by James W. Ure
In 1866, Utah again heard threats of a possible invasion by the federal government—this time over a case of adultery. In March, Newton Brassfield was shot after he married Mary Emma Hill, who was already married to a polygamous Mormon, Archibald M. Hill, then absent on a church mission. Since the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act had been passed by Congress in 1862, US judge Solomon McCurdy had told Mrs. Hill that her plural marriage's illegality rendered a divorce unnecessary.30
Brassfield, a gentile from Nevada, had been arrested and released following an attempt by him and Mary Emma to remove household items from the Hill residence. Mr. Hill's Mormon friends threatened them. Brassfield threatened back. He was arrested, placed in jail, then released on bail. When Brassfield was about to enter his hotel with US marshal J. K. Hosmer, a gunmen stepped out of the shadows and shot Brassfield. The assailant was pursued by police but escaped. Brassfield died forty-five minutes later.31
Brigham denied any involvement by the church, but at an April conference he condoned the murder. If he were absent from his home, he would “rejoice to know that I had friends there to protect and guard the virtue of my household.”32
This statement stung the angry anti-Brighamites.
General Connor's California Volunteers had been scheduled to leave Camp Douglas. Judge McCurdy wired military authorities of the rising conflict in the Brassfield affair. General Ulysses S. Grant instructed General William T. Sherman in St. Louis to keep the volunteers from Utah.33
Sherman sent Brigham a scorching telegram: “Our country is now full of tried and experienced soldiers who would be pleased, at fair opportunity, to avenge any wrongs you may commit against our citizens.”34 Brigham claimed he knew nothing of the murder but said any man had the right to take vengeance on a seducer of his wife.
Six months later Dr. John Robinson was killed after he attempted to file a claim for land within the expansive Great Salt Lake City limits. He built a shack on his claim, and the police tore it down. Robinson went to court to challenge the city's charter. On October 22, 1866, someone knocked on Robinson's door claiming his brother needed medical help. He stepped from his house and was shot. Colonel Connor, named a brevet major general after the end of the Civil War, immediately said Brigham's Destroying Angels had killed Dr. Robinson.35
Brigham once again said he had no knowledge of who might commit such a dastardly deed, but in his usual fashion added, “If they jump my claims here, I shall be very apt to give them a preemption right that will last them to the last resurrection.”36
“Young's blunt talk increased suspicion that the church hierarchy sanctioned anti-gentile violence.”37 As an example of such talk, Brigham had a proposition for certain senators and congressmen who were particularly anti-Mormon. He wrote to William Hooper, Utah's congressional delegate, “I have a proposition to make to the [senators]…when my old niger has been dead one year, if they will wash their faces clean they may kiss his ass.”38
Non-Mormons hoped that the coming of the railroad would dilute Brigham's power as more gentiles poured in to work the mines and settle the territory. Yet Brigham welcomed the transcontinental railroad in spite of fears that it would bring more non-Mormons. He obtained contracts for the brethren to dig grades for both the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific. He liked the money, and he saw it as a way of keeping out the rascals he expected to comprise the construction crews. It would help shore up the economy, since Brigham and the church were having financial difficulties. (Brigham was habitually late in paying his bills.) Better yet, the railroad would bring more Mormon converts and they would be able to come to Utah more cheaply.39
The beginning is the most important part of the work.
—Plato
The Union Vedette ceased printing in 1867, much to the relief of the church. Gone were the advertisements for liquor and burlesque and bear meat dinners at Wilton and Taylor's Saloon. Gone was the blatant Brigham bashing and constant harping on polygamy, since one of the two relics of barbarism, slavery, had been resolved. The second relic, polygamy, remained alive and flopping on the table.1
Orvin Nebeker “O. N.” Malmquist (1899–1985), the Salt Lake Tribune's political editor for nearly fifty years, would author a history of Utah's biggest newspaper.2 Known as “Quist,” he wrote, “There is abundant evidence to show that it was the economic issue more than anything else which led to the establishment of the Tribune. And if there was one facet of church economic policy which triggered the launching of the newspaper it was the organization of Zions Cooperative Mercantile Institution.”3
Brigham's dictatorial methods had failed to eliminate the gentile merchants who, he believed, sucked money from the Mormon economy and sent it out of state. Nor had he been able to curb what he considered were the high prices set by many Mormon merchants.4
In 1868 he hit upon a church-controlled, cooperative economic system, which soon became known by its initials, ZCMI, or just as “ZC.” By 1869, ZCMI retail stores began dotting the territory, swallowing up independent merchants by buying their stock.5 Brigham wanted it known that it was a holy business and essential for every Mormon to buy from ZCMI.
Merchants who were investor members of the cooperative displayed a sign with the ZCMI logo with a depiction of an all-seeing eye and the tagline, “Holiness to the Lord.”6
How could the faithful now shop elsewhere?
There was great risk and significant capital required for ZCMI. There was also controversy, especially from the economic elite of Mormon society.7 Cooperatives elsewhere had failed as city wholesalers undercut their prices.
Halt the cooperative?
No. Brigham Young was as steely as he was intrepid. He was unmoved by the counsel of many of his brethren. A prosperous Mormon, William Godbe, was among those who felt Brigham's dictatorial powers regarding ZCMI had overstepped the bounds of competitive capitalism. Mormon Elias Harrison shared Godbe's views. They also believed Brigham had lost sight of Joseph's spiritual piety, consumed as he was with what would today be called job creation. Godbe and Harrison were, however, in favor of keeping polygamy.8
In the spirit of the visions of Joseph Smith, Godbe and Harrison traveled to New York City and visited a spiritual medium named Charles Foster. Through him they received messages from such diverse persons as the German naturalist Alexander Humboldt, the late Mormon apostle Heber C. Kimball, and Jesus Christ. The spirits summoned by Foster were said to have written their names in blood on his hand or arm.9
Godbe and Harrison came away believing they had been chosen to reform the LDS Church by casting off the yoke of Brigham Young. Now it was time to spread the word.
In January 1868, the Utah Magazine appeared on the scene. Its publishers were Harrison and Godbe, and it was edited by Harrison, Edward W. Tullidge, and John Tullidge. At first it was condoned by the church with the Deseret News greeting it as an “enterprise worthy of commendation and support.”10
The church powers were unaware that Godbe and Harrison had some ideas of their own about how Utah's economy and ecclesiastical matters should be run. The two men quietly gathered a following of fellow dissenters who would soon be called New Movement Mormons, or Godbeites.11
Brigham was completely in the dark about this new threat. He presided over the plural marriage of Godbe to Charlotte Cobb, Brigham's stepdaughter by Augusta Adams, as late as the spring of 1869.12
By autumn of 1869 the Utah Magazine began to express the views of its owners more openly. “Think freely and think forever,” wrote Harrison, saying Utahns were letting the Mormon priesthood do their thinking for them.13 Harrison wrote an editorial:
Common sense would seem to say, develop that first which will bring money from other Territories and States, and then these factories and home industries which will supply ourselves will have something to lean upon…we live in a country destitute of the rich advantages of other lands—a country with few natural facilities beyond the great mass of minerals in its bowels. These are our main financial hopes. To this our futur
e factories must look for their life, our farmers, our stock, wool and cotton raisers for their sale, and our mechanics for suitable wages. Let these resources be developed and we have a future before us as bright as any country beneath the sun.14
The magazine also editorialized about Brigham's cottage industries, saying that only the vigorous development of mining could provide Utah's citizens with the currency they had long needed.
This would not do. The new publication found itself in collision with Brigham Young's wishes. The Deseret News reversed its positive opinion about Utah Magazine and ran an editorial on October 26, 1869, signed by Brigham, George A. Smith, Daniel H. Wells, Orson Pratt, Wilford Woodruff, George Q. Cannon, and Joseph F. Smith—the biggest guns in Mormonism and the leaders of the church:
The Utah Magazine is a periodical that in its spirit and teachings is directly opposed to the work of God. Instead of building up Zion and uniting the people, its teachings, if carried out, would destroy Zion, divide the people asunder and drive their Holy Priesthood from the earth. Therefore, we say to our Brethren and Sisters in Every place, the Utah Magazine is not a periodical suitable for circulation among or perusal by them and should not be sustained by Latter-day Saints. We hope this will be sufficient, without ever having to refer to it again.15
Brigham simmered, then unexpectedly invited Godbe and Harrison to explain themselves. He heard Godbe and Harrison before an ecclesiastical court. He listened to their opposition to his economic plans for the territory. His response was that he did not want his pastoral settlers distracted by mining, nor did he want an influx of outsiders who might tip the political and cultural scales. Brigham also perceived a threat in the spiritualism Godbe and Harrison had used as guidance on their New York trip: spiritualism was not revelation. Only Brigham was a revelator.16
The two men were a threat to his leadership.
The founders of the Utah Magazine were excommunicated for their deviation from Brigham's word. In a last hurrah, the editors and publishers announced,
The present volume of this magazine was commenced by the publishers with the express purpose of presenting before the people of Utah some of the broad and grand conceptions of God and humanity which they felt themselves called upon to present…. In the face of special prohibition by the absolute ecclesiastical authority which has prevailed in this territory, it has run its course, a silent preacher of advanced thoughts…and a steady opponent of absolutism in Church and State. It is now withdrawn to make way for a more prominent advocate of the same great principle.17
Undaunted by their banishment from the church, Godbe and Harrison founded the New Movement and attracted a small band of adherents, including some of the more well-to-do artistic and intellectual Mormons, quite unlike the dissident, murdered Morrisites of 1862.18
The New Movement founders of the Utah Magazine were already thinking about a new publication. New Movement Mormons saw ZCMI as the consummate act to enclose the Mormon economic system. To gentile businessmen it was a threat to their very existence. To the noncooperating Mormon merchants it was an ultimatum to join or leave the territory.
Brigham told the noncooperators, “[W]e shall leave them out in the cold, the same as the gentiles, and their goods shall rot upon their shelves.”19
The weekly Mormon Tribune made its first appearance on New Year's Day 1870. Its publishers were Godbe and Harrison. Managing editor was a newcomer to the territory, Oscar G. Sawyer. Associate editors were Edward Tullidge and George W. Crouch.20
It followed the same spiritual and economic philosophies of its Utah Magazine predecessor. By now, the mining camps were burgeoning in the canyons of the territory, and to the displeasure of Brigham, the Mormon Tribune followed the news of the mines. Editorials emphasized the need for cooperation between Mormons and non-Mormons and argued for freeing politics of control by the church. In spite of woeful finances and internal schisms, readership grew. The Tribune became a daily newspaper on April 15, 1871. It dropped the word “Mormon” from its masthead when it realized it might limit its readership.21
And what happened to the territorial economy after ZCMI was founded? The business of gentile merchants at first went into decline. Some left the territory. The Walker brothers, merchants who had earlier left the church over Brigham's tithing demands, claimed sales dropped from $60,000 in one month to $5,000. The Auerbach brothers claimed a similar drop. Tax records for the era indicate no such drop. It is possible that at least these two merchants may have benefited from other non-Mormon merchants leaving the territory.22
Both firms told Western historian H. H. Bancroft that they offered to sell to the church at fifty cents on the dollar and leave the territory, but that the offer was declined. By the time the 1869 LDS Semi-Annual Conference rolled around the non-Mormon stores were once again packed by Mormons.23
The world is not ready for some people when they show up, but that shouldn't stop anyone.
—Ashly Lorenzana
The new daily Salt Lake Tribune became “pungently anti-Mormon” under editor Oscar G. Sawyer, an experienced journalist trained in sensationalism by James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald Tribune.1
Harrison resigned as publisher, and Tullidge later wrote that “a Utah journalist ought to have perceived the unfitness of the New York Herald Bohemian to take the editor-in-chiefship of the Mormon Tribune.”2
Sawyer's editorship created schisms within schisms among the Mormons who had founded the paper and the gentiles who cooperated with the New Movement Mormons to effect economic change in the territory. There was a clash of philosophy. The excommunicated Mormon publishers did not consider themselves anti-Mormon. They just wanted things to change.
The non-Mormons and editor Sawyer believed the aim of the paper was to crush Brigham Young's economic and political grip on his people—nothing less. And the way they believed that could be done was by bringing to bear the power of the federal government.3
Sawyer and his adherents gained the upper hand in the editorial practices of the Tribune. Since sex provides sensational reading and was sure to draw public attention from the rest of the country, Sawyer lobbed plenty of sensational polygamy stories to the paper's readers. When referring to the “Utah problem” in Congress, it was understood this was polygamy. It was polygamy as much as politics that brought successive threats of invasion by government troops.4
Meanwhile Judge Dennis J. Toohy, a shareholder in the Tribune, added fuel to the fire of conflict. He gave a speech to a political party meeting, saying, “Here in Utah…sensuality and crime have found a congenial home; here immorality has been lifted up where virtue ought to reign. If I had time I could prove the leaders, not the people, were to blame for this.”5
Meanwhile, editor Sawyer, to the alarm of the founding publishers, was using plural marriage to inflame opposition to the Mormons on all levels.6 A powder keg sat within the staff of the Tribune. Editorials were erratic, depending on whether the bombastic Sawyer wrote them or whether one of the founders wrote them. It was a tussle in typography and must have left readers confused.
The keg blew when it was learned that Sawyer had allowed Chief Justice James B. McKean to write editorials in the Tribune sustaining his own decisions. McKean was hated by both the conventional Mormons and the New Mormons.7 The New Mormon founders called a meeting.
Harrison accused Sawyer of having given short shrift to maintaining the cause of freedom and the rights of all classes, without distinction of Mormon or gentile. He said Sawyer had been brought to Salt Lake City (the “Great” was dropped from its name in 1868) by Godbe with the
expectation that he would carry out the design of its founders; that he, Harrison, had resigned the editorship, and control of the paper, to give himself a temporary rest, with the said understanding that Mr. Sawyer, having obtained control, had turned the Salt Lake Tribune in a new direction and given it other aims and purposes from those for which it was established; but above all he impeached the managing editor on the specific charge
of having permitted Judge McKean to write editorials sustaining his own decisions.8
Sawyer told the directors they were mere merchants and knew nothing about journalism. Maybe so, but they knew how to terminate an employee. Facing this, Sawyer resigned, citing journalistic incompatibility between himself and the directors.9 The other directors of the Salt Lake Tribune, some of them non-Mormon, felt it was hopeless to attack some policies of the church and defend others.
Financial support withered.
The intelligent, artistic New Movement Mormons who had started Utah Weekly, later the Mormon Tribune, and finally the Salt Lake Tribune had underestimated Brigham Young. The prophet and president of the church was tough and pragmatic. He was beloved by devout Mormons, admired by many non-Mormons in the territory, and grudgingly respected by many who hated him.10
The New Mormons may have failed financially, but they were visionary when it came to seeing a time when Utah would enjoy a more open economic policy and a compromise by the church over polygamy.
In 1873, the original excommunicated founders sold the economically stressed Tribune to three men from Kansas: Fred Lockley, George F. Prescott, and A. M. Hamilton. The general manager was Fred T. Perris. They were dubbed the “Border Ruffians” by the Mormons, an insult to three Union veterans of the Civil War.11
The church ordered its readers not to subscribe. They did, anyway. They could read what the church was saying about itself in the church-published Deseret News. What they wanted to know was what the world was saying about the church, and only the Tribune provided that.
During the ensuing years the Tribune would frequently call for a full investigation into the shadowy Mormon explanations of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, suspecting that there was a dark underbelly to the story. Mormons clung to their chimera that the greatest single massacre of an overland wagon train in Western history was caused by Paiute Indians, incited to violence by the Fancher party.12