by James W. Ure
After arriving in Utah, Lee was faced with the previously mentioned dilemma over whether to surrender Emmeline Free to Brigham. Brigham promised Lee that if he'd give up Emmeline, he would uphold Lee “in time and eternity.”42 He was told he would sit at Brigham's right hand in his kingdom. Lee loved Emmeline dearly, according to Bagley, and he reluctantly gave her up to Brigham. She became one of Brigham's favorite wives and bore him ten children.43
Bowed but unbroken, Lee took Louisa Free, sister to Emmeline, as one of his nineteen wives. Lee later boasted to George Grant, like a teenage boy, that “he frigged Louisa Free 20 times in one night.”44 He carried on about his sexual prowess, and Grant would later testify that Lee “believed he had the Devil in him.”45 Lee's nineteen wives would give him fifty-six children.
As we shall see, Lee's role as Indian agent would have fatal consequences.
There were sixteen bands of Southern Paiutes as Lee's wards. The largest, the Tonaquints, who numbered about eight hundred, lived on the Santa Clara River. The nominal leader of this band was Tutsegabit. Most of them were older, their children having been taken as slaves by the Utes and Mexicans or otherwise sold.46 The Mormons may have purchased some, as indicated by this ad from the Deseret News of September 18, 1852:
RAN AWAY from the Subscriber, an Indian BOY, about 12 years old; speaks a little English. Supposed to have gone back to Parowan. Any person giving information where said Boy may be found, or returning him to me, shall be liberally rewarded.
—CHRISTOPHER MERKLEY, 19TH Ward.47
The disorganized Paiutes fought among themselves, sometimes brutally. Jacob Hamblin, a pioneer Mormon living in southern Utah, told how the Santa Clara band avenged the killing of one of their women by the Moapats: “[They] took a Moapats woman, fastened her to a tree, and burnt her.”48
Hamblin was liked by the Southern Paiutes. He made mush for them. He danced with them. He was a very effective missionary, and Brigham felt they had established a rapport.
Tutsegabit wasn't so sure: “We cannot be good, we must be Paiutes…We want to follow our old customs.”49
Outsiders visiting the Southern Paiutes saw ominous signs of an alliance with the Mormons. Lieutenant Sylvester Mowry wrote that the Santa Clara band had arms and ammunition, including good rifles. Two years before they had had only bows and arrows. Mowry believed that unless the federal government took steps, the Southern Paiutes would become formidable allies of the Mormons.50
In fact, Brigham was not arming all the Indians, only a select few to curry favor. He had laid down the law to the Mormons that guns, powder, and lead were not to be given by the Mormons to any Indians.51
The success of the Southern Indian Mission led Brigham to hope that other tribes could be converted and consolidated in the effort to overthrow the federal government in the coming apocalypse. Missionaries were sent to the Crow, Cheyenne, Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Hopi, Shoshoni, Navajo, Bannock, and Nez Perce, in addition to all of the Utah tribes.52
Brigham said, “The day has come to turn the key of the gospel against the gentiles and open it to the remnant of Israel.”53
The blood boiled still in some Saints who remembered their treatment in Nauvoo and in Missouri. Patriarchal blessings—blessings bestowed upon the worthy—promised they would lead Indian armies in the Last Days and avenge the blood of the prophets.
As Bagley wrote, “For the Saints, the war at the end of time had already begun.”54
[H]ostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.
—Napoléon Bonaparte
WANTED, at our office, flour, wheat, cornmeal, butter, cheese, tallow and pork in exchange for the NEWS.1
So read the first advertisement in the first issue of the Mormon Church's Deseret News, published on June 15, 1850. This time Brigham would control the news the church saw fit to disseminate. There would be no more runaway dissidents scribbling on pages read by the faithful.
Nearly three years after the burning of the Nauvoo Expositor, the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, still at Winter Quarters, authorized William W. Phelps to buy a printing press to be taken to their new Great Basin home. Phelps went to Boston and bought a wrought-iron Ramage hand-press, type, and other equipment. In April 1849, the large, heavy press was loaded onto ox-drawn wagons and traveled along the Mormon Trail. In Great Salt Lake City it was set up on the church block just west of Brigham's Beehive and Lion Houses, and was first used to print legal documents necessary in setting up the provisional state of Deseret.2
“Deseret” is a term used in the Book of Mormon and is said to mean “honeybee” in the language of the Jaredites, who Mormons believe came to America about the time of the Tower of Babel's construction.3 The ubiquitous bee and hive are symbols of the church found on the state flag and on public buildings. Numerous businesses carry the name, signifying they are Mormon, or are soliciting Mormon business.
The first issue of the Deseret News was eight pages. It included the paper's prospectus, along with news from Congress and a report on the 1849 Christmas Eve fire in San Francisco. Its motto was “Truth and Liberty.” In the beginning it was published once a week on Saturdays. The subscription cost $2.50 for six months.4 Its first editor was Apostle Willard Richards, who had escaped unhurt from the Carthage jail when Joseph was killed.
The Ramage press was also set up so the News could print books, booklets, handbills, broadsides, etc. for paying customers and other publishers. The Saints donated old paper and cloth to be recycled into paper for the venture. In the summer of 1854 the first issues of the News were published on locally made paper. It was thick and gray. Eventually, Brigham would establish a Rag Gathering Mission and this helped keep the paper going, at least most of the time.5
Occasionally an extra would be published, usually displaying a sermon or edict considered important to the brethren.
With the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in the foothills of California's Sierra Nevada, Utah became a path heavily beaten by forty-niners headed for the placers and mines. For the impoverished pioneers it was both a bane and a blessing.
The bane: Brigham hated the effect the stream of travelers had on the community. It was hard to keep his flock from joining them. The visitors could be rowdy. Gentiles established businesses in Great Salt Lake City. Worse, disaffected brethren and some Mormon women left with the travelers for the Sierras. Too many brethren were talking of leaving for California, so the boss, as he was known with varying degrees of affection, came down hard.
“There were plenty of ‘devils’ in the valley…that deserved death and should leave before meeting their end,” he warned. “Gold seekers and fornicators, leave the valley…. [Y]ou are in danger of more than you think of.”6
Brigham was uneasy; he had expected to rule without interference from gentiles, non-Mormon settlers or the US government, yet he was inundated and his people were distracted during a time when he insisted they concentrate on farming and building a new Zion.
The blessing lay in the fact that the gold seekers had seven hundred desolate miles to travel from Salt Lake to Sutter's Mill and its gold-bearing hills, and they needed to resupply in Great Salt Lake City. The Mormons bought worn horses from the travelers for pennies on the dollar and sold fresh ones for greatly inflated prices. Storekeepers did a booming business selling foodstuffs, clothing, and tack to the stream of California-bound men. The hard currency could not have come at a better time, and it helped keep the creaky Utah economy going during a period of hardship.7
Brigham was set on keeping his flock in line and keeping them from the ills that accompanied the boom-and-bust of mining. The Great Basin was an Eden, he said, suitable for building a Mormon community based on agriculture and light manufacturing. He warned the Saints not to go mining. Self-sufficiency was of paramount importance, and he preached it regularly from the pulpit.8
“Gold will sink a man to hell,” he said.9
Brigham was an outstanding organizer, partly because with his left hand h
e held a carrot and in his right a stick.
By 1850 he had seen to the establishment of an education system, including the University of Utah. A substantial library was established. Mills were built on the creeks running into the valley, and experiments to make sugar and molasses from beets were proving successful. Spinning wheels and carding machines were turning out material for fabric; tanneries were making leather from beef, calf, sheep, and dog skins. Pottery was manufactured. After the difficult early years, when some Mormons resorted to foraging for wild-growing tubers and berries, large fields of grain yielded harvests to sustain the Saints with bread. A foundry was built.10
City fathers repealed all licenses for selling beer and intoxicating liquors. However, Brigham owned a distillery that put out a whiskey that Mark Twain called Valley Tan in his book Roughing It.11 Brigham considered it a medicine. The Word of Wisdom—that Saints shall drink no alcohol, tea, or coffee and shall smoke no tobacco—had only been loosely enforced until the Mormons arrived in the Great Basin. Under Brigham it would move from moderate use to abstinence. Brigham's distillery provided medicinal whiskey, but apparently some was consumed for sport.12
The tranquility of life in Utah was frequently interrupted by skirmishes with the Indians, especially the Utes under Chief Wakara (Walker). Wakara had organized a tribal cavalry and was skilled at raiding. He spoke English, as well as several Indian dialects. He raided as far west as El Cajon, California, where he stole hundreds—if not thousands—of horses.13
It was during this period that Captain John W. Gunnison's Pacific Railroad survey party was exploring west of Fillmore, Utah. On October 26, 1853, a band of Utes massacred Gunnison and eight of his twelve men. Searchers found the mutilated bodies and buried them at the site.14
Brigham urged settlers not to go into the canyons alone or “bye places where an Indian can lurk unseen by you, without first exploring and ascertaining that all is safe.”15
That same year Brigham broke ground for the Salt Lake Temple. Plans were made to dig a canal to carry building stone from a quarry twenty miles away, near the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon. It would take forty years for the completion of the building.16
The search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower
The LDS Church can never see its wounds as being self-inflicted. Therefore it has a history of scapegoating. An example was its Willie-Martin handcart party disaster.
Today you can drive on good highways about five hours from Salt Lake City to South Pass, Wyoming. This was the portal through which most western-bound wagon parties crossed the Continental Divide.
Leave South Pass and drive eight miles southeast on the Lewiston Road, a well-marked dirt track through rolling sagebrush hills marked with stands of aspen trees. Antelope bark if approached by humans on foot. Golden eagles soar overhead.
You'll arrive at the Willie Handcart Memorial site. Under US Bureau of Land Management supervision, it is maintained by the LDS Church, and members of the church do frequent reenactments of a trek that killed more than two hundred Mormons pulling handcarts. They died because of poor foresight and mismanagement.
Mormon converts, who lacked funds for wagons and oxen in order to come to Utah, were encouraged to use handcarts, beginning in 1856. About three thousand converts from England, Wales, and Scandinavia would make their way across the plains from Iowa City, Iowa (the terminus of the railroad), to Utah in ten different handcart companies. The church established its Perpetual Emigration Fund to provide money for poor emigrants, and Brigham advanced the idea of having the poorer converts come west by pulling handcarts.1 The cost to bring emigrants to Utah in this way was about one-third of the cost of wagons and teams of oxen or horses.
Built to Brigham Young's specifications, the handcarts had two wheels five feet in diameter and a single axle four and a half feet wide. Empty, each weighed about sixty pounds. Running along the sides of the bed were seven-foot pull shafts ending with a three-foot crossbar at the front. The crossbar allowed the carts to be pushed or pulled. Cargo was carried in a box about three feet by four feet with eight-inch walls. The handcarts generally carried up to 250 pounds of supplies and luggage, though they were capable of handling loads as heavy as five hundred pounds. The handcart companies were organized using the handcarts and sleeping tents as the primary units. Five persons were assigned per handcart, with each individual limited to seventeen pounds of clothing and bedding. Each round tent, supported by a center pole, housed twenty occupants and was supervised by a tent captain. Provisions for each group of one hundred emigrants were carried in an ox wagon.2
Two of the companies ran into trouble nearly from the beginning.
The Willie Company and the Martin Company got a late start. In early October the two companies reached Fort Laramie, Wyoming, where they expected to be restocked with provisions. There were no provisions there for them. They cut back food rations, hoping that their supplies would last until help could be sent from Utah. To lighten their loads, the Martin Company cut the luggage allowance to ten pounds per person, discarding clothing and blankets that soon would be desperately needed.3 A company of returning missionaries passed the party and reached Great Salt Lake City with a message of their distress. Brigham ordered the Saints to mount a rescue mission. On October 7, 1856, the first wagons headed east from Salt Lake to meet the two parties.
Early snow began to fall, fast and thick—a real blizzard that stopped the companies in their tracks. The Willie and Martin companies were running out of food. Temperatures were bitterly cold. The Willie Company was along the Sweetwater River approaching the Continental Divide near South Pass.
The members of the Willie Company began slaughtering the handful of broken-down cattle that still remained. Meanwhile the human death toll mounted.
On October 21 Brigham's advance rescue party reached the company and provided them with food and assistance. Half of the rescue party remained to assist the Willie Company while the other half pressed forward to assist the Martin Company.4
The difficulties of the handcart pioneers were not yet over. On October 23, the second day after the main rescue party had arrived, the Willie Company faced the most difficult section of the trail—the ascent up Rocky Ridge. The climb took place during a howling snowstorm through knee-deep snow. That night thirteen emigrants died.5
On October 19, the Martin Company was about 110 miles farther east, making its last crossing of the North Platte River near present-day Casper, Wyoming. Shortly after completing the crossing, the blizzard hit them. Many members of the company suffered from hypothermia or frostbite after wading through the frigid river. They set up camp at Red Bluffs, unable to continue forward through the snow.6
The Martin Company remained in their camp at Red Bluffs for nine days until three scouts finally arrived on October 28. By the time the scouts arrived, fifty-six members of the company had died. Three days later the main rescue party arrived and helped them on to Devil's Gate.7
George D. Grant, who headed the rescue party, reported to President Young,
It is not of much use for me to attempt to give a description of the situation of these people, for this you will learn from [others]; but you can imagine between five and six hundred men, women and children, worn down by drawing hand carts through snow and mud; fainting by the wayside; falling, chilled by the cold; children crying, their limbs stiffened by cold, their feet bleeding and some of them bare to snow and frost. The sight is almost too much for the stoutest of us; but we go on doing all we can, not doubting nor despairing.8
The rescue parties escorted the emigrants from both companies to Utah through more snow and severe weather, and the handcart pioneers continued to suffer death from disease and exposure. When the Willie Company arrived in Great Salt Lake City on November 9, sixty-eight members of the company had lost their lives.9
The Martin Company arrived in Great Salt Lake City on November 30; at least 145 members of the compan
y had died. Many of the survivors had to have fingers, toes, or limbs amputated due to severe frostbite.10
Who was to blame?
Writer Wallace Stegner described the inadequate planning and imprudent decisions leading to the tragedy in his Gathering of Zion:
In urging the method upon Europe's poor, Brigham and the priesthood would over-reach themselves; in shepherding them from Liverpool to the valley, the ordinarily reliable missionary and emigration organization would break down at several critical points; in accepting the assurances of their leaders and the wishful importunities of their own hope, the emigrants would commit themselves to greater sacrifices than even the Nauvoo refugees; and in rallying from compound fatal error to bring the survivors in, the priesthood and the people of Mormondom would show themselves at their compassionate and efficient best.11
Brigham's misbegotten instructions for the emigrants to use handcarts to make their way west resulted in the deaths of more than two hundred men, women, and children.
While the Willie and Martin companies were still making their way to safety, Brigham Young responded to criticism of his own leadership by rebuking his Mormons. In a speech delivered in the Salt Lake Tabernacle on November 2, 1856, we have an example of the angry Brigham berating his critics:
If any man or woman complains of me or of my Counselors, in regard to the lateness of some of this season's immigration, let the curse of God be on them and blast their substance with mildew and destruction until their names are forgotten from the earth. I never thought of my being accused of advising or having anything to do with so late a start…. I do not believe that the biggest fool in this community could entertain the thought that all this loss of life, time and means was through the mismanagement of the First Presidency.12
Brigham, as author of the plan, was responsible. The buck had to stop somewhere. Ann Eliza Young, daughter of one of the men in charge of building the carts and later a divorced wife of Brigham Young, described her ex-husband's plan as a “cold-blooded, scheming, blasphemous policy.”13 Angry at Brigham and making money on the lecture circuit, Ann Eliza's motives must be considered.