogra-phy. By my calculation, only 15 percent of her sources are by or from NativeAmericans and many of those references were collected by non-Natives. The twochapters that come closest to the author’s stated objectives are the biographicalaccount of Manuelito and the stories about Juanita.The Manuelito chapter has 122endnotes, six of which cite a Navajo source, and half of these are contemporary inter-views. Nineteen endnotes are from original documents, most of which are cited fromsecondary sources; almost the entire chapter is based on secondary sources.

There are two problems with this.The most obvious is that an historian needsto go to original sources to determine what happened.There is little of that here,but it does not need to be that way. One six volume series cited, Through WhiteMen’s Eyes by J. Lee Correll, is a vast collection of primary source documents surrounding the Long Walk period (1860s) with frequent mention of Manuelito.No substantive use was made of it to tell an original story or new interpretation.Instead, there is a rehashing of events from secondary sources (the “colonial”view), even though scholars already criticized some of these sources for significantinaccuracy. There is nothing “Navajo” about her rendering of these events. Onemight argue that only the written white view now exists, but there are a numberof books based on testimony given by Navajo people about their, or their family’s,experience during that time. If the Navajo view is the only valid possibility—thenthese sources should have been used.

The chapter about Juanita raises different problems. Here, the author attemptsto integrate family oral tradition “to rewrite our histories in ways that more accu-rately reflect our experiences, especially under colonialism.”(129) Again, out ofsixty-three endnotes, five are oral interviews coming from four family members.They provide small snippets of family recollections about Juanita, which quicklypushes the author to other topics or personal reflection. Of history, there is little.An already published short account of the Navajo creation story is a brief foray bythe author to use traditional narrative materials. Remember, her stated purpose isto provide new insight, showing how some aspect of Navajo history relates to thistype of teaching.There is some discussion about the role of women as defined inthis narrative, but considering that Navajo culture is matrilineal, it is all too shortand general. An endnote explains that the author chose to use an already existingaccount to maintain privacy, which is fine, but if her intent is to explain Navajothought and interpret historic events from an oral tradition, then she is going tohave to say something new somewhere. The level of the Navajo creation storypresented here is well known, discussed openly by tribal members, and foundextensively in reservation school curriculum.

A final observation; in an attempt to be a pro-Navajo activist who will throwoff the oppressive yoke of colonial rule, Denetdale abandons good ethnohistoricalpractices. To borrow a metaphor from a different arena, her writing of history is

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like “playing tennis without a net.” Unwilling to use much of any original writtenor oral sources, the author ends up either critiquing other scholars’ writing or pre-senting history as she would like it to have been. Take for example, the issue ofManuelito talking about education as a ladder. This is so well known, it hasbecome a cliché in several forms—the song “Go My Son” with its obligatory signlanguage, the Manuelito Scholarships offered by the tr ibe, and the glossybrochures that promote education through the picture of a ladder—as examples.The author does a very good job of explaining all of the second and third handaccounts of this utterance, but then points out that “no written document testifiesto its authenticity.”(82) Still, it works to promote education, and Manuelito wasvery much in favor of that. Should the metaphor, however, be perpetuated? AskMason Weems about George Washington and the cherry tree.

Where does this leave us? Denetdale’s perception of history and the Navajopeople lies at the center of how she chooses to portray them. To her, they are adown-trodden people held captive by the colonial, capitalist system that has creat-ed 150 years of enslavement.The white man has created a series of symbols thathe refuses to let go and sees Navajo traditional dress and culture as a reaffirmationof these stereotypes. I feel differently. I see Navajo people as anything but downtrodden. They certainly have their share of issues, some of which do come fromthe capitalist system of the dominant society. But they are hardly passive and heav-ily exploited. I see them now, as well as in the past, charting their own course andbeing successful at it. Their future is bright and very much in their own hands.Thus, perhaps this is the ultimate straw man—to rewrite (reclaim)a people’s histo-ry that can stand on its own merits right beside its oral tradition.

ROBERT S. MCPHERSONCollege of Eastern Utah/San Juan Campus

Religion, Politics, and Sugar;The Mormon Church, the Federal Government, and

the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, 1907-1921. By Matthew C. Godfrey. (Logan: Utah

State University Press, 2007. vi + 226 pp. Cloth, $34.95.)

RELIGION, POLITICS, AND MONEY—sounds like the critical elements ofDan Brown’s next best selling novel. But in this new book, Matthew Godfrey usesthese themes to tell the fascinating and important story of a sugar beet companyin the Mountain West. It is a story of a young religion headquartered in the harshenvironment of the Intermountain West trying to help its relatively poor peopleimprove their economic circumstances. It is a story of a government slowly shiftingfrom a philosophy of laissez-faire (which really meant support for business overlabor and consumer) to a philosophy of regulatory capitalism.And finally it is a storyof money—of profits, of market forces and of a church’s involvement in both.

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The story Matthew Godfrey tells is essentially this:The Church of Jesus Christof Latter–day Saints (Mormons), having settled in the Great Basin of Utah in 1847but having spread into other mountain states, is the dominant ecclesiastical organi-zation of the region. In the eyes of its critics it is also much more than that—it isthe dominant organization in the region regardless of the field. Not content inproviding only religious direction, the church is desirous of helping improve theeconomic circumstances of its people as well. In doing so, the church becomesinvolved in establishing and helping grow the sugar beet industry.After all, it couldprovide a cash crop for farmers, jobs for others in the processing plants, andimprove the self-sufficiency of its members all at the same time.

With these goals in mind, the church helped organize and finance fledglingsugar companies. It then became a major stockholder in the consolidation of several small sugar beet companies into the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company in 1907.Church president Joseph F. Smith became the new corporation’s first president.This close relationship continued for most of the corporation’s history. Heber J.Grant, who succeeded Smith as church president also served as company president.Following Grant’s death in 1945, George Albert Smith became church presidentand president of the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company. In turn, David O. McKay succeeded Smith in the same two positions as well. Furthermore, Charles Nibley, aself-made millionaire, and Presiding Bishop of the church served as vice presidentand general manager for many years until his death in 1931.

The church’s deep involvement in the local economy and private enterprise wasnot new. Brigham Young successfully promoted cooperatives through out MormonCountry in the nineteenth century. But in the twentieth century American attitudestoward large and powerful corporations were changing. Big business and monopolieswere under attack by intellectuals, farmer organizations, labor, and social activists.Atthis time, many industries such as railroads, oil, steel, and sugar were dominated by afew companies. Enormous pressure was placed on government to break up or atleast regulate the corporations controlling these powerful industries. The nationalgovernment responded to the pressure. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890),Clayton Anti-Trust Act (1914) and the Federal Trade Commission (1914) were allfederal actions to either dismantle or regulate the monopolies.

After months of investigation and hearings, the Federal Trade Commission filedsuit charging the Mormon church with such unfair trade practices as workingagainst the creation of other sugar beet enterprises that would compete withUtah-Idaho, and setting sugar prices so high as to “gouge” its own people.

However, the book is more than a story of this lawsuit. Godfrey provides a fascinating and fair-minded story of how the Mormon church and the nationalgovernment clashed over religion, profits, markets, and power during the ProgressiveEra.The book is an enjoyable read and provides an excellent analysis of major trendssweeping across the American landscape in the early twentieth century.

MICHAEL CHRISTENSENSouth Jordan

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Bags to Riches:The Story of I.J.Wagner. By Don Gale. (Salt Lake City:The University

of Utah Press, 2007. xx + 202 pp. Cloth, $25.95.)

FROM RECYCLING used burlap bags, bottles, batteries, barrels, and bootlegstills—no, not theirs—to buying, selling and investing in real estate and businesses,Isadore Wagner took his family’s bag company from early twentieth-centurypoverty to postwar prosperity. In the doing, until his death in 2003 at age eighty-nine, this Utah native and son of immigrant Jews built his fortune, altered SaltLake City’s cityscape, and gave back to the community.

“[He] worried that he might leave the world before his account was in the bal-ance,” Don Gale writes in his unabashedly delightful book, Bags to Riches:TheStory of I.J.Wagner. A Utah author and broadcaster, Gale parallels the derring-do ofone of Salt Lake City’s “favorite sons” and noted “gadfly” with the city’s coming-of-age.

I.J. “Izzi”Wagner was a major influence in urban development at a time whendowntown Salt Lake City, riddled with a proliferation of railroad tracks and bill-boards, was in need of a face-lift. He not only helped eliminate the tracks but, fac-ing down criticism which went on for decades, reduced the amount of conspicu-ous signage.

Wagner volunteered on multiple city and community boards. His mother’s sageadvice coupled with his tenacity earned him praise as “the catalyst, advocate, leader,”and “conscience” behind such projects as the Salt Lake International Airport and theSalt Palace Convention Center. His charitable bent emphasizing diversity and toler-ance helped build the Jewish Community Center which bears his name.

Gale writes Wagner’s “word was his bond,” his handshake his contract. In 1990,that concord coupled with the donated site of his childhood home gave credenceto the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center.

Izzi’s parents Rose and Harry Wagner were from Northern and Eastern Europeand arrived in Utah in 1913 with three dollars to their name. Their small adobehome on 144 West Third South had neither sewer line nor running water and wassurrounded by a brothel, a small hotel, and several street-level bordellos. WhenHarry arrived home with used flour sacks in hand, Rose knew they had theingredients for a viable business: the Wagner Bag Company.

Izzi hawked out-of-date papers to out-of-towners when he was six years old.Later, he worked at Maurice Warshaw’s fruit stand. He played the violin, took box-ing lessons to defend against those intolerant of his ethnicity, and learned how todance.When Harry died suddenly in 1932, the family was in debt, and seventeen-year-old Izzi left his schooling at the University of Utah to take over the company.

Over the years, childhood friends became business partners; successes reinforcedothers and much land was bought up around downtown.Wagner Industrial Parkwas among the first of its kind in Utah.

During World War II,Wagner joined the Marines.A mosquito bite and malaria

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saved him from becoming a Pacific casualty in the bloody battle of Tarawa. In1942, he marr ied the love of his life, Mormon vaudeville dancer JeannéRasmussen, and by 1953, his company employed seventy people, produced fifty-thousand bags a day, and imported millions of yards of burlap from India. WhenWagner Bag Company merged with St. Regis Paper Company in 1960, theundisclosed amount of money ensured each family member a “comfortable” life.

Bags to Riches, a chronology of Wagner’s verve and experiences, reads like a trib-ute rather than a scholarly biography.With unbridled enthusiasm for a dear friend,Gale occasionally tumbles into excessive flattery and repetition. The inclusion ofWagner’s stereotypic slur about Jews getting the best price is unfortunate.

An ancillary to Gale’s generous portrait is his well-seasoned comprehension ofthe complexities of business and its power brokers. Using practical prose, anecdotalaccounts, and musings gleaned from five years of daily conversations with Wagner,Gale offers rare insight into the waning genre of businessmen who value tzedakahas well as their millions.A good man, indeed, a good read.

EILEEN HALLET STONESalt Lake City

Thunder Over Zion:The Life of Chief Judge Willis W. Ritter. By Patricia F. Cowley

and Parker M. Nielson. (Salt Lake City:The University of Utah Press, 2007.

xii + 372 pp. Cloth, $34.95.)

THUNDER OVER ZION:The Life of Chief Judge Willis W. Ritter is an affectionateand engaging portrait of an unusually controversial Utah figure who wieldedextraordinary power over the legal affairs of Utah for almost three decades. It iswell-researched and well-written and should be read by anyone with an interest inUtah legal history.The reader should be forewarned of the book’s flaws, however.

Patricia Cowley, married to a Utah lawyer, started the book and completed mostof the research. When her health did not permit her to finish the work, ParkerNielson, a Salt Lake City lawyer, completed the project, utilizing (and extending)Ms. Cowley’s research and his own extensive personal experience with Judge Ritter.

The book provides substantial information about Willis Ritter’s backgroundand somewhat dysfunctional upbringing and it provides possible insights into theirascibility that often surfaced during his judicial career. When his parentsdivorced, he stayed with his father and his brothers went with his mother, whomhe rarely saw thereafter.When Ritter’s father was unable to adequately provide forhis son,Willis moved in with his uncle and aunt,Willis and Mary Adams.

It is exceptional that Park High School’s class of 1918, consisting of eighteengraduates, included not only Willis Ritter, but also Roger Traynor, future ChiefJustice of the California Supreme Court and one of the most prominent and

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well-respected judges in the country for many years. Traynor was valedictorian,Ritter salutatorian.

Ritter owed his appointment as a federal judge to Senator Elbert Thomas, animportant mentor who had been Ritter’s political science teacher at theUniversity of Utah and on whose campaigns Ritter worked tirelessly. WhenTillman Johnson, who had served as the sole federal judge in Utah for thirty-threeyears, finally decided to retire at the age of ninety-one,Thomas kept a promise tonominate Ritter for the post. The difficulties over the nomination, including thealways-difficult religious and political tensions in Salt Lake City, make for a com-pelling tale.

Thomas, a Democrat and practicing Mormon, was encouraged to appoint JohnS. Boyden, who, like Ritter, shared political affiliation with Thomas and, unlikeRitter, religious affiliation, and was apparently torn in deciding whom to nomi-nate.According to the biography, recently-elected Arthur V.Watkins, a Republicanand Mormon, employed Ernest Wilkinson and others in an attempt to make surethat Ritter was not appointed.

It is in the description of confirmation proceedings that the biases of the bookbecome most evident. Senator Arthur Watkins, “Rube” Clark (LDS church J.Reuben Clark), Ernest Wilkinson, and John Boyden are all demonized in turn,using terms that do not do the book justice. Examples include referring toWatkins and Clark and their “minions,” (89) their “lies”(119), their “clever stratagemof deception to manipulate the Senate Judiciary Committee”(142) and to Boydenas “devious,” (104)as the “master manipulator,”(108)and as one who exhibited“paranoia.”(147)These terms either need to be proven beyond a reasonable doubtor toned down. There is little doubt that Watkins and Wilkinson and Clark used hardball political tactics in an attempt to block an appointment they foundobjectionable, but naming chapters 10 and 11 “Smear” and “Watkins’ Folly” isoverstatement.

Chief Judge Ritter’s judicial career, with all its controversies and attainments, isdescribed at some length, though the controversies are understated. Ritter ulti-mately is described as one who was an “unyielding, tireless bulwark againstoppression by those in power, secular or religious.” (304) The book does notalways directly address the problem of who would protect attorneys and litigantsfrom the oppression of Chief Judge Ritter, a man with enormous secular power.The biographers are not blind to Ritter’s faults, but find greater faults in his antag-onists.

Ritter appears genuinely to have been brilliant and, in the context of certainlegal concepts, particularly in the criminal area, far ahead of his time. His decisionswere referred often to when the United States Supreme Court afforded defen-dants important rights and protections that have now become familiar to everyonein the United States. Not surprisingly, the book’s analysis of Ritter’s importantrulings is excellent.

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The book contains a few unexpected editing gaffes.“Eugene” McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade is referenced (158) and a reference to “Heber Grant Ivins,”(48) clearly LDS church leader Anthony W. Ivins, should have been caught by acareful editor. Both names are correctly referenced in other passages in the book.

The authors suggest that many of the character flaws exhibited by Judge Ritterand some of the troubles he encountered in his marriage and family may havebeen triggered by “the injustice of attacks during his confirmation” or “may havebeen the effect of alcohol abuse in later years.”(294) A more plausible explanationis that, as some suggested at the time of the confirmation hearings, Ritter’s temperament was not suitable to a life-tenured federal judge. Elbert Thomasfeared this and should have followed up on his fears. My guess is that, while triallawyers like having smart judges, the vast majority, if they had to choose betweenbrilliance and fairness in a judge, would choose the latter. It is too bad that Utah’sprincipal federal judge for thirty years exhibited mental acuity but did not alwaysexhibit the equity and the appearance of fairness to which all should be entitled.

In spite of its flaws, this biography is ultimately a worthy contribution to our history that provides both information and insights into one of Utah’s mostinteresting characters.

KENNETH L. CANNON IISalt Lake City

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UTAH STATEHISTORICAL SOCIETY FELLOWS

THOMAS G.ALEXANDER JAMES B.ALLEN

LEONARD J.ARRINGTON (1917-1999)MAUREEN URSENBACH BEECHER

FAWN M. BRODIE (1915-1981)JUANITA BROOKS (1898-1989)

OLIVE W. BURT (1894-1981)EUGENE E. CAMPBELL (1915-1986)

C. GREGORY CRAMPTON (1911-1995)EVERETT L. COOLEY (1917-2006)

S. GEORGE ELLSWORTH (1916-1997)AUSTIN E. FIFE (1909-1986)

PETER L. GOSSLEROY R. HAFEN (1893-1985)

JOEL JANETSKI JESSE D. JENNINGS (1909-1997)A. KARL LARSON (1899-1983)

GUSTIVE O. LARSON (1897-1983)BRIGHAM D. MADSEN

CAROL CORNWALL MADSENDEAN L. MAY (1938-2003)

DAVID E. MILLER (1909-1978)DALE L. MORGAN (1914-1971)

WILLIAM MULDERFLOYD A. O’NEIL

HELEN Z. PAPANIKOLAS (1917-2004)CHARLES S. PETERSONRICHARD W. SADLER

MELVIN T. SMITHWALLACE E. STEGNER (1909-1993)

WILLIAM A.WILSON

HONORARY LIFE MEMBERS

DAVID BIGLERJAY M. HAYMOND

FLORENCE S. JACOBSENSTANFORD J. LAYTON

WILLIAM P. MACKINNONJOHN S. MCCORMICKMIRIAM B. MURPHYLAMAR PETERSEN

RICHARD C. ROBERTSMELVIN T. SMITH

MARTHA R. STEWARTGARY TOPPING

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UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Department of Community and CultureDivision of State History

BOARD OF STATE HISTORY

MICHAEL W. HOMER, Salt Lake City, 2009, ChairCLAUDIA F. BERRY, Midvale, 2009

MARTHA SONNTAG BRADLEY, Salt Lake City, 2009SCOTT R. CHRISTENSEN, Salt Lake City, 2009

RONALD G. COLEMAN, Salt Lake City, 2011MARIA GARCIAZ, Salt Lake City, 2011

ROBERT S. MCPHERSON, Blanding, 2011CHERE ROMNEY, Salt Lake City, 2011

MAX J. SMITH, Salt Lake City, 2009GREGORY C.THOMPSON, Salt Lake City, 2011

MICHAEL K.WINDER,West Valley City, 2009

ADMINISTRATION

PHILIP F. NOTARIANNI, DirectorWILSON G. MARTIN, State Historic Preservation Officer

ALLAN KENT POWELL, Managing EditorKEVIN T. JONES, State Archaeologist

The Utah State Historical Society was organized in 1897 by public-spirited Utahns tocollect, preserve, and publish Utah and related history.Today, under state sponsorship,the Society fulfills its obligations by publishing the Utah Historical Quarterly and otherhistorical materials; collecting historic Utah artifacts; locating, documenting, and pre-serving historic and prehistoric buildings and sites; and maintaining a specializedresearch library. Donations and gifts to the Society’s programs, museum, or its libraryare encouraged, for only through such means can it live up to its responsibility of pre-serving the record of Utah’s past.

This publication has been funded with the assistance of a matching grant-in-aid from the National ParkService, under provisions of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 as amended.

This program receives financial assistance for identification and preservation of historic properties underTitle VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The U. S.Department of the Interior prohibits unlawful discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin,age, or handicap in its federally assisted programs. If you believe you have been discriminated against inany program, activity, or facility as described above, or if you desire further information, please write to:Office of Equal Opportunity, National Park Service, 1849 C Street, NW,Washington, D.C., 20240.

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY(ISSN 0042-143X)

EDITORIAL STAFF

PHILIP F. NOTARIANNI, EditorALLAN KENT POWELL, Managing Editor

CRAIG FULLER, Associate Editor

ADVISORY BOARD OF EDITORS

LEE ANN KREUTZER, Salt Lake City, 2009STANFORD J. LAYTON, Salt Lake City, 2009

ROBERT E. PARSON, Benson, 2010W. PAUL REEVE, Salt Lake City, 2008

JOHN SILLITO, Ogden, 2010NANCY J.TANIGUCHI, Merced, California, 2008

GARY TOPPING, Salt Lake City, 2008RONALD G.WATT,West Valley City, 2010COLLEEN WHITLEY, Salt Lake City, 2009

Utah Historical Quarterly was established in 1928 to publish articles, documents, andreviews contributing to knowledge of Utah history. The Quarterly is published fourtimes a year by the Utah State Historical Society, 300 Rio Grande, Salt Lake City,Utah 84101. Phone (801) 533-3500 for membership and publications information.Members of the Society receive the Quarterly, and Currents, the quarterly newsletter,upon payment of the annual dues: individual, $25; institution, $25; student and seniorcitizen (age sixty-five or older), $20; sustaining, $35; patron, $50; business, $100.

Manuscripts submitted for publication should be double-spaced with endnotes. Authors are encouragedto include a PC diskette with the submission. For additional information on requirements, contact themanaging editor. Articles and book reviews represent the views of the authors and are not necessarilythose of the Utah State Historical Society.

Periodicals postage is paid at Salt Lake City, Utah.

POSTMASTER: Send address change to Utah Historical Quarterly, 300 Rio Grande, SaltLake City, Utah 84101.

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