by Timothy Egan
The Mormons were tired of fleeing, worn down by the intolerant, the leers, stares, and cheats. The death in 1844 of the ever-dexterous prophet and founder, Joseph Smith, at the hands of a mob in Carthage, Missouri, and the burning of what had been the Mormons’ finest creation, the second-largest city in Illinois, Nauvoo, had pushed the Saints to the edge. To get an idea of how American politics has changed, recall what Smith’s titles were when he was executed by the mob: he was the mayor of Nauvoo, commander-in-chief of his own uniformed militia, and prophet, seer, and revelator of his own religion. He also was a candidate for president of the United States, running on a platform of bringing “the dominion of the Kingdom of God” over the American states. As mayor, he had ordered his private police force to destroy a printing press that had been churning out unfavorable journalism about the religion he had founded. A better civics lesson in why the Constitution separates church from state and press from government, and dictates due process of the law, has seldom been found in one place at one time.
With Smith now a martyr, it was war or flight for the Mormons, perhaps both. Enough of the United States, declared Brigham Young, who succeeded Smith. Enough of the raw, sixty-year-old democracy. A New England carpenter by trade, he was called the American Moses by George Bernard Shaw. And like Moses, he needed a miracle or two to keep his people moving. Miracles had come easy to Joseph Smith, who kicked around as a water-diviner, itinerant treasure hunter, and loquacious con man before discovering the gold tablets—on his property in New York State—that form the basis for the Book of Mormon. They have disappeared, of course, as all founding religious documents are prone to do. Professing to tell the story of two lost tribes of Israel—one of which became white American Indians, while the other was condemned with the curse of dark skin—the tablets were an anthropological fairy tale, by any fair judgment. But the bottom line of this new American religion provided some powerful incentives to potential converts. It had an easy-to-follow map to heaven. The practice of the faith itself was fun, with much dancing and optimism. And for a young man of reasonable appetites, the prospect of a lifetime of sex with multiple partners fully sanctioned by the church was a terrific side bonus. God himself, said Joseph, had told him through a “call” that he could bed innumerable women as his brides. His bodyguard was among the first to follow the Prophet’s path, taking five wives.
Brigham Young was a detail man, a superb colonizer. During his long tenure as leader of the church, he had but one divine revelation. It was a logistical vision: the Saints should move west in orderly companies of ten, fifty, and a hundred people, each group having a captain. The first miracle of his reign came in 1846, when the Mississippi River froze solid enough to allow the Saints to escape west on an ice bridge. The practical God had spoken. Very soon after arriving in Utah, the Saints spread from the Salt Lake Valley out into the canyonlands of the south, into the Lake Tahoe Basin of Nevada, up along the Snake River, into San Francisco and the Sacramento Valley, throughout Arizona. But just a year after Brigham led his followers into the Great Basin, the federal government undercut him. President Polk, ever the expansionist, had routed Mexico and purchased what became the American Southwest for $15 million. Brigham had planned to carve his empire from Mexico, but there was that demon federal government preempting him. He was furious.
“God almighty will give the United States a pill that will puke them to death,” Young thundered. “I am prophet enough to prophesy the downfall of the government that has driven us out…. Woe to the United States!”
The Empire went ahead anyway. The new territory may have been officially named Utah, after the Ute Indians, but it was still Deseret (meaning “honeybee”) on Mormon maps. In two years’ time, twelve thousand people followed Brother Brigham into the Salt Lake Valley. In a land short of water, roads, and government help, Young put down more than 350 towns in his time. They were built along the lines of the same master plan for a livable city that is on display in the center of Salt Lake City today, with broad streets, ample sidewalks, the houses set back a considerable distance and zoned to keep them apart from commerce and the slop of agriculture. Orchards of cherries, peaches, apples went up in the desert valleys, watered by streams that were held back in reservoirs near the foot of the mountains. Lombardy poplars shaded homes. The Saints, wrote Stegner, “were the most systematic, organized, disciplined and successful pioneers in our history.” Stegner, a non-Mormon, was an admirer. What he liked was the bond of community in a land of harsh individualism. One year alone, 101 people were murdered in the secular mining town of Alta, while the Saints went on building a virtually crime-free society. By some views, Smith was something of a Marxist, and the Mormons were early communists. He created an economic system, called the United Order of Enoch, in which property was given over to community use, and any surplus grain or produce was used for the good of all. In addition, the church leaders tithed 10 percent of everything earned. The Order of Enoch broke down when the worker bees saw that the bishops and high council members were keeping surplus houses and goods. Still, Stegner was impressed. “Their record in the intermountain region is a record of group living completely at variance with the normal history of the West,” he wrote.
Gold strikes brought a surge of overland caravans through Utah, Gentiles not Saints, following the old Spanish Trail to California. And it brought a surfeit of cash to the church’s merchants, who had a monopoly on stores. It was said by wagon-train veterans that it cost nothing to get into Utah, but a hell of a lot to get out. When non-Mormons tried to open rival businesses, Young crushed them with boycotts. There was no real free enterprise in Brigham Young’s Utah. He drove out Jim Bridger, a tough-nutted mountain man, who said, “I was robbed and threatened with death by the Mormons, by the direction of Brigham Young, of all my merchandise, livestock, in fact everything I possessed. I barely escaped with my life.” But then, Bridger was one of the people who had believed that nothing could ever come of the colony in the Great Basin.
Brigham Young’s word was absolute. Like the prophet Smith, he was not only the leader of his church, the seer and revelator, but held all political power as well. And he was commander in chief of the Nauvoo Legion. Many of his followers were peasants from Europe, fleeing feudal states and futures of misery and landlessness. They were given free Atlantic passage by a Mormon emigration fund, later outlawed by the federal government. In the desert Zion, they had security and hope but had to follow orders from priests, bishops, and ultimately Young himself. When he told a group of people to head out to, say, Las Vegas and found a colony, it was a command not subject to debate. Some converts, feeling the religious imperative to move to Salt Lake at any costs, simply starting walking the fourteen hundred miles from the Mississippi River to Salt Lake. Thus were born the handcart brigades, people who were without horses, oxen, or common sense.
“The Lord through his prophet says of the poor, ‘Let them come on foot, with handcarts or wheel barrows, let them gird up their loins and walk through and nothing shall hinder them!’ ”Young said in an edict from the church office.
Today, in the glow of modern Utah, the handcart brigades are held up as an example of profound perseverance. Gird up their loins they did, these followers of Brigham dragging all their belongings in rickety little two-wheeled contraptions across the Great Plains and over row after row of mountain ranges. But it became the first great Mormon crisis in the West, an act of groupthink slow suicide that the historian Richard White calls “the greatest single disaster in the overland migrations.” The fatal party set out late in 1856, in mid-July. Early on, they ran short of food, burning far more calories pushing three-hundred-pound wheelbarrows uphill than they could replace on a daily ration of half a pound of flour. By late August, they were dying, literally dropping along the trail, or collapsing at night while staring at the fire. The stragglers pushed on to the Rockies, where they were crippled by fall snowstorms. Many, especially children, froze to death. By the time a rescue party reached t
hem in late November in Wyoming, three hundred miles short of Utah, more than two hundred people had perished.
The next year, 1857, brought an even bigger disaster. Newspaper accounts out of Utah told of a militant, clannish state run by an iron-willed theocrat, forming in a broad area of the West. At the same time, of course, the South was stirring for a fight and a break with the Union. At the first national convention of the Republican Party in 1856, It’s platform labeled slavery and polygamy “the twin relics of barbarism.” Utah had become a national issue. Young did nothing to appease Washington. He despised “the Americans,” as he called non-Mormons in his sermons; he wanted nothing to do with them. “We want to live free and independent, untrammeled by any of their destestable customs and practices,” he said. By the middle of 1857, he was stripped of his title of territorial governor, and a series of outsiders were sent to rule Utah. But Young still held power. As church president, he established an invisible government, issuing decrees, planting colonies, mustering his militia. He set up a Mormon court system, staffed by religious sycophants, who ran the legal system of the territory, rendering the federal courts useless.
Young stoked hatred of the Gentiles. They had killed the Prophet, driven the Mormons from New York, Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. If they had their chance, they would drive them into the ground, he preached. But they would not have their chance, not in the State of Deseret. In 1847, Young boasted that he needed just ten years and he would have enough of an army of his own to take on the United States government. Ten years later, Young had not only a well-drilled, fully mustered private army but a secret police force known as the Sons of Dan. The Danites, much feared by non-Mormons, viewed themselves as avenging angels, killing people as payback for the murder of Joseph Smith. Back in Washington, President Buchanan had heard enough. He sent an army detachment of twenty-five hundred soldiers west, led by Colonel Albert Sydney Johnston, to control Young and make sure the flag of America was flying over the theocracy of Deseret. It was, for the time, an astonishing commitment of manpower against a domestic force—nearly one-sixth of the entire United States Army. Young could match him with a force of equal size, one that had the advantage of being motivated to die for God. His second in command, Heber Kimball, who had married forty-three women, even boasted that “I have wives enough to whip out the United States.”
The Saints were never more ready for war. But if they were to lose Utah, they would destroy it in the process. Young ordered his men to burn the fields and crops on the way to Salt Lake, so that the approaching army could not get any food supplies. An alliance was shored up with the Paiutes to the south, the Mormons promising spoils to the natives if they would help them fight the Americans. Young also told his followers to get ready to torch their own homes, reducing to ashes the carefully constructed villages of the colony. People were called in from outlying towns, abandoning their houses. It was the moment when Brigham Young might have done something that would have ultimately linked his name in history to a person like Jim Jones, the cult leader from 1970s San Francisco who had his followers commit mass suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool Aid rather than face an inquiry from outsiders.
“We must waylay our enemies, attack them from ambushes, stampede their animals,” Young said. “We must lay waste to everything that will burn, houses, fences, grass, trees, and fields, that they cannot find a particle of anything of use.”
Just as the Saints were preparing their scorched-earth plan in midsummer of 1857, the Arkansas emigrants passed through Salt Lake, on their way to California. Bad timing was only part of their problem. The wagon trains had come to rely on their stopover in Salt Lake to replenish supplies, even at horrendously inflated prices. Now Young ordered that no grain or staples be sold to the Americans passing through. He deprived the travelers of the only source of food from merchants, he said in an affidavit twenty years later, because his own people needed it. Insults were exchanged. The Saints accused the emigrants of poisoning Mormon water and throwing around blasphemies about the Prophet Joseph; the overland travelers said that the Mormons were hostile and threatening. By the time the wagon train reached southern Utah, it had taken on demon status. Among those aboard were said to be some men from Missouri, a state where the Saints had faced a particularly hard time in the courts and from which they had been run out by a vicious state militia and a fanatical governor. In the slow, rumor-filled heat of summer, the overland Missourians came to embody everyone who had persecuted the Mormons. All sermons were directed at war, and the only information most Mormons received came from the church-run press, the Deseret News, which was running a series on how the saintly Prophet had been murdered. Killing the Americans, it was said, would avenge the blood of Joseph and others.
Paiute leaders met with both Young and his subordinates. They had been told, according to a number of people who attended the meetings, that they were free to attack the wagon train. Who exactly told them that is unclear. But Young himself wrote, in a letter to the church president in southern Utah, “The Indians we expect will do as they please, but you should try and preserve good feelings with them.”
The southern Utah church president, Elder Isaac C. Haight, had written the commander-in-chief in Salt Lake, asking what he should do with the wagon train passing through. This followed a Sunday service and an emotional meeting in Cedar City, where the Mormons first discussed the idea of killing the travelers from Arkansas—group premeditation. The militia head was called on, and he said he could bring fifty-four men to the task. Some Mormons wanted only to harass the American travelers, or perhaps steal their livestock. But a majority of voices favored “doing away with them,” as several witnesses recounted. They set up the Paiutes to do the killing, holding out the promise of loot and stock. Their justification was one familiar to groups that kill on behalf of God: they were doing the Lords work.
That was Sunday, September 6. The letter from Haight was sent to Brigham Young that day, supposedly asking for his advice on the plan. But Brigham did not give advice. He signaled yes or no, and that was that. On a decision as monumental as slaughtering an entire company of American civilians, down to the children, at a time when the eyes of the nation were on a dawning war in the Great Basin, Young later claimed he was never informed of any such plan. Virtually every letter sent from church regional presidents to Brigham Young is archived in Utah. But the letter from Isaac Haight to Brigham, raising the possibility of an ambush that could lead to a war that could crush the church, has disappeared.
By Friday of that week, the emigrants had been under attack by the Paiutes for several days but had held up fairly well. They were running low on food and ammunition, however, and they had suffered a number of casualties. Several were badly wounded and in need of immediate help. The Mormons decided to call in the Iron County Militia, headed by Colonel William Dame, to finish the job. At the same time, the emigrants sent a boy, Bill Aiden, out to get help from the whites. He was shot off his horse by a Mormon sniper. His death may have pushed the Saints over the edge, for now they may have felt they had to kill everyone to cover the murder of Aiden. Indians could always be blamed for going after wagon trains, but an assassination of one white by another—witnessed by two people who escaped—was something else. It would only aid the American cause for battle against the traitor Brigham Young.
The ultimate plan—hatched by a Mormon bishop, the church’s regional president and one of the original followers of Joseph Smith, and possibly others—was chilling. The Mormons would approach the besieged train with a white flag. They would tell them that they were saved from the Paiutes if they put down their arms and marched out single file. At a signal, the killing would begin. Each Mormon was assigned to shoot one man in the head, and the Indians were given the task of killing women and children. They could plunder any goods from the wagon trains as well. The plan worked just as outlined. A church leader, John D. Lee, remembered how welcome he felt as he came to the rescue of the wagon train, the families sobbing wit
h relief at their deliverance from the siege. Trusting blindly, the emigrants left all their guns behind and walked slowly into the open grave of the Mountain Meadows—men first, women and children herded off into a separate area.
Major John M. Higbee then called out a signal: “Halt! Do your duty!” At that, the Mormons turned to face their fellow Americans, and from only a few feet away, shot them dead. All the witnesses- the shooters—say it was over in a few minutes. The tough choice must have been deciding which children were so young as to be spared, for kids barely old enough to be in first grade were murdered. The order from above was: “None who are old enough to talk are to be spared,” wrote John Lee. After the slaughter, the Saints praised the heavens. “Thanks be to the Lord God of Israel, who has this day delivered our enemies into our hands, ” said Lee. A trusted Saint since his days with Smith, John Lee was Brigham’s right-hand man in southern Utah. His bond to the prophet had been sealed in church; what’s more, Lee was an adopted son of Brigham Young. After the killing, he rode to Salt Lake to give Young the details.
The militia men, the Mormon bishops and priests, all agreed to a vow of silence. They would blame the Paiutes for everything. Word spread to San Francisco of a terrible massacre, the worst yet in the fifteen years since the Oregon Trail had opened the way to cross country emigration to the West. It was said to be purely an Indian attack, though given the fact that Utah was in a state of war, many people doubted the official story. Brigham Young’s formal report implied that the Arkansas emigrants had asked for trouble by their behavior toward the Indians and the Saints. This version, on file in the Journal History of the Church, reports that the militia went to the rescue of the emigrants but arrived too late to be of any help. “The Indians had killed the entire company, with the exception of a few small children,” Mormon officials wrote. By Young’s edict, the case was closed. He refused to cooperate with federal prosecutors. “The more you stir a manure pile,” he said, “the more it stinks.”