In every gold rush…the suppliers and service industries will gather up the dust while ninety-nine percent of the minors go home with empty pokes.

—John McPhee

While Mountain Meadows simmered on the back burner, Brigham returned to consolidating his power and to bringing more converts to the Great Basin.

In the late 1850s and early 1860s, Brigham sought to make his Mormons more self-reliant. He tried growing cotton, which for a time seemed promising, especially in light of the blockade of the South during the Civil War. While Brigham had quit using tobacco in 1860, he nevertheless calculated that by home growing tobacco he could keep $60,000 a year out of the hands of non-Mormon merchants.1

With initial reservation, Brigham had allowed the brethren to conduct limited trade with Johnston's soldiers at Camp Floyd. When it became apparent the army was a very good market, he went full out, selling timber and food. The result was an influx of cash to the economy.²

When the army abandoned the fort at the start of the Civil War, Brigham—through several intermediaries—bought the army's flour, iron, machinery, and many wagons and horses at a fraction of its real price. He attempted to create self-sufficiency while at the same time encouraging the government to build a transcontinental railroad that would go through Utah. It would make the process of settling converted Mormons in Utah faster and cheaper, and it might create trade favorable to the church.

Brigham continued to be staunchly anti-mining. He wanted the church to benefit from any mining strikes but was worried that if gold was discovered, it would bring an overwhelming number of non-Mormons into the state. He had watched Mormons lose power in western Nevada when the Comstock Lode brought thousands of miners into what had been Mormon turf. The miners soon consolidated political power. Congress created the Nevada Territory in 1861 as a result. Mining would “weld upon our necks chains of slavery, groveling dependence and utter overthrow,” Brigham complained.3

Brigham himself was hardly impoverished. He told journalist Horace Greeley in 1859 he was worth a quarter of a million dollars. This didn't include most of the assets of the church, which were held in trust by Brigham or in his name. He sometimes mixed his personal funds with church funds. Brigham lived in spacious houses and drove a fine carriage. He'd grown up poor; now he was rich and not afraid to display his wealth, in spite of the poverty of many Utahns. “God heaps property on me, and I am duty bound to take care of it,” he said.⁴

The Civil War brought this comment from Brigham: “I earnestly prayed for the success of both North & South.”⁵

President Buchanan had been replaced by Abraham Lincoln. General Johnston had left Camp Floyd to join the rebels. Governor Cumming, a Southerner, also left the state. Western territories and states, including California and Oregon, had many Confederate sympathizers, but Brigham had made clear that Utah wanted entry to the Union as a free state. He was firmly pro-Constitution, firmly anti-government, and said so in the first telegraph transmission that went from Utah in 1861.⁶

Wars have always kindled Mormon hopes for the millennium, and the Civil War seemed to bring the Last Days even closer. Joseph Smith purportedly prophesied that Mormons would step in and save the Constitution. The future spread of their kingdom was linked to God's destruction of the US government.⁷

Governor Cumming's replacement was on the way, and he was rumored to be Broughton Harris. Harris had been one of the original 1851 appointees and had fled the state in fear of Brigham's hammer, and Brigham expressed his hope that “if Harris did come the boys & dogs would piss on him.”8 Harris did not come and dogs waited.

Instead, the new Utah governor was John Dawson. Dawson blocked Brigham's renewed attempt to gain statehood and thus frustrated Brigham's desire to be elected governor. Dawson's tenure was the shortest of any territorial governor's, and it was because of a sex scandal. Mormon Albina Williams, the subject of Dawson's unwanted advances, ostensibly drove Governor Dawson off with a shovel and then presented the attempted seduction in an affidavit to Brigham.⁹

Dawson threatened to shoot the editor of the Deseret News, Thomas Stenhouse, if he published anything about Dawson's alleged desire to “sleep with Tom Williams['s] widow.”¹⁰ Dawson left Great Salt Lake City on New Year's Eve 1861. Stopping at Ephraim a hundred miles south of Salt Lake, he was badly beaten; some rumored that he was castrated.¹¹

Editor Stenhouse would be excommunicated from Mormonism in 1871, and in a retaliatory exposé, he would claim Dawson had been entrapped by church leaders “in an offense.”¹²

Dawson was replaced by Stephen Harding, whose initial sympathies for the Mormons “evaporated within weeks.” He called the Mormons’ predictions of the downfall of the government “disloyal.”¹³

Utah impatiently waited for statehood. Congress rejected its petitions, based on polygamy and lingering questions about the Mountain Meadows episode.

Utah was strategically placed on the Overland Trail, and Brigham was ordered by President Lincoln to provide one hundred men to protect the mail route. Lot Smith, who had destroyed the army wagons in Wyoming in the Utah War of 1857, was named to lead the unit.¹⁴

However, in August 1862 Brigham received the unhappy word that a new detachment of federal troops from California would be sent to Utah. In anger and defensiveness, he withdrew Smith's services. Thus ended Utah's only contribution to the Civil War.¹⁵

In 1863, Colonel Patrick Edward Connor arrived in Great Salt Lake City with five hundred men of the Third Regiment, California Volunteer Infantry. His stated mission was to protect the route to California through the Utah Territory from Indian depredations. He was also in Utah to quell any possible Mormon “uprising.” Connor established Camp Douglas, named for Stephen A. Douglas, on a hill overlooking Great Salt Lake City. Connor, an outspoken Irishman, would become a hated Catholic symbol of authority over the Mormons.16 It may be apocryphal, but it was said that one of his first acts was to install a cannon aimed at Brigham Young's Beehive House three miles away.

Connor was among “the nation's foremost haters of Indians and Mormons.”¹⁷ He warned the Mormons that their treasonable sentiments would be harshly punished. On a foray into Great Salt Lake City he declared it “a community of traitors, murderers, fanatics and whores.” He called Brigham a despot and declared that he ordered the execution of “those disobedient to his will.” Connor said federal appointees were entirely powerless and lived in fear of Brigham's spies. He warned Washington of a Mormon attack and said if it should come, he would strike at the leaders of the church.¹⁸

On two occasions, believing Connor was about to arrest Brigham, signal flags were raised on the Beehive House. They summoned hundreds of armed Mormons who vastly outnumbered Connor's contingent.¹⁹

During the rest of the Civil War, Fort Douglas served as the headquarters of the District of Utah in the Department of the Pacific. Connor sent soldiers into the nearby hills seeking gold, silver, and other minerals, and also founded the first non-Mormon newspaper, the Union Vedette.

The Vedette was published from 1863 to 1867 and was an anti-Mormon voice.²⁰

Said the Territorial Enterprise, published in Virginia City, Nevada, “The Vedette is the Wooden Horse entered into the Troy of Polygamy…. The Union Vedette of Salt Lake is a thorn in the side of Mormonism. It is a Daily journal, published under the guns of Camp Douglas, and the ‘Destroying Angels’ are not disposed to molest the audacious little sheet. It is the enemy of polygamy and the effects of its broadsides are beginning to be seen and felt. Were the Federal Troops to be withdrawn from Salt Lake City, the Vedette would not long be permitted to assault the sacred symbols of Mormonism.”²¹

Connor was looking for a fight, and Brigham roared his readiness to take up the challenge. However, cooler heads prevailed. Brigham was a fox as much as a lion.²² Accommodations were reluctantly made by both sides.

Lincoln's second inauguration brought a troop of Connor's soldiers and members of the Nauvoo Legion together in a march through the streets of Great Salt Lake City. A month later Brigham lowered the flags to half-mast following the assassination of the president, whom just two years before he had labeled “as wicked a man as ever lived.”23

Indian problems continued to beset the settlers, and in the natives Connor saw a foe he could fight with bullets and powder.

In January 1863, a Mormon scout led Connor's soldiers toward a Shoshoni village on the Little Bear River near the Utah-Idaho border. They attacked the sleeping village at dawn and in the end killed 235 men, women, and children. Connor declared a great victory, and even the Deseret News was supportive. In fact, it was a slaughter of innocents based on the report of a stolen cow.²⁴

Today at the Fort Douglas Military Museum (the fort has largely been subsumed by the University of Utah), a tasteless paean to General Connor's massacre of Native Americans on the Little Bear is inscribed on a plaque: “In May, 1863, following his impressive victory at the Battle of the Bear River, Connor was appointed to Brigadier General.”²⁵

At the museum Connor is described as the “Father of Utah Mining,” certainly accurate, but he is also described as “First Gentile of Utah.” The latter is accurate in a weakly symbolic sense. In 1854, seven years before Connor came to Utah, Julius and Fannie Brooks became one of Utah's early gentile families. They were Jewish.²⁶

Connor encouraged the development of mining, and many of his California volunteers had experience in the gold fields. By 1863 the first claims had been filed in Bingham Canyon in the southwest corner of Great Salt Lake Valley.²⁷ More claims would be staked in adjacent Tooele County and at Alta in Little Cottonwood Canyon, just twenty-nine miles from the Beehive and Lion Houses. Shortly thereafter, mines were opened in the Tintic District, eighty miles to the south, and Park City, thirty-three miles east.²⁸ By 1864 non-Mormons were pouring into Utah to pry precious metals from Brigham's Great Basin Kingdom.²⁹

In 1866, Utah again heard threats of a possible invasion by the federal government—this time over a case of adultery. In March, Newton Brassfield was shot after he married Mary Emma Hill, who was already married to a polygamous Mormon, Archibald M. Hill, then absent on a church mission. Since the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act had been passed by Congress in 1862, US judge Solomon McCurdy had told Mrs. Hill that her plural marriage's illegality rendered a divorce unnecessary.30

Brassfield, a gentile from Nevada, had been arrested and released following an attempt by him and Mary Emma to remove household items from the Hill residence. Mr. Hill's Mormon friends threatened them. Brassfield threatened back. He was arrested, placed in jail, then released on bail. When Brassfield was about to enter his hotel with US marshal J. K. Hosmer, a gunmen stepped out of the shadows and shot Brassfield. The assailant was pursued by police but escaped. Brassfield died forty-five minutes later.³¹

Brigham denied any involvement by the church, but at an April conference he condoned the murder. If he were absent from his home, he would “rejoice to know that I had friends there to protect and guard the virtue of my household.”³²

This statement stung the angry anti-Brighamites.

General Connor's California Volunteers had been scheduled to leave Camp Douglas. Judge McCurdy wired military authorities of the rising conflict in the Brassfield affair. General Ulysses S. Grant instructed General William T. Sherman in St. Louis to keep the volunteers from Utah.³³

Sherman sent Brigham a scorching telegram: “Our country is now full of tried and experienced soldiers who would be pleased, at fair opportunity, to avenge any wrongs you may commit against our citizens.”³⁴ Brigham claimed he knew nothing of the murder but said any man had the right to take vengeance on a seducer of his wife.

Six months later Dr. John Robinson was killed after he attempted to file a claim for land within the expansive Great Salt Lake City limits. He built a shack on his claim, and the police tore it down. Robinson went to court to challenge the city's charter. On October 22, 1866, someone knocked on Robinson's door claiming his brother needed medical help. He stepped from his house and was shot. Colonel Connor, named a brevet major general after the end of the Civil War, immediately said Brigham's Destroying Angels had killed Dr. Robinson.³⁵

Brigham once again said he had no knowledge of who might commit such a dastardly deed, but in his usual fashion added, “If they jump my claims here, I shall be very apt to give them a preemption right that will last them to the last resurrection.”36

“Young's blunt talk increased suspicion that the church hierarchy sanctioned anti-gentile violence.”³⁷ As an example of such talk, Brigham had a proposition for certain senators and congressmen who were particularly anti-Mormon. He wrote to William Hooper, Utah's congressional delegate, “I have a proposition to make to the [senators]…when my old niger has been dead one year, if they will wash their faces clean they may kiss his ass.”³⁸

Non-Mormons hoped that the coming of the railroad would dilute Brigham's power as more gentiles poured in to work the mines and settle the territory. Yet Brigham welcomed the transcontinental railroad in spite of fears that it would bring more non-Mormons. He obtained contracts for the brethren to dig grades for both the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific. He liked the money, and he saw it as a way of keeping out the rascals he expected to comprise the construction crews. It would help shore up the economy, since Brigham and the church were having financial difficulties. (Brigham was habitually late in paying his bills.) Better yet, the railroad would bring more Mormon converts and they would be able to come to Utah more cheaply.³⁹