of 1872.2 Following his victory, Grant argued in February 1873 that Congress
should have no faith in the Latter-day Saints’ ability to govern themselves. Only
the federal government could properly enforce the law in Utah Territory: “So
long as Congress leaves the selection of jurors to the local authorities, it will
be futile to make any effort to enforce laws not acceptable to a majority of the
people of the Territory.”3
In addition, during his time in Utah, Kane had evidently discussed with
Young possible Mormon settlements in Arizona and Mexico; Young had
begun to plan for a missionary expedition to Arizona and Sonora, with his
brother Joseph at the head.4 (On April 10, 1873, following Brigham Young’s
1. Kane had written to Y
oung following his arrival in New York City on March 24, 1873,
instructing Young to “inform me how I will most safely communicate with you by mail”
and asking him to write to Kane at the home of his father-in-law William Wood in New York City. This brief letter is not reproduced in this volume because it is in the hands of a private collector. Included in this private collection is also a list of questions and answers regarding Young’s will, dated May 19–22, 1873. Kane to Young, March 24, 1873, private collection.
2. Grow, Liberty to the Downtrodden, 250–253.
3. See Ulysses S. Grant to Congress, February 14, 1873, John Y. Simon, The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, Volume 24: 1873 (Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 35–38.
4. Brigham Young to Joseph W. Young, March 19, 1873, BYOF.
466
the prophet and the reformer
resignation as the church’s trustee-in-trust, the New York Herald speculated that Young himself would lead the Saints to live in Arizona and possibly in
Sonora.)5 The missionaries hoped to establish themselves among the Indian
tribes in order to “induce them to abandon their present habits and labor as
we do.” The Saints also sought to found a new city on the projected Southern
Pacific Railroad along the 35th parallel.6 This letter from Kane, however,
informed Young, “No one has much faith in the 35th parallel route for present
purposes.”
Kane also declined to participate in the possible extension of the Utah
Southern Railroad, as he felt pressed to manage Young’s estate, a case that was
“bristling with law points.” Given the vastness of Young’s holdings, the com-
plexity of his family, and the mingling of church and personal assets, Young’s
will demanded Kane’s full attention.
Source
Kane to Young, April 4, 1873, draft, box 15, fd 6, Kane Collection, BYU.
Letter
Acknowledge receipt of this Letter as 1.7
4. W. 18th St. N. Y.
April 4. 1873
President Brigham Young,
Dear Sir:
The protectors of the Indian whom I have conversed with praise
Grant as their reliable friend. Smith’s is considered a good appointment.8
5.“The M
ormon Question,” New York Herald, April 10, 1873, 6.
6. Young to Albert Carrington, April 19, 1873, BYOF.
7. While this suggests that Kane may have written another letter this day, Young acknowledged only the receipt of this one and no evidence of another letter exists. See Young to Kane, May 7, 1873.
8. In 1873, Grant appointed Edward Parmelee Smith, an evangelical reformer and defender of American Indians, to be Commissioner of Indian Affairs. On April 9, 1873, Brigham Young Jr. wrote Kane, “Mr. Grant’s Indian policy is working to a charm so far and, we are of the opinion, that our efforts will accomplish more among the red men than all other missionaries together.” The Grant administration authorized Protestant clergymen, many of them Quakers, to serve as Indian agents in the hopes of avoiding past graft and inefficiency.
Kane to Young, April 4, 1873
467
But Grant is no friend of the Mormons. I have tried him again
through an intimate friend, who finds that he is as obdurately bitter
as ever.
I have put in the Apache wedjes. [wedges?]
The Press needs looking after.
No one has much faith in the 35th parallel route for present pur-
poses. The Texas pacific will pursue the Southern (Gila) one.9
Moneyed men talk a good deal about Railroading being over-
done: look out for a reaction &c. 10 [p. 2]
But Mr. Scott speaks confidently of his ability to put the T. P. through
in two or three years.11 He told me on Saturday that he would not fail
to complete his first five hundred miles East, under the Texas arrange-
ment, within nine months from Jan. 1. next.12
S ee William H. Armstrong, Edward Parmelee Smith: A Friend to God’s Poor (Athens, Ga.: The University of Georgia Press, 1993; Brigham Young Jr. to Kane, April 9, 1873, Kane Collection, BYU; Robert M. Utley, The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846–1890
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 127–133.
9. The most common propositions were for a route on either the 32nd or 35th parallels.
The Atlantic and Pacific Railroad embraced the 35th parallel. Meanwhile, Thomas Scott, a Pennsylvania railroad executive acquainted with Kane and president of the Texas and Pacific Railroad, pursued the route along the 32nd parallel. In August 1873, the Atlantic and Pacific Railway merged with the Texas and Pacific, making Scott the “controlling genius” of all railroads in the South and Southwest. Scott arranged for the railroads to unite at Albuquerque and continue on as a single line to San Francisco. Initially, Texas and Pacific executives were planning a railroad along the 32nd parallel—also known as the “Gila” route—through Texas to the Rio Del Norte with its terminus in San Diego with a branch to San Francisco.
See “Acquisition,” San Diego Union, August 14, 1873, 2; “Railway Interests,” New York Herald-Tribune, August 5 and 11, 1873; “The New Railroad Combination,” San Francisco Bulletin, August 12, 1873, 2.
10. Throughout the country, voices warned of the consequences that would come from a glut of railroads. “It is difficult at such a moment for a journal to remind a community that the country has already too many railroads,” the Milwaukee Journal of Commerce proclaimed, and
“that it has been extending them unwisely and extravagantly.” The railroad market experienced a contraction in fall 1873, prompting railroad companies to ask for government assistance. See “The Perils of Expansion,” Milwaukee Journal of Commerce, June 25, 1873, 2; “The Speculators’ Panic,” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, September 22, 1873, 2; “Something Wrong About It,” New York Herald-Tribune, August 6, 1873, 4.
11. Thomas A. Scott, president of the Texas and Pacific Railroad, had promised to have it finished within three years. See “The Texas and Pacific Railway,” San Francisco Bulletin, June 12, 1873, 2.
12. By December 1874, the Texas Pacific Railroad had completed approximately 325 miles of rail along with nearly 200 miles of partially completed rail. See “Railroad Interests,” San Francisco Bulletin, December 7, 1874, 4; “Transcontinental Railroad,” San Francisco Bulletin, February 27, 1874; Lewis Lesley, “A Southern Transcontinental Railroad into California: Texas and Pacific versus Southern Pacific,” Pacific Historical Review, vol. 5, no. 1(1936): 52–60.
468
the prophet and the reformer
The Arizona-Sonora Extension of the Utah Southern RR. has been
presented to me in inviting colors, offering me the strongest induce-
ments to be the first to take hold of it. But I set my self against the
thing resolutely, recognizing, as I have elsewhere repeated, that the
Settlement of your Estat
e should engross all the leisure from other avo-
cations which either of us can give. There is scarcely a feature of your
case that is not bristling with law points. Devoting my self exclusively
to its study for the next half year, I can only expect to put things into
the best trim to meet the litigation which, after, if not before your death,
you had better be prepared to look upon as inevitable.
Thomas L. Kane
89
Kane to Young, April 15, 1873
on april 10, 1873, Brigham Young sent a telegraph to James Gordon Bennett,
Jr., editor of the New York Herald, in response to a telegraphed request for information regarding Young’s resignation from several business positions. Young
had recently resigned as trustee-in-trust for the Church, as president of Zion’s
Mercantile Cooperative Institution, as president of the Deseret National Bank,
and as president of the Utah Central Railroad Board of Trustees.1 In his lengthy
telegraph to the Herald, which the newspaper published, Young clarified that these resignations “are made solely from secular cares and responsibilities, and
do not affect my position as President of the Church.” “In that capacity,” he
explained, “I shall still exercise supervision over business, ecclesiastical and secular, leaving the minutiae to younger men.” Young explained the change in terms
of his age, declaring, “For over forty years, I have served my people, laboring
incessantly, and am now seventy-two years of age and I need relaxation.” He also
provided evidence of the Latter-day Saints’ prosperity, stated that they intended
to establish settlements in Arizona, and denied rumors that he “had a deposit of
several millions of pounds sterling in the Bank of England.” Summarizing his
accomplishments, he wrote:
The result of my labors for the last twenty-six years . . . are: The peopling
of this Territory by the Latter-day Saints of about one hundred thousand
souls; the founding of over two hundred cities, towns, and villages . . .
and the establishment of schools, factories, mills, and other institutions
calculated to benefit and improve our community.2
1. Y
oung to Board of Directors of ZCMI, April 4, 1873; Young to Board of Directors of Deseret National Bank, April 1, 1873; Young to Board of Directors of Utah Central and Utah Southern Railroads, April 12, 1873, all in BYOF.
2. See “Apocalypse,” New York Herald, April 11, 1873, 7.
470
the prophet and the reformer
Along with Young’s telegraph, the New York Herald published a derogatory
“Sketch of Brigham Young,” which denounced him as ambitious, dictatorial,
greedy, crude, and unscrupulous. The newspaper concluded, “There could be
but one Joseph Smith and there can be but one Brigham Young, and one
of each is as much as any one generation should be expected to endure.”3
Young’s telegraph announcement was widely reprinted and, notwithstanding
the Herald’s comments, Kane perceived that it had a “beneficial influence” on the public.4
Source
Kane to Young, April 15, 1873, box 15, fd 6, Kane Collection, BYU.
Letter
President Brigham Young
Dear Sir:
You are to be congratulated on the beneficial influence of your recent
public utterances here.
Most respectfully and truly yours
Thomas L. Kane
Washington, April 15. ’73
3.“
Apocalypse,” New York Herald, April 11, 1873, 7.
4. For further treatment of Young’s announcement, see “A Letter from Brigham Young,”
Sun (Maryland), April 12, 1873, 4; “The Mormon Difficulty,” Critic-Record (Washington, D.C.), April 11, 1873, 1, and “The Mormons,” Boston Daily Advertiser, April 12, 1873, 1.
90
Young to Kane, May 7, 1873
in this letter, Young responded to several letters (including some that are
no longer extant) that Kane had sent the previous month. Rather than respond
to the letters specifically, Young sent this letter with Brigham Young Jr. and
George Q. Cannon, whom Young authorized to speak with Kane on various
subjects, including the arrangements of his estate and will. Young told Kane
that he and Cannon could decide together who should serve as the “coun-
sel that would be needed.” Kane advised that he represent Young and that
the church retain separate counsel, as Young’s “individual interests” and the
church’s interests were “confusedly interwoven in a manner likely to prove
prejudicial to both.”1 “I should act as for him alone,” Kane wrote Daniel
H. Wells in April, and the church should find “a professional gentleman” soon
“to protect the Church’s interests as such.”2
Kane recommended Eli Price, a Philadelphia probate attorney and Kane
family friend, to represent the church.3 A biographical sketch noted of Price,
“it is said that no other member of the Philadelphia bar was ever intrusted
with so large a number of valuable estates.”4 While Mormon leaders stated
that they could not see “any discrepancy of interest as existing or likely to
arise,” they acquiesced to Kane’s advice.5
1. M
emorandum of Conversation with Hon. Eli Price, May 27, 1873, Kane Collection, BYU.
2. Kane to Wells, April 2, 1873, Daniel H. Wells Papers, CHL.
3. See Memorandum of Conversation with Hon. Eli Price, May 27, 1873. Kane had initially suggested another Philadelphia lawyer, Henry Clay. Kane to Brigham Young Jr., March 29, 1873, BYU.
4.“Eli Kirk Price,” National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 10:412–413.
5. Kane to Wells, March 31, 1873, and Wells to Kane, May 6, 1873, both in Kane Collection, BYU.
472
YoUng to K ane, maY 7, 1873
Source
Young to Kane, May 7, 1873, box 15, fd 6, Kane Collection, BYU. A draft,
dated May 6, 1873, is in Kane Collection, BYU.
Letter
Salt Lake City
May 7th 1873
My Dear General
Your two favors, of April 2d and those of the 3d, 4th & 15th of April
that of the 4th being numbered 1 were duly received by the hand of my
son John W., and were perused with much pleasure and satisfaction.6
I would have acknowledged them earlier, but prefered to send by pri-
vate hand rather than to trust to the uncertainty of the mails, and that
our communication may be reliable I expressly send my son, Brigham,
and Geo. Q. Cannon to see you, and carry such information respecting
my affairs as you desire. I have conversed freely and fully with them
upon the various matters under consideration, and they will be able to
make explanations which will relieve me from the necessity of writing
at length upon many points. I feel that you also may converse with them
with confidence, and I wish you to give them such instructions as you
may wish to do in these matters.
The words you sent me to read came to hand, but the edition of the
work we arranged to use has slipped from my memory.7 Will you pleas
communicate the same by the bearers? [p. 2]
The interest which you manifest in myself and in the arrangement
of my affairs is very gratifying to me, and your suggestions are appreci-
ated and will receive due consideration. With the speedy means of com-
>
munication we now enjoy, I trust that, hereafter, our separations will not
be so lengthy, or our correspondence so much interrupted as it has been
in the past. The recent visit of yourself, wife and children to our country
6. S
ee Kane to Young, April 2, April 4, and April 15, 1873. The second April 2 letter and the April 3 letter apparently have not survived.
7. Kane had previously used a cipher system of coded letters with his family during the Utah War and with Brigham Young and other church leaders. John W. Young to Kane, November 9, 1871, Kane Collection, BYU.
Young to Kane, May 7, 1873
473
I greatly enjoyed, and hope that, ere long, you will be able to afford us
the pleasure of again seeing you.
As to the counsel that will be needed, yourself and our Delegate8
can converse together upon the subject and decide as to who will be the
most suitable person.
Give my kind regards to Mrs Kane and the children, and accept my
love to yourself.
With earnest desires for your health and prosperity, I remain as ever
Your Friend
Brigham Young
Major General Thoms. L Kane
Kane, McKean Co. Penn.
8. G
eorge Q. Cannon.
91
Young to Kane, July 31, 1873
in this letter, Young thanked Kane for his assistance in designing a will,
stated that he would again assume control of Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile
Institution, spoke of the possibility of renewed congressional attacks, and
referred to the difficulties met by early settlers in Arizona. Since his return from Utah to Pennsylvania, Kane had worked to write a will which would address
both Young’s complicated family and the entanglements between his personal
business dealings and church-owned property and businesses. As part of this
effort, Brigham Young Jr. and George Q. Cannon arrived in Philadelphia by
May 29 and then accompanied Kane to his home in the Alleghenies.1 While
visiting with Kane on June 6, Brigham Jr. wrote to his father:
I hope that we shall be able to retain in our minds the vast amount of
The Prophet and the Reformer Page 66