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Episode: 091 "Buchanan's Blunder" and the Utah War

Author: Scripture Central
Duration: 01:10:48

Episode Shownotes

After the 1838 “Mormon War” and their official expulsion from Missouri, Latter-day Saints relocated to Illinois where they built up the city of Nauvoo and a number of other settlements in Hancock County. After a short time of relative peace, they were again embroiled in conflict with their enemies which

culminated in the murder of Joseph and Hyrum Smith. This was followed two years later by the battle of Nauvoo and yet another expulsion from a US state with the blessing of its governor. Then it was off to the West where, not long after the Saints’ arrival in the Salt Lake Valley, conflicts began to arise with Native Americans. And by 1857 US President James Buchanan had ordered a force of 2,500 military personnel, under the command of Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston, to march to Utah to ensure that Brigham Young be replaced as the governor of Utah, which brought on the “Utah War.” Today on Church History Matters, we discuss all of this and of course trace Latter-day Saint involvment in the violence which occured along the way. For show notes and transcript for this and other episodes go to https://doctrineandcovenantscentral.org/church-history-matters-podcast/

Full Transcript

00:00:06 Speaker_01
After the 1838 Mormon War, and their official expulsion from Missouri under the executive order of Governor Lilburn W. Boggs, Latter-day Saints relocated to Illinois, where they built up the city of Nauvoo and a number of other settlements in Hancock County.

00:00:21 Speaker_01
After only a short time of relative peace, they were again embroiled in conflict with their enemies, which culminated in the murder of Joseph and Hyrum Smith.

00:00:31 Speaker_01
This was followed two years later by the Battle of Nauvoo and yet another expulsion from a U.S. state, with the blessing of its governor.

00:00:39 Speaker_01
Then it was off to the West, where, not long after the Saints' arrival in the Salt Lake Valley, conflicts began to arise with Native Americans. And by 1857, U.S.

00:00:49 Speaker_01
President James Buchanan had ordered a force of 2,500 military personnel under the command of Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston to march to Utah to ensure that Brigham Young be replaced as the governor of Utah, which brought on the Utah War.

00:01:04 Speaker_01
Today on Church History Matters, we discuss all of this, and of course, trace Latter-day Saint involvement in the violence which occurred along the way. I'm Scott Woodward, and my co-host is Casey Griffiths.

00:01:15 Speaker_01
And today, Casey and I dive into our fifth episode in this series on peace and violence in Latter-day Saint history. Now, let's get into it.

00:01:26 Speaker_00
Hello, Scott. Hello, Casey. Here we are once again, talking about violence. Talking about violence.

00:01:34 Speaker_00
We don't wanna make it sound like we're taking that lightly or not but sometimes if you don't laugh you're gonna have to cry with some of the stuff that we have to deal with here.

00:01:43 Speaker_01
I have a neighbor who apologized to my wife and said, I just started listening to your husband's new series about violence, and it was so heavy I had to stop. And my wife said, it's totally OK. You're not required to listen to every episode.

00:01:58 Speaker_01
It's totally cool. You don't have to apologize. If this is a topic that's not working for you, just skip to another topic or wait until we come up with a new series or something. But I thought that was cute and also kind of poignant.

00:02:13 Speaker_01
little too heavy and not your jam right now, that's totally okay. It's here when you need it. That's what this series is. It's for those who are wrestling with this question about violence and religion generally, as well as

00:02:26 Speaker_01
specifically the criticism against Latter-day Saints as potentially being a violent faith. So if this is a question that you are wrestling with, then we hope that this series is helpful.

00:02:37 Speaker_01
If it's not, we're not offended if you're not sticking with us through this whole thing. That's okay. That's okay.

00:02:44 Speaker_00
I'm just happy that your neighbors listen to this. My neighbors have never come up and been like, hey, good podcast, even though I'm desperate for their approval. I do have people at church that come up and say, hey, Good podcasts and stuff like that.

00:02:58 Speaker_01
So your neighbors aren't just showering you with approval now that you've got this church history podcast going, Casey?

00:03:05 Speaker_00
I thought once I had a podcast, they would respect me, but I don't know if they do or not. Maybe I need to, you know. Do a better job on my yard or something like that. Yeah.

00:03:15 Speaker_00
People at my gym though, have come up and asked me questions and that's kind of difficult because I'm sitting there like out of breath and someone's like, Hey, tell me about this letter that Thomas Sharp wrote. And I'm going, well,

00:03:29 Speaker_00
I just, I can't switch into professorial mode when I'm winded and I'm winded most of the time at the gym. It's a new experience for me. So, but I'm hanging in there. That's hilarious.

00:03:39 Speaker_01
Good. Well, good job. You'll, you'll get there. Your, your neighbors will come around.

00:03:42 Speaker_00
I feel like, and I have to say, I don't think that our subject today is entirely unpleasant. In fact, it's like, it's interesting. It's sort of fun. You know, it's kind of the craziest time in the history of Utah. We're talking about the Utah war today.

00:03:57 Speaker_00
Yeah. And boy, is this a fascinating period in the history of the church? Like there's so much happening and so many interesting characters and plot twists and surprises and some difficult things.

00:04:09 Speaker_00
And I think our listeners probably know that we don't always record our episodes in order. A couple of days ago, we had the chance to sit down with Rick Turley and Barbara Jones Brown. and talk about Mountain Meadows.

00:04:21 Speaker_00
And Rick Turley, who is somebody I just really admire, sort of said, yeah, this period where we're talking about the Mountain Meadows massacre and things surrounding it is the most difficult thing to talk about in church history.

00:04:34 Speaker_00
But his attitude was, if we can talk about that, we can talk about anything. Even if this is difficult, you'll hang in there with us because this is worthwhile stuff to know and it's stuff that every Latter-day Saint needs to be aware of. Yeah.

00:04:46 Speaker_00
So that it doesn't ever happen again.

00:04:48 Speaker_01
Yeah. Really important lessons to learn from this history. And so, yeah, we're going to try to bridge today from the 1838 Mormon war in Missouri. which we talked about in our last episode, to the Utah War. How do we go from there to here?

00:05:03 Speaker_01
So let me just kind of start a little bridge here. So after the Mormon War and the extermination order in Missouri, the Latter-day Saints relocate to a place called Commerce, Illinois. Later, the name is changed to Nauvoo, Illinois by the prophet.

00:05:20 Speaker_01
They settle there and in other settlements in Hancock County and across the river in Iowa.

00:05:25 Speaker_01
After a relatively short period of peace, Casey, about four-ish years of peace, conflict begins to raise its ugly head again, and the saints are embroiled in another spat of controversies that is eventually going to culminate in the deaths of Joseph and Hyrum Smith.

00:05:45 Speaker_01
And we have gone into detail in a previous series. In fact, we dedicated an entire series to the martyrdom of the prophet Joseph and his brother Hiram. And so if anyone's interested to get into the details of that, we recommend that other series.

00:05:58 Speaker_01
And so we're going to just gloss over that right now, hours and hours of content. We're just going to gloss over that and talk about how

00:06:05 Speaker_00
We didn't gloss over, by the way, I think we did like 10 episodes on the martyrdom. And so we did a lot. Yeah. Go back and listen to those. We just won't revisit it here because we've covered it.

00:06:16 Speaker_01
We're showing some restraint right now by not digging into any of the details of that. Suffice it to say, Joseph and Hiram were killed because of intense conflicts, some coming from within the church and some coming from without the church.

00:06:29 Speaker_01
The combination of those forces brought about the very tragic death of our prophet and his brother.

00:06:36 Speaker_01
Kind of leading up to the martyrdom, in fact, some of the just days before the martyrdom, Joseph expressed to some of his friends that the reason that he was willing to go to Carthage was because he did not want the horrors of Missouri to be revisited upon the saints in Illinois.

00:06:52 Speaker_01
In fact, according to Dan Jones, one of the prophet's friends, when Joseph Smith was leaving Nauvoo to Carthage, he says to Jones, I love the city of Nauvoo too well to save my life at your expense.

00:07:05 Speaker_01
If I go not to them, to Carthage, they will come here and act out the horrid Missouri scenes in Nauvoo. I may prevent it. I fear not death. My work is well nigh done. Keep the faith, and I will die for Nauvoo."

00:07:21 Speaker_01
pretty dramatic statement there, recorded by Jones. And you see the prophet's concerns about Missouri happening again. If he's got to die to prevent another Missouri from happening in Illinois, he'll do it.

00:07:33 Speaker_00
Yeah. It really seems like the specter of what happened in Missouri, especially Hans Mill have kind of haunted the prophet. And as we went through those sources linked to the martyrdom, again, the thing that impressed me over and over again.

00:07:47 Speaker_00
was that after Missouri, whenever Joseph Smith was confronted with violence, he chose the least violent path away from it.

00:07:54 Speaker_00
So even like these guys that published the Nauvoo Expositor who threatened to kill him, and on one occasion, even like pull a gun on him, he'll fine them. He'll be like, $100 fine. He won't hit back.

00:08:06 Speaker_00
He tries to use legal and peaceful means, even to the point to where the Dan Jones statement seems to illustrate that one of the reasons he went to Carthage was he thought,

00:08:15 Speaker_00
Even if it results in my death, it's better than Missouri happening all over again.

00:08:20 Speaker_01
But unfortunately, Joseph and Hiram's death only temporarily prevented violence against the Saints. But within two years, the Saints were forced to evacuate Nauvoo under threat of violence once again.

00:08:34 Speaker_01
And so on our way to the Utah Wars, I want to take a few minutes and talk about the violence that happened there in Nauvoo, something called the Battle of Nauvoo.

00:08:43 Speaker_01
And then we'll talk about the Saints coming out to the Intermountain West and things that happen out here.

00:08:48 Speaker_01
We're going to continue to follow the model, Casey, that you broke out for us, the three-part model, the different categories of violence that Latter-day Saints have been involved in. And it breaks down like this.

00:08:59 Speaker_01
Category one, situations where the Saints were the victims of violence, just straight-up victims. Other than acting defensively to protect their homes and families, the Saints don't really engage in retaliatory violence here.

00:09:12 Speaker_01
The most common example is one that we already cited, which is the 1833 violence in Jackson County and Joseph and Sidney at the John Johnson home in 1832.

00:09:23 Speaker_01
Category two is where the saints actually fight back, where they may not have started the violence, but they were willing to strike back to try to finish it. There is retaliation, there is tit for tat, lex talionis.

00:09:35 Speaker_01
And the most common example of this is our last episode with the 1838 Mormon War. We're going to see a little bit more of Category 2 today as we talk Utah War.

00:09:45 Speaker_01
Category 3 then is when the Saints are the aggressors, and we haven't had any instances of that yet in our history up to this point.

00:09:53 Speaker_01
But what we're talking about today actually sets the scene for and is the context of the worst example of Category 3 that the Saints ever were involved in, and that's the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which we'll talk about beginning in our next episode.

00:10:08 Speaker_01
So our burning question of the day today essentially is this. What episodes of violence took place during the Saints' removal from Nauvoo? and their experience in the Intermountain West.

00:10:19 Speaker_01
Honestly, the violence surrounding the Trek West and the immediate years following has incidents that fit into all three categories. So we're just going to briefly explore instances that represent all three during this episode.

00:10:32 Speaker_01
First, the Battle of Nauvoo, which takes place September of 1846. Second, conflicts with the Native Americans in the Great Basin, particularly what's called the Walker War, which takes place from July 1853 to May of 1854.

00:10:46 Speaker_01
And then finally, we'll dive into the Utah War, which takes place from 1857 to 1858. How's that sound? That sounds good. So you want to start us out with the Battle of Nauvoo, Casey?

00:11:11 Speaker_00
Yeah, again, we covered a lot of the violence in Nauvoo in our series on the martyrdom, but we did kind of end that with the trial of Joseph and Hiram Smith's murderers and didn't go much further.

00:11:22 Speaker_00
Now, there's not a lot of violence that takes place because Brigham Young basically exceeds to the demands of the anti-Mormons in Hancock County and agrees to remove the saints and even leaves earlier than he originally intended to.

00:11:37 Speaker_00
But there was some violence. For instance, you'll remember Thomas Ford, our old friend, who was the governor of Illinois, who we argued may have been complicit in Joseph Smith's death, either ignorantly or deliberately.

00:11:50 Speaker_00
And I think you landed on the side of deliberately.

00:11:54 Speaker_00
Yeah i think i was kinda like no i think he was just sort of dumb i think it was ignorance and i still think that but i'm open to other ideas anyway it's hard to be that dumb now but anyway yeah we debated this and it was fun and i don't know if i would underestimate the intelligence of american politicians to be honest with you but yeah okay so tom ford writes a history of illinois and he summarizes the saints departure from number like this he says.

00:12:19 Speaker_00
It is with much satisfaction that I am enabled to state that the people called Mormons have been removed from the state.

00:12:26 Speaker_00
The great body of them removed voluntarily, but a small remnant of them were barbarously expelled with force, and in a manner which reflects but little credit on the state or its institutions. So give him a little credit. He is a little introspective.

00:12:40 Speaker_00
He's not proud of the way that we were kicked out. He's not proud of how it ended. What he's referencing here when he says the small remnant that were barbarously expelled by force is what's known as the Battle of Nauvoo.

00:12:52 Speaker_00
It took place in September 1846. And just setting the scene, by the time the battle takes place, most of the Saints had evacuated the city. They were gone, Brigham Young and the first group start to leave as early as February 1846.

00:13:05 Speaker_00
I mean, we've all seen those dramatic paintings of the saints crossing the ice while the Mississippi river is still frozen.

00:13:13 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:13:14 Speaker_00
But a small number of Latter-day Saints remained in Nauvoo, and these were sometimes poorer Latter-day Saints who had trouble cobbling together the resources to head west.

00:13:22 Speaker_00
Some of the people that participated in the Battle of Nauvoo were actually new settlers who had come up and purchased the land cheap and kind of fell under the dangers posed by these anti-Mormon forces that were just dead set on getting every Latter-day Saint out of Nauvoo, even if it was just a small number who were essentially no threat to them.

00:13:40 Speaker_00
The other thing is that the battle of Nauvoo helped draw national attention to what was happening to the saints as well. In particular, there was a philanthropist from Philadelphia named Thomas L. Kane, who's going to be big in our story today.

00:13:55 Speaker_00
Kane comes after the battle of Nauvoo.

00:13:58 Speaker_00
and he travels all the way across Iowa and even goes to winter quarters, and he writes a really moving speech that he gives in Philadelphia to try and help people understand what was happening to Latter-day Saints, this refugee crisis.

00:14:12 Speaker_00
In fact, here's how he describes the plight of the saints. Thomas Kane wrote, Dreadful indeed was the suffering of these forsaken beings,

00:14:19 Speaker_00
Cowed and cramped by cold and sunburn, alternating as each weary day and night dragged on, they were, almost all of them, the crippled victims of disease.

00:14:29 Speaker_00
They were there because they had no homes, nor hospital, nor poorhouse, nor friends to offer them any. They could not satisfy the feeble cravings of their sick, and they had not bred to quiet the fractious hunger cries of their children.

00:14:41 Speaker_00
Mothers and babes, daughters and grandparents, all of them alike, all of them were bivouacked in tatters, wanting even covering to comfort them, to comfort those whom the sick shiver of fever was delivered to the marrow.

00:14:54 Speaker_00
And so, I mean, Cain actually fell sick himself.

00:14:57 Speaker_00
Disease was so rampant among the saints at winter quarters that he gets sick and he's nurtured back to health by the Latter-day Saints, and for that he remains a loyal friend to them for the rest of his life, though he does have, you know, complicated moments when plural marriage is announced.

00:15:13 Speaker_00
He's going to play a big role in the later part of the story here.

00:15:16 Speaker_00
But while some saints are out on the plains and some are setting up winter quarters, and the whole exodus, at least the first phase of it when they cross Iowa, was much, much more difficult than they thought it was going to be.

00:15:26 Speaker_00
There's a few Latter-day Saints back in Nauvoo who are trying to get packed up to go, but they don't have much protection.

00:15:35 Speaker_00
The Nauvoo Legion, who up to that time was one of the largest armed forces in the United States, had already left the city, and they're not really involved in the Battle of Nauvoo with a few exceptions.

00:15:44 Speaker_00
But even though the Saints are in the process of leaving Illinois, their enemies want to expedite the process. And you might recognize some of the names I'm going to mention here.

00:15:53 Speaker_00
The two main motivators behind the attack appear to have been Thomas Sharp, our old friend from the series on the martyrdom, and Levi Williams, two of the men who were indicted for the murders of Joseph and Hiram Smith.

00:16:07 Speaker_01
So they were not satisfied with the martyrdom. They needed to go further and bring this upon the Saints.

00:16:12 Speaker_00
Yeah, and a lot of this happens after they're acquitted in their trials for the murders of Joseph and Iris. In fact, some people think it may have emboldened them, that basically they killed two people.

00:16:23 Speaker_00
They let a mom that killed two people, and there were no legal consequences whatsoever for it. Nothing happened. They didn't even hold a trial for the murder of Hiram Smith, the prosecutor dropped out.

00:16:34 Speaker_00
And so they are emboldened and they launch a plan to just forcibly get any Latter-day Saints that are remaining out of Nauvoo. And they're organizing anti-Mormon forces.

00:16:45 Speaker_00
When you read histories of this, sometimes they're called the Carthaginian forces because they mostly come from Carthage, Illinois.

00:16:50 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:16:50 Speaker_00
But this is a town versus town, but with others from Warsaw helping. And the whole situation kind of comes to a head on September 10th, 1846, when 1000 members of the anti-Mormon forces actually march on Nauvoo.

00:17:03 Speaker_00
So they come to literally invade Nauvoo. In Nauvoo, there's about 150 men to set up defenses while women and children shelter near the temple. The temple is still standing at this point. And so.

00:17:15 Speaker_00
The way the battle went down, if you've been to Nauvoo, Mulholland Street is the main street up on the bluff by the temple. And that's the direction that the invading forces come in from. So the defenders of the city set up two makeshift cannons.

00:17:28 Speaker_00
They weren't actually real cannons. They were made from a steamboat shaft and then they barricade Mulholland Street facing Carthage. So imagine a kind of setup like you see in Les Miserables. The cannons weren't even real.

00:17:41 Speaker_00
I mean, they're doing the best they can here. I mean, were they functional or were they just... They were functional.

00:17:46 Speaker_00
I actually went to Nauvoo a couple weeks ago with some of my teaching assistants, and in the museum in Nauvoo that's not operated by the church, it's operated by the locals, there's cannonballs from the Battle of Nauvoo that are stored in there.

00:17:59 Speaker_00
And so the cannons did function, but it sounds like the defense was improvised. Jerry Riggs steamboat shafts turned into cannons. Yeah, they're doing the best they can with what they have. And again, it's about 150 versus a thousand people.

00:18:12 Speaker_01
Okay.

00:18:13 Speaker_00
And so the thousand men anti-Mormon group comes up and there's skirmishes on the 11th and 12th of September. And then on the 13th, there's a full on siege of the city.

00:18:24 Speaker_00
They push forward in spite of this opposition and it doesn't take very long before the defenders are overwhelmed and they're pushed back through the city. So.

00:18:33 Speaker_00
How's the house battles as they're moving back the entire battle doesn't last very long they get pushed from mulholland all the way down to the river within about an hour and forty five minutes.

00:18:44 Speaker_00
And the defenders of the city eventually get backed up against the mississippi river and several of them are killed not a lot we're talking maybe two or three of the defenders but they surrender at their waters and they give up their arms.

00:18:56 Speaker_00
Now, somebody that was involved in the defense was a guy who's also going to be important in the story named Daniel H. Wells. Squire Wells, as Joseph Smith called him, was not a Latter-day Saint.

00:19:06 Speaker_00
He does join and later on becomes a member of the First Presidency and leads the Nauvoo Legion during the Utah War. But he kind of reasons with the defenders. This is what one of the defenders records him saying.

00:19:19 Speaker_00
He said, what interests have the Saints to expect from its defense? Our interests are not identified with it, but in getting away from it, who would urge the propriety of exposing life to defend a place for the purpose of vacating it?

00:19:32 Speaker_00
So Daniel Wells basically reasons with the defenders and says, why are you trying to defend something that you're going to leave? This is just pride.

00:19:39 Speaker_01
You're planning on evacuating anyway. So yeah. Why defend it?

00:19:43 Speaker_00
Yeah. So the defenders of Nauvoo give up, they evacuate the city, the attacking forces enter, they ransack homes, they burn fields, and they desecrate the temple. Some of the remaining saints are literally thrown out of their homes.

00:19:57 Speaker_00
Some were thrown into the river in a form of mock baptism. That's how the sources describe it.

00:20:03 Speaker_02
Boy.

00:20:03 Speaker_00
And a preacher in the mob actually climbed to the top of the temple tower in Nauvoo and cried, peace, peace, peace to all the inhabitants of the earth. The Mormons are now driven. That's ironic.

00:20:12 Speaker_01
A preacher crying on the top of the temple, peace, because the Mormons are driven. He's part of the mob.

00:20:19 Speaker_00
He's part of the mob. That's messed up. This is actually kind of weirdly, they get forced across the river and Brigham Young hears that they have been forcibly removed. Where's Brigham Young at this time? Brigham Young's on the other side of the state.

00:20:33 Speaker_00
He's at the Missouri river on the other side of Iowa. Okay. Setting up winter quarters when word comes of the battle of Nauvoo.

00:20:40 Speaker_00
And he gives a speech that is very similar to the speech he's going to give about 10 years later when the hand card pioneers are trapped in Wyoming. Where he says, we've got to go back and we've got to rescue them.

00:20:52 Speaker_00
We've got to organize ourselves so that we can make sure these people. Okay. And it's sort of the dress rehearsal for the, for the handcart rescue that will happen in Utah later on. Got it. But this is the violent end to the saints time in Nauvoo.

00:21:07 Speaker_00
After this, Nauvoo becomes a ghost town. Those that have been to Nauvoo will see that it's alive and it has its own kind of unique and beautiful history, but it still kind of has this ghostly feel to it, like it used to be something huge.

00:21:19 Speaker_00
It's a little small. Some of the most beautiful writing about it comes from Thomas Kane. So several months later, this philanthropist from Philadelphia arrives in the city and here's what he wrote.

00:21:28 Speaker_00
He said, the town lay as in a dream under some deadening spell of loneliness from which I almost feared to waken. For plainly it had not slept long. There was no grass growing in the paved ways.

00:21:40 Speaker_00
Rain had not entirely washed away the prints of the dusty footsteps. Yet I went about unchecked. I went into empty workshops, rope walks, and smithies. The spinner's wheel was idle.

00:21:51 Speaker_00
The carpenter had gone from his workbench and shavings his unfinished sash and casing. Fresh bark was in the tanner's vat. and the fresh-chopped lightwood stood piled against the baker's oven.

00:22:02 Speaker_00
The blacksmith's shop was cold, but his coal-heap and his ladling-pool and crooked water-horn were all there, as if he'd just gone off for a holiday. No work-people anywhere looked to know my errand.

00:22:13 Speaker_00
If I went into the gardens, clinking the wicket-latch loudly after me to pull the merry-golds, heartsies and lady-slippers, and draw a drink of the water-sodden well-bucket,

00:22:22 Speaker_00
and its noisy chain, or knocking off with my stick the tall, heavy-headed dahlias and sunflowers, hunted over the beds for cucumbers and love apples, no one called out to me from any open window, or a dog sprang forward to bark an alarm.

00:22:35 Speaker_00
I could have supposed the people hidden in houses, but the doors were unfastened, and when at last I timidly entered them, I found dead ashes white upon the hearths." Like, this guy's a good writer. I know a ghostly, haunting description.

00:22:49 Speaker_00
Yeah, I easily classify and disagree with me if you will, the Battle of Nauvoo is category one. They had the cannon. They did have a cannon, but it was entirely defensive and they didn't even set up defenses until they were attacked.

00:23:04 Speaker_00
And then it's kind of a route to begin with.

00:23:07 Speaker_01
I think that's right. I think that's right. There's no retaliation. There's just a, almost a weak defense and then total surrender.

00:23:14 Speaker_00
Yeah, it kind of boggles the mind on both sides. Like why were the anti-Mormons so set on getting every Mormon out of the county if they were already leaving?

00:23:23 Speaker_00
And the defenders too, which I'm guessing they just didn't have time to get organized and leave. Why risk their lives defending a city?

00:23:31 Speaker_00
That's what Daniel Wells finally reasons with them is, why are you doing this if you already decided you're going to vacate the city? Don't waste any more blood for a place that you've already chosen to give up.

00:23:43 Speaker_00
And so I'd say this is probably category one.

00:23:57 Speaker_01
Okay. So now let's transition from, okay, we leave Nauvoo. we're headed to Utah, and we arrive in Utah. So upload all the pioneer stories and things here. We're headed to Utah.

00:24:08 Speaker_01
When the saints begin to arrive in Utah, they were wary of conflicts with the Native Americans. Brigham Young later recalled, he said, when we first entered Utah, we were prepared to meet all the Indians in these mountains.

00:24:22 Speaker_01
kill every soul of them if we had been obliged to do so. This preparation secured to us peace." Okay, that's pretty violent rhetoric.

00:24:30 Speaker_00
Petey And you're going to notice a marked shift in the rhetoric as we move from Joseph Smith to Brigham Young. Brigham Young talked and could talk big, essentially.

00:24:39 Speaker_00
His record is actually pretty good, especially when it comes to Native Americans, though there are some aberrations, especially early on. But you'll notice they're in this completely unknown wilderness and

00:24:51 Speaker_00
they're wary of native americans even though they do have this scriptural belief that native americans are part of the house of israel and they want to see them as their allies and also potential converts to the church that they also get the feeling that when they get into the territory they've got to basically send a message that they're not messing around yeah.

00:25:11 Speaker_00
And they won't be taken advantage of. And I think that's where that kind of tough talk comes from, where he says they were prepared.

00:25:16 Speaker_01
We're prepared to kill every soul of them. Yeah. Yeah. And you can kind of understand how the saints are coming from a pretty defensive posture, having been the victims of violence very recently in Nauvoo.

00:25:28 Speaker_01
and now making all this sacrifice out into this unknown territory where there are potential threats in the Native Americans who might see the Latter-day Saints as those who are encroaching upon their territory, right?

00:25:40 Speaker_01
And so they recognize there could be some conflict and they need to be ready. Here's some more of Brigham Young. Here's what he cautioned the Saints to do. He told them to build defenses against attacks from Native Americans.

00:25:50 Speaker_01
He said, quote, every settlement that has been made in these valleys of the mountains has received strict charges from me to build in the first place a fort and live in it until they were sufficiently strong to live in a town to keep their guns and ammunition well prepared for any emergency.

00:26:06 Speaker_01
and never cease to keep up a night watch if any apprehensions of the Indians being hostile were entertained.

00:26:12 Speaker_01
We have suffered nothing from them compared with what we have suffered from white men who are disposed to steal, and I would rather take my chance today for good treatment among Indians than I would among white men of this character.

00:26:23 Speaker_01
I have always acknowledged myself a coward," he says. and hope I always may be, to make me cautious enough to preserve myself and my brethren from falling ignobly by a band of Indians."

00:26:35 Speaker_01
So be on the lookout, be ready, build forts, have your guns ready, just in case. Now, unfortunately, there are some conflicts between the Saints and Native Americans that break out not too long after they arrived in the Salt Lake Valley.

00:26:50 Speaker_01
The first skirmishes come in Utah Valley, where a group of Indians known as the Timpanogos Utes, or the fish eaters, lived.

00:26:57 Speaker_01
In late 1848, some church members who moved to settle Utah Valley called for reprisals against Ute bands who stole their livestock and horses. Brigham Young initially rejected such talk.

00:27:09 Speaker_01
He said, quote, many elders have prayed to be among the Lamanites. And now they want to kill them. And so he taught that the Indians are the children of Abraham, the descendants of Israel, and the remnants of Israel.

00:27:22 Speaker_01
So he's going back and forth here, it sounds like, right? On the one hand, we need to be prepared and ready to defend ourselves. On the other hand, don't retaliate against the Indians because these are remnants of the house of Israel.

00:27:34 Speaker_01
I mean, what do you want to say about that tension?

00:27:37 Speaker_00
Well, I mean, again, I think the saints are nervous. Yeah. They're moving into this territory that they haven't seen before. Let's acknowledge here too, that racism against native Americans was just endemic among Native Americans.

00:27:52 Speaker_00
19th century Americans. It was just a thing. The saints have this push and pull amongst themselves to where they're still Americans and some of them still harbor racial prejudice against the Indians.

00:28:02 Speaker_00
But they also have this doctrine teaching that the Indians are descendants of the house of Israel and they don't want to fight with them.

00:28:10 Speaker_00
They also like Brigham Young acknowledged, see them as possibly potential allies against the white Americans that have been persecuting them. So There's an interesting dynamic push and pull that goes on here.

00:28:22 Speaker_00
And again, Brigham Young early on, I think, was basically playing it tough so that the Indians would know that they wouldn't be taken advantage of.

00:28:31 Speaker_00
And he softens a little bit as time goes on, as they stay in the Utah Territory and make more and more friends with Native Americans.

00:28:37 Speaker_01
Yeah, so in those first incidents where we get cattle theft and horse theft, Brigham says, hold on, do not retaliate. But after several more months of cattle theft, Brigham Young changes his mind.

00:28:49 Speaker_01
Little Chief, who is one of the leaders of the Utah Valley Utes, meets with several Latter-day Saint scouts in Utah Valley, and he complains about former members of his band who stole Mormon cattle and encouraged, quote, the big white Captain Young to send up some men and kill those mean Utes.

00:29:06 Speaker_01
Little Chief, one of the leaders of the Utah Valley Utes, actually meets with several Latter-day Saint scouts in Utah Valley, and he complains about former members of his band who stole Mormon cattle

00:29:19 Speaker_01
And so he actually encourages, quote, the big white captain, who's Brigham Young, to send up some men and kill those mean Utes, meaning this chief is encouraging Brigham Young and the saints to actually hunt down those Indians, those Native Americans who stole their horses and kill them.

00:29:39 Speaker_01
So prompted by this, actually, Brigham Young does authorize an expedition that does track down these horse thieves. and killed them, with the exception of a 16-year-old boy who surrendered. So that's pretty intense.

00:29:52 Speaker_01
Several more incidents in Utah Valley led Brigham Young to authorize even greater uses of force. As more Indian raids took place, Brigham decided to use up the marauders, he says. He declared, they must either quit the ground or we must.

00:30:08 Speaker_01
And several Native Americans were executed by the militia.

00:30:12 Speaker_00
So this is getting intense. These early conflicts that took place in Utah Valley were pretty brutal, is my understanding.

00:30:19 Speaker_00
And at least one of them was started by the Saints, not under Brigham Young's direction, but just the Saints who were settling in Utah Valley started a conflict with the Native Americans over something as dumb as a shirt.

00:30:32 Speaker_00
They killed a Native American and then threw him into Utah Lake They'd already cut them open and filled them with stones, like violent stuff.

00:30:41 Speaker_00
Again, not authorized by Brigham Young and not done by policy, but Brigham Young seems to, once he hears of more and more conflict, sort of say, all right, we're going to show them that we're serious.

00:30:51 Speaker_00
And there's some brutal stuff that happens here, though not necessarily under Brigham Young's direction.

00:30:56 Speaker_01
And then over time, it seems like Brigham Young softens his stance in dealing with Native Americans. So from 1853 to 1854, the Saints do engage in a war, more like a series of raids, led by Walcara, who's a Ute chief.

00:31:14 Speaker_01
But then Brigham Young actually negotiates an end to the war, and then afterwards he frequently teaches that it's easier to feed the Indians than to fight them.

00:31:22 Speaker_00
Yeah, that's the big quote that is always associated with Brigham Young. I've always said it was easier to feed the Indians than it was to fight them.

00:31:30 Speaker_00
And they take this approach, let's preach the gospel, let's feed them, and let's don't engage in conflict. And for the most part, there's still exceptions to this, like the Circleville Massacre that happened later on.

00:31:41 Speaker_00
But the Saints do have a generally better record with the Native Americans than their contemporaries throughout the West.

00:31:49 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's almost like they began. engaging with them in the same way that others were engaging with the Native Americans. But then Brigham Young does a pivot and says, let's not actually do it that way. I don't like where this is going.

00:32:01 Speaker_01
There's a letter that he wrote to Jacob Hamblin, who was a missionary that was sent out to the Indians. And Here's what Brigham Young said, quote,

00:32:37 Speaker_01
and begin to rise and increase in the land and become a people whom the Lord will delight to own and bless. In regard to the cattle, you should control them and use them for the best interest of both the missionaries and the Indians.

00:32:50 Speaker_01
The Indians should be encouraged in keeping and taking care of stock. I highly approve of your designs and doing your farming through the natives.

00:32:57 Speaker_01
It learns them to obtain a subsistence by their own industry and leaves you more at liberty to visit others and extend your missionary labors among them. Few missionaries to show and learn them

00:33:09 Speaker_01
And learn them to raise stock and grain, and then not eat it up for them is most judicious. And you should always be careful to impress upon them that they should not infringe upon the rights of others.

00:33:20 Speaker_01
And our brethren should be very careful not to infringe upon their rights in any particular, thus cultivating honor and good principles in their midst by example as well as precept.

00:33:30 Speaker_01
I wish all the missionaries to aid and assist Brother Amasa all they can in his explorations. As ever, I remain your brother in the gospel of salvation. Signed, Brigham Young."

00:33:40 Speaker_00
So, this seems very… Pete It's progressive, right? I mean, there's still kind of this white man superiority. David For sure, for sure. Pete That kind of comes through it. But at the same time too… David Let's be genial to them.

00:33:53 Speaker_01
Let's be helpful to them. Let's train them. Let's teach them.

00:33:57 Speaker_00
Yeah. And I mean, he has a progressive attitude, like there's even statements from Brigham Young where it sounds like he recognizes the cultural differences between the two.

00:34:06 Speaker_00
On one occasion he taught, why should men have a disposition to kill a destitute naked Indian who may steal a shirt or a horse and thinks it no harm when they never think of meeting out a like retribution to a white man who steals, although he has been taught better.

00:34:22 Speaker_00
And so there is this recognition from Brigham Young that people just inherently treat Native Americans worse than they treat European settlers, and that that's not right.

00:34:33 Speaker_00
And other things tend to win him the confidence of most Native American, not all, but most Native Americans in the Great Basin.

00:34:40 Speaker_00
And Latter-day Saints are generally seen by the Native Americans as more peaceful, more cooperative, and more friendly towards them.

00:34:48 Speaker_01
Well, Brigham Young's efforts to work with Native Americans weren't like always successful. Others did take note that they were trying, right? Like Senator Salmon P. Chase of Ohio.

00:34:58 Speaker_01
He stated that quote, no governor has ever done so well by the Indians since William Penn as Governor Young, close quote. Which is a cool compliment.

00:35:08 Speaker_00
Yeah.

00:35:08 Speaker_01
When Brigham Young passes away, one local chief paid him a compliment by saying, what shall we do? Who will be our friend now? That's pretty touching. So he did work, like you said, over time, he softens.

00:35:20 Speaker_01
They come in kind of hard, and then by the end here, they're pretty soft towards the Native Americans. They didn't know quite what to expect, but I think they learned how to work with them rather than against them.

00:35:31 Speaker_00
They do fall victim to some of the racial attitudes that are just common among European Americans at this time. So I probably classify this as category two, where they went back and forth, but eventually they settle on a more peaceful course.

00:35:45 Speaker_00
I mean, we'd be unfair if we weren't acknowledging that there were some extremely violent conflicts when the saints first got here.

00:35:52 Speaker_00
but that later on they settle into more of a conciliatory course where they're trying to help the Native Americans and they're trying to teach them the gospel, and they're not dead set on conflict with them.

00:36:03 Speaker_00
In fact, they sort of see them as allies and friends.

00:36:06 Speaker_01
What do you think about the disproportionate retaliation of killing for stealing, right? They steal cattle, and so the saints hunt them down and kill some of them. Does that start to get close to category three for you, or maybe not?

00:36:24 Speaker_00
It might, um, a lot of the sources I looked at here were from John Turner who wrote a really good biography of Brigham young. John Turner's not a Latter-day Saint, but his book on Brigham Young, I thought was really fair.

00:36:36 Speaker_00
And his judgment was that kind of looking at the standards of the time, that was pretty common, I guess. I would say it was probably a little bit more harsh than was warranted, but we would also say it was provoked.

00:36:49 Speaker_00
That they were being warned by some Native Americans too, that if they didn't take action, they would be taken advantage of to a large degree. And so.

00:36:58 Speaker_00
We might be verging a little bit towards category three here but it seems like it happened and it happened early and they corrected so i'm gonna say we're still probably in category two interesting like you noted that it was actually native americans who encouraged.

00:37:13 Speaker_01
the saints to kill the horse thieves. Little Chief, when he says, you should hunt them down and kill those thieves, it's like, there's almost to say, okay, from outside looking in culturally, this looks horrific.

00:37:25 Speaker_01
But in the context of the times, that was like you said, this is the way things were done. That doesn't excuse it. Of course, it does not excuse it, but it helps us to see with that empathetic lens.

00:37:37 Speaker_01
That's how you deal with the horse thieves back then, I guess.

00:37:39 Speaker_00
Yeah.

00:37:40 Speaker_01
Then over time, Brigham's like, well, you wouldn't kill a white man for stealing, so let's not kill Native Americans. How about that? That's where he lands, right?

00:37:47 Speaker_01
By the end, he lands on that note, which again, none of this is excusing anything, but we're just trying to understand the nature of the violence in the context of the day.

00:37:56 Speaker_00
Yeah, I'd also point out that the end of the Walker War, the struggle the Saints have with Chief Wakara, the end of the war doesn't result in the Saints taking away land or trying to wipe out the Native Americans.

00:38:10 Speaker_00
They end it successfully without further violence. And Brigham Young, I believe actually meets with Chief Wakara. And both of them agree that violence between their peoples isn't desirable and they want to be friends.

00:38:22 Speaker_00
Well, Carr is a really interesting figure that maybe we should dive into in future episodes. But it doesn't end badly, I guess you'd say.

00:38:30 Speaker_00
They fight and then it's resolved peacefully without further violence or a total victory for either side, which is really rare among Native American-European conflicts in the Intermountain West in the 19th century. Yeah, that's important to note.

00:38:44 Speaker_01
It takes us about 10 years in the West to develop decently good relationships with the Native Americans. On the other hand, our relationship with the United States at the time was not so good. No.

00:38:58 Speaker_01
All of these threads start to converge together in the 1857-1858 conflict that we know today as the Utah War.

00:39:18 Speaker_00
So let's talk about the Utah war because this is where things started to get really crazy. Yeah. So the Utah war was an extensive and expensive conflict for the United States and for the saints.

00:39:31 Speaker_00
I'll say some historians have referred to the Utah war as the nation's first civil war. but it was east versus west rather than north versus south.

00:39:41 Speaker_00
The conflict on one side, Pitts Brigham Young, president of the church, but he's also acting as the governor of Utah and the superintendent of Indian Affairs in Utah against James Buchanan, who was president of the United States.

00:39:55 Speaker_00
James Buchanan's another one of those complex figures. He's not generally rated highly among presidents of the United States. In fact, he's usually, in most historical surveys of effective presidents, Buchanan's usually near the bottom.

00:40:10 Speaker_00
And the Utah War actually is part of that discussion, too. Yeah. Buchanan's blunder, right? Militarily, it also pits the Nauvoo Legion. That's Utah's territorial militia.

00:40:21 Speaker_00
They hang onto the name from Nauvoo against nearly one third of the United States army, though we should note the United States army was not huge at this time. It was pre-civil war. And fortunately the Utah war saw no military battles.

00:40:35 Speaker_00
There were conflicts and violent

00:40:37 Speaker_00
conflagrations but it ends in a peaceful way to it ends with a negotiated settlement brigham young willingly gives up the governorship and it does cause dramatic changes within the church in the western regions of the united states.

00:40:49 Speaker_00
Up to this time, really for the first 10 years that the church was in the Great Basin, we were what church members would call a theodemocracy, where both ecclesiastical and civil authority were vested in the same person, Brigham Young.

00:41:01 Speaker_00
And that was just a recognition of reality. Almost all of the European settlers in the Great Basin were Latter-day Saints, and Brigham Young was their leader in every sense of the word. But the Utah War starts to shift that balance too.

00:41:13 Speaker_00
And even the names of the Utah War are interesting. I looked it up on Wikipedia. Different names for the Utah war include the Utah war, the Utah campaign, some sources call it the Mormon war or the Mormon rebellion.

00:41:27 Speaker_00
But my favorite name is Buchanan's blunder.

00:41:31 Speaker_04
Yeah, my favorite too.

00:41:34 Speaker_00
Partially because blame for the war has largely fallen upon the head of James Buchanan because he did some unreasonable things. He sends the army to Utah without notifying Brigham Young, who's the territorial governor at the time.

00:41:49 Speaker_00
He doesn't even send a telegram to Brigham Young telling him that he's being removed. He just sends the army. He doesn't send any investigators. He doesn't do anything to try to resolve the situation peacefully.

00:41:58 Speaker_00
He just pulls the trigger and sends this army out. And it turns into a big fiasco. As the war progressed, public opinion turns against Buchanan. The New York Times, this is one of my favorite statements about the Utah war too.

00:42:12 Speaker_00
The New York Times summarized the war by writing, the Mormon war has been unquestionably a mass of blunders from beginning to end. Whichever way we look at it, it is a great mass of stupid blunders.

00:42:29 Speaker_01
Okay, so back us up. Tell us what exactly, like, caused the war. Like, what was in Buchanan's mind to lead him to, like, send the army out? Like, what was at stake for him?

00:42:39 Speaker_00
Well, people are still sort of, like, why did he react this way? And there's a lot of theories. And these are just theories, I want to say. But this is 1857. We're three years away from the actual civil war between North and South that happens.

00:42:54 Speaker_00
Some people have wondered if Buchanan was looking for something to unite the North and South against each other. It is interesting to look at names in the Utah war and then find out where they landed during the Civil War.

00:43:07 Speaker_00
For instance, Albert Sidney Johnson, who's the guy who leads the army to Utah, actually resigns from the army. He's from Texas. He's from the South.

00:43:15 Speaker_00
Goes back home, becomes a Confederate general, and fights against Ulysses S. Grant at the Battle of Shiloh, where he's killed.

00:43:22 Speaker_00
And so some people, I mean, some historians have speculated maybe Buchanan reacted or overreacted because he was trying to create a conflict that would unite the States that were on the very verge of bloodshed at this time.

00:43:35 Speaker_00
I mean, civil war is going to be the bloodiest war in the history of the country.

00:43:38 Speaker_01
So what did he use as the justification for the war, like what was the provocation in Utah that he was reacting to?

00:43:46 Speaker_00
Yeah, so let me set the scene a little bit. Utah is not the most desirable place for a federal official who's looking to climb the ladder, right? Not the plum assignment? It's not the plum assignment.

00:43:57 Speaker_00
So the federal officials that are sent to the Utah territory are not of the highest caliber, I'll say. Okay. And second, they're dealing with an already hostile population, like the Saints came to Utah because they wanted self-rule.

00:44:10 Speaker_00
They do agree to be in American territory, but they're here because they want autonomy and they don't like these federal officials telling them what to do. And there's no love lost between the federal officials and the Saints.

00:44:21 Speaker_00
For instance, one who's named W. W. Drummond, who's a

00:44:24 Speaker_00
Territorial associate justice writes a letter where he calls the latter day saints, uh, damned rotten hearted scoundrels and poor miserable black legs broken down political hacks, robbers, and whoremongers. And I mean, them's fighting words, right?

00:44:41 Speaker_00
The deseret news which is established in utah during this time acknowledges that lying letters though written by nobody's have excited and bewildered the public mind so these federal officials are writing back and basically saying we can't get anything done because the mormons won't let us do anything and the latter day saints don't have much of a chance to make their case either but the central charge seems to be that brigham young has absolute power that he's the head of both church and state which was true.

00:45:09 Speaker_00
but that the Latter-day Saints were in rebellion against the United States.

00:45:15 Speaker_00
Buchanan gives this speech where he says that if Brigham Young's government shall come into collision with the government of the United States, the members of the Mormon Church will yield implicit obedience to his, Buchanan's, will.

00:45:27 Speaker_01
Pete So there's not actually a rebellion happening. It's the potential for rebellion if there's ever a conflict between the US government and Brigham Young's will, they know that the Saints will go with Brigham Young.

00:45:39 Speaker_01
They want to split Brigham's power here. They want to put some other governor in the place who's not LDS, so as to divide the power that is consolidated at the time of Brigham Young. Is that right? Something like that.

00:45:50 Speaker_00
Yeah, and it does kind of come to a head when these federal officials that are criticizing the Saints abscond from the territory.

00:45:57 Speaker_00
Like they come to feel that they're being threatened and so they all up and leave together and go back east with these reports that the Latter-day Saints are in rebellion. And Buchanan, here's the problem.

00:46:07 Speaker_00
Instead of sending people to investigate or even contacting Brigham Young and saying, are you in rebellion? just calls out the army. But at the time, Latter-day Saints had announced in 1852 they were practicing plural marriage.

00:46:20 Speaker_00
And that really excites the nation. And a lot of people are basically looking at Latter-day Saints as this kind of strange group in the Western United States that they need to get rid of.

00:46:33 Speaker_00
Even Stephen A. Douglas, okay, who is going to run for president against Abraham Lincoln and lose. But earlier was a good friend of the Saints while they were living in Illinois, makes a speech where he

00:46:43 Speaker_00
He says this, When the authentic evidence shall arrive, if it shall establish the facts about Utah which are believed to exist, it shall become the duty of Congress to apply the knife and cut out this loathsome, disgusting cancer.

00:46:59 Speaker_00
And those are tough words too, right? Like everybody's saying, we've got to put an end to Mormonism.

00:47:05 Speaker_00
And at the very least, they've got to replace the government in Utah because Brigham Young is both the secular and the spiritual leader of the territory.

00:47:13 Speaker_00
So President McCannon orders out a force of 2,500 military personnel, which is a huge number for this time period. Like I said, the American army was always relatively small until the civil war.

00:47:25 Speaker_00
And he orders them to travel to Utah and to escort Alfred Cumming, who's going to be appointed as the new governor of Utah. And it was launched without as much as an investigative committee sent to determine if rebellion was taking place.

00:47:40 Speaker_00
In fact, the army's coming to Utah, and there might be indications too that the army wasn't intending to be violent just to forcibly make sure that Brigham Young left the governorship.

00:47:50 Speaker_00
In fact, a supply captain from the Army, Captain Stuart Van Vliet, arrives in Salt Lake City and Brigham Young confronts him and says, Congress has promptly sent investigating committees to Kansas and other places as occasion has required, but upon the merest rumor, it has sent 2,000 armed soldiers to destroy all the people of Utah without investigating the subject at all.

00:48:11 Speaker_00
And that is a really valid concern to bring up. So while Van Vliet is in Utah, Brigham Young kind of puts on a show for him, basically invites him to a church service.

00:48:22 Speaker_00
And with Van Vliet sitting nearby, Brigham Young gets up and gives a speech where he says the following. He says, they say their army is legal. And I say that such a statement is false as hell.

00:48:34 Speaker_00
And that they are as rotten as an old pumpkin that has been frozen seven times and then melted in the harvest sun and then in the speech he goes on to just basically say here's our strategy he says, if the army forces way to utah they would find nothing but a bear and waste we should burn.

00:48:51 Speaker_00
everything that was wood and every acre of grass that would burn, they would not find anything to eat in this territory when they come. And this is all deliberate. Brigham Young wants the army to know what his strategy is going to be.

00:49:04 Speaker_00
That's that they're going to basically destroy everything before they get there and leave them with nothing but scorched earth when they come.

00:49:11 Speaker_01
So a bit of psychological warfare first. He's like, if you guys come a little bit, this is what's going to happen. So you might as well not come. Hopefully the Saints don't actually have to do that. If

00:49:20 Speaker_00
Yeah, the army gets the hint, but he's grandstanding a little bit. Brigham young is because he knows that this army captain is with them. Yeah.

00:49:28 Speaker_00
But private journal entries that he makes during this time indicates that he's trying to use words to avoid violence. For instance, this is from his journal. If I have to fight, I wish to give my enemies fair warning. And then he said,

00:49:43 Speaker_00
And then if they will not take it, they must abide the consequences. I wish to meet all men at the judgment bar of God without any to fear me or accuse me of wrong action."

00:49:53 Speaker_00
And so, yeah, he publicly and privately saying, I want them to know what we'll do, because they've been pushed and pushed and pushed, and finally they've traveled a thousand miles into the wilderness. And they're saying, where would we go from here?

00:50:06 Speaker_00
Like, what would we do? Brigham Young in the speech says, this is the last mob that's going to come upon Latter-day Saints. We're not going to be forced from our homes again. And it works, I mean, to a certain degree.

00:50:17 Speaker_00
So Van Vliet sees the territory, sees how sincere the Saints are in their desire to defend it. He also sees the geography, the narrow mountain passes that lead into Salt Lake, kind of make it a natural fortress. And he also

00:50:33 Speaker_00
reports back this strategy for what it's going to be like he writes back to the army and says their plan of operations will be burn up grass cut up the roads and stampede the animals so as to delay the troops until snow commences to fall which will render the road impassable and his assessment is actually a pretty good summary of what brigham young and the navoo legion plan to do which is slow down the army

00:50:56 Speaker_00
So that there's more time to try and get words to Buchanan. So the cooler heads will prevail so that when the army comes into salt Lake, they're not going to be guns blazing. They'll have a chance to basically share their side of the story. Yeah.

00:51:21 Speaker_01
Yeah, so let's talk about the strategy then during the war. So we've got the rhetoric at first trying to explain the game plan to delay the army on its way, right? Brigham Young will do what he said he would do.

00:51:33 Speaker_01
And in fact, Brigham Young and Daniel H. Wells do direct a company of mounted militia led by a guy named Lot Smith to go out and slow down the army by stampeding their cattle and burning their supply trains, meaning the cattle and supply trains of the army.

00:51:49 Speaker_01
But here's his instructions. He says, save life always when it's possible. We do not wish to shed a drop of blood if it can be avoided. This course will give us great influence abroad."

00:52:02 Speaker_00
Yeah, they're kind of saying, hey, we have the moral high ground right now. We're being persecuted. But if we shed blood, we'll lose the moral high ground. Yes, right.

00:52:12 Speaker_00
I also think that they were acknowledging that they don't want the conflict to turn violent, and so they're directing these raiders to avoid loss of life whenever possible.

00:52:22 Speaker_01
So then Brigham Young's strategy consists of three major points. The first one is that Latter-day Saint militia would slow the army's approach by intercepting their supply trains, burning the prairie grass, their animals needed to survive.

00:52:35 Speaker_01
It's hoped that this would slow down the army enough that they wouldn't be able to make it to Utah before the winter snow sets in, that would make it impossible for the army to pass through.

00:52:43 Speaker_01
Back Daniel H. Wells, who commanded the Nauvoo Legion, he sent the following directive to his troops, quote, on ascertaining the locality or route of the troops, proceed at once to annoy them in every possible way.

00:52:57 Speaker_01
Use every exertion to stampede their animals and set fire to their trains. Burn the whole country before them and on their flanks. Keep them from sleeping by night surprises.

00:53:08 Speaker_01
Blockade the road by felling trees or destroying the river fords where you can. Watch for opportunities to set fire to the grass on their windward, so as, if possible, to envelop their trains. Leave no grass before them that can be burned.

00:53:22 Speaker_01
Keep your men concealed as much as possible and guard against surprise." That's strategy number one.

00:53:29 Speaker_01
Strategy number two, if the troops did make it through, the saints would destroy their own settlements and then flee to the mountains or some other remote region to escape the army.

00:53:40 Speaker_01
Third leg of the strategy, Brigham believed that if conflict came to an all-out war, an alliance with the Native Americans in the region might provide an advantage.

00:53:49 Speaker_01
On August 4, 1857, Brigham sends a letter to Jacob Hamblin, a missionary who works with the Indians, that read, quote, "...continue the conciliatory policy toward the Indians, which I have ever recommended."

00:54:01 Speaker_01
And then he said, "...seek by works of righteousness to obtain their love and confidence, for they must learn that they have either got to help us or the United States will kill us both." That's leg number three of the strategy here.

00:54:16 Speaker_00
So they're going to leverage their relationship with the Native Americans and see them as allies. And a lot of the most extreme rhetoric surrounding the Utah war given by church leaders is this, the Native Americans are going to be our saviors.

00:54:29 Speaker_00
Like they're going to join with us and that's how we're going to have the sufficient force to fight the army if it comes to that. Yeah. But again, the strategy is to stall, essentially, to try and see if they can negotiate peacefully.

00:54:43 Speaker_00
And so, throughout the summer and fall of 1857, Latter-day Saint raiders, particularly a contingent of the legion commanded by Ladsmith, who later become known as the Mormon raiders, harassed Johnson's army. They delay its approach to Utah territory.

00:54:56 Speaker_00
In fact, the most dramatic encounter takes place on October 4th, 1857, when a wagon train that was supplying the army, so this isn't the actual army, this is the wagon train, is captured by Lott Smith.

00:55:09 Speaker_00
Lott Smith runs up and captures them, and then he sort of politely explains, like, we're the Mormon Raiders, and we're gonna burn

00:55:16 Speaker_00
your wagons and the way lot smith tells the story and what's that was a good story teller was that the captain of the wagon train exclaimed for god's sake don't burn the wagons and lots of says i replied it was for his sake i was going to burn them and then he burns them.

00:55:32 Speaker_00
And again, Lotsmith writes this great narrative that's really lively. I just want to share a couple of my favorite excerpts from it. So he talks about harassing the army. They burned two large wagon trains.

00:55:43 Speaker_00
At one point they steal a bunch of government beans. And he records, we fell back on Fort Supply, eating the beef we had borrowed and sampling some half-cooked government beans.

00:55:54 Speaker_00
This experiment developed, as never before conceived in my imagination, the enormous pressure the human stomach is capable of sustaining without damage and came very near developing the necessity for someone else to write this sketch.

00:56:09 Speaker_00
So government beans, he feels, are more dangerous than Gorging themselves on beef that they borrowed, he said. Beef that we borrowed and half-cooked government beans. Yeah. And I mean, the strategy does work. The army is slowed down and delayed.

00:56:26 Speaker_00
The army also gets more and more annoyed, if that was part of the idea too, to where some of the soldiers are really spoiling for a fight as they get closer to Utah, but they don't make it to the mountain passes before winter sets in.

00:56:40 Speaker_00
and the army basically has to accept that they're not going to make it before winter, and that buys several additional months to figure things out.

00:56:46 Speaker_00
In fact, the army expected to winter at the edge of Utah territory at Fort Bridger, which had been purchased by the church, but when they get there, they find that the fort is a smoldering pile of ashes due to Lod Smith and the other raiders.

00:56:59 Speaker_00
They burn it down, basically, and that takes them off further. They have to spend this miserable winter in Fort Bridger spoiling for the spring when the snow will melt and they can go through the mountain passes and lay waste to the Saints.

00:57:13 Speaker_00
So that's the situation when winter starts in 1857, that the armies at Fort Bridger, Daniel Wells has called out Mormon militia, they're way outnumbered, but they're going to dig in on the rims of Echo Canyon.

00:57:27 Speaker_00
If you've ever driven from Salt Lake to Evanston, Wyoming, you'll go through Echo Canyon and there are these huge kind of red cliffs.

00:57:34 Speaker_00
And that's where the navu legion of the conflict came to it was going to fight they would fight the army when it was kind of funneled into this narrow canyon that they have to go through to get the salt lake yeah i remember seeing going up there and seeing like there's certain places strategically up on the top where they would have like boulders and stuff and they were planning on pushing those boulders down and

00:57:55 Speaker_01
harassing the army from up top as well if they could.

00:57:58 Speaker_00
And everybody's talking big, like the Nauvoo Legion is saying, yeah, if they come into Echo Canyon, we'll wipe them out. Men from the army are saying, we have artillery and we'll make a short work of you if you try to do that.

00:58:11 Speaker_00
It looks like once the snow melts, it's going to be bloodshed, that the Utah Wars is going to turn hot and people are going to get killed. That's when the first glimmer of hope arrives.

00:58:23 Speaker_00
It's just about Christmas 1857 when this mysterious writer comes into Salt Lake going by the name of Dr. Osborne. He immediately gets off his horse and says, I want to meet with Brigham Young. It turns out that it's our old friend from Nauvoo,

00:58:39 Speaker_00
Tomas Cain. Okay, so here's what's happening on the other side of the continent while the Raiders and the Johnson's army are fighting with each other.

00:58:48 Speaker_00
So Tomas Cain, who was a long-standing friend of the Saints, he kind of had a period where he cut off contact with the Saints after they announced plural marriage.

00:58:56 Speaker_00
But once he hears what Buchanan's planning, Thomas Cain sort of says, I know Brigham Young. I know that he's not really guilty of the things that he's been charged with.

00:59:05 Speaker_00
And he, along with John M. Bernheisel, who was the congressional delegate of the Utah territory, went to Washington DC and they plead with James Buchanan to embolden them, to basically empower them to be peace commissioners.

00:59:19 Speaker_00
Like Cain just basically says, yeah, I'll negotiate with you. I know Brigham Young. I think we can resolve this without bloodshed. And Buchanan is kind of like, well, if you can get there before the army, good luck.

00:59:30 Speaker_00
And so Cain accepts the challenge and he doesn't think he can beat the army to Utah. So he does something completely different. He charters a ship and he sails down to Panama.

00:59:40 Speaker_00
He crosses the isthmus of Panama, then sails up to San Francisco Harbor, then journeys over land and gets to Utah just before Christmas, 1857. Brigham Young saw Cain, he wrote very pale and worn down and immediately gave him a blessing.

00:59:58 Speaker_00
So he goes in and meets with them, says, are you guys in rebellion? Brigham Young says, no. Thomas Cain says, then I will go on through the mountain passes and tell the army that you're not in rebellion.

01:00:08 Speaker_00
And we'll find out a way to resolve this peacefully. Brigham Young is so moved that he gives Thomas Kane a blessing, and he says, Brother Thomas, the Lord sent you here, and he will not let you die. No, you cannot until your work is done.

01:00:20 Speaker_00
I want you to have your name live with the saints to all eternity. You have done a great work, and you will do a greater work still. So this guy, Thomas Kane, like I said, is a hero.

01:00:34 Speaker_00
He goes through all this just to get to Salt Lake, and then he goes through the mountains, assisted by Latter-day Saints, even though it's still covered in snow, and he gets to Fort Bridger on March 12th, 1858.

01:00:48 Speaker_00
And at first, he's greeted by skepticism from the army commanders who spent the winter sort of languishing in the cold and really wanted to fight the Latter-day Saints.

01:00:58 Speaker_00
And, I mean, to make it worse, a series of misunderstandings that happen when Cain gets there led Cain to challenge Albert Sidney Johnson to a duel. They get into an argument and Cain's like, I demand satisfaction, sir, and they were going to duel.

01:01:12 Speaker_00
But Alfred Cumming, who's the governor who's supposed to replace Brigham Young, calms them both down and he agrees to go with Cain back through the mountains without the army.

01:01:24 Speaker_00
So they're traveling through Echo Canyon, and one story from the Utah War, this is in Whitney's History of Utah, says that bonfires had been lit on both sides of the canyon to make it look like there were more men defending the canyon than there actually were.

01:01:37 Speaker_00
And by the time Kane and Cummings make it to the Salt Lake Valley, they're convinced that the number of defenders in Echo Canyon are way more than are actually there. Another psychological warfare technique here.

01:01:49 Speaker_00
Psychological warfare, yeah, chess move back and forth.

01:01:52 Speaker_02
Yeah.

01:01:53 Speaker_00
So when Cummings gets to Utah, Brigham Young meets with him, and Brigham Young agrees to step down as governor, but on a few conditions. He said the army could enter Utah, but he didn't want them to occupy Salt Lake.

01:02:06 Speaker_00
He sort of wisely realized that the army with the state they were in and the Saints with the state they were in should not be in close contact with each other. So he says you can come through Salt Lake, but the army can't encamp here.

01:02:19 Speaker_00
And he also takes steps to show the army that they're really serious.

01:02:23 Speaker_00
So Brigham Young comes up with a plan that today is known as the move South, which was basically everybody in the Salt Lake Valley who estimates at the time were around 30,000 Latter-day Saints. relocated to Utah Valley.

01:02:37 Speaker_00
They move south to Utah Valley, at least temporarily, and then that summer when the army comes through, all they find is a settlement abandoned.

01:02:44 Speaker_00
In fact, this is when the foundations of the Salt Lake Temple are actually buried and then plowed to look like a field.

01:02:51 Speaker_01
In the old movie, Mountain of the Lord, a lot of people will recognize that scene, yeah.

01:02:56 Speaker_00
Yeah, there's a great scene in mountain lord where someone's like these moments, you know, have a field in the middle of their city. What a strange people.

01:03:04 Speaker_00
And I think the guy who's playing Albert Sidney Johnson says, I believe, sir, that they are ready to burn down every last structure in the city. Should we cause any provocations?

01:03:12 Speaker_00
And I don't know if that's exactly what happened, but the army just kind of marches through. That was pretty good reenactment, Casey, nicely done. Thank you. Thank you. That's my thespian training coming through.

01:03:22 Speaker_01
My favorite line in the whole movie is when Brigham Young puts his cane in the ground and says, here we will build a temple to our God. Oh, yeah. He says it in the most cool-like way, which I'm sure is totally reflective of reality.

01:03:37 Speaker_00
I think that happened. I think that happened. Wilford Woodruff recorded that.

01:03:41 Speaker_01
Did he say it in that cool of a voice? Cause it was really cool.

01:03:43 Speaker_00
Well, I don't know what Brigham Young's voice sounded like. We don't have any audio recordings, but it's hard to imagine Brigham Young saying something and it not sounding objectively awesome. Way cool. The guy was great at big statements.

01:03:54 Speaker_01
Anyway.

01:03:55 Speaker_00
At any rate. Okay. Back to war. Because of Brigham Young and Governor Cummings, the army marches through the city, but then goes on to Cedar Valley, close to where present day Eagle mountain is.

01:04:06 Speaker_00
There's actually still a town out there called Cedar Fort and they stay there. The army builds what's called Camp Floyd, which there's still a little historic site you can visit there.

01:04:16 Speaker_00
They're there for the next two or three years until the civil war breaks out. Alfred Cummings becomes a really good friend to the Saints. He's a really good guy, and he serves out his full term, but he's from Georgia.

01:04:28 Speaker_00
So when his term is done, he goes back to the United States, which at this point has been separated into the North and the South, and he tries to make it back to Georgia, but he can't because the war's happening.

01:04:39 Speaker_00
And Albert Sidney Johnston, like we mentioned earlier, actually goes back, joins the Confederate Army, and dies fighting against Ulysses S. Grant. So the Utah War, what category would you put that in, Casey?

01:04:51 Speaker_00
You know, I was thinking about this and I would probably go category two, but like a good category two. Cause I mean, for all of his talk, Brigham young and the documentary record, I think represents this really didn't want bloodshed.

01:05:07 Speaker_00
And on one level you could say it's just because he's not an idiot. And he realizes that if the people in the army are killed, it's going to escalate just like it did in Missouri in previous places. And it's going to lead to worse and worse violence.

01:05:19 Speaker_00
That's like the most practical way of viewing it. I believe that Brigham Young genuinely didn't want blood to be shed either, that he wasn't interested in killing for the practical reasons we've stated, but also because he's a Christian.

01:05:33 Speaker_00
He's the leader of the church and he recognizes the effect violence has on people and he doesn't want anyone to die.

01:05:38 Speaker_00
So the saints do fight back, but in a bloodless fashion that doesn't result in many people getting killed, though there are some people that are killed. Again, a very small number in the direct conflict between the Nauvoo Legion and the U.S. Army.

01:05:53 Speaker_00
But I'd rate it as category two because the saints fought back, but in the least violent way that they could.

01:05:59 Speaker_00
I mean, they do burn wagons and supply trains, and it costs a lot among the saints, especially the ones that have to move south, but they seem to avoid human bloodshed as much as they can. The general leadership of the church does.

01:06:11 Speaker_01
Yeah, well said. I guess the results or the effect of the Utah War is that it ends the period of what you call theodemocracy, right? The civil and ecclesiastical government under Brigham Young's jurisdiction.

01:06:25 Speaker_01
Also, Alfred Cummings proves to be a pretty good, fair, decent governor of the Utah Territory.

01:06:31 Speaker_00
We've got to give Alfred Cummings a lot of credit, too, for not being a hothead and for trying to resolve it. And after Brigham Young leaves the governorship, he is very fair to the Saints. He treats them very well.

01:06:43 Speaker_01
And speaking of people who deserve a shout out, how about Thomas L. Cain? Man, he probably single-handedly averted a very bloody conflict and so props to Thomas L. Cain. We actually have a place in Utah named after him, Cain County.

01:06:58 Speaker_00
Let me add too, a few years ago, Matthew Groh wrote a biography of Thomas Cain called Liberty to the Downtrodden. It just made me love the guy even more.

01:07:08 Speaker_00
Thomas Cain was just a good man who did everything he could to make sure there was peace and to help the saints. This episode renews his friendship with the saints. Later on, he'll make periodic visits to Utah.

01:07:21 Speaker_00
He even brings his wife, Elizabeth Kane, and they write books and tracts to try and help the Saints become known among the people who would discriminate against them. So this guy isn't just a hero in the Utah War.

01:07:33 Speaker_00
He is a person that deserves a lot of our honor for being a peacemaker. Even though he never becomes a Latter-day Saint, he is one of our best friends and an important figure in our history. I love that man.

01:07:44 Speaker_01
We wish we could say that the Utah war was completely bloodless.

01:07:49 Speaker_00
I mean, at this point, it could just be like a funny story. It wasn't funny to the people that were happening at the time, but it has funny episodes. But if we were to say the Utah war is bloodless, we would be missing a huge part of the story.

01:08:04 Speaker_01
We should probably point out too that the hysteria in Utah over the approaching army does actually lead to one of the most tragic episodes in Latter-day Saint history, and that's what we call the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

01:08:18 Speaker_01
This Utah War really does set the contextual stage for what we're going to talk about next time.

01:08:24 Speaker_00
Yeah, and again, the Utah War was difficult for everybody involved, but it's really the backdrop for Mountain Meadows that gave us the reason to talk a little bit about it.

01:08:35 Speaker_00
You've got to understand what's happening in the Utah War and how much tensions have been raised and how much hysteria was happening throughout the territory to understand what, you know, was effectively the darkest day in the history of the church, which is the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

01:08:47 Speaker_00
And I believe that's what we're going to talk about next time.

01:08:50 Speaker_01
Yes, sir. Well, thank you, Casey. Until next time. All right. Thank you, Scott. Till next time. Thank you for listening to this episode of Church History Matters.

01:09:02 Speaker_01
In our next episode, Casey and I talk about the darkest and most violent episode in our church's history, when on September 11th, 1857, a group of Latter-day Saints in southern Utah participated in the wholesale massacre of around 120 men, women, and children at a place called Mountain Meadows.

01:09:21 Speaker_01
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01:09:33 Speaker_01
That makes us easier to find. Today's episode was produced by Scott Woodward and edited by Nick Galletti, with show notes and transcript by Gabe Davis. Church History Matters is a podcast of Scripture Central.

01:09:44 Speaker_01
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01:09:54 Speaker_01
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01:10:05 Speaker_01
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01:10:14 Speaker_01
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01:10:25 Speaker_01
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01:10:40 Speaker_01
Thank you so much for being a part of this with us.