by James W. Ure
The Saints played Cumming well that day, whipsawing him with threats and placating him with creamy words. Apostle John Taylor was interrupted by Brigham during his harsh remarks to Cumming. Brigham asked the apostle to tone down his rhetoric, “and not be so personal in your remarks.”35 The Saints roared their approval when Taylor insisted that “those troops must be withdrawn before we can have any officers palmed upon us.”36
Brigham followed with soothing words about “his friend Governor Cumming.”37 Later Brigham told Cumming that had it not been for his influence over the hotheads among the Saints, the people would have destroyed Johnston's army.
That evening they made certain Cumming received a report that Brigham was preparing to move south, to Sonora. Cumming would be a governor without a people.38 The tactical ruse created by Kane and implemented by Brigham succeeded brilliantly.
“I can do nothing here without your influence,” Cumming told Brigham.39 In a letter to the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Cumming identified Brigham Young as the head of the peace faction and even speculated that “some Mormons hate him in consequence perhaps of his pacific measures.”40
Kane, Cumming, and Brigham huddled and forged an understanding. They agreed that Brigham would not impede Johnston's oncoming army as it entered the valley. Cumming in turn promised to shield Brigham from Chief Justice Delana Eckels's grand jury.41 President Buchanan sought peace roughly along the lines of this understanding, offering “a free and full pardon to all who will submit themselves to the authority of the federal government.”42
Bearing these terms was a two-man peace commission that arrived in Great Salt Lake City on June 7, 1858, nine months after the Mountain Meadows slaughter. Brigham was reluctant to embrace the offer. He feared political subordination and likened it to slavery.43 Finally, however, he accepted the president's offer as long as the federal troops were billeted some distance from the city.
On June 13 Johnston's army resumed their march from Wyoming into Utah and headed down Echo Canyon, prepared to fight. Not a shot was fired. Two weeks later he entered Great Salt Lake City not to cheers and bands but to sullen emptiness. Per the agreement, he marched forty miles southwest of the city and established Camp Floyd, named for the secretary of war, near what is now the town of Fairfield, an old Pony Express stop. At the time it became the nation's largest military garrison.44
Brigham refused to acknowledge the arrival of Johnston's army as a defeat. In fact, as the soldiers marched through the city, Brigham considered it a victory.45
In a contrary view, Secretary of War John B. Floyd wrote in his annual report of 1858 that “[the Mormons’] bluster and bravado sank into whispers of terror and submission.”46 Brigham locked himself into his compound and set guards at the gates, perhaps fearing lynching at the hands of the soldiers. Whether depressed or fearful, he did not reemerge for several months. Many Mormons, disaffected by three years of poor harvests and perhaps feeling they'd been dealt with too harshly under the Reformation, took this time as an opportunity to leave the Great Basin.47
The federal government strained to establish a judiciary independent of the LDS Church.
Judge John Cradlebaugh, brought in with Johnston's army, was about to become Mormondom's new pain in the neck. Cradlebaugh, with his one good eye, perceived unpunished injustice as he set up at Camp Floyd. Some apostate Mormons in southern Utah were talking about what happened in the year before at Mountain Meadows. Cradlebaugh wanted to investigate the Mountain Meadows Massacre. He didn't believe the Mormon leader's cover story. Escorted by a military detachment he left Camp Floyd on March 7, 1859, and made his way to the massacre site. The party observed “human skulls, bones, and hair scattered about, and scraps of clothing of men, women and children.”48
The sworn silence of the Mormon perpetrators had not held up. Whispered names flew among the brethren, especially from the apostates, and found their way under cover of dark to the judge as he waited in Cedar City. Cradlebaugh issued warrants for forty alleged Mormon perpetrators. Abruptly, in response from Cumming, who was now basically Brigham's lackey, President Buchanan ordered that only the territorial governor could request army escorts for judicial investigations. It was justice diverted for Cradlebaugh and a win for Brigham's Cumming.49
However, Brevet Major James H. Carleton and the First Dragoons from Fort Tejon, California, had been dispatched to escort Camp Floyd's payroll, a $150,000 in gold, to the Utah military post and to investigate the Mountain Meadows Massacre along the way.50
Surgeon Charles Brewer “found mases of women's hair, children's bonnets, such as are generally used upon the plains, and pieces of lace, muslin, calicoes and other material, part of women's and children's apparel.” He reported that many of the skulls “bore marks of violence, being pierced with bullet holes, or shattered by heavy blows, or cleft with some sharp-edged instrument.”51
Carleton reported seeing several bones of what must have been very small children. He and his officers concluded the Paiutes were incapable of executing the massacre. They thought the Indians “a miserable set of root diggers.” Major Carleton argued that the entire massacre was done with skill, patience, and tenacity, which “only the Mormon settlers possessed.”52
Carleton's men measured the site and marked it. They buried some bones between 2,500 and 2,900 yards from the spring. They identified one cluster as women, the other as men, presumably from the clothes still clinging to the remains. Later, Jacob Hamblin appeared on the scene, coming from his ranch a few miles away. He showed Carleton a place in the sage where he said he had buried some bones. Carleton's men gathered the skeletons of thirty-four persons and interred them on the north side of the emigrant's rifle pit.53
Army surgeon Brewer wrote about what he saw, and Harper's Weekly published his account of the massacre, including a grisly illustration of wolves gnawing on bones. Now the world knew the name of Mountain Meadows.54
The soldiers built a conical monument fifty feet in circumference and topped it with a cedar cross bearing an inscription, “Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord.” The soldiers erected a slab of granite and chiseled into it, “Here 120 men, women and children were massacred in cold blood in early September, 1857. They were from Arkansas.”55
Carleton's fury surfaced in the report he made on the massacre at Mountain Meadows. “Who composed the jury to find the indictment? The brethren. Who are generally the witnesses before that jury? The brethren. Who are the officers and jailers who have custody of the prisoner before and after the trial? The brethren. Who are the members of the jury before whom the trial takes place? Still the brethren. Who are the witnesses for the prosecution, and, more particularly, who are those for the defense? The brethren.” He further complained that if a criminal should be found guilty, there was still the power of the pardon. And that came from the brethren—Brigham's lackey, Governor Cumming.56
Nothing had been settled between the government and the rebellious Mormons. Rifts remained. No one had been indicted for the Mountain Meadows Massacre. There would be continuing imbroglios with the army and the courts, but the church leaders managed to dance away from attempts to either prosecute or muzzle them.
Polygamy, equated by some with slavery, was still unresolved. Three years later Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston, now Brevet Brigadier General Johnston, would leave Camp Floyd to join the Southern cause in the Civil War, where he would be killed at Shiloh.57 The camp was shut down in 1861, and the three thousand soldiers still stationed there scattered to choose sides in the War Between the States.
Governor Cumming was in the thrall of Brigham and would do little to upset the status quo. Besides, Brigham had promised to deliver the miscreants at Mountain Meadows for trial. Cumming wanted to believe it and waited patiently.58 The Mormons were busy as ever concocting cover stories and tightening loose lips. Trouble was the recounting of events kept shifting, like shadows from a candle.
The erosion of Brigham's autocratic reign had begun,
but Utah as a theocracy would continue to thrive until this very day, in spite of the Salt Lake Tribune's attempts to curb it.
In every gold rush…the suppliers and service industries will gather up the dust while ninety-nine percent of the minors go home with empty pokes.
—John McPhee
While Mountain Meadows simmered on the back burner, Brigham returned to consolidating his power and to bringing more converts to the Great Basin.
In the late 1850s and early 1860s, Brigham sought to make his Mormons more self-reliant. He tried growing cotton, which for a time seemed promising, especially in light of the blockade of the South during the Civil War. While Brigham had quit using tobacco in 1860, he nevertheless calculated that by home growing tobacco he could keep $60,000 a year out of the hands of non-Mormon merchants.1
With initial reservation, Brigham had allowed the brethren to conduct limited trade with Johnston's soldiers at Camp Floyd. When it became apparent the army was a very good market, he went full out, selling timber and food. The result was an influx of cash to the economy.2
When the army abandoned the fort at the start of the Civil War, Brigham—through several intermediaries—bought the army's flour, iron, machinery, and many wagons and horses at a fraction of its real price. He attempted to create self-sufficiency while at the same time encouraging the government to build a transcontinental railroad that would go through Utah. It would make the process of settling converted Mormons in Utah faster and cheaper, and it might create trade favorable to the church.
Brigham continued to be staunchly anti-mining. He wanted the church to benefit from any mining strikes but was worried that if gold was discovered, it would bring an overwhelming number of non-Mormons into the state. He had watched Mormons lose power in western Nevada when the Comstock Lode brought thousands of miners into what had been Mormon turf. The miners soon consolidated political power. Congress created the Nevada Territory in 1861 as a result. Mining would “weld upon our necks chains of slavery, groveling dependence and utter overthrow,” Brigham complained.3
Brigham himself was hardly impoverished. He told journalist Horace Greeley in 1859 he was worth a quarter of a million dollars. This didn't include most of the assets of the church, which were held in trust by Brigham or in his name. He sometimes mixed his personal funds with church funds. Brigham lived in spacious houses and drove a fine carriage. He'd grown up poor; now he was rich and not afraid to display his wealth, in spite of the poverty of many Utahns. “God heaps property on me, and I am duty bound to take care of it,” he said.4
The Civil War brought this comment from Brigham: “I earnestly prayed for the success of both North & South.”5
President Buchanan had been replaced by Abraham Lincoln. General Johnston had left Camp Floyd to join the rebels. Governor Cumming, a Southerner, also left the state. Western territories and states, including California and Oregon, had many Confederate sympathizers, but Brigham had made clear that Utah wanted entry to the Union as a free state. He was firmly pro-Constitution, firmly anti-government, and said so in the first telegraph transmission that went from Utah in 1861.6
Wars have always kindled Mormon hopes for the millennium, and the Civil War seemed to bring the Last Days even closer. Joseph Smith purportedly prophesied that Mormons would step in and save the Constitution. The future spread of their kingdom was linked to God's destruction of the US government.7
Governor Cumming's replacement was on the way, and he was rumored to be Broughton Harris. Harris had been one of the original 1851 appointees and had fled the state in fear of Brigham's hammer, and Brigham expressed his hope that “if Harris did come the boys & dogs would piss on him.”8 Harris did not come and dogs waited.
Instead, the new Utah governor was John Dawson. Dawson blocked Brigham's renewed attempt to gain statehood and thus frustrated Brigham's desire to be elected governor. Dawson's tenure was the shortest of any territorial governor's, and it was because of a sex scandal. Mormon Albina Williams, the subject of Dawson's unwanted advances, ostensibly drove Governor Dawson off with a shovel and then presented the attempted seduction in an affidavit to Brigham.9
Dawson threatened to shoot the editor of the Deseret News, Thomas Stenhouse, if he published anything about Dawson's alleged desire to “sleep with Tom Williams['s] widow.”10 Dawson left Great Salt Lake City on New Year's Eve 1861. Stopping at Ephraim a hundred miles south of Salt Lake, he was badly beaten; some rumored that he was castrated.11
Editor Stenhouse would be excommunicated from Mormonism in 1871, and in a retaliatory exposé, he would claim Dawson had been entrapped by church leaders “in an offense.”12
Dawson was replaced by Stephen Harding, whose initial sympathies for the Mormons “evaporated within weeks.” He called the Mormons’ predictions of the downfall of the government “disloyal.”13
Utah impatiently waited for statehood. Congress rejected its petitions, based on polygamy and lingering questions about the Mountain Meadows episode.
Utah was strategically placed on the Overland Trail, and Brigham was ordered by President Lincoln to provide one hundred men to protect the mail route. Lot Smith, who had destroyed the army wagons in Wyoming in the Utah War of 1857, was named to lead the unit.14
However, in August 1862 Brigham received the unhappy word that a new detachment of federal troops from California would be sent to Utah. In anger and defensiveness, he withdrew Smith's services. Thus ended Utah's only contribution to the Civil War.15
In 1863, Colonel Patrick Edward Connor arrived in Great Salt Lake City with five hundred men of the Third Regiment, California Volunteer Infantry. His stated mission was to protect the route to California through the Utah Territory from Indian depredations. He was also in Utah to quell any possible Mormon “uprising.” Connor established Camp Douglas, named for Stephen A. Douglas, on a hill overlooking Great Salt Lake City. Connor, an outspoken Irishman, would become a hated Catholic symbol of authority over the Mormons.16 It may be apocryphal, but it was said that one of his first acts was to install a cannon aimed at Brigham Young's Beehive House three miles away.
Connor was among “the nation's foremost haters of Indians and Mormons.”17 He warned the Mormons that their treasonable sentiments would be harshly punished. On a foray into Great Salt Lake City he declared it “a community of traitors, murderers, fanatics and whores.” He called Brigham a despot and declared that he ordered the execution of “those disobedient to his will.” Connor said federal appointees were entirely powerless and lived in fear of Brigham's spies. He warned Washington of a Mormon attack and said if it should come, he would strike at the leaders of the church.18
On two occasions, believing Connor was about to arrest Brigham, signal flags were raised on the Beehive House. They summoned hundreds of armed Mormons who vastly outnumbered Connor's contingent.19
During the rest of the Civil War, Fort Douglas served as the headquarters of the District of Utah in the Department of the Pacific. Connor sent soldiers into the nearby hills seeking gold, silver, and other minerals, and also founded the first non-Mormon newspaper, the Union Vedette.
The Vedette was published from 1863 to 1867 and was an anti-Mormon voice.20
Said the Territorial Enterprise, published in Virginia City, Nevada, “The Vedette is the Wooden Horse entered into the Troy of Polygamy…. The Union Vedette of Salt Lake is a thorn in the side of Mormonism. It is a Daily journal, published under the guns of Camp Douglas, and the ‘Destroying Angels’ are not disposed to molest the audacious little sheet. It is the enemy of polygamy and the effects of its broadsides are beginning to be seen and felt. Were the Federal Troops to be withdrawn from Salt Lake City, the Vedette would not long be permitted to assault the sacred symbols of Mormonism.”21
Connor was looking for a fight, and Brigham roared his readiness to take up the challenge. However, cooler heads prevailed. Brigham was a fox as much as a lion.22 Accommodations were reluctantly made by both sides.
Lincoln's second inauguration b
rought a troop of Connor's soldiers and members of the Nauvoo Legion together in a march through the streets of Great Salt Lake City. A month later Brigham lowered the flags to half-mast following the assassination of the president, whom just two years before he had labeled “as wicked a man as ever lived.”23
Indian problems continued to beset the settlers, and in the natives Connor saw a foe he could fight with bullets and powder.
In January 1863, a Mormon scout led Connor's soldiers toward a Shoshoni village on the Little Bear River near the Utah-Idaho border. They attacked the sleeping village at dawn and in the end killed 235 men, women, and children. Connor declared a great victory, and even the Deseret News was supportive. In fact, it was a slaughter of innocents based on the report of a stolen cow.24
Today at the Fort Douglas Military Museum (the fort has largely been subsumed by the University of Utah), a tasteless paean to General Connor's massacre of Native Americans on the Little Bear is inscribed on a plaque: “In May, 1863, following his impressive victory at the Battle of the Bear River, Connor was appointed to Brigadier General.”25
At the museum Connor is described as the “Father of Utah Mining,” certainly accurate, but he is also described as “First Gentile of Utah.” The latter is accurate in a weakly symbolic sense. In 1854, seven years before Connor came to Utah, Julius and Fannie Brooks became one of Utah's early gentile families. They were Jewish.26
Connor encouraged the development of mining, and many of his California volunteers had experience in the gold fields. By 1863 the first claims had been filed in Bingham Canyon in the southwest corner of Great Salt Lake Valley.27 More claims would be staked in adjacent Tooele County and at Alta in Little Cottonwood Canyon, just twenty-nine miles from the Beehive and Lion Houses. Shortly thereafter, mines were opened in the Tintic District, eighty miles to the south, and Park City, thirty-three miles east.28 By 1864 non-Mormons were pouring into Utah to pry precious metals from Brigham's Great Basin Kingdom.29