Devil's Gate

by David Roberts

  Rigdon indeed decamped for Pittsburgh with a smattering of followers, and there established his “true” Mormon church. It flickered briefly, then expired. The man himself lived on for decades, humiliated by his failure. As late as 1871, from a farm in Pennsylvania, he sent a letter to Young in Salt Lake City offering to help the church weather its latest crisis. Young did not bother to answer.

  THUS BRIGHAM YOUNG took control of the church he would head for the next thirty-three years, until his death in 1877. He would become a Prophet, Seer, Revelator, and President even more autocratic than Joseph Smith—the epithet “despotic” is not too strong. Yet during the first two years of his leadership, it was all Young could do to hold the battered, fragmenting community of Saints together. Besides the challenge briefly posed by Rigdon’s breakaway church, a very strange visionary Saint named James L. Strang apostatized and proceeded to set up his own church in Wisconsin. By 1846, he reportedly had ten thousand devotees in his flock—two-thirds as many as the faithful in and around Nauvoo. The bizarre career of Strang and the Strangites deserves a book in its own right.

  The greatest threat to Brigham’s supremacy, however, came in the person of William Smith, one of Joseph’s brothers. In the aftermath of the Prophet’s murder, their mother, Lucy Smith, claimed to have received visions conferring the succession on William. In a gesture of apparent modesty, William insisted that his tenure as Prophet would only be temporary, until Joseph’s twelve-year-old son grew old enough to assume the mantle. John D. Lee, in his late, embittered autobiography, claimed that in Nauvoo Young himself had often sworn that the twelve-year-old was destined to succeed his father. “He is too young to lead this people now,” Lee swore Young had averred to Lucy, “but when he arrives at mature age he shall have his place. No one shall rob him of it.”

  The feud between William Smith and Young intensified. In 1845, the former fled to St. Louis, where he began delivering public lectures attacking the “false” Prophet. Finally, in 1860, William established his own church, calling it the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Remarkably, the church still exists today as the Community of Christ, headquartered in Independence, Missouri. The chief doctrinal difference between the Reorganized branch and the mainstream LDS church was the denial, first voiced by William, that Joseph Smith had ever preached or practiced polygamy.

  After a lull in the hostilities around Nauvoo, new frictions arose between the Mormon stronghold and the surrounding Gentile towns. They were brought to the flash point on September 16, 1845, when Porter Rockwell murdered Franklin Worrell, one of the leaders of the Carthage Greys, the militia that had collaborated with the Warsaw Dragoons in the killing of Joseph and Hyrum. Several prominent Mormons later admitted that this assassination was carried out by Young’s leading Danite, though Harold Schindler, Rockwell’s biographer, portrays the encounter as an act of self-defense on Rockwell’s part.

  In response, Gentiles attacked the Mormon town of Lima, burning down 175 houses. A handful of further killings on both sides ensued. A newspaper in Hancock County captured the mood of the day: “Every Saint, mongrel or whole-blood, and every thing that looked like a Saint, talked or acted like a Saint, should be compelled to leave.”

  In 1845, the Illinois legislature revoked the charter for Nauvoo. It was the crushing blow. Smith’s “beautiful place” was doomed. Zion would have to be raised elsewhere.

  Before fleeing Illinois, however, the Saints, under Young’s energetic direction, did something that to outside observers must have seemed a very curious deed. Only months before abandoning Nauvoo, they erected its most spectacular building, a temple in which the sacred ordinances could be performed.

  The temple, which Mormons claimed cost $600,000 (a wildly inflated figure), had been divinely ordained by God through Joseph Smith. The nature of the ordinances and “endowments,” which persist today, and which still can be carried out only inside an LDS temple, have always been kept secret by the church, but many a nineteenth-century apostate gleefully detailed them. Morris Werner argues that a more pragmatic motive contributed to Young’s zeal—the hope of selling the building for profit once it was built. The temple in fact was eventually put up for sale, but found no buyers.

  Alas, the grandiose building was destined for a sorry end. A fire in 1848 and a tornado in 1850 destroyed much of it, and the citizens of what was left of Nauvoo pushed down its remaining walls. Between 2000 and 2002, under church auspices, the temple was completely rebuilt. Formally dedicated on June 27, 2002, by LDS president Gordon B. Hinckley, it serves today as a fully functioning temple.

  During the last weeks in Nauvoo, more than a thousand Saints “received their ordinances” in the temple. Among them was Brigham Young, who was “sealed” to thirty-four of the thirty-five wives he had taken by early 1846. Young would always insist that when the doctrine of plural marriage was first revealed to him by Smith, he was revolted. “It was the first time in my life that I had desired the grave,” he would later claim, “and I could hardly get over it for a long time.”

  No doubt there were dutiful aspects to Young’s wife-taking, as in the fact that he was “sealed for time” to eight of Smith’s widows (not all of whom were young or comely) so that they could be “sealed for eternity” to Smith in the afterlife. Yet if Young initially obeyed Smith’s order to take many wives with reluctance, he would acquire a taste for the obligation. In Utah, quite a few of the brides he wooed, all but commanding them to marry him, were pretty, and some were as young as fourteen.

  Early in February 1846, Young led some two thousand followers west across the Mississippi River, as they turned their backs on Nauvoo for good.

  IF THERE IS a single narrative that validates the church today in the hearts and minds of Saints all over the world, it is the grand 1846–47 pageant of the pioneer trek from Nauvoo across the plains and through the Rocky Mountains to the Great Basin, where the faithful would finally build their Zion on the site of what is now Salt Lake City. The subtitle of Leonard Arrington’s comprehensive (if biased) biography of Brigham Young, American Moses, draws without irony a parallel between the second LDS Prophet and the Old Testament patriarch who led the chosen people out of bondage to the promised land. It was an analogy of which the Saints in that voyage were fully conscious, for they called themselves the Camp of Israel.

  Yet fundamental ambiguities still linger about that landmark hegira. Chief among them is whether Young had his destination in mind from the beginning, or instead simply headed west along the Oregon Trail until he might stumble upon the proper place for Zion.

  As he fled into Iowa to escape the militia in June 1844, one recalls, Smith had told his retainers that he would strike out for the Rocky Mountains. On the other hand, when Kentucky statesman Henry Clay had recommended Oregon as an ultimate destination for the Saints a few years earlier, Smith had replied with a sneering, indignant refusal.

  We know that Young had read (or had had read to him) John C. Frémont’s famous Reports detailing his 1842 and 1843 explorations along the Oregon Trail, during the second of which he had veered south through the Great Basin on his way to California. The reports were illustrated with Charles Preuss’s exquisitely accurate maps. In fact, as it headed west, the Mormon caravan carried Frémont’s books with them.

  The most careful study of the question may appear in Will Bagley’s introduction to The Pioneer Camp of the Saints, the edited journals of Thomas Bullock, a member of the pioneer party. Writes Bagley:

  Much speculation has gone into when LDS leaders picked the Salt Lake Valley as their ultimate destination. By January 1845, the Saints had stated their determination to go to California, but in 1845 “California” included everything west of New Mexico and the Rocky Mountains and south of Oregon. Until July 1847 when he actually looked at the Salt Lake Valley, Brigham Young’s statements about his destination were ambiguous and wildly contradictory, perhaps intentionally so to deceive the government and Mormon political enemies about the pr
ecise location of the new Zion.

  Before leaving Nauvoo, Young and some of the leading Apostles had sought out expert advice about a safe haven for the Saints from everyone from politicians to newspaper editors. The recommendations ranged from the mouth of the Colorado River to San Francisco Bay to Vancouver Island. Yet Bagley concludes,

  The Mormon leaders had determined to leave the United States and move into Mexican territory and had identified the Great Basin as their destination by the late summer of 1845, when they publicly announced their plans to abandon Nauvoo by the next spring…. On 9 September they resolved to send 1500 men to “Great Salt Lake Valley” to find a location for the saints.

  If in fact Young hoped to lead such a multitude (let alone all two thousand who followed him out of Nauvoo) all the way to the Mormon promised land in one push in 1846, he soon grew discouraged at the prospect. In the feverish preparations for the exodus, the Saints bought and built their own wagons in a motley assortment of styles and makes. As early as October 1845, the Nauvoo newspaper had published a list of goods recommended to be carried in each of those wagons. It is a mind-boggling roster, including a thousand pounds of flour, twenty pounds of soap for each family, a gallon of alcohol, a pound each of cayenne pepper and cinnamon, “1 good seine and hook for each company,” and “from 25 to 100 lbs. of farming and mechanical tools.” (Such baggage was a far cry from the seventeen pounds per person to which the hand-cart pioneers of 1856 would be limited!)

  It did not take long on the road for the wagons to groan under their excessive burdens. Write William Slaughter and Michael Landon in Trail of Hope, “As the long journey weakened and wearied the oxen, loads were lightened. Such heirlooms as prized furniture, book collections, china, and pianos were often abandoned along the trail. Sometimes precious items were left along the trail with the hope of picking them up at a later date.”

  Adding to the pilgrims’ difficulties was the fact that they seriously underestimated Iowa. The iron cold of February gave way to drenching rains in March and April. The trail turned to impassable muck. Instead of proceeding in an orderly cavalcade, the hundreds of emigrants started to get spread out, according to their hardiness and the quality of their teams, across scores of miles. Young and other leaders were compelled to travel back all the way to Nauvoo to help the stragglers. The horde of two thousand that had crossed the Mississippi with Young starting on February 4 was but an advance guard: in their wake eventually followed the other ten thousand Saints exiled from Nauvoo. As it was, even an elite cadre of skilled travelers, pushing ahead of the disorderly caravan as a kind of advance scouting party, needed a full four months to cross Iowa and reach the banks of the Missouri River.

  So halting and desultory was the Saints’ progress across Iowa that they decided to build a pair of way stations for those too weak to go on. Garden Grove and Mount Pisgah, in central Iowa, quickly morphed from camps into bona fide villages. Between five hundred and six hundred settlers would spend the winter in Garden Grove. The population of Mount Pisgah eventually swelled to between two thousand and three thousand. Many of those homesteaders would push on to Zion only years later; others would never leave Iowa.

  Despite the emigration’s early start, by the beginning of summer Young was reconciled to the reality that he would never be able to transport as many as a thousand Saints to the Great Basin in one year. Besides the hardships of the trail itself, the pioneers suffered from alarming outbreaks of malaria and other diseases. A substantial wintering-over settlement would have to be built. Yet the Prophet still keenly hoped to push on with a small, handpicked advance party that summer and fall.

  The decision to winter over was sealed by the arrival in Mount Pisgah, on June 26, of a four-man military delegation that had traveled east from Fort Leavenworth, in what is today Kansas. The Mexican War had broken out. Since taking office in 1845, President James K. Polk had agonized over the Mormon situation. Now he performed a brilliant stroke of co-option. The delegation brought the president’s formal request for five hundred Mormon volunteers to join General Stephen Watts Kearny’s Army of the West as it marched to Santa Fe and southern California. If Mormons could be coerced to serve the cause of the United States, that would seriously blunt the edge of their threat to flee the country’s confines to establish their autonomous Zion in the wilderness.

  In later years, Young would rail against Polk’s interference. “There cannot be a more damnable, dastardly order issued than was issued by the Administration to this people while they were in Indian country, in 1846,” he thundered in an 1857 speech. “That was President Polk; and he is now weltering in hell.” Yet Young was every bit as Machiavellian as the president. The request for volunteers proved an unexpected windfall. The army pay for five hundred volunteers for a year’s service amounted to $21,000, of which Parley Pratt, acting for Brigham, managed to secure as much as $6,000 in pledges to bolster the colony of over-wintering Saints. In addition, the army would effectively pay the way to Zion for five hundred Saints who would otherwise have had to finance their own pilgrimage.

  The story of the so-called Mormon Battalion, many of whose members reached California, then made their way back to Utah to meet the pioneer trekkers in 1847, is a minor epic in its own right, about which numerous books and articles have been written. And attached to that story is the usual Mormon mythologizing. As Wallace Stegner sardonically sums up the response to the call for volunteers:

  Some orthodox histories say that Brigham at once found among his steadfast people the volunteers their ungrateful country called for—simply asked and saw the firm chins rise, the resolute figures step forward. The fact is that he asked from Miller’s Hollow through Mt. Pisgah to Garden Grove, and in every place got mainly shuffling feet and mulish downcast looks.

  In the fall of 1846, on either side of the Missouri River, the Mormons started building houses. On the east side, in Iowa Territory, they constructed Miller’s Hollow, soon to be renamed Kanesville, then Council Bluffs. On the west side, in Indian Territory (and thus technically illegal), they started to build Winter Quarters, later renamed Florence.

  At last Young had given up his dream of pushing on toward the Great Basin with an advance party in the fall of 1846. Instead, he settled in to run Winter Quarters. A year-end census of the fledgling village counted 3,483 people, of whom, thanks to the volunteers who had left with the Mormon Battalion, only 502 were men. The town was laid out in the by now standard Mormon grid. There were 538 wooden houses, most of them made of cottonwood, and eighty-three sod dugouts.

  It was a hard winter, as cold and scurvy took their toll. No accurate death count can be retrieved today, but a commemorative LDS Web site sets the number of those who perished at 325.

  The sufferings of one resident of Winter Quarters are brought vividly to life in her retrospective account:

  Winter found me bed-ridden, destitute, in a wretched hovel which was built upon a hillside; the season was one of constant rain; the situation of the hovel and its openness, gave free access to piercing winds and water flowed over the dirt floor, converting it into mud two or three inches deep; no wood but what my little ones picked up around the fences, so green it filled the room with smoke; the rain dropping and wetting the bed which I was powerless to leave.

  ON APRIL 7, 1847—the day after the seventeenth anniversary of the founding of the church—Young set off westward with a handpicked party of 144 men. That number resonated throughout Winter Quarters: twelve men standing for each of the twelve tribes of Israel. In the end, however, one man backed out because of illness, while three women (including one of Young’s wives, Clara Decker Young) and two children joined the entourage at the last minute.

  It would take the pioneer party 108 days to travel the 1,031 miles from Winter Quarters to the site of their new Zion, an average of a little less than ten miles per day, though the procession actually moved faster, since every Sabbath was observed as a rest day. That 1847 journey has become the founding saga of the whole Morm
on odyssey, endlessly retold and celebrated by the Saints. Stegner calls it “the most extensively reported event in western history.” Burnished as myth, it seems to acquire the kind of heroic glow that Odysseus’s voyage home from Troy to Ithaca forever radiates.

  Yet in many ways the pioneer trek was a routine peregrination. South Pass in western Wyoming, the key to the easy crossing of the Continental Divide, had been discovered (as far as Anglos are concerned) as early as 1812, by Robert Stuart, traveling east from Astoria, the famous outpost at the mouth of the Columbia River. After its rediscovery in 1824 by a party guided by Jedediah Smith, the pass became a regular itinerary for the mountain men. The first wagons crossed South Pass in 1832.

  With the opening of the Oregon Trail in the early 1840s, the path along the North Platte, the Sweetwater River, and over South Pass became the standard route for emigrants flocking to homestead in what was still officially British territory (though Polk, running for president in 1844, would famously dispute the claim under the ringing campaign slogan “Fifty-four Forty or Fight”). In 1843 alone, some nine hundred emigrants traveled to Oregon along the trail. Though not published until 1849, Francis Parkman’s enormously popular The Oregon Trail recounted the author’s journey of 1846, a year before the Mormon exodus. The Donner Party also traveled along the trail that year, and in fact blazed the difficult route through the canyons of northeast Utah that Young’s pioneers would follow in 1847.