Requirements of Each Family of Five for the Journey Across the Plains Each family consisting of five adults, will require 1 good strong wagon, well covered. 3 good yokes of oxen between the ages of four and ten. Two or more cows. One or more good beeves, some sheep if they have them.
THE LIST WENT ON TO INSTRUCT THE EMIGRÉS TO PREPARE A YEAR’S SUPPLY of food for each family, including one thousand pounds of flour in sturdy sacks, a bushel of beans, cured meat and dried fruit, a good musket or rifle for each man with powder and lead, one hundred pounds of sugar, twenty-five pounds of salt, between ten and fifty pounds of seed and farm tools, cooking utensils, “a few goods to trade with the Indians,” and other supplies to total one ton for each wagon.
Although there had been an uneasy peace for a time in Hancock County, Illinois, after the murder of the prophet in 1844, marauding mobs soon became active again. Arsonists destroyed more than two hundred homes as well as haystacks, barns, and other buildings on farms scattered beyond Nauvoo. After anti-Mormon gangs committed several murders and some rapes in outlying areas, terrified farm families began to take refuge inside the borders of the city itself. The Saints wanted to finish their beloved temple, to honor the wishes of their dead prophet, and to carry out their long-desired holy ordinances. But the leaders were already planning to transplant the kingdom somewhere west, on a new frontier.
By October 1, 1845, the Quorum of Twelve Apostles had agreed with a committee sent by Illinois Governor Thomas Ford to leave the following spring as soon as grass was ready to provide forage for their animals along the way. Trustees were appointed to remain behind and help dispose of property, but as a sign of their readiness to leave, the Mormons refrained from further planting of winter wheat.
By early December the temple was completed sufficiently to begin sacred ceremonies, and working around the clock for several months, more than 5,600 endowments were rushed through, along with family sealing rituals. The temple that they had sacrificed so hard to build would survive Mormon Nauvoo only briefly; it was severely damaged by arson two years later and then destroyed by a tornado two years after that.
During the last few months of Joseph Smith’s life several destinations for Zion had been considered, including Texas, California, and Oregon. In the year after the assassination the apostles and the Council of Fifty focused on the Salt Lake Valley, which at the time belonged to Mexico. The church authorities wanted a location far enough in the wilderness that the Saints could be isolated from other settlers and the outside world, a gathering place where the church could develop a cohesive community. The other options were too attractive to other settlers.
The Nauvoo evacuation was carefully planned. The families were to be grouped along military lines in groups of ten, fifty, and one hundred, each with an officer reporting to an authority further up the line. Shops in Nauvoo were busy forging wheels and sewing canvas canopies; families attempted to divest themselves of their property and organize supplies for the road. Their livestock was to go with them, some 30,000 head of cattle, flocks of sheep, mules, and horses. Pigs and poultry were to travel in coops attached to the wagons.
Brigham Young took a nose count before Thanksgiving: 3,285 families planning to trek west, with 2,508 wagons ready and another 1,892 in preparation. Two new threats precipitated the carefully prepared move into a premature and hasty winter exit: a warrant was issued to arrest Brigham Young on a charge of sheltering counterfeiters, and a false rumor circulated that federal troops were planning a raid. With flatboats and skiffs, the first group of Saints left the wharf at Nauvoo and crossed the Mississippi River on February 4. That first cold night in Iowa nine women gave birth. Young’s own extended family left Nauvoo on February 15, a group of fifty with fifteen wagons. Hundreds more, then thousands of the Mormon refugees followed over the next weeks as the river froze to form a solid walkway, and a temporary camp was set up at Sugar Creek, nine miles into Iowa.
The American Exodus was under way, with Young as the latter-day Moses.
Figures vary on the size of the 1846 emigration from the United States. Some scholars say that as many as half may have drifted away from Young’s church or decided to stay on in the Midwest, to be replaced by converts. At Smith’s death there were 26,000 Mormons worldwide, and by some estimates, in the late spring of 1846 there were as many as 16,000 Saints on the road headed toward the Great Basin. Brigham Young called his people the “Camp of Israel.” Ever conscious of history, many kept diaries, as Mormons then and now are encouraged to do, and the diaries show that the Saints were deeply conscious of the biblical parallels to their wandering through the wilderness toward the promised land.
At Sugar Creek rules were drawn up that would govern the wagon trains in camp and on the journey ahead. These included the time to rise and pray (up at 5:00 a.m. and ready to roll by 7:00 a.m.); regulations for wagons on the road; the length of the lunch hour; how to circle the wagons at night; how to guard the livestock; the time for evening prayers and bed (8:30 p.m.); and punishments for such infractions as swearing or beating animals. The principle of organized cooperation along the route was established with a string of camps set up en route, each planted with crops to be harvested by Saints traveling through later.
The first destination was Winter Quarters, near what is now Omaha, Nebraska, about 300 miles from Nauvoo. Some Saints, without money for outfits, had remained in Nauvoo until the end of the summer. Others, apparently unmolested by non-Mormons, had simply decided to remain in Illinois or had drifted back; still others went to St. Louis first for outfits and supplies and joined the Saints later on the road. In the first months road progress was painfully slow—an agonizing six miles on a good day. The wagons were hampered by the torrents of an unusually rainy spring; wheels clogged with sticky, thick mud slithered through increasingly deep ruts on the trail until sometimes the wagon bed sank all the way down to the mud. Those Saints who left in February took four months to reach their destination. Some lucky ones who waited until late May to leave Nauvoo needed less than three weeks to cover the same territory.
At Winter Quarters land was cleared, more than 620 log cabins were built and fenced, and crops were planted. A grist mill was constructed and put into operation. Winter Quarters continued to serve as a semipermanent staging area; more than several years some 20,000 people lived there for a time before undertaking the next 1,000 miles to Utah. It was platted like a town, with the temporary residents—–3,200 families or so at a time—divided into 22 wards. They worked hard, but there was time for cheerful play as well; comic readings were staged, and a brass band accompanied singing and dancing.
From Winter Quarters Brigham Young sent a letter to President James K. Polk:
The cause of our exile we need not repeat; it is already with you, suffice it to say that a combination of fortuitous, illegal and unconstitutional circumstances have placed us in our present situation, on a journey which we design shall end in a location west of the Rocky Mountains, and within the basin of the Great Salt Lake, or Bear River valley, as soon as circumstances shall permit, believing that to be a point where a good living will require hard labor, and consequently will be coveted by no other people, while it is surrounded by so unpopulous but fertile country.
Who was Brigham Young, the man who seized leadership to plan the successful migration of such a mass of people?
Like the first prophet, Young was a dirt-poor New Englander born in 1801 to a large Vermont farming family. Like Joseph Smith, Brigham grew to maturity under the influence of the religious activities in upstate New York’s Burned-Over District; his youngest brother was named after the itinerant revivalist Lorenzo Dow. When Brigham was fortunate enough to own a pair of shoes, he wore them inside church services but carefully carried them during the walk. Brigham’s mother died of tuberculosis when he was fourteen.
As Young matured, he acquired the typical skills of a rural boy, from hunting and trapping to farming and tapping for sugar. Lacking formal education, though literate, he learned through apprenticeship the skills of the construction trades, including carpentry and paint-mixing. He also mastered the crafts worked in a forge, and his industry and initiative won him a high local reputation. In 1823 Young moved west, lured by better opportunities in the boomtowns along the Erie Canal. In 1824, the year he married his first wife, Miriam Works, he briefly became a Methodist. Miriam died in 1832 of tuberculosis, leaving him with two small daughters.
Brigham Young’s brother Phinehas was introduced to the Book of Mormon by Joseph Smith’s brother Samuel in 1830. Brigham took his time, studying the new scripture carefully, evaluating the Mormons he met. In the spring of 1832 he, all his brothers and sisters, and other family members were baptized, and all would remain loyal Mormons. The next year Young moved to Kirtland and in 1834 joined Joseph Smith’s Zion’s Camp militia expedition to Missouri. For the rest of his life he cherished the memory of those two months spent close to the prophet, learning about the faith and becoming a trusted insider.
Smith named Young to the original Quorum of Twelve Apostles in 1835, and he became president of the Quorum in 1840. After the assassination there were competing claims for leadership of the church, including those of several Smith family members. There is historical evidence that Joseph Smith blessed his son, Joseph III, with the intention that the boy would become his successor, but the boy was only eleven when his father was murdered. There were other claimants, the most aggressive being Sidney Rigdon, the only surviving member of the First Presidency. But on August 8, 1844, Brigham Young asserted the claims of the Quorum of Twelve to govern the church and was supported by the vote of a church General Conference. Joseph Smith had been a charismatic leader, full of creative ideas and doctrinal innovations. Brigham Young was a genius organizer and shrewd administrator, a colorful orator little given to intellectualizing or revelations. He was just the right man to lead his people to their promised land.
Young’s leadership skills had become apparent in the 1839 Missouri evacuation to Illinois while Smith was imprisoned in Liberty, Missouri. This time the Saints fully accepted the leader who cajoled, ordered, harangued, organized, loved, and led them. He was, wrote Wallace Stegner, a “terrible and rewarding man to be scolded by. There has never been a people that so dearly loved a scolding,” and Young understood them “to the ground.” There were to be no rules that could not be kept, but there would be order in camp, Young told his followers.
Federal help of a sort arrived in June 1846 when President Polk authorized General Stephen W. Kearny to raise a battalion of Mormon volunteers to help fight the war against Mexico. By July 20, after Young had coaxed and pressured the beleaguered families for three weeks, 526 of the menfolk marched off in the battalion. Their clothing allowance of $21,000, left with Young at Winter Quarters, was an important source of hard cash for the refugee church. Another $50,000 in battalion salaries was eventually funneled back into church funds. None of the battalion actually fought; most were mustered out and returned to their families in six months after marching to California. Another eighty or so reenlisted for another six months.
By April 7, 1847, more than 70 wagons were outfitted and ready to roll, the first contingent to cover the 1,031 miles to Salt Lake. The lead wagon carried the precious bell from the tower of the Nauvoo temple (now on display in Temple Square in Salt Lake City). The initial wagon train included 143 men, 3 women, 2 children, a boat, a cannon, 93 horses, 52 mules, 66 oxen, 19 cows, 17 dogs, and some chickens. Along the way they would have to cope with illness, exhausting work, hostile Indians, and wild animals. They forded streams and crossed rivers in homemade rafts. They learned that the bumpy wagon ride churned their butter for them, and that buffalo dung made good fuel.
The mosquitoes thickened as the party made its way across the Rocky Mountains in late June and early July, and a number of the travelers, including Young, became very ill with what was probably Colorado tick fever. On July 20, a small advance group went ahead into the Salt Lake basin, glimpsing their first view of the valley two days later. In good Mormon fashion, two hours after entering the valley they set to work, organizing the first planting of potatoes and other crops. Mountain streams tumbled down nearby canyons, promising fresh water for domestic use and irrigation. This was semidesert country, treeless and with sandy soil, but the high grass could sustain grazing. The area had been traversed by traders and trappers, but not by white settlers. The Ute Indians were further south. Two days later a weak but recovering Brigham Young entered the valley. According to legend, he surveyed the valley and said, “This is the right place, drive on.” That date, July 24, is now marked by the big annual Pioneer Day celebration, a state and Mormon holiday in present-day Utah.
Laboring six days a week and observing Sunday as a day of rest, the advance party began to build cabins, using adobe because of the wood shortage, and to lay out streets according to a plat drawn up by Young four days after entering the valley. All streets were to be 132 feet wide, enough space for an ox train to turn around, and to be numbered and named from the temple lot reserved in the center. The streets were to have twenty-foot sidewalks; lots were to be one and a quarter acres, with eight lots to the block and houses set twenty feet back from the street. Natural resources were to be developed for the common good. A church General Conference was held in the fledgling Salt Lake City, and in late August, after setting policies for government and trade, Young and a small party headed back to Winter Quarters. They passed other emigrant trains heading into the valley, groups of Saints from Colorado and Mississippi as well as points to the east. By the time winter settled into Salt Lake more than 2,000 Saints had arrived in the basin, and their leader was back at Winter Quarters, where he was named president of the church at the end of 1847. Fully in charge of his people, Young prepared the larger movement to head west in the spring.
Food shortages haunted the earliest residents of the valley before the snows melted in the spring of 1848. The first potatoes had been the size of grapes and were gone too soon. Some of the livestock disappeared in the wake of Indian and wolf raids. By early spring farmers were desperately eating anything from roots to crows. Just as spring crops were ready for harvest, hordes of crickets swarmed over the fields and chomped the corn and wheat. Whole families tried to burn them out, smoke them out, beat them out with brooms—to no avail. Still the crickets came. The people knelt and prayed. At the height of a plague of biblical proportions, when some considered packing up and moving on to California, large white flocks of seagulls soared in from the Great Salt Lake and devoured the crickets. For several weeks the birds gorged on the black crickets, regurgitated the indigestible parts, and went back to eat more. Faithful Mormons honor this as divine intervention, the “Miracle of the Seagulls,” and a monument to the event stands today near the temple.
When Young left Winter Quarters in May 1848, there were 2,000 Saints ready for the trail. His own contingent had 397 wagons, 1,229 people, 74 horses, 1,275 oxen, 699 cows, 184 loose cattle, 411 sheep, 141 pigs, 605 chickens, 37 cats, 82 dogs, 3 goats, 10 geese, 2 beehives, 8 doves, and one crow. Families took seriously the prophet’s instructions to write their own journals and histories. They were experiencing sacred history.
One important safety rule was that all wagons should keep rolling without a stop, because a break in the train would make it vulnerable to Indian attack. Shortly after Young’s train rolled out Lucy Groves, a young mother weak from childbirth, fell out of her wagon, breaking three ribs and a leg as the wagon’s front wheels rolled over her body. Her husband barely managed to pull her out of the path of the rear wheels. Young set her leg, but it was rebroken several days later when a child stumbled over her. This time the young woman screamed every time her wagon bumped, and she begged Young to leave her behind. Young refused and, ever practical and ingenious, fashioned a hammock from her mattress, swinging it from the bows of the wagon. He blessed her and for several days rode next to her to monitor her condition.
Young himself became the father of male twins born en route. His own section of the wagon train entered the Salt Lake Valley on September 20, after 122 days on the road, averaging twelve miles each day of travel. This time Young was home for good; he lived his remaining twenty-nine years in the valley, building the kingdom and shaping his people.
Some evidence implies that Young wanted to establish a sovereign empire in the West, but there is more evidence that church authorities wanted the territory to be part of the United States. They carried an American flag with their first 1847 caravan and planted it in their new town. In 1848 the United States gained possession from Mexico with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War, and the area was formally organized as a territory in 1850, with Brigham Young appointed as governor. The Mormons wanted their land named Deseret, after a Book of Mormon word meaning “honeybee,” to symbolize cooperative industry. The beehive today is on the state’s official seal, but Congress chose to create a territory and name it Utah after the Ute Indians.
Gathering all the Mormon Saints to the new kingdom in the Great Basin was Young’s first priority. By the end of 1848 another 3,000 settlers had made it to the Salt Lake Valley, and Young began to assign groups of them to establish a string of other settlements north and south in the valley, and then later in a wider range and into Nevada, eastern Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, southern Colorado, and San Bernardino, California. Emigrés continued to arrive at a pace of 3,000 to 4,000 newcomers every year. After 1852, when the midwestern Saints were largely relocated in the Great Basin, immigrants began to arrive in large numbers from overseas, especially England and Scandinavia, about 3,000 each year, challenging the ability of the land and the economy to absorb them. By 1857 the Mormon population in the Great Basin was about 35,000; by 1869 that figure had swollen to 75,000; and by 1877, the year Young died, the new Zion was home to about 135,000 souls.
Many of the overseas Saints arrived with the assistance of the Perpetual Emigrating Fund (PEF), established in 1850 to help poor converts come to the Great Basin. Some paid their own way, of course; others paid a portion; and the rest were expected to repay the fund later with goods, cash, or labor. They usually came by ships chartered from Liverpool, landing in New Orleans. Again, in typical Mormon fashion, the Mormon passengers were carefully disciplined and organized into small groups with leaders. There were prayers and cleaning duties, choirs and classes. Many of the poorest ate better on board ship than they had at home. The next leg was by riverboat up the Mississippi to Missouri, then the overland journey to Utah. A family might leave Liverpool in January and arrive in Salt Lake City by October.
Immigrant wagon trains were greeted at Emigration Canyon with an escort; when they arrived in Salt Lake City, they were met with ceremony and fanfare—brass bands and a cannon salute—as they passed Temple Square. After celebrations with special dinners, singing, and dancing, they would attend placement meetings to receive their housing and work assignments. Often Saints who were already established would temporarily house newcomers and help their guests find employment.
The PEF was an expensive program for the church, so in 1856 church leaders hit on the idea of handcarts to provide a quicker, cheaper solution to the overland journey. Under ideal conditions, the handcart companies could move faster than oxen-drawn wagon trains. The carts were like oversized wheelbarrows with two wheels and a pair of long handles that one or two adults could lift to pull the carts while they walked overland. The carts could be loaded with several hundred pounds of the most essential food and supplies. One drawback, of course, was that this strategy limited the journey to those with enough physical stamina to walk and haul; moreover, the travelers had no real shelter. Another problem was that some dishonest suppliers used green wood, so the carts sometimes fell apart before they reached their destination. From 1856 to 1860 more than 3,000 Saints walked from Iowa through Nebraska and into Utah pulling these handcarts.
In 1856 the first three handcart companies left Iowa City in June and safely walked 1,300 miles to Utah, arriving in September. They were followed by a tragedy that lives as a landmark in the trek saga. There are graves in Winter Quarters, in all the supply camps en route, in early Salt Lake City, and in the other early settlements. Many died from cholera, tuberculosis, and other diseases that took their toll in the nineteenth century. Babies and young children died, as did women in childbirth, and others succumbed to the dangers and privations common to pioneers on the American frontier. But none are more poignant than the deaths in the Willie and Martin handcart companies en route to the Great Basin.
Bad luck dogged the companies from the start. Their suppliers delivered the carts later than scheduled, and it was late in July 1856 before the emigrants were ready to head for the Great Basin. Those experienced in the ways of the Rockies advised them to wait until spring, but they were eager to reach their promised land. The 500-person Willie company and 576-person Martin company left the Nebraska staging area in late August. Their carts, shoddily thrown together with green wood, began to stick and wobble. The travelers tried to grease the axles with tallow; this proved to be disastrous since the tallow attracted sand, which ground the joints down. The carts began to collapse. A freakishly early blizzard blanketed the emigrants with snow, which became thicker as they ascended the Rockies. Supplies began to run out. News of the impending disaster, of more than 1,000 Saints facing an early winter trapped on the trail, reached Salt Lake City in October. Young appealed for donations, and a mule train of rescuers reached the handcart travelers, but not before more than 200 had frozen to death or died of exhaustion. The companies finally reached Salt Lake City in early December. Many of the survivors had to undergo amputation of frozen fingers and feet. Mary Goble Pay, a survivor, wrote in her diary:
We arrived in Salt Lake City nine o’clock at night the 11th of December 1856. Three out of four that were living were frozen. My mother was dead in the wagon.
Bishop Hardy had us taken to a home in his ward and the brethren and sisters brought us plenty of food. We had to be careful and not eat too much as it might kill us we were so hungry.
Early next morning Bro. Brigham Young and a doctor came. The doctor’s name was Williams. When Bro. Young came in he shook hands with us all. When he saw our condition—our feet frozen and our mother dead—tears rolled down his cheeks.
On the great day in May of 1869, when America’s Transcontinental Railroad was completed with the driving of the golden spike at Promontory Summit near Ogden, Utah, the pattern of emigration changed permanently. From that point on traveling to Utah was no more arduous than any train trip. From the church’s point of view, of course, the ease with which the Great Basin was linked to the rest of the country was a double-edged sword. With rapid travel and communication—a transcontinental telegraph had gone through a few years before the railroad—the Mormon kingdom was clearly linked with the rest of the United States. The Saints were no longer isolated. The challenge increasingly posed to church authorities was to strengthen group loyalty and solidarity in the face of the encroachments of the outside world.
From the first Young’s goal was to attain economic self-sufficiency for the Saints. In the earliest years the pressing need was simple survival while absorbing a constant stream of new arrivals into a fragile economy. Some of Young’s colonizing decisions were flawed. Occasionally there was needless suffering when newcomers were sent off too late to provide for themselves before winter closed in. But most settlers answered the call obediently, and the sheer need to survive allowed plenty of scope for individual initiative. Mormons blended a sturdy emphasis on self-reliance, part of their theological as well as their pioneer heritage, with a strong culture of mutual help. The dream of building God’s kingdom in such an inhospitable environment required cooperation through authoritarian organization as well as the impulses of private neighborliness and charity. Food was often rationed, but through cooperation the pioneers avoided starvation. Young’s sermons, bristling with earthy language and colorful illustrations, make it clear that not all the sharing was cheerful and voluntary, and individual members were sometimes not above a bit of corner-cutting in their tithing contributions.
Agriculture was the first priority for Utah’s settlers, and before arriving in the Great Basin the leaders were well aware that farming there would differ greatly from raising crops in humid climates. Water control and irrigation were planned from the outset, with access and distribution a clear matter of church regulation. Crop yields were often marginal. Land, however, was available for the taking, unlike in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, where it required cash or credit. Only one white settler resided in the basin when the Saints arrived, a trapper named Miles Goodyear who claimed to own a large portion of the valley near present-day Ogden. About $2,000 of good Mormon battalion cash bought him out. The emerging kingdom economy mixed cooperative venture with private ownership. Land was often assigned by lot; a small farm in a new village might often be a ten-acre allotment, with extra plots for polygamous families. Homes were often grouped around a village meetinghouse to create a communal village, with farmers traveling to their fields outside of town.
Saints were regularly exhorted not to import nonessential items. They were to make their own clothes, make do, or do without. Incoming freight was to concentrate on necessary manufactured items such as machinery. Young attempted to establish industries that would serve the Saints’ needs and possibly produce goods for sale outside the Great Basin: sugar, wool, cotton, silk, iron. For a variety of reasons—including distrust of importing skilled Gentile administrators, insufficient capital, daunting environmental problems, and sometimes sheer bad luck—none of the early ventures was particularly successful. Most production was confined to cottage industries.
But expanding contact with the Gentiles had an upside. As thousands of non-Mormon emigrés passed through the basin on their way to California—some in the gold rush of 1849, some ordinary settlers—they were willing to pay inflated prices for supplies the Saints were willing to sell. The Saints were discouraged from participating in the gold rush, but some did, and gold dust began to trickle into church coffers, too. For a while Utah minted its own gold coins. In the late 1850s, with a federal military fort established not far from Salt Lake City, the Saints discovered that a military base, then as now, could be a profitable project for the local residents. The army brought with it good cash for a cash-starved economy. When the soldiers were withdrawn in 1861 to fight the Civil War, they left behind a bonanza in military surplus. The Saints were able to buy about $4 million worth of goods for $100,000: food, livestock, animal feed, iron, tools, and equipment.
Contracts for the transcontinental telegraph and railroad lines were made through the church and provided employment for many in the 1860s. Mining was increasingly important as significant mineral deposits were discovered in the basin, and it became profitable once the railroad made it practical to ship large quantities of ore. Young, however, was suspicious that mines and miners would attract more unwanted Gentile influence into the basin, and he pressured the Saints to avoid the industry and stick to agriculture.
In the early 1870s an attempt was made to establish cooperative communities, stores, and factories partly to avoid doing business with non-Mormons. The School of the Prophets, named after the early Kirtland educational enterprise but in Utah more of a governing council, was established by Young in 1867 to guide these activities. This council and its branches included about 5,000 priesthood holders who met to study religious questions as well as to guide economic activities for the church.
In 1874 the School of the Prophets was absorbed into the United Order of Enoch, an idealistic experiment in localized cooperative enterprise and communitarian living that took as inspiration the early church ideas of conservation and stewardship. With the railroad’s entry into the desert, the idea was partly to keep the outside world at bay and avoid absorption into eastern big business. About one hundred of these communities were formed, mostly in southern Utah. There were several types: (1) A commune in which all economic property was owned in common and differential wages were paid depending on the participant’s original property contribution and his work skills and assignment. (2) Extension of various cooperative activities already begun, in existing settlements or wards of cities, using “increase” to establish a variety of enterprises ranging from sawmills to cheese production. (3) Strictly communal cooperatives, much like the twentieth-century kibbutz in Israel.
Some of these cooperatives fell apart quickly through member disagreements. Others became increasingly complex as they branched into a wide variety of ventures. Some lasted until the 1880s, when they fell victim to the pressures of antipolygamy campaigns. The late historian Leonard Arrington, in his classic study Great Basin Kingdom, wrote that there is much evidence to indicate that these cooperatives were designed to be temporary, but that they “helped to keep Utah economically independent of the East longer and more completely than would otherwise have been the case.”
A more centralized cooperative venture was Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution (ZCMI), which was founded in 1868 and lives on as a major commercial institution in today’s Intermountain West. Young wanted Mormons to boycott Gentile merchants, so ZCMI was established, originally as a wholesale operation; retail was added later. Two men, Young and William Jennings, together owned nearly 80 percent of ZCMI shares. The signs at ZCMI stores had the words “Holiness to the Lord” emblazoned over the All-Seeing Eye of Jehovah. ZCMI immediately controlled the wholesale business of the area and soon dominated retail activities as well. Spies allegedly reported on disloyal Mormons who patronized Gentile merchants. Over this same period Mormons established other significant large-scale cooperative enterprises in banking and textile manufacture and expanded agriculture-related production.
Internal opposition to the cooperatives arose in a movement later known as the Godbeite heresy. William Godbe, a leading merchant and friend of Young, and other intellectuals of the day wanted the Mormons to end their social and economic insularity and founded the Utah Magazine to argue their case. They believed that Utah’s future economic growth and prosperity depended in considerable part on developing its mineral resources and practical interaction with Gentiles. In the long run Utah’s agriculture could not possibly compete with that of places like California.
Astute as those perceptions may have been, expressing them was considered to constitute heresy because one was not supposed to disagree openly with the policies of church authorities. The Godbeite leaders were excommunicated, but not before launching the Salt Lake Tribune, originally a fervently anti-Mormon publication and today a nonpartisan daily competitor of the church-owned Deseret Morning News. The Godbeites also founded a political party to resist the church’s hegemony and generally stretched the limits of dissent in Mormon country at a time when no law was made or action carried out without the approval of a shadow government operated by the church. The Godbeites founded a small, short-lived splinter, the Church of Zion, which developed spiritualist tendencies. It was telling that the only significant church schism during Young’s reign essentially involved economics, not doctrine. Young’s main importance to the later church was organizational rather than intellectual or theological.
In 1877, after years of isolation and with Young’s decades of rule coming to an end, the church was again increasingly embroiled in anti-Mormon difficulties, this time at the federal level. As in Illinois, the issues were the recurring ones of theocratic control and polygamy. A shared heritage of persecution and pioneer hardships, in addition to shared beliefs, had developed a powerful sense of group identity. Joseph Smith’s church polity has been hierarchical and authoritarian from the beginning. This was naturally reinforced by the pioneer experience in which survival depended on community cooperation that flowed necessarily from a clearly defined authority structure.
All that was clear enough. What was less clear was how Mormon ideals could play themselves out within the American conception of church-state relations. Shortly before Smith was assassinated, he claimed that “the whole of America is Zion itself from north to south.” At the same time his revelations regarded American institutions, and especially the U.S. Constitution, as divinely inspired. Young, like Joseph Smith before him, always allowed for untrammeled private freedom of worship for non-Mormons. The problem lay in how to balance their territorial claims for the kingdom of God against those of American secular society. The separatism of Mormonism, Thomas O’Dea wrote, “was not only theocratic in church government but also totalitarian, in the sense of encompassing the totality of human activity within its orbit and under the leadership of the church.”
Beginning in 1850 the Mormons repeatedly applied for admission as a state to the Union, a goal not achieved until nearly two decades after Brigham Young’s death. Strands of separatism always mingled with patriotism in the Mormon attitude toward the Union, and after territorial status was achieved, relations with federal officials were edgy. When Young’s term as provisional governor ended in 1854, he was not about to move over easily and cede the office to a federal appointee. Through a mixture of Mormon truculence and ineptitude in Washington, a federal governor was not seated until after the “Utah War” of 1857–58, another episode that looms large in the Mormon collective memory, although it was a war in which no shot was fired.
Utah’s success at keeping its own affairs in church hands became an embarrassment to the U.S. government. In 1856 the national Republican candidates campaigned with a promise to rid the country of the “twin relics of barbarism,” slavery, and polygamy. In 1857 President James Buchanan, convinced by false reports that the Mormons were in rebellion, sent a military contingent to Utah to install his appointee, Alfred Cumming, in the territorial governor’s seat.
Rhetoric grew increasingly apocalyptic as the church prepared for the federal government’s Utah Expedition. Young’s response was to plan the Great Move. This was a dramatic gesture in which 30,000 Saints temporarily abandoned their homes and farms, in and around Salt Lake City, with Mormon men instructed to torch any settlements the army attempted to occupy. The idea was in part to demonstrate true Mormon solidarity, and perhaps also to win some sympathy back east. For several weeks, as many as 600 wagons a day rolled out of Salt Lake City. In the end the soldiers marched peaceably through Salt Lake City, on June 30, 1858, under strict instructions not to tamper with anyone’s property; they set up camp thirty miles south of the city. Governor Cumming assumed office without further trouble. And all the Saints came back home. The episode, say Arrington and Bitton, had “something of the incongruity of comic opera. The President of the United States had dispatched the largest peacetime army in the nation’s history to oversee the installation of half a dozen officials in a minor territory.”
The worst episode during the Utah War period had nothing to do with U.S. soldiers. This was the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre of September 11, 1857, in which Mormon settlers in southern Utah led Indians in attacking disarmed non-Mormons in the Fancher wagon train that was passing through, murdering 120 men, women, and children, all pioneers from Arkansas. This tragic affair has to be understood in the context of the hysteria of the time, as well as the vigilante culture that sometimes operated on the raw frontier. Mormons had apparently refused to sell supplies to the Fancher train, and the emigrés had responded by taunting the Mormons on sensitive pressure points like the Haun’s Mill Massacre and the murder of their prophet. The careful research in Juanita Brooks’s 1950 book The Mountain Meadows Massacre shows that the Mormons acted from a mixture of motives, including fear of war and invasion as well as a desire for revenge.
Brooks concluded that Young was not part of the plot to wipe out the Fancher train, but her research implicated the church in attempting to cover up the role played by Mormons in the slaughter. The nation at the time of the murders reacted with horror, and the church feared that its negative image was impeding the attempt to achieve statehood. Nearly twenty years after the massacre, Young’s adopted son John D. Lee was executed by the territorial government as a scapegoat made to carry the whole blame for the tragedy. Four decades after Brooks’s book, the church erected a monument dedicated to the victims of the massacre. The church’s president, Gordon B. Hinckley, then first counselor in the First Presidency, attended.
Debate over the massacre was revived in 2002 by Blood of the Prophets, a book by Salt Lake Tribune columnist Will Bagley. He built a circumstantial case that Young was responsible for initiating “the sequence of events that led to the betrayal and murder” and then concealed the situation to protect the church and its members. Loyalist scholars have been researching a book to undergird the argument that the isolated Mormon group acted on its own without headquarters involvement. The tragedy was also depicted in Brian Patrick’s 2003 documentary film Burying the Past, and the 2007 movie September Dawn starring Jon Voight.
Three years after the federal soldiers built their base, they abandoned it to fight the Civil War. Utahns were largely ignored during the war, a turn of events much to Young’s liking. Mormons sent T. B. H. Stenhouse to Washington, who reported that President Abraham Lincoln had said: “Stenhouse, when I was a boy on the farm in Illinois there was a great deal of timber on the farm which we had to clear away. Occasionally we would come to a log which had fallen down. It was too hard to split, too wet to burn, and too heavy to move, so we plowed around it. You go back and tell Brigham Young that if he will let me alone I will let him alone.”
But not long after the Civil War the winds changed as Utah’s period of isolation ended. The waning years of Young’s life were spent shoring up the Saints’ insularity by the cooperative movement and protecting the promised land from the encroachments of Gentile business and secular culture. In the years after his death the church had to deal with the largest barrier to statehood, the inflammatory issue of plural marriage.
When Brigham Young died on August 29, 1877, the legacy he did leave behind was clear. Under his presidency, the church had grown from 26,000 to 135,000 members. Major persecutions lay just ahead, but the resiliency to meet the challenges was also in place. The church was what he had hoped it would be: large, growing, and with a healthy sense of its own unique peoplehood. He died of peritonitis following a ruptured appendix, and a daughter reported that he perished with the name of Joseph on his lips.