masterly way; the main body, for instance, in its trip across the prairies made flour in a mill built by Young and reaped grain sowed months before by an advance guard. The first migration arrived in Salt Lake City in September, and the population of the new settlement before the close of 1848 was about 5000. The city did not prosper, however, during the first few years of its settlement; but in 1849 and 1850 it became a dépôt and outfitting place for the immigrants to California in the gold excitement. The great improvement of the country under systematic irrigation (here first used on a large scale in the United States) was another factor in the industrial growth of the settlement. As early as 1837 Mormon missionary work had begun in Great Britain, and many foreign converts had immigrated to Ohio, Missouri and Illinois; in December 1847, in a “general epistle” to the Church, Young urged all Mormons in Europe to emigrate as speedily as possible; 120 British saints immigrated in February 1848; a general “emigrating fund” was established in 1849, and the Perpetual Emigration Fund Company was incorporated in 1850; but in 1855 when there were 4425 emigrants, according to the British agency, as a result of an attempt to cut down expenses, proper provision was not made for their transportation from Iowa City, only hand-carts or push-carts being supplied, and one-sixth of a party of 400 died of starvation or exhaustion in a winter march across the plains.
When the Mormons first went west they thought they would escape from the jurisdiction of the United States, but the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the close of the Mexican War transferred the region to the United States. In March 1849 a convention at Salt Lake City organized the “State of Deseret,” of which Brigham Young was elected governor; a general assembly meeting in July sent a delegate to the Federal Congress and asked through Stephen A. Douglas for admission into the Union as a state or as a Territory; and on the 9th of September 1850 Utah was admitted as a Territory, of which Young became governor. He forced three non-Mormon district judges to leave the Territory in 1851, and by his open opposition to Lieut.-Colonel Edward Jenner Steptoe, U.S.A., who was stationed in Salt Lake City in the winter of 1854–1855 with about 300 soldiers on the way to California, and who was appointed governor of Utah in December 1854, forced Steptoe to decline the nomination. In 1855–1856 actual violence seems to have been offered to Judges George B. Stiles and W. W. Drummond; and about the same time Federal Indian agents in Utah complained that Mormon missionaries to the Indians were rousing them to hostilities against the United States. The defiant attitude of the Mormon Church towards the United States was thus being continually brought to the notice of the Federal authorities by official reports and by officials fugitive from Utah; and at the same time popular sentiment was stirred against Mormonism by constant rumour of violence in Utah against non-Mormons and apostates and by the official publication, in August 1852, of the “revelation on the eternity of the marriage covenant, including plurality of wives.” In 1853 Young put down autocratically the “Gladdenites,” followers of Gladden Bishop, who opposed polygamy. In 1856 the Mormon “Reformation” had begun: its principal factors were an elaborate system of confession to missionaries of the Church; the apparent inspiration by the Church of assassination of any suspected of hostility to the Church, of opposition to the ambition of its leaders, or of an intention to escape from Utah and the control of Young; and the doctrine of “blood atonement,” which was introduced by Jedediah Morgan Grant (1817–1856) and by which the only remission for certain sins was the shedding of the sinner’s blood, so that, according to Brigham Young, “cutting people off from the earth . . . is to save them, not to destroy them.” Many outrages were committed by a Mormon band of desperadoes who called themselves “Wolf-hunters.” Young’s agents doubtless killed William P. Parish of Springville, Utah, early in 1857, apparently because he was planning to remove to California; at about the same time a party of six, including two brothers named Aikin, travelling from San Francisco were arrested as spies, were acquitted, and then were attacked in their camp and murdered, one at least by an assassin who claimed that Young had given him the order; and at Mountain Meadows in Washington county, in the south-western part of Utah, on the 11th of September 1857, about 120 immigrants on their way to southern California, having been attacked four days before by Indians and Mormons and having made a bold defence, were tricked by a flag of truce carried by Mormons who pretended to be a rescuing party, and were killed by armed Mormon troops,[1] seventeen of the younger children being spared.
In 1857 President Buchanan[2] appointed Alfred Cumming (then superintendent of Indian affairs on the Upper Missouri) as governor of the Territory in place of Young, and sent 1500 men to Utah under Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston. On the 15th of September Young issued a proclamation forbidding all armed forces from entering the Territory, calling to arms all forces in the territory, and declaring martial law. On the 5th and 6th of October a band of mounted Mormons under Major Lot Smith captured and burnt three supply-trains of the Federal troops; soon afterwards 800 oxen were cut out from another supply-train and were driven to Salt Lake City. The main body of the Federal troops under Colonel Johnston went into winter quarters in November at Black’s Forks, near Fort Bridger. But in the spring of 1858, through the intervention of Thomas L. Kane of Pennsylvania, who had probably been baptized by Young in 1847 and seems to have been a Mormon agent in the East, and who now received letters of authority from President Buchanan, the Mormons were induced to make a merely formal submission to Federal authority. Governor Cumming acquiesced in this settlement of affairs, by which the actual victory was with the Saints. A peace commission sent to Utah in the summer of 1858 carried to the Mormons a presidential proclamation by which they received pardon for their treason. Practically all the Federal troops were withdrawn from Utah in the summer of 1860; soon afterwards Governor Cumming left the Territory to join the Confederate army. One of his immediate successors, John W. Dawson of Indiana, late in 1861 was forced to leave the territory, having been terribly beaten by several Mormons who professed (with apparent truth) to avenge an insult to a woman. In 1862, because the Mormons were suspected of sympathizing with the Confederate States, Colonel P. E. Connor, in command of the military district of Utah (and Nevada), actually marched United States troops into Salt Lake City. Governor Stephen S. Harding, appointed in 1862, proved less tractable than previous governors; a mass meeting in March 1863 undertook to secure his removal; and in June he and a Federal judge were displaced, possibly by the influence of Young (whom Harding had arrested for polygamy but who was not indicted), through capitalists interested in western mail-express and telegraph projects. The Church became less hostile to the Federal government toward the close of the Civil War, as it became apparent that the Confederacy was to be defeated.
Young made a successful effort in 1868–1869 to assure the industrial and commercial control of Utah: after Colonel Connor established Camp Douglas in the immediate vicinity of Salt Lake
- ↑ There is no positive proof that this massacre was ordered by the authorities. John Doyle Lee, who was executed in 1877 for the massacre, was a prominent Mormon, had been “adopted” as a spiritual son of Brigham Young in Nauvoo, was one of the founders of Provo and other Mormon settlements in southern Utah, a probate judge, afterwards a member of the Territorial legislature, and his statement implicates the Church. Lee said that he was sacrificed to justice. The only charge against the immigrants seems to have been that they were from Arkansas, and that all Arkansans had forfeited their lives because it was in Arkansas (near Van Buren) that Parley Parker Pratt, the Mormon Isaiah, was killed on the 13th of May 1857 by Hector H. McClean, with whose wife Pratt had eloped. It seems probable that sentiment was aroused against the Arkansans by false stories of their poisoning wells, burning fences, &c.
- ↑ Buchanan’s message (Dec. 8, 1857) stating that Young and his followers apparently intended “to come into collision with the government of the United States” and his sending troops to Utah were considered by his critics as attempts to create an issue which would overshadow the slavery question and to draw away from the army an important force.
