by James W. Ure
Finally on April 16, they got underway with 143 men and three women, plodding along barely fifteen miles a day. Brigham's train had started earlier than most of the four thousand emigrants who would take the Oregon Trail west during the summer of 1847. The “Mormon Moses” also traveled along the less used north bank of the Platte River.20 They met the occasional trader and sighted Pawnee and Sioux Indians. The Pawnees stole some of their horses, but while they lived in fear of Indian attacks, none materialized.21
In early June they reached Fort Laramie, six hundred miles from Winter Quarters. They pushed on soon after arriving, hoping to stay ahead of the rush of emigrants who would be using the grass near the trail needed for the livestock, including the oxen necessary for pulling the wagons.22
The band crossed the Continental Divide at South Pass, Wyoming, and pushed on. In late June the party encountered two seasoned western mountain men, Jim Bridger and Moses Harris. Both knew the region better than anyone, excluding Indians.23
Bridger recommended that the party make for the area between Utah Lake and Great Salt Lake. Harris suggested they'd do better in the area of the Bear River's Cache Valley northeast of Great Salt Lake.24 Brigham took Bridger's advice—mostly. He wanted to avoid agitating the Ute Indians who had winter encampments around Utah Lake. So he chose the area around Great Salt Lake and urged his oxen forward.
They crossed the Green River four hundred miles from Fort Laramie and met up with Sam Brannan, who had been dispatched by sea from New York with a group of 230 Mormons to explore and perhaps colonize California. He had come across the Great Basin to meet the incoming party. He encouraged Brigham to move on to California, but Brigham wanted nothing to do with a country already populated and governed by the United States.25
They stopped at the rudimentary Fort Bridger, then began one of the most difficult legs of the journey. They followed in the mountainous tracks of the ill-fated Donner Party, which had passed the year before and had become stranded in the early snows in California's Sierras. The Donners had resorted to cannibalism before at last being rescued.26
Brigham's party was forced to crisscross streams, climb steep hills, and lock their wheels to creep down steep washes.27 Brigham became ill on this last leg of the journey. On July 12, he took to his bed in his wagon. His apostles took charge.28
An advance party reached Salt Lake Valley on July 22. Brigham arrived on July 24, 1847, a date celebrated in Utah as Pioneer Day. The state flag bears both the date of Mormon arrival in Salt Lake as well as the date Utah was admitted to the union, 1896. It is a symbol of the melding of church and state.29
Brigham, now recovered, considered the efforts of the Saints both prophetic and practical. He set up work parties, built houses, rebaptized everyone in the first wagon party to arrive, and encouraged the Mormons to avoid commerce with outsiders. They would grow and make everything they would need.
He was still fighting a rearguard action with some of his apostles. He had to reassert his power. Orson Pratt claimed the apostles could overrule Brigham. Brigham became agitated. Pratt likened the apostles to Congress. “Shit on Congress,” said Brigham.30
Ultimately the apostles confirmed the existence of a First Presidency, with Brigham as president supported by two counselors.31
By the fall of 1848, four thousand Mormons had settled in the Great Basin, the majority a few miles distant from the eastern shore of the Great Salt Lake.32
Seven clear, cold creeks flowed into the valley from heavily timbered Wasatch Mountains, and the river bottoms in the valley contained stands of cottonwood, willow, box elder, and gamble oak.
It was at the mouth of City Creek Canyon that Brigham built the Lion House and the Beehive House, and it was from this point that he would lay out the city with wide streets and lots big enough for a house and a garden. The Mormons believed the Wasatch Mountains provided a ten-thousand-foot-tall bulwark against the encroachment of the hated gentiles and the federal government.
John Pulsipher wrote in 1848, “The Lord Almighty is preparing a scourge for this nation. The blood of the Saints is crying out from the ground for vengeance on that wicked nation…. We are glad the mountain valies [sic] are so far off as they are.”33
Word had come in 1848 that Utah was no longer a Mexican territory. The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo ceded “Upper California” to the United States, and Brigham found himself serving as governor under an “irredeemably corrupt government,” wrote historian John G. Turner.34
The mountains would not stop the rush of forty-niners, nor would they prove insurmountable to the federal government and the long arm of the law. Even newspapermen would make it over the rocky passes and narrow clefts.
In order to secure the Mormons’ geopolitical power in the Great Basin, Brigham sent settlers as far as Las Vegas Springs and San Bernardino to the south, north and west to Yellowstone country in Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, and onto the western slope of the Rockies in Colorado. Brigham never again wanted Mormon towns to be surrounded by gentile communities. The hostility the Saints had endured in Ohio and Missouri was a strong and bitter memory. Within a few years the Mormons had laid claim to a thousand-mile corridor of colonies and forts in the American West. These included the Iron Mission west of Cedar City, and the Cotton Mission in St. George.35 Both towns would be implicated in the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857.
Yet only the atrocities of the conquered are referred to as criminal acts; those of the conqueror are justified as necessary, heroic, and even worse, as the fulfillment of God's will.
—Jim Fergus
An important part of the work of these colonizers was to evangelize the Lamanites, the term the Book of Mormon applied to Native Americans. Brigham is famously noted for his comment, “It's better to feed them than fight them.”1 In fact his policy, as BYU historian Howard Christy calls it, was an “open hand and mailed fist.”2 The Indians had the choice of becoming enemies or dependent on the Mormons.
It had been Joseph Smith's dream to form a union between the Saints and the Indians. Together they would move on the wicked world and “put to flight those that have Oprest them.”3 The intent of the golden plates was to bring knowledge of their ancestors to American Indians. This would bring them to believe in Mormon gospel and Jesus Christ. Until changes made in 1981, the Book of Mormon assured the dark-skinned Indians that once they repented and became righteous, they would become “a white and delightsome people again.”4
Wrote Historian Will Bagley, “The Mormons faced no greater challenge than that posed by their Ute, Paiute, Goshute and Shoshoni neighbors.”5 As they settled the fertile valleys, they pushed out the Indians.
The act creating Utah Territory specified that the governor would serve as ex-officio superintendent of Indian affairs. That would be Brigham Young. The federal government appointed three agents in 1851 to work under Brigham's supervision.6
The agents didn't like the way Brigham did things with the Indians. The Mormons “at first conciliated the Indians by kind treatment; but once they got a foothold they began to force their way. The consequence was a war with the Indians, and in many instances, a most brutal butchery,” wrote subagent Jacob H. Holeman.7 “At best, any money Brigham spent on the Indians was to proselytize them and to promote the interests of the church,” according to Holeman.8
John D. Lee's angry memoir says, “The only money [Brigham] ever spent on the Indians was when we were at war with them.”9
And yet, Mormons had come to believe that the Indians, the bad Lamanites who fought the good Nephites in the Book of Mormon, would be their foremost allies. Indians would be a fearsome weapon against their enemies. Within six months of Joseph Smith's death the Saints were asserting that Indians would play a major role in avenging the death of Joseph.10
Brigham vowed that the Mormons and the Indians would join forces and bring vengeance on the persecuting gentiles, a theme to which he would return again and again for the first ten years the settlers were in Utah.11 The Indians viewed
the Mormons as visitors, bound to leave sooner or later.
In southern Utah lived a tribal band called Nuwuvi or Paiutes. Most of them lived along the Santa Clara, Virgin, and Muddy Rivers. They lived in small family groups raising corn, squash, beans, melons, sunflowers, gourds, and wheat in small plots. Hunter-gatherers, they moved with the seasons.12
Magotsu Creek, which flows through Mountain Meadows in the southwest corner of Utah, was named for the country of the Matootshats band of Paiutes, who headquartered south of Mountain Meadows at a hot spring near present Veyo. We will return to them later.
Brigham never forgot the prophecy of the Indians partnering to defeat the gentiles, but he declared that they were “hopeless cases and would die and be damned.”13 At a meeting of the Council of Fifty on May 12, 1849, he dropped any pretext of a practical approach to the local tribes. They would never be converted to Mormonism. It didn't matter “whether they kill one another off or Some body else do[es] it.”14 In fact, he wanted them moved to a reservation, preferably on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada some three hundred miles west.15
The Indians were soon the subject of complaints by the Mormons. Campsites and water sources were points of conflict, and skirmishes soon turned bloody.
Brigham sent John M. Higbee and thirty-three men to build a settlement at the mouth of the Provo River where it entered Utah Lake. This was traditional Ute fishing ground. A young Indian met the settlers and blocked the trail with his horse. The settlers pleaded that they should try to live together. The young Indian made them take a vow that the white people would not take any of their rights or try to drive them away.16
The settlers broke the vow. Tensions grew, and several Mormon men brutally killed an Indian who caught them poaching a deer. At a council held in Great Salt Lake City on January 31, 1850, Parley Pratt, whom we will visit later in this narrative, thought it would be best to kill all the Indians. It was put to a vote. Every hand went up in a vote to exterminate them.17
Shortly after, a battle raged on the shore of Utah Lake. One Mormon man was fatally shot, and another man was wounded. Seventeen Ute prisoners were executed on the ice of Utah Lake, and their wives and children were taken as slaves.18
Some idea of the treatment of some Indians was noted in the Deseret News of 1852, part of a series of letters by Mrs. B. G. Ferris, a Mormon:
They [the settlers] came to an open rupture with these miserable natives in the winter of 1850, and killed some of them in various skirmishes. He said it was very similar to chasing wild beasts, and that they would often stumble upon the poor creatures while burrowed, as it were, in the thick grass and concealed in clumps of willows. They captured quite a number of squaws and children, and provided for them till spring—some of the squaws, however, stole away and lay in the hot-spring lake, near the city, to keep warm—just keeping their heads out of water, and in this condition they would catch the wild fowl swimming around them and devour them raw.19
Brigham acknowledged that the Mormons were on Indian land, using their water and grass, and growing crops on Indian soil. But his policy toward the Indians continued unabated. Indians could surrender and supplicate or resist and be killed.
In late 1849 Apostle Parley Pratt was sent south from Great Salt Lake City with twelve wagons and fifty-two Mormon men. With him was a diarist, Isaac C. Haight, who noted that the Ute Indian response to a measles epidemic was to shoot “a small Pah Uta boy as a sacrifice that the sickness must stop.”20 As with others, we will return to Haight and his role at Mountain Meadows in 1857.
The party crossed over the rim of the Great Basin into a landscape the likes of which the Mormons had never seen before. It was rough, with jumbled mountains, grassless plains, and perpendicular beds of sandstone.21
Then they ascended the Santa Clara River from its confluence with the Virgin River, coming upon Mountain Meadows. It was fertile, studded with pinion and juniper trees, a fine, clear stream, and rolling pastures. Haight called it one of the loveliest places in the Great Basin.22
The Paiutes in the area were solicitous. They offered to trade a vast tract of land for a knife if the Mormons would settle among them and help them raise corn, although the Mormons found dams, irrigated fields, and stands of corn eleven feet high.23
After returning to Salt Lake, Pratt told Brigham of the nearby abundance of iron ore and coal, resulting in Brigham dispatching 120 men to establish the Iron Mission under the command of Apostle George A. Smith, a cousin of the prophet Joseph. He'd earned the affectionate rubric of the “Potato Saint” during the difficult winter of 1847 when he discovered that raw potatoes would prevent scurvy among the shivering pioneers at Winter Quarters.24 He looked like a potato himself, tall, weighing over three hundred pounds, round, and awkward. George A Smith was also known for his fiery rhetoric that could inflame the passions of the faithful. In spite of his inability to mount a horse, he would eventually be named brigadier general commanding the Nauvoo Legion in southern Utah. The Potato Saint knew he was ugly, but he was also vain. Outlandish clothes and a poor-fitting red wig completed his exhibition of bad taste. When he took out his false teeth, observant Indians dubbed him “Man Who Comes Apart.” George would also play a role in the drama that would unfold in the next few years.25
The Iron Mission settlers founded a village called Cedar Fort, which would in a short time be renamed Cedar City. They also founded and built Fort Louisa, which would become Parowan. Nearby coal outcroppings were mined to smelt the iron ore.26
Pretty much everyone hated being part of the Iron Mission. John D. Lee offered $2,000 to be released from the mission, but Brigham declined it.27
The Iron Mission turned out a low-grade pig iron beginning in 1852. For six more years they struggled to produce iron under the direction of the inexperienced but willing Isaac Haight. They were never able to produce enough to make the mission economical.28
It brought the Mormons into closer contact with the Southern Paiutes, who were grateful when the Mormons halted the ceaseless raids on their band by Utes and Mexicans looking for slaves. In a kind of quid pro quo, Brigham decided that he would send missionaries to the Southern Paiutes.29
Dimick Huntington was among those charged with learning the Southern Paiute dialect. Huntington had solid ties to the Mormon leadership. He had sealed (married) two of his sisters to Joseph Smith. The sisters married Brigham Young and Apostle Heber Kimball after Joseph's death. In 1857 Huntington was the official federal government interpreter for the territory, a job that paid the princely sum of five dollars a day in gold. Huntington handled Brigham's “most dangerous and delicate” Indian problems.30
Brigham, as Indian superintendent for the territory, also appointed John D. Lee as farmer to the Indians, a federal government post requiring that Lee protect the Southern Paiutes and emigrants from each other. He was to teach them to farm and distribute goods to the Indians.31
John D. Lee was born in Illinois in 1812. He had a difficult early life. He was left to a nurse after his alcoholic father abandoned him in 1815, and was cared for by Catholic relatives who took his inheritance (such as it was). At sixteen he became a frontier courier and then a fireman on a Mississippi boat. He fought in the Black Hawk War.32
Married in 1833, he was reading the Book of Mormon the night of his daughter's death of scarlet fever in 1837. He moved from Fayette County, Illinois, to be with Joseph Smith in Far West, Missouri. Far West became the headquarters of the Latter-day Saint movement in early 1838 when the prophet Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon relocated to the town from the previous church headquarters in Kirtland, Ohio. After Lee became a Mormon, he went on a mission in 1838, preaching the gospel in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee and converting entire families and congregations with his eloquence and passion.33
When the anti-Mormon religious wars broke out in Missouri in 1838, Lee heard Rigdon's impassioned speech threatening a “war of extermination.”34 Like other true believers, Lee felt the Mormons were invincible because of the righteous
ness of their cause. When Brigham took over as president after Joseph's death, Lee was one of those appointed to replace Brigham's opponents on the Council of Fifty. He became clerk for the council as it planned the move west.
Later that year Lee received his patriarchal blessing, a special benediction that traces the recipient's lineage from the Tribes of Israel. It is also a blessing in which the future of its supplicant is predicted.35
For Lee, he would have luxuries and power over his enemies. If he lived righteously he would rise on the morning of the first day of the resurrection.36
But as Bagley noted, “The blessing carried an odd qualifier: the only act that could prevent Lee's salvation was ‘the shedding of innocent blood or consenting thereto.’”37
Through the Law of Adoption, a Mormon temple ritual (since abandoned), every member of the priesthood was adopted into the extended families of Mormon authorities. Lee had been sealed to Brigham and in pride began signing his name “J. D. L. Young.”38
Patriarchal blessing or not, Lee went into the Nauvoo Temple in 1845 for a “second anointing,”39 which was ever more sacrosanct than the standard endowment. Brigham had added a Pledge of Vengeance to the second anointing ceremony, one in which Lee promised, “I will pray, and never cease to pray, and never cease to importune high heaven to avenge the blood of the Prophets on this nation, and I will teach this to my children, and my children's children unto the third and fourth generations.”40
In this ceremony, Brigham would “swear by the eternal Heavens…I have unsheathed my sword, and will never return it until the blood of the Prophet Joseph and Hyrum, and those who were slain in Missouri, is avenged.”41 For Lee this oath was the more sacred obligation than his patriarchal blessing.