26 June 2022 Copyright
by Hershel Parker
1850s Utah as Military
Theocracy:
Robberies, Murders, and the Ultimate American Atrocity
I
bought Roger V. Logan, Jr.’s big expensive 1998 The History of Boone County, Arkansas in 2011 thinking I might find
something about my Coker kinfolks (“There was a battle in New Orleans last
January, on the 8th.” “Why, that’s the day we got here!”) I was
stunned by Logan’s tragic account of an atrocity I had never heard of––the Mountain
Meadows Massacre of the Fancher-Baker wagon-train of emigrants bound for
California in 1857. These were 120-150 local northern Arkansawyers, probably
joined by a few men from Missouri. This massacre was, T. B. H. Stenhouse wrote
in the 1873 Rocky Mountain Saints,
“the darkest crime on record in American history,” and as William Alexander
Linn put it in The Story of the Mormons
(1902), “the most horrible massacre of white people by religious fanatics of
their own race that has been recorded since that famous St. Bartholomew’s night
in Paris.” The Catholic massacre of Protestant Huguenots went on for weeks in
1572, not one night. On their trip into the vast Utah Territory the emigrants
from Arkansas had paused daily for Methodist worship, and any Missourians with
them probably joined the worship. (On 14 June 1857 Brigham Young joked that his
people might call him “more foolish than a Methodist”--New York Herald, 27 July 1857.) In the April 1864 Atlantic Monthly Fitz Hugh Ludlow gave this description of the man
who thought himself king of independent Utah: “Brigham
Young is the farthest remove on earth from a hypocrite; he is that grand, yet
awful sight in human nature, a man who has brought the loftiest Christian
self-devotion to the altar of the Devil.”
Once the Arkansas
emigrants began making their way across and down parts of Utah Territory with
their many wagons and a thousand head of cattle, Mormon merchants on orders of President
Young refused to sell them the most basic supplies for man or beast, and all
along the way they were robbed and otherwise harassed by Mormons and Indians
under the control of Mormons. Utah was a military theocracy. On 25 May 1857 a
refugee from Utah wrote in the Washington DC States about the “Nauvoo Legion,” Young’s storm troopers: “There are to-day, within
the imperial jurisdiction of Brigham Young, more than twenty-five thousand
fighting men, armed and equipped, who are bound by the most solemn oaths to
hold themselves in readiness at a moment’s warning, and fight for the church
till the last man has expired.” Then on 11 September 1857, in extreme
southwest Utah, dozens of Mormons (with help from subservient Paiute Indians)
slaughtered these 120-150 emigrants. This was plotted in excruciatingly slow stages, over many days, then carried
out in--what? an hour or two?-- by the local “Nauvoo Legion,” the Mormon “Danites”
or “Destroying Angels.” This troop of Destroying Angels slaughtered the Arkansas emigrants
in an act of religious fanaticism for the glory of God, Jesus Christ, and
Brigham Young. The Mormons immediately blamed the massacre on the Indians, as
they had been doing regularly for any theft or murder, and as they swore to do
just after the killings (Bagley, 158). Californians knew better as soon as word
of the massacre got there, but for the East the Mormons managed the story for a
long time, denying any guilt.
The massacre
at Mountain Meadows was family history
for Roger V. Logan, Jr., who eloquently describes the immediate grief of the
Arkansas relatives and friends as, months later, at the end of the year, they
learned the names of some of the families, at first the Fancher and Baker
emigrants, then within weeks a reprint of a newspaper article by a California witness
who remembered (heartbreakingly) the “well grown” Dunlap youngsters. Logan is a
Dunlap. Later, they knew that among the dead were Tackitts, Mitchells, Dunlaps,
Camerons, Huffs, the Prewitt boys, the Wood boys. Other people had joined late (probably
Edward and Charity Coker and two children) and might have parted from the train
early, or not, and left relatives to conjecture about them for decades. Many
waited two years before knowing for sure that men and women of their families
had been killed. They learned by the end of 1857 that some children were alive,
so for another year and a half they hoped against hope that one or more of the
living children belonged to their family. Old W. C. Mitchell went out to Fort
Leavenworth telling himself he would recognize one or more of a son’s babies but
brought home only other people’s grandchildren. The surviving families suffered
for decades, as did the children who survived. The families still suffer every
time they read a Mormon denial of complicity in the murders.
This is family history for me also. Killed were my Prewitt cousins and the Coker grandchildren (Winnie Stallcup and the Wood brothers), Richard Wilson (who had a Coker wife and son), probably Edward and Charity and their two children, who joined belatedly and never got to California. By number the biggest losses of my kinfolks, though distant, were the sisters Mary Dunlap (wife of Jesse) and their seven children and Nancy Jane Dunlap (wife of Lorenzo Dow) and their six children. I am more distantly kin to the Fanchers, Bakers, and, remotely, the Aden artist who joined the train. Writing this chapter cost me many sleepless nights, and even now I cannot make myself retrace in detail the story of the slow entrapment before the swift treacherous slaughter. Brigadier General Albert Sidney Johnston, dispatched to Utah but hobbled by President James Buchanan, had seen horrible crimes in the Mexican War but (in a letter to General Winfield Scott on 31 March 1859) he identified the Mormons as still worse than any evil he had known because of their “apparently studied refinement in atrocity hardly to be conceived of”--the excruciating slowness and cynical duplicity of entrapment and murder of the Arkansas emigrants. That process is what I cannot repeat here. You can read about that in the 2008 Massacre at Mountain Meadows, by Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley, Jr., and Glen M. Leonard, an attempt at honest research from Utah. Better, see Will Bagley’s eloquent Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows (2002). Bagley, a great historian, was a Facebook friend who died in late 2021, while I was writing this chapter. Bagley worked closely with another meticulous historian of Utah in the 1850s, David L. Bigler, and edited Bigler’s posthumous Confessions of a Revisionist Historian (2015).
Learning
about the massacre is still challenging. You cannot trust any document on Google about
individual Mormons involved in Mountain Meadows Massacre or any aspect of it.
You cannot trust Wikipedia, the universal infallible encyclopedia of the first
quarter of our new century! As late as 2007,
according to Wikipedia, the Deseret
Morning News said that Elder Parley Parker Pratt (a 10th cousin
of mine) “was killed . . . by a small Arkansas band antagonistic toward his
teachings.” No! He was killed because he had seduced the wife of one too many
men and then sent the latest one (the last we know about) far away with her
husband’s children. You have to start from old documents (weighing one against
another) to find the truth where even government documents tell diverse
stories. In my account, built largely from newspaper exchanges (copies
routinely sent to other editors, an effective predecessor of syndication), I use items from odd
places--Bellows Falls, Pomeroy, Easton, Freehold--rather than only New York,
Washington, and Chicago. I do this to convey what the East and South (and
California) were learning about Utah, and to judge the observations of editors
of many local papers. (If I just say East I mean East and South.) Every scholar
should be grateful for the honest work by rigorous researchers such as Juanita
Brooks and Will Bagley. Brooks was a pioneer historian who has been corrected
on details. No one has done as much accurate work on the families of the slain
as the devoted regional historian Roger V. Logan, Jr. And you have to hope, as
the best scholars do, that the Mormons will yet release more documents from
their archives. We lived with the Big Lie, 2020-2021 and 2022 still. Can the
lie of the “Stolen Election” possibly control what is written for a century and
three quarters, as lies about the Mountain Meadows Massacre have done?
The three collaborators on Massacre, Walker, Turley, and Leonard
did much admirable work but they made choices that weaken their efforts. Words matter. Common
meanings of words matter. Throughout, the three misuse the term “militia,”
the word used in my folks’ Carolinas and other colonies in the Revolution and
used in the Second Amendment. It identifies local citizens banding together for
a particular patriotic military action. The writers of Massacre apply the word “militia” to religious fanatics, the Mormon
Danites or the “Nauvoo Legion,” the Destroying
Angels, terrorist blood-shedders, for President Brigham Young, God, and
Jesus. A United States official, the “Sufferer,” who had daringly made an
“almost superhuman escape” from Young’s “militia” (after it was known that
United States troops were on their way to Utah) wrote in the Washington DC States on 25 May 1857 of the “blind
fanaticism” against which no one could reason: “There are to-day, within the
imperial jurisdiction of Brigham Young, more than twenty-five thousand fighting men, armed and equipped, who are
bound by the most solemn oaths to hold themselves in readiness at a moment’s
warning, and fight for the church till the last man has expired.”
A brother of the self-proclaimed transcriber
of The Book of Mormon, William Smith,
as a non-Mormon exposed the founding of the Danites (17 July 1857 Olympia, WT,
from the New York Tribune): “Brigham
Young, in connection with John Taylor, A. Lyman, P. P. Pratt, E. Snow, H. C.
Kimball, Geo. A. Smith, W. Woodruff, Orson Hide, Willard Richards (now dead),
Hosea Stout, Orson Pratt (killed a few days ago) [so reported, but it was his
brother P. P. Pratt], and others known as the principal leaders of the Mormons,
were the founders of the secret Danite banditti, or “destroying angels,” as they are called by the Mormons. In regard to
the designs of these Mormons to rob and plunder the California emigrants, and
to commit certain depredations upon the General Government--to hoax, fool, and
to gull money out of them under various pretenses, I can testify that I have
heard Mormons boast and talk of these designs in Nauvoo, previous to their
leaving for the Salt Lake Valley, and have also often heard Mormons talk openly
of their designs in robbing the Gentiles and of putting to death dissenting
Mormons; and that also, when they got among Indians, they would lead them on to
the slaughter of the men, women and children of the American people. Suffice it
to say, that in presenting to Congress my remonstrance to these views of
Mormons at the time I have mentioned, I greatly endangered my life. I escaped
the penalty of the Danite law, which is death; but the Mormons robbed me of all
my property--confiscated everything I possessed.”
Whatever the intention of the three authors
of Massacre, the result is insidious:
the choice of a neutral vocabulary term gradually transforms fanatical
military-religious terrorists into innocuous local military folks doing their
temporary duty. Democratic Americans in 1970 made the disastrous mistake of
letting anti-feminists co-op the term “pro-life.” Early in 2022 we are told that
the treasonous insurrection of 6 January 2012 constituted “legitimate political
discourse.” For the same reason, the cheapening or tumbling over of meaning, I
do not refer to Mormons as “saints” and I do not refer to non-Mormons as “gentiles.”
I do not refer to “the Mormon Reformation of 1856-57” since it was in no
honorable sense a “reformation.” Perhaps most importantly, I do not
refer to the few children who were not killed as being “spared” from slaughter
(why? because the murderers pitied them?). They were kept alive only because
they were worth money. “Americans” would ransom them some day. Only those
children the murderers were sure would not remember the slaughter were allowed
to live, and they were valuable. Be clear: the Mormons murdered the fathers and mothers, robbed
the corpses of a fortune in gold (as I show later), held the babies two years for
ultimate profit, and then collected the ransom. The children were not “spared.”
The ultimate triumph of Mormon packaging a historian hesitates
to name: the use of “Jesus Christ” in the official name of the church. In the
1850s, that was sacrilegious.
It would be
easy to let modern political correctness and even-handedness blind us to what
we know of the massacre. In 2017 we heard that the violent white supremacists
in Charlottesville were “very fine people,” that “both sides” were at fault,
racists and non-racists. An American news agency’s role (even MSNBC’s) as late
as 2016 was never to challenge lies or label them as false but to be
even-handed, giving equal time for those who deplored racism, equal time for
violent white supremacists, much more than equal time to Benghazi and Hillary’s
emails. Even in 2022 Yahoo News labels as an “alleged” rioter Ryan Nichols, who
filmed himself repeatedly threatening Vice President Pence--“alleged.” The
Buffalo Republic and Times on 3 March
1858 headlined “The Two Sides of the Mormon Story,” one a letter from the
heroic Indian agent Dr. Garland Hurt (in the east after a perilous escape from
Mormon silencers) addressed to the compliant new Utah Governor Albert Cumming,
the other an address from Brigham Young to the Mormon Legislature. There were,
of course, two equal sides to any dispute: don’t you want to be fair? This
still goes on. A congressman in early 2022 declared that teachers should not
call Nazism wrong, there being much to say on both sides of the Final Solution.
But not every violent confrontation features good people on both sides. (I
revised some of these words on 6 January 2022.)
The United
States official, the “Sufferer,” newly escaped from Utah, warned in the 25 May 1857 Washington DC States that tolerant people were
allowing Mormons to infiltrate American society: “by pretending impartiality, they reach our ears, poison the minds of
our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, wives and daughters; ay, the nurse
that waits upon our infants--thus gaining access to our houses, our fire-sides,
and, by their false and insidious reasoning, undermine the very altars of our
Christian faith, break through every barrier to the family altar, and
ruthlessly invade the sanctity of the family relation.” Chances are that the
writer was David H. Burr, the Surveyor General of Utah, who according do the Sunbury
American (Sunbury, Pennsylvania, 13 June 1857) had returned to Washington
before 8 May. Later he sent his son, David A. Burr, to Salt Lake City, “to
collect the books, papers and property of the late Surveyor General’s office,
and transfer them to his successor” (St. Louis Missouri Republican, 27 October 1858). Burr may hoped signing
himself “Sufferer” would shield him and his family.
On 4 June 1857 the “Sufferer” wrote again
in the States, warning against bland
tolerance toward evil sympathies: “There are those in the States and
Territories who sympathise with them [the Mormons]--some from a want of a
proper knowledge of the facts in the case; some from erroneous impressions,
some from design. These latter become their excusers and apologists on all
pressing occasions; insidiously intimate that the ‘report may be exaggerated,’
‘the government has no constitutional power to maintain an armed soldiery among
them,’ ‘as it is highly probable they (the Mormons) will so conduct themselves
as to get around the law,’ &c.,
&c., &c., to the end of the chapter. But these smoothing irons of
Mormonism scorch and blister wherever they touch.” The “smoothing irons” (an
archaic term?) still work among people who want to deceive and others who pride
themselves on being benignly tolerant, not judgmental. How did we
get to the point that Tackitts, Mitchells, Dunlaps,
Camerons, Huffs, the Prewitt boys, the Wood boys and others could be
slaughtered without massive investigation and punishment in the same decade or
at latest the next decade? How did we allow the massacre to be denied or minimized
or still blamed on those bloodthirsty Paiutes?
How
Utah Territory became a Polygamous Military Theocracy
After the
publication of Joseph Smith’s The Book of
Mormon in 1830 Mormonism began to spread in upstate New York, the scene of
extreme social and religious experimentation. Christian sects fragmented there
partly because the God and Jesus had begun appearing with some regularity. Jesus
was especially active and versatile, appearing to Shakers as Mother Ann, and
there were sexual consequences, for the Shakers practiced celibacy with enough
success to put themselves out of business in time. In the Oneida experiment of
John Noyes, monogamy was rejected and polyamory practiced. Children froze to death in
Pennsylvania as families waited up all night in October 1844 for Jesus’s public
return, which He then postponed. Both God and Jesus visited a poorly
educated upstate New Yorker named Joseph Smith, then an angel repeatedly
visited him and at last showed him where (still in upstate New York) to find
buried golden plates (subsequently mislaid) which were inscribed with a very
long text of a history of Pre-Columbian America in an ancient language,
“Reformed Egyptian,” which Smith with angelic assistance transcribed and
published in 1830 as The Book of Mormon.
Today the gilded Moroni, who had an angelic hand in retrieving and writing the
golden plates, stands more than twice as tall as Joseph Smith as he presides
over traffic in Westwood, California, his back to a center of learning, UCLA.
In 1837 Joseph Smith sent early converts Orson
Hyde and Heber C. Kimball as missionaries to Great Britain, envisioning they
might bring back converts. It was also a way of avoiding controversy in United
States until they were more numerous. Kimball, especially, was not confident.
In his journal he lamented his “stammering tongue,” but he proved to be
eloquent. God had told Smith to become a polygamist, and he obeyed. More
converts from abroad meant more women and their daughters Smith
could bring into God’s kingdom through binding them to him in libidinal
sanctity, “sealing” women to himself, and later to his chief followers. Smith
needed, it turned out, to bring into carnal celestiality with himself 20 wives
(or was it 50-some?--Wikipedia is uncertain). The missionaries were
phenomenally successful. This is the London correspondent 24 Nov 1857 to the N
Y Herald of 14 December: “Statistics
of the Mormon Emigration from England to the United States--27,000 Disciples
have Sailed from Liverpool--Alphabetical List of their
Occupations--Arrangements and Order on Shipboard, &c.”
How did the early Mormon men accrue so many women?
Partly by not being rigorously selective as to age, physical appearance, or
frequency of previous parturition (although in the 1850s in Utah they sometimes
paid murderous attention to the beauty of very young females). Mainly (the
Chicago Tribune said on 4 March
1857), they capitalized on the seduction strategies they soon
developed, before many non-Mormons caught on.
In Missouri
and Illinois, Joseph Smith set up military enclaves with a private army of
storm troopers, the Nauvoo Legion or the Danites, fanatical theological vigilantes organized
in the 1838 so-called “Mormon War.” Under Smith’s successor Brigham
Young these became “Destroying Angels.” The states on the Mississippi River
ultimately drove Mormons out after they were exposed as polygamists and
military terrorists. Thereafter the Mormons cursed people from Missouri and Illinois for
expelling them. Such “enemies” had no right to live. In 1850 the accidental
President Millard Fillmore took a cowardly way of putting the violent and
vulnerable Mormons out of sight, out of mind, letting them settle in the west
near Great Salt Lake, not foreseeing they would become a barrier to westward
travel for gold seekers and other settlers.
Once at home
there in the vast Utah territory, Mormons began sending many well-chosen
proselytizers abroad. Over the next years these missionaries imported thousands
of new believers from Europe, many of them willing to push a handcart from
Missouri to Utah, die on their way if they had to. Recruits included some
unmarried women as well as many unmarried men or men with one wife already. All
the men were stirred by new revelations from God, Jesus, and angels in the Book of Mormon as explicated by the
missionaries (as well as the Old Testament stories they already knew about
patriarchs with multiple wives, some--Abraham’s Sarah?--incestuously kin to them).
Healthy male converts in need of more than one woman could not escape the
dizzying thought that they might have a religious duty to engage in divinely
blessed sex more frequently and with more women than their own fathers had
done, however formidable the fathers had loomed as erotic threat and model.
Throughout
the decade of the 1840s Mormon leaders were already yielding to an angel’s and
sometimes God’s new command to take multiple wives even while they denied that
they polygamists. They were not only practicing polygamy--they were mastering its
complicated domestic practicalities. Still in the early 1840s many Americans
could not believe claims that the Mormons were polygamists. Here is the
Washington Globe (1 February 1850): “We take no part in the
controversy between the Mormons and their antagonists.” Now that Mormons were in
Washington seeking equal status, not everyone opposed statehood. Many
easterners had been hornswoggled: “we have been most positively assured, by one
of the Mormon Delegates, that the charge of polygamy and of bigamy, brought
against the citizens of Deseret, is utterly unfound, and that it is a cruel
calumny.”
In the mid-1850s, no longer freshly
remembering the militarized Mormon towns of Illinois and Missouri, no longer
bringing to mind the Mormon threat to exterminate people from Missouri and
Illinois, many conventional Americans were edgy if not appalled at new evidence
of Mormon sexual license close to home--just look around! Suddenly (it seemed)
Mormonism was touching more Americans. The Sunbury, PA Republican (20
June 1857) warned of the progress Mormons were making: “There are organizations
of these Latter Day Saints in most of our principal cities, and leaders are
laboring quietly but surly in their villainous work of breaking up peaceful
families, tearing mothers from their children, and wives from husbands who have
hitherto doted upon them. Even women who have been the ornament of their
peculiar sphere of society are lured from the path of duty and virtue, and
induced to journey with the missionaries of evil, far away to Utah, where, if
their eyes are opened, they are compelled to remain in dreadful captivity.”
Still worse, for the future: “the delusion is not made to operate merely upon
this continent. Almost every week, a vessel lands upon our shores numerous
bands of converted Mormons from European countries, where among the ignorant
peasantry, the missionaries of Brigham Young find an ample field for diffusing
their poison.”
From subterranean denial that they were
polygamists some Mormons switched to extreme admissions. Elder Orson Hyde
celebrated polygamy as “a divine institution,” declaring it was taught in the
New Testament--“that our Savior himself was a polygamist, that he had several
wives, that Mary and Martha were his wives, that he was the father of many
children, and that the marriage in Cana of Galilee was his own marriage.
Doctrines so revolting must strike all Christian people with inexpressible
horror,” said the Marysville, O. Tribune,
(10 January 1855). When the question of
statehood arose again the Bellveue, Nebraska Palladium (17 January 1855) declared that the “system of Polygamy”
was “an unmitigated evil, and being inconsistent with christianity, is entitled
to no respect as a religious institution.” By then all Mormon
leaders were not only admitting polygamy but using it at home and abroad as a
recruiting tool. American Protestants (then far outnumbering Catholics) were
not pleased. The St. Albans, Vermont Messenger
(5 June 1856) had a piece on “Brigham Young”: “This curious fanatic, and
cunning knave has been preaching a sermon on polygamy, in which he promises
damnation to all Mormons who deny the plurality of wives. . . . Brigham says
that when Joe Smith first revealed to him that God had ordered and enjoined
them to have many wives he felt sorrowful, as he had rather have but one wife.
But as it was a religious duty to have many wives, he lost no time in getting
them. He says he begins to like it now, as he has a great many boys which he
could not have had with but one wife. The old reprobate.”
Intelligent
women wrote extravagantly about their worship of their new Mormon husbands. My
distant cousin through the Bells and Knoxes, Eleanor McComb McLain, a wife and
mother when she was taken as one of Parley Parker Pratt’s wives and in July
1857 set herself up in Salt Lake City as his foremost widow, wrote eloquently
about how she worshipped Pratt as Mary had worshipped Jesus, how she “washed
his feet, combed his hair and often walked that he might ride” (Van Buren Arkansas Intelligencer 22 May 1857). This was adoration, far
beyond infatuation.
Often
worshipped, Brigham Young was in fact strikingly pleasing, when he wanted to
be. He had the “easy, personal address” of “the accomplished roué,” as well as
a powerful public voice, but he was not the only Mormon with powers to attract.
The writer of “Mormonism Exposed” (Boston Evening
Transcript, 24 January 1852) declared that it would be hard to find even
one Mormon leader “who has not only ruined and thrown into utter degradation,
wives and mothers but has supplied his harem with young girls whom he has
seduced, and induced under the disguise of religion, and by the grossest
misrepresentations and falsehoods to leave father, mother, home, and rush into
absolutely slavery and despair.”
How Brigham Young was Allowed to Rule
Unchecked
Three of our most incompetent Presidents,
three in a row, refused to challenge Mormons for their polygamy and for manning
ideological toll-booths, harassing and frequently killing travelers and for (a
matter of great importance) their interfering with the United States mail. The accidental
president Millard Fillmore (a fourth cousin of mine, a few times removed), appointed
Brigham Young (a tenth cousin of mine) Governor of the Utah
Territory. In Utah earlier
subservience to Joseph Smith was codified in the early 1850s.
Fillmore, the hapless predecessor of the equally hapless Franklin Pierce and
James Buchanan (both my cousins, more remote), stood by while Young swiftly
made Utah his militarized theocracy. Fillmore
compounded his folly by supporting the Fugitive Slave Law as part of the
Compromise of 1850, which meant that Abolitionists clashed with authorities
through the decade, postponing freedom for the slaves, while distracting the
country from what was happening in Utah Territory. Then in 1854 the
Kansas-Nebraska Act superseded the Missouri Compromise of 1820 by opening the
West to slavery, if new inhabitants chose to be in a slave state. In 1856 the
rejected opportunist puppet Fillmore headed the Know-Nothing party. The Buffalo Commercial (10 September 1856) picked up a squib on The Free Love
Candidate”--“Remember that Millard Fillmore sustained Polygamy in Utah by the
authority and treasury of the United States. Remember that he appointed as
Governor, Brigham Young who keeps sixty concubines under lock and key,
prohibited from visiting or receiving company.”
Despite
charges of approving polygamy, Know-Nothings dodged the most explosive issues
of the day by spreading the word that soon the Pope might seize the United
States in a coup and make it a Papal colony. After all, they were convinced
that the Jesuits had been “prowling” as early as the 1830s, before aroused Protestants
had burned a Catholic school in Philadelphia, even before being sloshed by the
wave of immigrants from the potato famine. In the mid-1840s the Irish (rarely
Mormon converts) often came not in family groups but alone. “Ship Arrivals” in
seaport newspapers show one young Irish man (or more rarely woman) sent away
for survival, and perhaps later to aid the family back home somehow. But any
newly arrived young Irishman (single men being vulnerable to joining
conspiracies) might take orders from the prowling Jesuits and seize the
country. In 1854 seemingly frivolous worry about Catholics distracted the
Know-Nothings from concern about slavery and also from the dangers of letting
Mormons become ghoulish toll takers who obstructed and preyed on travelers to
and from California. In these years they perfected the technique of instilling
terror of Indians so as to lure travelers into welcoming the protection of
Mormons. Politicians had let Brigham Young take total control the best land
route to California.
After the
passage of the Compromise of 1850 a national pattern was set: unsettling truths
were to be quickly forgotten or avoided. Who was Castner Hanway after 1851?
Who, in a little while after 1854, was Anthony Burns? As I type on 6 January
2022, is our democracy in danger? Oh, no. With state sovereignty (slave or not)
legal after 1854, the land to the east of Utah (there being no Colorado) became
Bleeding Kansas, where reports of horrific crimes were not always believed.
Could John Brown and his sons have hacked to pieces neighboring men and a mere
boy in 1856 because they were not Abolitionists? Oh, no, surely not. The
irrefutable truth about Brown’s guilt at Pottawatomie was publicized swiftly
but vehemently denied by almost everyone for two decades, even in the Atlantic Monthly (April 1872) which had
fairly early, in 1859, exposed the Mormon massacre at Mountain Meadows.
Transcendentalists could worship the Pottawatomie machete wielder as the new
Jesus. Emerson did, taking Brown’s punishment on the gallows for his 1859 raid
on Harper’s Ferry as a modern equivalent of Jesus’s suffering on the Cross. [possibly
use some of next paragraph]
On 24 May 1856 at Pottawatomie, Kansas
Territory, John Brown, some his sons and a few others, hacked to pieces several
men and boys whose sin was to be against abolition. Brown became famous as a
fervent Abolitionist to the point that Emerson, Thoreau, other idealistic
Northerners all but worshipped him. Rumors had reached them about his violence
in Kansas. That is, the truth was proclaimed in the pro-Southern New York Herald while denied in Horace Greeley’s Tribune. You could choose to ignore the Herald. On 11 November 1859 in the
Tremont Temple in Boston Emerson hailed Brown as, “The
Saint, whose fate yet hangs in suspense, but whose martyrdom, if it shall be
perfected, will make the gallows as glorious as the cross.” The Detroit Free Press on 6 January 1860 asked, without a question mark, “What
manner of man was he whose gallows is glorious like the cross.” He insisted:
“But it is well that the country should know . . . .” The Liberator on 16 December 1859, two weeks after Brown was hanged,
printed a letter from R. J. Hinton: “John Brown told me he was not a
participator in the Pottawatomie homicides. John Brown was incapable of
uttering a falsehood.” The Liberator
on 24 February 1860 set people at ease: “John Brown not at Pottawatomie.” It
was not for many years that almost everyone was compelled to acknowledge the
truth. In 1879 James Townsley confessed that Brown personally had led the Pottawatomie massacre.
Will historians ever unite in denying
that the election of 2020 was not stolen?
Could the
Mormons have perpetrated the Mountain Meadows Massacre? No, surely not, eastern
editors said, even though their guilt was announced almost at once (in
California, where everyone knew in weeks, knew even the names of some of the
families slaughtered), but denied even after the evidence was undeniable to any
rational person. Many eastern newspaper editors declared that the Indians had
killed the emigrants, just as the Mormons said. Was there a normal tourist
visit of patriotic Americans to the Capitol on 6 January 2021 or was there an
armed murderous insurrection intent on overthrowing a valid election because of
the lies of the losing President and his henchmen? Some lies last longer than
the truth. Some eras have a great supply of manipulative cynics ready to
mislead a greater supply of gullible gulls. And some crimes are, as General
Albert Sidney Johnston said, an apparently studied refinement in atrocity
hardly to be conceived of.
Utah as it Was in the Mid-1850s
In 1857 the
Mormons in Utah (then a vast poorly defined area) were not shiny-clean smartly
dressed young missionaries standing persistently but respectfully at your door.
Mormon men were not the perplexed idealistic young fellows in the popular
movies The Falls and Latter Days. Many of them were converts
from Europe whose first language was not English, and none thought of
themselves as “Americans” (enemies, said Young). So forget Nick and Benjamin in
The Falls, forget Aaron (yes, he was
punished but--see later--his throat was not slit) and Christian in Latter Days. Mormons in the 1850s were
not like my present-day close cousins whose faces perturbingly resemble my
father’s. These cousins are assiduous genealogists who distress me only when
they retrofit my fiercely Presbyterian Revolutionary ancestors into Mormons. Do
not confuse Mitt Romney, who might have been President except for a video of
his disdainful comments on 47% of Americans wanting handouts, with his
ancestor, Parley Parker Pratt, a great seducer, whose killing in Arkansas in
May 1857 went far to justify the slaughter of 120-150 male and female emigrants
and all their “well grown” children. Mitt inherited some of Pratt’s DNA, and
yes, in 1983 Mitt’s dog Seamus got diarrhea on top of a station wagon on a
12-hour road trip, but Mitt is not identical to the Pratt who had concealed
himself (calling himself “Parker”) in his last uneasy skulking about the
Southwest following another man’s wife. (Pratt’s distant kinship to me--and
Mitt’s still more remote kinship to me--is through the Dabbs family, not the
Parkers.)
No, you have
to forget modern images. That’s not what Mormon men were like in Utah Territory
in the 1850s. Under Brigham Young, travelers were regularly assaulted and
robbed, usually by Mormons. Sometimes the travelers got to buy their goods
back, being told that evil Indians had stolen their horses, say, or their flour
barrels, but that Mormons had retrieved them and would return them, if paid
sufficiently for the trouble and the outright danger they had endured in
getting them from the Indians. For years, newspaper items show, the Mormons had
been blaming travelers for sometimes imaginary disrespectful speech or
misbehavior, and routinely blaming Indians for deeds the Mormons had incited them
to do or had perpetrated themselves, and then had required ransom for anything
stolen and then sold back to the travelers.
What deeds?
Robbing and murdering many travelers one or two or a few at a time, some never
missed, others named in a stray surviving newspaper that survives by chance. Late
in January 1857 word came in Springville that young Henry Forbes, recently from
California, was to be killed. First his revolvers were stolen and his horse
“carried off by Indians,” then he was killed and his landlord named Terry went
about on his horse and carrying his revolvers. (The Valley Tan 19 April 1857.)
In March of
1857 the Bishop of Springville prayed that the Lord would give some men the
strength to perform his work--to murder a Mormon named Parrish who was trying
to get east with his sons and two men named Potter and Darger. After
Mormons said the Indians had massacred the United States military surveyor
Captain John W. Gunnison in 1853, the Mormons produced his scientific
instruments for ransom. Gunnison’s widow, right or wrong, was sure the Indians
would not have saved those instruments and that the Mormons had arranged the
killing. Potter’s brother had been killed on that expedition, and Potter “was
one of the very few who knew the secret history of that sanguinary
transaction.” (28 May 1857 Washington New
Era.) Their horses and wagon stolen, they tried leaving on foot. Potter
was shot dead. Parrish was wounded then the assailants ripped open his stomach
and “cut his throat from ear to ear.” One of Parish’s sons was struck down as
he ran, his stomach ripped up and his throat cut, like his father’s. The other
Parrish son and Darger escaped. Mormons, the Parrishes all knew the “Mormon
secrets.” (Washington New Era 28 May
1857) In April 1858 in Pondtown, Mormons, claiming Henry Jones had stolen
horses, shot him and his mother (a bullet hole through her forehead) and pulled
the roof and all the sand on it down on them in their twelve foot square
dug-out down (Valley Tan 19 April
1859).
The New
York Herald on 28 February 1858
reported “The Murder Story of Five Americans in Utah,” two of them brothers
named Aiken, going east with money earned in California. (In 1863 Cradlebough
counted six killed.) Imprisoned in Salt Lake City, they were robbed, and four
were killed. The fifth man, wounded, could not write to California for help
“owing to the strict espionage exercised over the Post Office Department in the
revolted Territory.”
In 1857 shortly
before the massacre at Mountain Meadows Young tried to keep United States
officials from leaving: he demanded a passport, so he could seize, imprison,
and kill anyone who asked for one. The “Sufferer” recently very daringly escaped
from Utah (Freehold, NJ, Monmouth
Democrat, 4 June 1857) cited the thousands “who have suffered in their
persons, property and character,” but “as a general rule, they (the Mormons)
have managed to throw the blame on the poor Indian.” Always, when Mormons
recovered stolen items, they expected ransom for their trouble and expense. On
5 November 1857 (reprinted in the New Orleans Picayune 28 November) the Alta California
quoted a traveler named Abbott as saying that “five hundred immigrants have
been killed this year, on the road between Salt Lake and California, by Indians
and Mormons,” but added, perhaps naively, “this estimate is certainly very much
exaggerated.” Although skeptical about 500 dead, the Picayune took the Alta
report as “Very strong corroborative
evidence” that the massacre of the wagon train from Arkansas “as the work of
Mormons.”
Meanwhile,
nothing impeded the popularity of polygamy. Joseph Smith and his Apostles had
pretty quickly discovered in themselves not just a need to bring more and more
women into celestial union but also an opportunity to yield themselves in the
powerful pleasures of rampant God-approved sexual license. Smith began eyeing
adolescent (and prepubescent?) girls as candidates for celestial marriage (such
as the fourteen year old daughter of Apostle Kimball) and eyeing even the wives
of his chief followers (such as Apostle Orson Pratt’s, while he was on a
mission). Most of his followers got over their initial perturbation and
bewilderment to enjoy for themselves the new divinely revealed sexual doctrine.
In 1845, Bagley
shows, Apostle John D. Lee was engaged to two sisters, Louisa and Emmeline when
Brigham Young saw Emmeline and wanted her for himself. To get her, he promised that
Lee would sit “at Young’s right hand” in his heavenly kingdom. Emmeline went on
to bear Young ten earthly children. Excited, thwarted, half sorry he had
relinquished Emmeline, Lee confided that he had “frigged” Louisa “20 times in
one night” then “frigged all the women he had in his house.” These men were not
driven by religious frenzy to seduce women only
for the good of God and to retain them for celestial unity. Once the Apostles
learned that Jesus would bless their celestial sex with any woman he or God put
in their way, starting for convenience with wives of other Apostles, they
became licentious, religiosely delusional predatory horndogs--the best of them
powerful as preachers, irresistible as seducers promising sensuous celestial
unions.
By the
mid-1850s the value of individual women declined. Was Mrs. Ferris accurate in
her story of Orson Pratt’s brother Parley Parker Pratt’s attempt to “swap” one
wife, an English girl named Martha, to the Indian chief Walker for ten horses?
This story (gruesome because of the damage to the English girl) may have been
true or based on rumor which had itself been based on something like truth.
There were reports of incest by any definition. Nothing wrong with incest: after
all, wasn’t Isaac not only a legitimate son but also Abraham’s grand nephew? The
Sufferer, the official who had escaped from Utah in 1857 ahead of Garland Hurt,
gave examples. English-born George D. Watt, stenographic writer for the church,
has a half-sister as his second wife. George A. Smith, the church historian, a
brother of Joseph Smith, got the consent of the authorities to marry one of his
blood sisters but Brigham Young himself listened to her protests so she “was
saved from the beastly passions of Joseph’s unnatural brother.” That was
unusual, but he knew it was common for a man to marry a woman and her
daughters, as Elder Brown did.
You get some
sense of how Smith’s successor Brigham Young valued his harem in what the
Deseret News printed of his sermonic
address to his “own women” on 21 September 1856 (which included the “women” of
other Mormons): “I am going to give you from this day to the 6th day
of October next for reflection, that you may determine whether you wish to stay
with your husbands or not, and then I am going to set every woman at liberty,
and say to them, ‘Now, go your way, my women with the rest; go your way.’” He was
confident that once liberated the women would all say, “‘You can have as many
women as you please, Brigham.’” And he could have any other Mormon’s wives, as
Jedediah M. Grant is said to have put it: “If President Young wants my wives, I will give them to him without a
grumble, and he can take them whenever he likes.” Such
shuffling of women among worshiping friends could not go on forever.
After
Brigham Young had staged a partial exodus from the city as U. S. troops
approached, the Baltimore Exchange
(16 August 1858) quoted the Cincinnati Enquirer:
“Women here are little else than mere chattels, bought by the highest bidder,
or what is the same thing, compelled for many reasons of necessity to marry
persons of known fidelity to the church.” He described a memorable spectacle:
“We saw two women hitched to a cart, dragging it along through the dust like
oxen, or, in the disgusting language of Heber Kimball, like ‘cows,’ while the
barbarian, their husband, walked beside the cart driving them on. . . . Let womankind
in the Christian world pity woman in Utah.” When a man named Nash came to Provo
his seventeen year old daughter was “much sought by the propagators of the
‘Celestial Kingdom.’” She rebuffed “the antiquated and anointed roues among the ‘Saints.’” Nash died,
and after praying over his dead body the Bishop of Provo “turned to the weeping
girl, and informed her she was now unprotected and must become his wife. In less than ten days she was forced to
yield.” (7 July 1857, Orville Butte
Record).
The Salem Gazette
(23 Nov 1849) reported that a lady from Lynn had been to Utah where the men can
have “as many wives as they can support--the young being able to take care of
five or six only, and the older twenty-five or thirty.” The editor declared,
“We utterly disbelieve this statement.” His skepticism statistical, not moral:
“It is impossible to be true, since it is known that the Mormon community
consists of about as many men as women.” In an isolated enclave like
Utah Territory men would run out of women to seal in physical and celestial
marriages. Maybe many Mormons in
Utah could not afford even one wife? The correspondent of the
Cincinnati Enquirer (quoted in the
Baltimore Exchange for 16 August
1858) said out loud what others must have perceived but did not say: “Many
industrious young men cannot get wives at all.”
Maybe more
female converts came from Europe than male converts? Shipping records show that
did not happen. The Sunbury PA Gazette
(20 June 1857) speculated: “How many of the women who accompany these
expeditions [from Europe] have been induced to leave a husband and children to
follow the saints, we cannot precisely determine, but are quite certain, from
facts that have been published to the world, that the proportion is not very
small.” Anyone who looked at the ship arrival notices rather than at morality
could see that by the 1860s and 1870s Mormons would have to decide what to
do with an Apostle’s sons--the forty or fifty or sixty brothers and
half-brothers born in Utah and reared in households focused on paternal erotic
patronage (“This is Susan’s night”) and stewing with roiling testosterone in the
sons, more sons advancing farther into manhood. How could these healthy lads find
multiple wives?
In 1859,
looking only at his present-day Utah Territory, the Salt Lake City
correspondent of the Chicago Tribune
counted 387 men in Utah who had seven or more wives and 13 of the 387 who had
more than 19 wives. 730 men had 5 wives, 1100 men had four, and 1400 had two or
three. As early as the late 1850s there would not be enough women for every
religious man to have four or five, or even two wives. God had given Joseph
Smith the command to have multiple wives but he had not designated a term limit
at which time Mormons would run out of women. Sons of the Mormon Apostles would
find sexual opportunity unfair--progressively limited, one generation along.
These are not hypothetical numbers and hypothetical consequences. Secret rural
polygamous Mormons in our own time have expelled boys at 14 or 15 from their
compounds to make their way as male prostitutes on city streets, the writer
Betty Webb shows.
Brigham Young’s Defiance of President
Buchanan
In the fall
of 1855 (said the 11 January Woodstock Vermont
Standard) at the Mormon Conference Brigham Young publicly stated “that the
Mormons, thank God, were strong enough to defy the power of the United States,
and that the United States might go to hell.” Young persistently called
Americans the “enemies” of Mormons (except for some immediate strategy, when in
his rhetoric he became American again, claiming a citizen’s privileges). The
threat of religious violence in Utah in the early 1850s became profound. A man who knew Utah tried to explain (the
Buffalo Republic, 10 March 1857):
“The influence which has been acquired over many of their ignorant followers .
. . is unbounded. I will give you an instance.--While traveling a short time
since, I had occasion to ride in a wagon with a Mormon who was very firm in the
faith, but naturally communicative. In the course of a conversation which we
had about Mormonism, I found occasion to ask him what he would consider it his
duty to do if Brigham should counsel him to murder me. His reply was that if
Brigham told him to murder me, it would be because God had revealed it to be
necessary that I should leave the world, and, therefore, he, as the instrument
in the hand of God through the prophet Brigham, would not be responsible for
taking my life. Alone with this man, far from any settlement, this confession,
made in a solemn, earnest manner, impressed itself deeply on my mind.”
Even the highest United States
officials were vulnerable. Albert Cumming, appointed Governor by
Buchanan in 1857, arrived in Utah with the military prepared to defer to
Brigham Young as the true Governor. Cumming appeased, placated, deferred and
kept the military from doing their jobs. Nevertheless, his mere presence in
Utah was offensive. The Buffalo Morning Express (2 July 1858), gave this
instance in Cumming’s career in Utah: “Upon one occasion, grave men of mature
years told him in the open street, in all soberness of word and manner, that
they would have no hesitation in cutting his throat, deeming it God service.”
Unlike
eastern and southern Americans at the time, in their threats the Mormons
habitually talked of slitting throats,
as in Elder Taylor’s sermon in the Deseret News
(11 October 1857). In that paper five days later, Brigham Young reveled in
repeating the term. Throat-slitting left to right was part of the secret oaths
in the Nauvoo Endowment Ceremony--what a man swore to do if he violated his
oaths, swore by dragging his thumb along his throat. (Was there a variant
ritual for left-handed Mormons?) The Utah correspondent of the New York Times
(as quoted in the 28 May Washington DC National
Era) told of Brigham Young’s summoning a father and asking the ages of his
daughters--16 and 10. He must give the older, very attractive, daughter to
Territorial Marshall McRay, Young said. Stalling, the father said he thought
she was engaged. She, in the meantime, was visiting a non-Mormon family, a
mistake: “In ward meeting, on the evening of the 25th of January,
the speaker declared that if the did not cease visiting the Gentiles, she
should have her throat cut; and that if her father would not be her
executioner, somebody else should!” Stenhouse in the Rocky Mountain Saints (1873) describes a loving punishment for an adulterous
woman. Her husband explained that “she could not reach the circle of the gods
and goddesses unless her blood was shed.” She “seated herself upon her
husband’s knee, and after the warmest and most endearing embrace she had ever
known . . . with his own right hand he calmly cut her throat and sent her
spirit to the keeping of the gods.” Stenhouse was acquainted with that
particular “kind and loving husband,” who after sending his wife to the circle
of the gods and goddesses still preached “occasionally with great zeal,” and seemed
“happy enough.” This sort of blood atonement was just not the method
Vermonters, Pennsylvanians, Virginians, Georgians, or Tennesseans thought first
of when they made threats to kill. For Brigham Young’s frugal followers, shoot
if you had to subdue someone in the back, running away from your lawful arrest,
but otherwise the rule was slit a throat,
save a bullet.
Examples of
throat-cutting abounded. The New Orleans Picayune (27 June 1858) reviewed “one or two new chapters of Mormon
horrors.” In January 1858 Utes digging for roots found four bodies of teamsters
bound for California, freshly interred, all had been shot, and all “had their
throats cut,” for full measure. In October or November 1857, just after the
massacre at Mountain Meadows, young men from California were arrested, robbed
of their horses, imprisoned, then four of the men started back to California
“under a Mormon guard, consisting of Porter Rockwell, John Murdock and two
others, ostensibly to protect them from Indians.” Later an Indian, Aropeen, in
a wagon saw bloody bodies of men “he had seen going in the other direction with
Porter Rockwell a few days before.” Outraged, Aropeen “demanded some of the
‘plunder,’” and was given clothing. At Salt Creek, Bishop Bigler “justified” all
four murders, two of them “the brothers Aiken, of California” (Aiken cousins of
mine, born in Tennessee but from the South Carolina family?). Porter Rockwell
was a helpful guide. After the massacre a memorable throat-slitting scene
occurred. George Adair was stripping the bodies when he found a pouch filled
with gold. Superstitious, he held it away, but John Higbee seized it and
stuffed it in his pocket (Bagley 157). Adair remembered: “It was then that he
caught me by the hair, pulled my head back, and drawing a big knife across my
throat, said if you ever divulge what you have seen, I will cut your throat
from ear to ear.”
On 30 March 1857 the United States “Justice
of Utah Territory” W. W. Drummond explained why he was resigning: “After a
careful and mature investigation, I have been compelled to come to the
conclusion, heart-rending and sickening as it may be, that Capt. John W.
Gunnison and his party of eight others were murdered by the Indians in 1853
under the order, advice, and directions of the Mormons; that my illustrious and
distinguished predecessor, Hon. Leonidas Shaver, came to his death by drinking
poisonous liquors given to him under the order of the leading men of the Mormon
church in Great Salt Lake City; that the late Secretary of the Territory, A. W.
Babbitt, was murdered on the plains by a band of Mormon marauders, under the
particular and special order of Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, and J. M.
Grant, and not by the Indians, as reported by the Mormons themselves, and that
they were sent from Salt Lake City for that purpose, and that only; and, as
members of the Danite band, they were bound to do the will of B. Young, as the
head of the church, or forfeit their own lives.” (Louisville Journal, 22 April 1857). There was no
follow-up to these allegations. Mormons routinely skated for their crimes. Who
could enforce laws of the United States? In any hypothetical trial all the
jurors would be Mormons. Drummond and his true accusations suffered when it was
revealed that the woman he was with in Utah was not the wife at home in
Oquawka, Illinois with the children (Augusta GA Constitutionalist, 4 June 1857). Who would believe a man who was having
sex with a second woman, in Utah?
In mid 1857
United States troops were almost at
hand, and being harassed by Mormons, their supply wagons burned, horses stolen
regularly. Their failure was guaranteed because they brought with them the new
Superintendent of Indian affairs, Jacob Forney, who wanted most to appease the
man he had accompanied, the new Governor Albert Cumming who wanted only to
appease Brigham Young, to let him know that he was still unchallenged as the
ruler of the Kingdom. (Cumming was a disaster; Forney was finally fired in 1860
for profiteering.) Cumming could neutralize General Johnston, but there was
widespread panic, and Young faced the possibility that the United States troops
could became active and that more troops were sent to Utah in a few months. He
thought of the possibility that the Mormons might have to flee again, as they
had fled from Missouri and Illinois. Mormons were talking about stashing grain
in the hills if they had to flee.
In a sermon on 8 October 1857, Young warned
that “Men shall be secreted here and there, and shall waste away our enemies in
the name of Israel’s God” (the 16 January 1858 Richmond Dispatch). Young was readying his people to fight a war of
attrition: “I know that the comparatively few scattered here and there over the
country and in the mountains, can spoil their march before they could get
here.” Nevertheless, he was also preparing to be driven out of Utah. The editor
commented: “a very mysterious journey to the North was made by Brigham Young
last summer. He took a large and well appointed train with him, and was absent
nearly two months. It is reported that he penetrated far into the British
possessions on the north, and may have there settled upon a location for a
colony. Neither the object nor the result of that journey has ever been clearly
explained in the Mormon journal.” Would they flee to Canada or Mexico?
The
“Sufferer” who had escaped alive from Utah, scotched one absurd rumor, that
Brigham Young was fleeing Utah “to save himself from the violence of his
flock”: “I happen to know the
contrary. In the spring of 1855, a Mormon exploring party discovered the ruins
of an Aztec city in the fastnesses of the Wasatch mountains, three or four
days’ travel east of Manti, a description of which was at the time published in
the Deseret News. It appears to have been a fortified city, containing cellars,
vaults, subterranean passages, magazines, &c., with winding passages
leading to the top of their dwellings, which constituted the outer walls of defense.
It is to this locality that Brigham wishes to conduct the archives of his
church, and where he expects to take his stand of defiant treason against the
United States.” (Washington, D.C. States,
25 May 1857.) The subservient docility of the new putative Governor Albert
Cumming, and Jacob Forney, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs, gave promise
that the troops would never assert real military power, but what if something
brought about actual battles?
Brigham Young behaved defiantly despite the
presence of United States troops nearby. A delusional fanatic, he spoke
words his followers thought were from God: “Suppose that our enemies send
50,000 troops here, they will have to transport all that is required to sustain
them over one winter, for I promise them, before they come, that there shall
not be one particle of forage nor one mouthful of food for them should they
come. . . . It will cost them all they have in this world, and land them in
hell in the world to come, while the only trouble to us is that we have two or
three times more men than we need for using up all who can come here to deprive
us of our rights.” (on 5 July 1857, from the 7 January 1858 Brownville Nebraska
Advertiser.) In a sermon on 26 July 1857 (printed in the
Baltimore Sun for 15 September) Young
again proclaimed his defiance: “But woe, woe to that man who comes here to
unlawfully interfere with my affairs. Woe, woe to these men who come here to
unlawfully meddle with me and this people. I swore in Nauvoo, when my enemies
were looking me in the face, that I would send them to hell across lots if they
meddled with me, and I ask no odds of all hell to-day. . . . Would it not make
any man or community angry to endure and reflect upon the abuse our enemies have
heaped upon us, and are still striving to pour out upon God’s people?”
On 2 August from the pulpit Young
proclaimed treasonously: “The time must come when this kingdom must be free and
independent from all other kingdoms. Are you prepared to have the thread cut
to-day?” He continued: “Now let me tell you one thing. I shall take it as a
witness that God designs to cut the thread between us and the world when an
army undertakes to make their appearance in this territory to chastise me, or
to destroy my life from the earth. I lay it down that right is or at least
should be might with Heaven, with his servants, and with all its people on the
earth. As for the rest, we will wait a little while to see; but I shall take a
hostile movement by our enemies as an evidence that it is time for the thread
to be cut.” The Wilmington, NC Journal
on 14 November 1857 quoted the London Post:
“The condition of affairs in Utah affords confirmation of the old adage that
extremes met. Utah is nominally republican, but the culminating point of its
freedom is Brigham Young, who is practically a greater autocrat than the
Emperor of all the Russias.”
The District Court of the United States
of America in Green River County, Utah, December Term 1857, indicted for
treason Brigham Young for acts done four days after the Mountain Meadows
Massacre. On 15 September 1857 Young and his followers “did wickedly,
maliciously and traitorously conspire, combine, confederate and agree together
to levy war” against the United States and “then and there the said Brigham
Young . . . did issue a wicked, malicious and treasonable proclamation.” Young
had forbidden “all armed forces, of every description, from coming into this
Territory, upon any pretext whatever.” He had mobilized all his forces “to
repel any and all such invasion.” And he had declared martial law in the
Territory “and no person shall be allowed to pass and repass into or through,
or from this Territory, without a permit from the proper officer,” Young being
the master of passports. In a speech on 27 September 1857 Wilford Woodruff
offered an alliterative slogan which seems not to have won the popularity it
deserved, keys to the Continent: “Through the persecutions of the enemies of
truth many of the saints have been worn out, but as a body the kingdom and
people have been led off as victorious conquerors. We stand now and hold the keys of the American Continent; we stand in
the strong chambers of the mountains, and can the Lord God give us the
victory? He can and he will.”
The Buffalo Morning Express (25 December 1857) offered an ominous gift for
anyone celebrating this day as a holiday: “The boldest and most insolent threat
of all yet to be made by the Mormon leaders, is given in a deposition of Mr.
Ellis Eames, published in the Los Angeles Star. This gentleman says that one
Dr. Dunion, who was surgeon general to Brigham Young’s army, had informed him
that ‘arrangements were already entered into that, provided the army should
enter the settlements, every city, town and village in the states of
California, Missouri and Iowa, should be immediately burned; that they had men
to do this who were not known to be Mormon.’ (!)” Who knew what could happen?
Ineffectual as James Buchanan was, Young’s
treasonous proclamation forced him into something that at first meant military
action and certainly involved American soldiers in a long trek and a cold,
frustrating winter, frustrating since Buchanan also sent out a new Governor,
Albert Cumming, who interpreted his job as to keep the military passive and to
flatter and appease Brigham Young and all other Mormons.
A letter from Salt Lake City
dated 26 June 1858 reached the Mississippi towns and by 28 July was quoted far
east, in the Raleigh NC Register. The United States army under Albert Sidney
Johnston was set to march into Salt Lake on the 27th to the putative
United States Governor showed how he could abase himself and the country:
“Governor Cumming has issued a proclamation addressed to the inhabitants of
Utah, offering them, in accordance with the instructions of President Buchanan,
‘a free and full pardon’ for all treason and sedition heretofore committed,
provided they faithfully submit to the laws and the constitution. Gov. Cumming
declares that peace is restored.”
Somewhere in
Utah a handful of little children remained captive, their parents and other
kinfolks slaughtered nine months earlier in the Mormon massacre at Mountain
Meadows.
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