Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  All the same, they would never have come through but for the great gifts of their Prophet. 15 For one thing, they were desperately poor. They had managed to escape from Nauvoo with a surprisingly large number of horses, mules, sheep and 30,000 head of cattle, but the Illinois mob had forced them to sell most of their property at minimal prices; sometimes there had been no buyers at all, even for a good house or a flock of sheep. Yet it was usually reckoned that a pioneer outfit, one adequate to carry a family from Independence to Oregon or California, cost at least 500 dollars. Until the passage of the Homestead Act in 1862, which in effect made the public lands free for the taking, money would also be needed to buy a farm on arrival, and even after that it might be some time before they could support themselves in the new country. Further supplies must be brought along against that contingency, or at least some good specie dollars. The Mormons, even the best-off among them, and after a year’s preparation, and allowing for the fact that they would not have to pay for the land they proposed to settle, were quite without resources on the necessary scale. So Young set about fund-raising. He encouraged the men to hire themselves out at any odd jobs as the wagon-train passed through the scantily settled Iowa prairie (i 846 was the year Iowa won its statehood). He put Mormon communities everywhere – Ohio, Mississippi, England – under contribution. He exploited the needs of the United States government: while the Mormons were on the march another war broke out, this time with Mexico (by this means the Americans meant to make sure of Texas, recently annexed from Mexico, and the whole of the Pacific West), and Young was happy to supply 500 indifferent soldiers to serve the country’s need. The Mormon battalion won no military glory, but the money paid it for wages and expenses was impounded by the Prophet and kept the emigration alive.

  Forward planning was essential. Young soon accepted the fact that the Saints would not get to the Great Basin in 1846. It would be as much as he could do to get them from the Mississippi to the Missouri. So his advance party was set to establishing a transit camp, Winter Quarters, near the site of the present city of Omaha, Nebraska, on the western bank of the Missouri. It was really a town, carefully laid out according to the Mormon passion for town-planning, with streets, mills, wells. The houses were not much – mostly mere huts; but they were better than nothing, though the mortality rate during the winter of 1846 – 7 continued to be appalling. Most important of all, fields were dug, tilled and sown: the Mormons from now on would have an independent and sure food-supply. Young saw to it that tillage was also undertaken, on a smaller scale, at the string of lesser camps that he planted across Iowa, though their prime purpose was to provide rest and repair facilities for the rearguard. (The last of the Saints did not get away from Nauvoo until September 1846, and they were the most destitute party of the lot, for the Gentiles grew ever bolder and more violent as the number of Mormons in Illinois dwindled.) Beyond all this it was necessary to learn all one could about the road to the Salt Lake and about conditions on its shores.

  That Young did not fail or falter in doing all this, as well as governing the whole Church of the Latter-Day Saints throughout the world and organizing the necessary lobbying at Washington, is proof enough of his abilities.

  The 1847 journey was much easier than that of the year before. After they left Winter Quarters they soon reached the river Platte, where they joined the Oregon Trail pioneered by more ordinary emigrants. The Trail went along the south bank; the Saints kept to the north, to avoid contamination from their fellow-adventurers. They had been able to wait until April and May before beginning their journey: that was the right time for crossing the Great Plains, when the grass was growing again for the cattle to eat. Indeed, Mormon discipline and training meant that they could now show the Gentiles a thing or two. Those unenlightened souls were fiercely individualistic, questioning all orders, or rather suggestions, of the wagon-train captain and constantly delaying themselves to indulge in another favourite occupation of the village on wheels, politics. (They had left state and federal elections behind them, but they were still Whigs and Democrats: so they organized elections of their own.) There was no such nonsense in Brigham Young’s flock. He had it well in hand, so it made excellent time; though like all pioneer parties it had to struggle against many difficulties, of which perhaps the white alkaline dust of the Wyoming desert was the worst. It damaged eyes, sometimes to blindness, corroded the skin, smothered the lungs and was a sure sign of bad water to poison men and beasts. Yet the advance party won through, crossed the Divide by South Pass (the Rockies equivalent of the Cumberland Gap: beyond it you drink from streams which flow to the Pacific) and reached the Salt Lake in July 1847. The main party ofthatyear’s migration got there in August. By winter, 1848, Brigham Young was settled in Salt Lake City, which was rapidly taking shape, with 5,000 Saints around him. And more were coming. For the next thirty years Deseret (as they named what the United States called Utah – the word is supposed to mean ‘land of the honeybee’) filled up steadily with Mormons, summoned by their Prophet from all quarters, especially England and Wales.

  The country could never have prospered but for Young’s last great innovation. It was obvious to all that the Great Basin could only yield crops if it was extensively irrigated.16 Young’s inspiration was to see how this might be arranged in Mormon fashion. Clearly the old law of riparian rights, by which the water of a stream or river belonged to the owners of the banks, would not do: such was the reckless, self-serving individualism of the American nineteenth-century temperament that it was quite certain that such rights, if conceded, even to Saints, would be abused. So Young laid it down firmly that ‘there shall be no private ownership of the streams that come out of the canyons, nor the timber that grows on the hills. These belong to the people: all the people.’ The system he adopted was not unlike that of the Spanish, first rulers of an empire in the West, or the ancient Egyptians. Water, it was laid down, would be allotted for their use, like land, by the community’s officials, who had to swear oaths to do so fairly. To construct and maintain irrigation ditches, the Mormon families were organized by their bishops into groups, the men of which were required to contribute their labour, in proportion to the amount of land they wanted to water; when the system was ready, water was allotted in proportion to the amount of labour contributed. The use of timber was regulated on the same principles, and strict discipline enforced its conservation.

  This arrangement worked excellently, and in modified form continues in the Mormon West to this day. It set an example which other Americans would have done well to heed: instead of which they persisted in the ruinous individualistic scramble until the coming of the New Deal. This was, in fact, the most successful co-operative experiment ever undertaken in the United States. It is impressive for many reasons, not least that it was managed with next to nothing in the way of outside capital. ‘We shall need no commerce with the nations,’ said Brigham Young. ‘I am determined to cut every thread of this kind and live free and independent, untrammelled by any of their detestable customs and practices.’ And when Brigham Young was determined on a thing, it happened.

  He was in many ways an unattractive character. He had an instinct for power, for the surest means of getting it, wielding it and cutting down rivals with it. Smith communed with God and His angels, but Young was more concerned with economic advantage, especially in his later years. He was also bloodthirsty in a peculiar, vicarious way. He often preached sermons that were naked incitements to violence; he was capable of dropping hints, much subtler than Henry IIs, when he wanted someone put out of the way. The result was a long series of murders, which he sometimes deplored, but could not talk about without a sort of gloating. Unpleasant; yet it must be allowed that even in Deseret the Mormons continued to suffer from the ferocious aggression of their fellow-Americans, and if Young defended his society in part by violence, so did many other nineteenth-century frontier communities, whether in mining camps or cattle towns like Dodge City. And the community which the heroic labour
s of Young and his followers built was unique. It was an achievement to compel respect.

  The rules laid down by Smith and revised by Young stood the test of time and use. There was always Young’s absolute authority to fall back on if Saints grew restless; for the rest of the time there were the common principles of social organization in the church to rely on. Joseph Smith had decreed an in-gathering of Saints, so the population of Deseret grew steadily: from 11,000 in 1850 to 87,000 in 1870. The Mormon village was as compact as the first Puritan villages in New England, which not only ensured that the church officials would be able to enforce their regulations, but also made possible the most efficient and egalitarian use of the common lands. The principle of stewardship on behalf of the Kingdom of God, a fundamental Mormon tenet, made the practice of co-operation easy; and the pursuit of prosperity was sanctioned by the duty of the Saints to redeem the earth from the primordial curse brought on it by Adam’s fall, and so to use it as to make it fruitful, like Eden, for man’s use. The emphasis on plain living (not only alcohol but also tea and coffee are forbidden indulgences) made sure that every spare penny was reinvested.

  It was a unique system, bordering on socialism, but still it was less un-American than, superficially, it seemed. The pioneers who were pressing westward to Oregon and California differed from the Saints in their individualism, but shared the belief that a better life could be found toward the setting sun: they too were looking for a white horse and self-sufficiency. Above all, the fundamental commitment to equality which was so essential a mark of nineteenth-century America was manifest among the Mormons. It was subordinate equality, enforced by authority; it was certainly not complete economic equality (Brigham Young believed in the parable of the talents) but the same might be said of the United States itself. As the irrigation regulations show, every Mormon was expected to contribute his labour to society, and every Mormon could claim a stake in return: land, security, prosperity. Nor were even the two most objectionable features of life at Salt Lake City without parallels. Brigham Young’s power as Prophet, Seer, Revelator, Trustee-in-Trust and, for four years, Governor of Utah Territory (appointed by President Fillmore) and the informal power he wielded over executive, legislature and judiciary resembled that of a big city boss, or of Huey Long in Louisiana in the 1930s. Even his use of violence, of which the most disgraceful episode was the Mountain Meadows massacre of 1857, when a party of Mormons commanded by one of Young’s closest henchmen slaughtered 120 Gentile men, women and children, can be likened to massacres of the Indians (the Sand Creek massacre occurred only seven years later). And to Americans in the 1850s polygamy was important, once the sexual titillation of it had been allowed for, because it raised exactly the same questions about states’ rights, individual rights and that instrument which so delicately combined the two, the US Constitution, as did slavery. Did not the philosophy of equal individual rights entitle the federal government to intervene to protect women and slaves alike? The new Republican party thought that it did, and in its 1856 platform denounced slavery and polygamy together as ‘twin relics of barbarism’. Or did the philosophy of states’ rights bar the government from meddling in state matters? That was the view of the South, which hoped to win the support of the Mormons for its own ‘peculiar institution’ if it showed itself ready to accept theirs. Brigham Young saw which side his bread was buttered. He welcomed Stephen Douglas’s doctrine of popular sovereignty17 and made no secret of his opinion that slavery was just what the Negro deserved.18 Deseret was neutral in the Civil War, since although it was part of the North a Southern victory would probably have cleared the way to a successful secession by the Mormons. The anti-polygamy case strikingly resembled the anti-slavery one: polygamy, it was said, was anti-Christian, it destroyed family life, it made its victims degraded and unhappy, it encouraged the worst propensities in males, it was economically antiquated and it threatened to impede the glorious progress of the great American nation by dissolving the Union. Abraham Lincoln might as well have said of polygamy what he did of slavery, that if it was not wrong, nothing was wrong. There was even an impending crisis which led in 1857 to a miniature civil war, when an army expeditionary force was sent against Salt Lake City. Young, a much wiser man than Jefferson Davis (and in a much weaker military position), prudently defused the crisis by peaceful submission, which left him master of the situation; but the difference in outcome scarcely weakens the force of the overall similarities.

  Opinions differ as to just how many polygamists there were among the Mormons. It is at least clear that, like the Southern slave-holders, they were in a minority, and not a large one; but they dominated their people. And Brigham Young knew very well that polygamy effectively cut off the Mormons from their countrymen, thereby rendering them all the more dependent on each other and on him. What does not seem to have concerned him was the corrupting effect it had on the position of Mormon women, even those who were not plurally married. They were fully as devout and brave as the men, and did as much to build up Deseret; in return they were reduced, in the eyes of their menfolk and even their own, to the status of chattels. They were deemed to be naturally inferior, as blacks were by their masters. Their function in life was to be household drudges. Poor farmers found it cheaper to marry several wives, who would get no wages, than to hire male labourers. Young, who did not believe in intellectual aspirations for anyone (there were no books in his houses and he was always at feud with the best educated of the Mormon leaders, Orson Pratt), saw nothing wrong with such a state of affairs. He preferred, however, to stress the spiritual advantages that plural marriage brought. A man with more than three wives was certain to enter the highest heaven (he himself, as a prophet with seventy wives, was going to rule that heaven, or part of it); a wife of such a man would also be sure of heaven, and if she had children, to multiply the Saints on earth, would be given an honourable place there. In exchange for this promise, Mormon women gave away their self-respect and their hope of love. In a way it was a worse bargain than slavery itself.

  It seems that even women who accepted or defended polygamy did not on the whole thrive in these conditions. The consolation is that the system did not last long. Victory in the Civil War immeasurably strengthened the federal government, legally as well as materially, and the coming of the transcontinental railroad in the years immediately after the war not only brought Gentiles in large numbers to Utah but made it possible to pour in troops in large numbers at the slightest sign of trouble. And the federal government was implacably anti-polygamist. So the choice before the Saints was again to be submission or flight. Young succeeded in postponing the moment of choice, but after his death it was laid down: abandon polygamy or suffer the consequences. In 1890 the church repudiated the practice; six years later Utah at last became a state of the Union. The struggle to preserve plural marriage had very nearly wrecked the church, and had come near to destroying its wealth; but at least Mormon women could now enjoy the rights which their sisters elsewhere had already begun to win for themselves; though still, in remote country places, polygamy persists.

  The verdict on Brigham Young must in the end be ambiguous. He did great good, and great evil. He was a quintessential figure of the frontier West. His career illuminates its most heroic phase. Its final act may be studied through the career of a simpler, better man.

  William Frederick Cody was born on the Iowa bank of the Mississippi on 26 February 1846, a hundred miles or so north of the place where the Mormons were crossing from Nauvoo. His father was a pioneer from Ohio who in 1852 moved with his family to Missouri. Frontier violence there had taken a new turn, getting caught up in the rapidly developing conflict between the free and slave states. Isaac Cody was a Free Soiler, opposed to any new westward extension of slavery. As such he was stabbed, and eventually harried to death in 1857, leaving his eleven-year-old son to be the family’s breadwinner. Young Will was precociously ready for the job. He could already ride and shoot competently; in the years to come, as he grew, so d
id his skills. He was a child of the West, haunted by the legend of the great mountain men, Kit Carson and Jim Bridger; by tales of Indians and wagon-trains. He was never to lose this boyish enthusiasm: it was to be the secret of his immense success. Inevitably, he was drawn along the Plains trails.

  His career was never so heroic as a mountain man’s, but it had adventure enough for any lesser mortal and well represents various phases of Western history.19 He was a trapper. He went prospecting for gold in Colorado when he was thirteen. He was a rider for the pony express which relayed messages right across the continent (until it was killed by the electric telegraph) when he was fourteen. He spent the Civil War in Kansas, fighting at first as a Jayhawker, that is, as one of the Union raiders who gave tit-for-tat to the Bullwhackers, Confederate raiders from Missouri. Neither force had a good reputation and it was as well for young Cody that in 1864, after his mother’s death, he enlisted as a scout with the Ninth Kansas Cavalry, seeing action in Tennessee, Mississippi and Missouri. After the war he married (it was a tempestuous and in the end an unhappy union). He tried to maintain his family by working as a stage-coach driver and (unsuccessfully) as a hotel-keeper; then he took service as a scout for the US army, which was beginning its long struggle to tame the Plains Indians. The railroads came to the West, and Cody found new employment as a buffalo hunter, slaughtering the huge beasts for the rail workers to eat. He had a horse called Brigham (after the Prophet) which he bought from a Ute Indian; together they performed prodigies. Cody would herd a number of buffalo to a point conveniently near the workers’ camp, then, galloping alongside on Brigham, would bring them down as quickly and economically as possible: he is reported to have regularly killed eleven buffalo with twelve bullets as they stampeded. It was better than a circus to watch. In the seventeen months that he worked for the railroads he killed 4,280 buffalo, and thus earned the sobriquet ‘Buffalo Bill’ under which he became immortal.