At Sword's Point: A Documentary History of the Utah War to 1858
544
At Sword's Point: A Documentary History of the Utah War to 1858
544Hardcover
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Overview
The Utah War of 1857–58, the unprecedented armed confrontation between Mormon Utah Territory and the U.S. government, was the most extensive American military action between the Mexican and Civil wars. At Sword’s Point presents in two volumes the first in-depth narrative and documentary history of that extraordinary conflict.
William P. MacKinnon offers a lively narrative linking firsthand accounts—most previously unknown—from soldiers and civilians on both sides. This first volume traces the war’s causes and preliminary events, including President Buchanan’s decision to replace Brigham Young as governor of Utah and restore federal authority through a large army expedition. Also examined are Young’s defensive-aggressive reactions, the onset of armed hostilities, and Thomas L. Kane’s departure at the end of 1857 for his now-famous mediating mission to Utah.
MacKinnon provides a balanced, comprehensive account, based on a half century of research and a wealth of carefully selected new material. Women’s voices from both sides enrich this colorful story. At Sword’s Point presents the Utah War as a sprawling confrontation with regional and international as well as territorial impact. As a nonpartisan definitive work, it eclipses previous studies of this remarkably bloody turning point in western, military, and Mormon history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780870623530 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 04/15/2008 |
| Series: | Kingdom In The West , #10 |
| Pages: | 544 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.50(d) |
About the Author
William P. MacKinnon is an independent historian who lives in Santa Barbara, California. A widely recognized authority on Utah’s violent territorial period and the U.S. Army’s western campaigns, he is the author of numerous journal articles and the author-editor of At Sword’s Point, Part 1: A Documentary History of the Utah War to 1858.
Read an Excerpt
At Sword's Point, Part 1
A Documentary History of the Utah War to 1858
By William P. Mackinnon
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2008 William P. MacKinnonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87062-353-0
CHAPTER 1
"LIKE A THOUSAND O' BRICK"
Tense Prelude to Armed Intervention, 1849–55
Since we came down on the Gentiles lately "like a thousand o' brick," we have nearly scared them all out of the Territory, and we are anticipating a very quiet and peaceable winter.
— First Counselor Heber C. Kimball to James Ferguson, 8 September 1855
The Utah War did not simply spring up on a single day in 1857. It was a conflict nearly ten years in the making, a long period during which already frayed Mormon-federal relations deteriorated steadily, beginning with a minor clash with the army in 1849.
The first U.S. troops to visit the new Mormon settlement at Salt Lake — then an isolated, politically unorganized part of the Mexican Cession — arrived in late August 1849, two years after the Mormons first entered the Great Basin. The troops were detachments detailed by the War Department for quite different purposes. The contingents, traveling only days apart, encountered a suspicious, hypersensitive Mormon community at a time of great political uncertainty. Emblematically, the troops became embroiled in incidents that became part of a long chain of events leading to the Utah War.
The first detachment, 1st Lt. Robert M. Morris's company from the Regiment of U.S. Mounted Riflemen, was escorting Joseph Wilson, superintendent of Indian Affairs for much of the Mexican Cession. Wilson was in transit to California. He and Morris's escort arrived in Salt Lake City on 30 August 1849 and departed two days later. During their brief stay, some of the troops or their civilian packers scuffled with Salt Lake City constables following what was allegedly a rape attempt on the wife of local citizen Rodney Badger. Although a relatively minor and now obscure incident, Apostle George A. Smith recalled it heatedly nine years later during the Utah War.
The day after the Wilson-Morris group departed, 1st Lt. John W. Gunnison entered Salt Lake City from Fort Bridger with the vanguard of Capt. Howard Stansbury's party of topographical engineers. As with the Wilson-Morris group, the War Department had dispatched the Stansbury Expedition without notifying the Mormon community, although Mormon sources had provided Brigham Young with informal intelligence reports of Stansbury's westward movement for weeks. This federal insensitivity and Mormon information-gathering capability were harbingers of future behavior.
Although Captain Stansbury's troops and employees were apparently better disciplined than Lieutenant Morris's party, the melee of a few days earlier must have affected negatively the warmth of their welcome in Salt Lake City. Even more important were severe Mormon apprehensions about the impact on Mormon land claims of Captain Stansbury's mission — charting the Great Salt Lake. Without political organization as either a territory or state, the Salt Lake community was without access to the American system of preemption (homesteading); Mormons were, in effect, squatters on the public domain laboring in a harsh environment to improve land holdings for which they held no title. They pioneered under a church land-allocation system unrecognized by the U.S. government. The unannounced arrival of Stansbury's Expedition, equipped with the paraphernalia of surveyors as well as cartographers, stimulated Mormon apprehensions of land loss while aggravating perceptions of earlier victimization of homesteading Mormons in Missouri during the 1830s. Stansbury and Gunnison had to use all of the diplomacy they could muster before a suspicious, offended Brigham Young would accept and agree to assist their mission.
Although one officer associated with the Stansbury Expedition — 2d Lt. George W. Howland — provocatively left the Salt Lake Valley for Oregon Territory with a former plural wife of First Counselor Heber C. Kimball, the main group departed for Washington the next summer on generally good terms with the Latter-day Saints. Nonetheless the Compromise of 1850, finalized by Congress as Stansbury rode east, failed to extend the preemption land system to the new Utah Territory. The result was severe Mormon-federal conflicts over land issues that continued into the 1860s, when Congress remedied the situation.
The tensions in Salt Lake City over the first brief presence of federal troops were soon followed by an escalating series of incidents revolving around not only social conduct and survey disputes but a wide range of other matters. The conflicts involved virtually every aspect of federal-Mormon interface: the quality of mail service; the jurisdiction of county, territorial, and federal courts; the evenhandedness of criminal justice; Indian relations and perceptions of Mormon tampering with tribal allegiances; Governor Young's handling of congressional appropriations; and the accuracy of the territorial census, an issue important to any Mormon bid for statehood. Reports of Mormon conduct and attitudes from argonauts passing through Salt Lake City to California were mixed, with some travelers positive and grateful about Mormon hospitality while other visitors were sometimes highly critical, citing exploitative, predatory, intimidating, and disloyal behavior.
Aggravating these bitterly contested federal-territorial issues was a series of even more volatile sectarian issues. Chief among these was the obvious but unadmitted practice of plural marriage or polygamy. But at the heart of much of this tension was a collision between Brigham Young's vision of Utah under his leadership as an autocratic theocracy (anticipating the Second Coming of Christ) rather than as a conventional federal territory functioning as a ward of Congress under republican principles of government.
Under territorial status officers were appointed by the president with advice and consent of the Senate. It was by such process, accompanied by intensive lobbying by Thomas L. Kane, a friendly non-Mormon Philadelphia philanthropist, that Pres. Millard Fillmore had designated Brigham Young governor in 1850. Several other Latter-day Saints were also among Utah's first federally appointed officials. In Young's case he held the overlapping roles of governor, U.S. superintendent of Indian Affairs, and militia commander in addition to his church positions. But when such appointees were non-Mormons, Brigham Young and other Mormons challenged them, especially if they were hacks, alcoholics, grafters, libertines or incompetents. When this was done with inflammatory language or occasional violence, such challenges spawned a growing eastern perception of Utah as a disloyal, violent society.
This is not the place for an exhaustive examination of these incidents. But a summary description of the most significant pinch points — some poorly understood today — illustrates an important, foundational concept. The Utah War came about not because of a single critical incident during the spring of 1857. Rather, it was the product of nearly a decade of corrosive incidents, deteriorating relations, and grossly differing philosophies of governance — one secular, conventional, and republican while the other was authoritarian, millennial, and theocratic.
TENSIONS OF THE EARLY 1850S
As Congress debated the political organization of the Mexican Cession during 1849–50, it received two petitions bitterly critical of the Mormon Salt Lake community and its loyalty to the U.S. government. These accusations were the dramatic work of a man appearing to be a Mormon insider, William Smith — the erratic, vindictive younger brother of LDS church founder Joseph Smith, Jr. The petitions had a negative impact on Congress's willingness to sanction either a State of Deseret or Brigham Young's early appetite for a vast Mormon political entity stretching from the crest of the Rockies to San Diego Bay. The result was the Compromise of 1850 and Congress's creation of a large but substantially more circumscribed Utah Territory.
During the summer of 1851 Utah's non-Mormon federal appointees arrived in the territory and then abruptly returned to Washington in the fall of 1851 bearing tales of abusive, disloyal behavior on the part of Mormon leaders, especially Gov. Brigham Young. As the departing officials prepared to leave Utah, Brigham Young's quasi-governmental Council of Fifty covertly considered acquiring an exotic weapon developed by elderly, eccentric "Professor" Uriah Brown. At the invitation of Phineas Young, the governor's brother, Brown had traveled to Utah to sell what Young described for the council as "an invention of liquid fire to destroy an army & navy. Many evidences of the power of the invention can be adduced. ... If pipes were laid in the kanyon he could destroy an army instantly without injuring the operator. If we ever settle on a sea port he could destroy any number of vessels, any navy in an instant. "Since Brown's invention was not intended for Indian warfare, the question arises as to the potential application being contemplated by the Mormons. Equally unusual was the request made during the fall of 1851 by Nauvoo Legion general Daniel H. Wells of Samuel Colt, the famous Hartford arms manufacturer. Wells sought information on the price and availability of large quantities of Colt's most powerful, sophisticated, scope-equipped weapons and "any kind of instruments you may be manufacturing, suited to mountain warfare." It was an urgent inquiry of the type that Colt might have expected from the U.S. Army's ordnance bureau rather than from a poorly financed territorial militia concerned about sporadic Indian attacks.
Notwithstanding a national uproar and congressional inquiry into the public aspects of the so-called runaway-officials affair, it largely subsided in 1852 after Young dispatched his second counselor, Jedediah M. Grant, to conduct a campaign of aggressive rebuttal if not attack in eastern metropolitan newspapers with the covert help of Thomas L. Kane. Although these efforts were relatively successful, subsequent widespread rumors of a Mormon independence movement to take the new Utah Territory out of the federal union forced an intense campaign of denial by Mormon leaders in early 1852.
Another national sensation arose in 1852 following the 12 August public disclosure in Salt Lake City that the frequently denied principle of celestial (plural) marriage was and had long been an integral part of Mormon practice as well as theology. The vitriolic uproar over this announcement swelled rather than diminished with time. It nearly cost the church the support of a shocked, disapproving, but ultimately forgiving Kane, a past and future Mormon advocate. Not surprisingly, during 1852 Utah failed in a second attempt to obtain congressional approval for its proposed political transformation from a territory into a State of Deseret. Lost in the process was the Mormons' ability to elect their own officials and to deflect a growing public clamor for federal action over the polygamy issue.
With the departure of a simpatico President Fillmore and the inauguration of an untested Franklin Pierce in March 1853, Brigham Young recognized the political dangers ahead. President Pierce was well aware of the recent runaway-officials predicament, and in 1854 he would need to decide whether to nominate Young for a second four-year term. With a friendly, even chatty tone ("Wishing you a happy, prosperous, and peacefull administration"), Young wrote to Pierce on 30 March in an attempt to influence the president's thinking on appointments at the onset of his administration. Young's letter was essentially an exposition of the need to appoint Mormons to Utah's federal offices on grounds that qualified candidates were locally available and only they understood and could serve effectively for the long term in the territory's isolated, expensive, and culturally unusual environment. In the midst of these arguments, Young included a request "in my own behalf" that he "shall have the honor to be continued in the Office I now hold." This was one of the rare direct communications between Brigham Young and an American president. Four years later his attempts to influence a newly elected James Buchanan would be significantly different — indirect, severe, and only through intermediaries.
On 26 October 1853, along Utah's Sevier River, Capt. John W. Gunnison and seven members of his army topographical engineering party were massacred while surveying one of the routes proposed for a transcontinental railroad. Although the overwhelming likelihood was that the murders were committed by an Indian group (Pahvants), accusations welled up asserting that Mormons were responsible for the atrocity either directly as assassins or indirectly as enablers. Other conspiracy theories associated the massacre with presumed Mormon displeasure over the 1852 appearance of The Mormons, a book published by Gunnison following his 1850 return east from a winter in the Salt Lake Valley with the Stansbury Expedition.
During the late summer of 1853 a large Mormon posse expelled frontiersman and national icon Jim Bridger from his trading post on Blacks Fork of the Green River for allegedly violating Brigham Young's ban on trading alcohol and munitions with Indians during the Walker War, a local Mormon-Ute conflict. Responding to lobbying in Washington by Bridger during January 1854, Congress seriously debated but ultimately declined to truncate Utah's eastern frontier while creating boundaries for the new adjacent territories of Kansas and Nebraska.
Throughout 1854 Pres. Franklin Pierce quietly struggled with the dilemma of whether and how to replace Brigham Young as Utah's governor upon the expiration of his term, a political danger of which Young was well aware through Bernhisel's periodic meetings with Pierce and monthly reports to Salt Lake City. In the midst of this uncertainty U.S. Army brevet lieutenant colonel Edward J. Steptoe arrived in Salt Lake City from Fort Leavenworth on 31 August with a command of about 325 soldiers and civilian packers, as well as nearly 1,000 horses and mules. This was an army presence grossly larger than the detachments of Morris, Stansbury, and Gunnison as well as the early 1854 civilian exploring expedition of John C. Frémont. Steptoe's mission was three-fold: to provide troops and animals for Pacific Coast garrisons; to mark a better road from Salt Lake City to California; and to assist Utah authorities in the capture of those responsible for the prior year's Gunnison massacre. As year-end 1854 approached, relations between Steptoe's troops and civilians in Salt Lake City declined steadily over matters of public drunkenness and what today would be called fraternization with Mormon women. On Christmas Day, following an earlier brawl at the Salt Lake Theater, there was a drunken riot in the city's streets requiring intervention by Steptoe's officers and the Nauvoo Legion. Four days earlier, without Steptoe's awareness, the U.S. Senate confirmed Pierce's nomination of Steptoe as Brigham Young's gubernatorial successor.
By early February 1855 rumors of Steptoe's appointment drifted into Salt Lake City from California and soon became an open secret even though Steptoe kept his own counsel. It was an opportunity about which the colonel agonized throughout the winter and on which he took no action because of his reluctance to leave the army and doubts about his ability to govern Utah. In early spring, three Pahvant Utes were tried in Nephi, Utah, for the Gunnison massacre, resulting in their conviction by a Mormon jury for manslaughter. Perceived as a tepid verdict contrary to the judge's instructions and rendered against perhaps the wrong defendants, it was an outcome that enraged Steptoe's officers — and later many eastern non-Mormons — nearly as much as the convicts' subsequent escape from Utah's porous territorial penitentiary.
In May the Steptoe Expedition left Utah. Its commander had still not decided whether to accept Pierce's appointment. Upon departure the army was accompanied by as many as one hundred married and single Mormon women seeking an exit from the LDS church and the protection of a military escort to California. Here was the 1850 Howland incident writ large. Mormon leaders were livid at the size and character of this female exodus and what they perceived as wholly unacceptable social conduct by Steptoe's command. In the meantime Brigham Young's gubernatorial status remained unaddressed and ambiguous as additional federal appointees — including for the first time a surveyor-general — arrived to fill other territorial positions. Within a remarkably short period of time, the newcomers too were alienated and mutually at odds with Mormon leadership.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from At Sword's Point, Part 1 by William P. Mackinnon. Copyright © 2008 William P. MacKinnon. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Illustrations,Foreword,
Acknowledgments,
Editorial Procedures,
Introduction,
1. "LIKE A THOUSAND O' BRICK": TENSE PRELUDE TO ARMED INTERVENTION, 1849–55,
2. "HAPPY FIGHTING LED BY INSPIRED MEN": APPROACHING THE FLASH POINT, 1856,
3. "SEE THE RED STUFF RUN": AWAITING BUCHANAN,
4. "DANCING ON A VOLCANO": THE CHANGE IN ADMINISTRATIONS,
5. "IT'S A HELL OF A PLACE": THE DECISION TO INTERVENE,
6. "PRESIDENT YOUNG SAYS THAT HE WOULD BUILD A FORT": UTAH PREPARES FOR THE STORM,
7. "TO CONQUER BOTH TIME AND DISTANCE": HARNEY ORGANIZES THE EXPEDITION,
8. IN PHARAOH'S ARMY: TEAMSTERS, REPORTERS, AND SOLDIERS WEST,
9. "WE WILL MAKE A POTTER'S FIELD OF EVERY CANYON": YOUNG AND THE LEGION RESPOND,
10. "BRING HOME ALL THE POWDER AND LEAD": THE QUEST FOR ARMS AND MUNITIONS,
11. "IF WE ARE DRIVEN INTO EXTREME MEASURES": BRIGHAM YOUNG BELEAGUERED,
12. "LONELY BONES": VIOLENCE AND LEADERSHIP,
13. "LIKE STUBBLE BEFORE A WIRLWIND": THE LEGION STRIKES,
14. "STAGGERING ALONG LIKE SO MANY DRUNKEN MEN": THE ARMY'S ORDEAL,
15. "MY THOUGHTS UPON UTAH MATTERS": ORIGINS OF KANE'S MISSION,
16. "MUCH EASIER TO PLAN THAN EXECUTE": BUCHANAN AND DIPLOMATS REACT TO LOT SMITH,
17. "INTO WINTER QUARTERS": SIDNEY JOHNSTON TAKES CHARGE,
18. "TO AVERT A WAR OF EXTERMINATION": CONVERGING DESTINIES OF KANE, BUCHANAN, AND YOUNG,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,