The Prophet and the Reformer
Page 6
perhaps a hint of a future conversion. His name would be held in “honorable
remembrance among the Saints to all generations.” The promises came with
a condition: Kane must live an exemplary life and “seek the good of the Lord’s
people.”13 Kane put enough credence in the blessing to speak fondly of it in
later years and to inquire whether it remained in force.14
When Kane left Cutler’s Park, Young gave him a letter of recommenda-
tion to Mormon leaders at Nauvoo, Illinois, that described him as a “soldier,
a gentleman, [and] philanthropist, whose acquaintance had been very pleas-
ant.” He further wrote, “We trust an endless friendship exists between us.”15
Kane also carried another letter from Young to Polk, probably written at Kane’s
urging. The Mormons realized that by camping on Omaha lands they were
violating the 1834 Indian Intercourse Act, which made it illegal for whites to
settle on Indian lands. Americans often did not pay much attention to this
law, and government officers hurried to buy Indian land titles ahead of the
rush of expansion. But the Mormons were anxious for the government’s good
11. “C
ertificate written by Dr. Edes,” in Journal History, August 19, 1846; Thomas L. Kane to John K. Kane and Jane Leiper Kane, August 19, 1846, APS.
12. Scott G. Kenney, ed., Wilford Woodruff’s Journal, 1833–1898 (Midvale, UT: Signature Books, 1983), September 7, 1846, 3: 75–76.
13. Kane, patriarchal blessing, September 7, 1846, CHL. There are several versions of Kane’s blessing, with small variations.
14. Kane to Young, Heber C. Kimball, and Willard Richards, February 19, 1851.
15. Young to Almon Babbitt, Joseph Heywood, and John Fullmer, September 7, 1846, BYOF.
Kane to Young, September 10, 1846
29
opinion. Young’s letter explained that the Omahas had recently given the Saints
permission to camp on their lands and that the Saints and the Indians hoped
to help each other. It further sought permission from Polk for the Mormons to
teach and trade with the Omahas, as well as sojourn on their land.16
Kane’s plan was to take the Mormon road across Iowa and see Nauvoo. When
he got to the Missouri River, however, he learned that two letters addressed to him had been sent to Cutler’s Park, and Mormon scout Orrin Porter Rockwell, one of
his traveling companions, went to get them.17 For a day or two, Kane pushed on
into Iowa, thinking that Rockwell would catch up with him. But a major relapse in
his health forced Kane to return to Point aux Poules—Trader’s Point—where he
heard local Indian subagent Robert B. Mitchell pour out warnings and complaints
about the Mormon camps in Iowa. These had come upriver from Mitchell’s supe-
rior, Major Thomas H. Harvey, Superintendent of the Upper Missouri Agency,
located in St. Louis. Mitchell requested Kane to “communicate” with Young about
Harvey’s warning, presumably either by returning to Cutler’s Park, about fifteen
miles to the northwest, or by writing a detailed letter. Kane “declined the office”
because of his health, opting instead to write this shorter letter.
Source
Kane to Young, September 10, 1846, box 40, fd 9, BYOF. There are two
rough drafts of this letter in the Kane Collection, BYU.18
Dear Sir,
Mr. Sub Agent Mitchell19 has requested me to communicate to you
orders he has received from Major Harvey Supt. of Ind. Affs. at St Louis
16. Y
oung to James K. Polk, September 7, 1846, draft, BYOF. Kane also carried with him an old Indian head from a mound near Cutler’s Park. He wanted one of his science friends in Philadelphia, “versed in the science” of craniology to take a look at it. Horace K. Whitney, journal, August 5–6, 1846, CHL.
17. These unidentified letters had been secured in St. Louis by Indian trader Peter Sarpy, who brought them up the Missouri River and then sent them to Cutler’s Park. Journal History, September 9, 1846.
18. The back of the letter contained the address: “General Young/Cutler’s Park/Favors of Mr.
Rockwell/Sept 10-1846/T. L. Kane.”
19. Mitchell’s first dispatches to Thomas Harvey about the Mormons were favorable. At the end of June, he reported that Young was complying with the law by holding the Saints “aloof from the Indians” and not trading with them. While the Saints had been “badly treated” by their fellow Americans, they nevertheless “declare their intention to bear the American Flag to whatever country they may cast their Lot.” Robert B. Mitchell, Council Bluff Sub Agency, to Thomas H. Harvey, June 29, 1846, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Letters Received 1846–1872.
30
the prOphet and the refOrmer
to enjoin your people to be careful not to commit any “waste” of tim-
ber upon the lands of the Pottawatamies during your passage through
their country; as they have no right to give you the permission you have
received from them, the Treaty being already ratified by which they
have conveyed said lands to the United States; and, he says, your pas-
sage through the country should occupy no longer time than is alto-
gether necessary.20
I have just informed him that I think it would be more in order for
him to write to you, in person; and, at the same time offering him the
services of Mr Rockwell to convey to you his message, have declined
the office, which my present weak & low state makes exceeding dif-
ficult to me. Yet I must not, in spite of my wavering hand, abstain from
saying in comment upon his notification to you, which you may not
understand, that it need not give you uneasiness. The Pottawatamies
it is true have no right to convey to you their timber &c., title to it
being already fully vested in the U.S.; but there is no reason, in my
opinion, wherefor your people should not be justified ex post facto, so
to speak, by Government in using all that that is necessary for their
perfect comfort & convenience. My papers will be arranged in a day
or two, I trust, in such a manner as to represent themselves, in case my
present drawback [p. 2] continues to be of moment, and thus, whether
I reach Washington in safety or not, I feel justified in saying to you to
stop where befits you, and cut all needful wood and to continue in your
present course unchanged. The letter The letter from Major H. and
that from Mr Medill (Head of Bureau Washington)21
20. H
arvey was relaying orders given to him by the Office of Indian Affairs in Washington, which said that the Mormons “should . . . be distinctly informed that they cannot be permitted to make any permanent location there, or any longer stay than is actually necessary, and that it is expected that they will abstain from all interference with the Indians and move onwards as soon as possible.” The Office of Indian Affairs wanted nothing to jeopardize the removal of the Pottawattomies to Kansas Territory nor the orderly transfer of land to the newly created state of Iowa. The U.S.-Pottawatomie treaty had been negotiated in 1846, and proclaimed six weeks later. William Medill to Thomas H. Harvey, July 27, 1846, Letters sent by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824–1882, microfilm copy at Utah State Historical Society; see also Medill to Harvey, August 22, 1846, Letters sent by the Office of Indian Affairs. See Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, compiled by Charles J. Kappler (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904), 557–560.
21. William Medill (1802–1865) was elected in 1838 to the U.S. Congress and served two ter
ms. Polk appointed Medill to the Office of Indian Affairs shortly after the start of his administration. See Stephen Rockwell, Indian Affairs and the Administrative State in the Nineteenth-Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 256–258.
Kane to Young, September 10, 1846
31
founded,> which have been shown me,22 are, it is true, quite in rule, but
matters shall all be arranged believe me as is proper in a few weeks, and
you will hear as little of your using timber as of the “necessity” that your
passage through the country should occupy any shorter time than such
as suits you best.
Farewell;—I am constrained to be brief—very much against my will.
Dr. Richards will understand why this stands as my only answer to his
kind letter23—I did not credit myself with force to write so much when
I began—Farewell—Say to my friends for me that which I would say,
and yourself and your own, remember me as
Yours sincerely
Thomas L. Kane
General Young.
Point a Poules Sept. 10-(!) 11, 1846
22. Kane had seen one of the letters M
edill sent Harvey. Medill would follow these two letters
with a third. See Medill to Harvey, September 2, 1846, Letters of the Office of Indian Affairs; Bennett, Mormons at the Missouri, 104–105.
23. Willard Richards had written a personal letter to Kane, which Rockwell delivered along with the two letters misdirected to Kane via Cutler’s Park. Richards to Kane, September 9, 1846, Willard Richards Papers, CHL.
3
Kane to Young, September 22, 1846
prOstrated With illness, Kane gave up on going overland and instead
took a steamer owned by the American Fur Company downriver toward St.
Louis, planning on a second river boat to get him to Nauvoo. Traveling with
him on the first leg of the trip was Indian subagent Robert B. Mitchell, which
gave Kane a chance to request another affidavit favorable to the Mormons. “So
far as I know, the general conduct of the Mormon people has continued irre-
proachable,” the statement went. It was written in Kane’s handwriting, with
Mitchell’s signature at the bottom.1 Kane was uncertain whether he would
reach Nauvoo. Before saying good-bye to the traveling companions at Traders’
Point, he told one of them he could have his horse if Kane “failed” to arrive at
the old Mormon headquarters.2
Within two weeks, Kane was at Keokuk, Iowa, at the great river’s rapids
and only a few miles short of Nauvoo. He hired a carriage to get him through
Iowa’s Half-Breed Tract, a sanctuary for human flotsam—“coiners, horse
thieves and other outlaws,” Kane said. Finally, he saw the city rising on a roll-
ing bluff at a bend of the river. Kane had gone to Nauvoo hoping for a few
literary scenes but instead found high drama. A week before he arrived, a mob
had forced out the last Mormon citizens, many of whom had been too aged,
poor, sick, or pregnant to go west sooner. Nearly four years later, he described
Nauvoo in a lecture before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and then
in an influential pamphlet. “The town lay as in a dream,” he wrote, “under
some deadening spell of loneliness, from which I almost feared to wake it.
For plainly it had not slept long. There was no grass growing up in the paved
1. R
obert B. Mitchell, statement, September 19, 1846, Kane Collection, BYU.
2. Horace K. Whitney, journal, September 11, 1846, CHL.
Kane to Young, September 22, 1846
33
ways. Rains had not entirely washed away the prints of dusty footsteps.”3 That
evening, he re-crossed the river and landed near a camp of the refugees.4
Kane wrote Brigham Young a letter from Nauvoo, or more likely from the
Mormon camps just across the river.5 During his trip to Nauvoo, Kane received two
letters from his father describing his success in lobbying the Polk administration.
The letters contained two enclosures—letters written by William Medill, head of
the federal Office of Indian Affairs, which stated that the Latter-day Saints would be allowed to camp temporarily upon Pottawatomie lands in western Iowa. Kane
wanted Young to see the material firsthand and sent them with his own brief epistle.
Source
Kane to Young, September 22, 1846, box 40, fd 9, item 2, BYOF.6
Letter
Nauvoo (!) Illinois.
September 22d. 1846
My dear friend,
As my mind is confused by the effect of over exercise this hot day
upon my disease shattered frame, I forward to you in original or copy, all
the enclosures which I have received from my Father, that they may tell
their own story better than I am able to do it for them. I do not, you may
believe, deny myself the pleasure of writing to you at length without
reluctance; but the pain I have at present in my head is really so acute
that you must take my honest wish to do so, for the deed itself.7 With
regard to the clauses which for convenience I have hurriedly marked
3. Kane,
Mormons, 3–4.
4. Kane, Mormons, 9–10. Illinois governor Thomas Ford, who was no friend of the Saints, confirmed Kane’s pen picture in his History of Illinois: From Its Commencement as a State in 1818 to 1847 (Chicago: S. C. Griggs & Co., 1854), 308–326.
5. The morning before crossing the Mississippi River to visit Nauvoo, Kane met with Mormon Newel K. Whitney, and it is likely that Kane composed his letter to Young at this time, as his letter contains no information about Nauvoo itself. Newel K. Whitney to Young, September 22, 1846, BYOF.
6. On the back of the letter, Kane addressed it to “General Young” at “Camp at Cutlers Park Upper Missouri.”
7. Kane enclosed several letters with this letter. First, he enclosed John K. Kane to Thomas L. Kane, August 18, 1846. In this letter, written by his father from Philadelphia in response
34
the prOphet and the refOrmer
with asterisks in the communication of Medill to Major Harvey of St.
Louis,8 I need only observe, that the first shows that Captain Allens
Report, which fully narrated your objects and intentions alluded to, has
in all probability never been despatched to Washington,9 inasmuch as
the date of Medill’s letter to my Father is as late as September 3d.;10 and
that the second and third suggest it to me to remind you that I have with
me, in case of personal accident, documents in the nature of vouchers
&c. not only from Mitchell the Sub-Agent in question, who is pledged
to me personally,11 but from all having influence or authority [p. 2] in the
upper Missouri Country, which are every way satisfactory to us in their
nature. You see, therefore, that you need apprehend no more from any
instructions to Harvey or Mitchell such as those which I fear alarmed
to Thomas
’s letter of July 23, John informed Thomas that he had “lost no time in making the appeal to the President for the permission to remain.” Furthermore, within the week, John promised to see President Polk in person “and take care that the thing is done.”
Second, Thomas enclosed a letter from William Medill, Office of Indian Affairs, to John K. Kane, September 3, 1846. John Kane had written Polk on August 29 seeking permission for the Mormons to “winter in the country recently purchased from the Pottowatomie Indians, near Council Bluffs, where they now are.” Medill communicate
d to John Kane regarding Polk’s decision “to give the permission in the form and upon the conditions contained in a letter to Major [Thomas] Harvey.” He enclosed a copy of the letter to Harvey (dated September 2, 1846) and asked John to send it to his son Thomas.
Third, Thomas enclosed two copies of Medill’s September 2, 1846 letter to Harvey,
Superintendent of Indian Affairs in St. Louis; Kane added some asterisks to this letter to emphasize certain phrases (see succeeding footnotes). This letter confirmed Medill’s previous letters to Harvey that the Mormons would be permitted to camp temporarily upon the Pottawattomie lands.
8. William Medill to Thomas H. Harvey, September 2, 1846, Letters of the Office of Indian Affairs, copy made by Thomas L. Kane in CHL. Kane first marked with an asterisk Medill’s statement that the Mormons’ “object and intention” in asking to temporarily remain on the Pottawatamie lands had not been “very satisfactory set forth.”
9. James Allen, the initial commanding officer of the Mormon Battalion, died on August 23, 1846. Young respected him as a “kind, gentlemanly officer” with a “fatherly deportment.” See Young to Samuel Gully (quartermaster of the Mormon Battalion), August 27, 1846, BYOF.
10. William Medill to John K. Kane, September 3, 1846, Letters of the Office of Indian Affairs. The Mormons preserved a copy of this letter in Brigham Young Manuscript History, November 11, 1846, CHL.
11. Kane marked two other clauses with asterisks in Medill’s letter to Harvey, September 2, 1846. The first instructed Harvey that he needed to be “satisfied” that the Mormons intended to leave the Pottawatamie lands in the spring. The second referred to Harvey’s duty to
“instruct the Sub-Agent” to allow the Mormons to remain on the land temporarily. Kane referred in part to the written document that Robert B. Mitchell signed, September 19, 1846, Kane Collection, BYU, as well as the personal assurances that Mitchell has given to Kane that he would work on the Mormons’ behalf.
Kane to Young, September 22, 1846
35
you a little at the time of my departure. I am getting to believe more
and more every day as my strength returns that I am spared by God for
the labour of doing you justice; but, if I am deceived, comfort yourself