Under the Banner of Heaven (29 page)

Such rhetoric, on top of ever more numerous reports of Mormon belligerence, alarmed the rest of the nation. The more Washington tried to rein Brigham in, however, the more brazen his insubordination became. In March 1857, shortly after James Buchanan was inaugurated as president, the Utah Territorial Legislature sent a truculent missive to Washington announcing that the Saints would ignore any and all federal statutes they determined to be unjust and would expel from their midst any federal officers who didn’t meet the rigorous moral standards of the Mormon Church.

It proved to be bad timing on the part of the Saints. Utah Territory was an annoying problem for the new leader of the nation, but compared to other national problems then looming it was a relatively small one, which President Buchanan thought he could handle quickly and easily. And in the Mormon insurrection he saw a means to distract Americans from much larger, much less tractable issues—the increasingly divisive rancor over slavery, for instance, which was threatening to tear the country to tatters. As a pro-slavery Democrat, Buchanan figured that by coming down hard on pro-slavery Utah,* he could gain favor with abolitionists without having to sacrifice much political capital, because the Mormons were so widely reviled. So he followed the counsel of lawyer Robert Tyler—the son of former president John Tyler and an influential operative within the Democratic Party—who urged him to “supersede the Negro-Mania with the almost universal excitements of an Anti-Mormon Crusade.”

*Although Joseph Smith had been opposed to slavery on moral grounds (in 1836 he’d even ordained an African-American man, Elijah Abel, as an elder in the Mormon priesthood), Brigham Young was an unapologetic racist (as were a great many other nineteenth-century Americans) whose interpretations of scripture institutionalized racism within the LDS Church. Under his leadership, Utah became a slave territory, and the Mormon Church supported the aims of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Brigham’s lasting impact on LDS doctrine made blacks feel exceedingly unwelcome in the church until more than a century after his death. Through most of the twentieth century, African-Americans were strictly banned from the priesthood, and black-white marriages were considered an outrage against God. Then, in 1978, President Spencer W. Kimball had a revelation in which the Lord commanded that the LDS priesthood be open to males of all races, initiating a slow but profound shift in Mormon attitudes about race. In February 2002, the student body of Brigham Young University, though only 0.7 percent African-American, elected a black man, Rob Foster, as their president—the first black student president in the school’s history. Given the strongly held views of BYU’s namesake, Foster’s victory was regarded as an especially potent symbol.

Launching a nice little war to divert national attention was a gambit no less appealing to nineteenth-century politicians than it is to their present-day counterparts. As historian Will Bagley noted, “Of all the complex difficulties facing the new administration, the Mormon problem offered the most tempting political opportunity and promised the most beguiling of solutions—military action, a course that might unify the nation in a popular crusade against the evils of Mormonism.”

Alleging that the Mormons had committed a long list of treasonous acts, in May 1857 Buchanan dispatched a contingent of federal officials to restore the rule of law in Utah, including a new territorial governor to replace Brigham Young. More ominously, the new president ordered twenty-five hundred heavily armed soldiers to escort these officials into Salt Lake City and subdue the Saints if necessary. For all intents and purposes, the United States had declared war on the Mormons.

The Utah War, as it was known, has been compared by more than one historian to a comic opera. As Leonard Arrington and Davis Bitton wrote in
The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saints,
“The President of the United States had dispatched the largest peacetime army in the nation’s history to oversee the installation of half a dozen officials in a minor territory.” It turned out to be a war that generated much more smoke than heat, and a concord was ultimately negotiated before the Saints and American soldiers exchanged a single shot.

The amicable resolution came too late, however, for members of a Gentile wagon train traveling to California through a lovely valley in Utah’s remote southwest corner, high on the rim of the Great Basin. This bucolic sanctuary, named the Mountain Meadow, is now synonymous with one of the most chilling episodes in the history of the American West—an episode that exemplified the fanaticism and concomitant brutality of a culture that would be so enthusiastically idealized a century later by Dan Lafferty and his fundamentalist brethren.

EIGHTEEN

FOR WATER WILL NOT DO

Mormons were different because they said they were different and because their claims, frequently advanced in the most obnoxious way possible, prompted others to agree and treat them as such. The notion of Mormon difference, that is, was a deliberate invention elaborated over time. It was both cause and result of a conflict in which all parties discovered reasons to stress not what Mormons had in common with other Americans, which was a great deal, but what they did not have in common. One result of the conflict was an ideology that sought to turn the self-advertised differences of the Mormons into a conspiracy against the American republic.

R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans

By the time it reached the uplands of southern Utah, 280 miles beyond Salt Lake City, the wagon train that would be known to history as the Fancher party included some 130 emigrants, mostly from Arkansas, as well as a thousand head of cattle and two hundred horses.* Over the preceding weeks, a downtrodden assortment of “backouts”—apostate Mormons eager to leave the territory after acrimoniously quitting the church—had joined the Fancher group as well, swelling the company’s ranks to approximately 140.

*Although the wagon train took its name from forty-five-year-old Alexander Fancher, who headed one of the company’s most prominent families, the “Fancher party” was actually a loose affiliation of at least four distinct groups, including one led by Captain John T. Baker—hence the other name by which the wagon train was commonly known: the Baker-Fancher party.

This unusually large train, spread out along miles of the Old Spanish Trail (the southern route to California), rolled into the Mountain Meadow* over several hours on the evening of September 6, 1857, and the travelers stopped for the night beside a clear artesian spring. Their campsite was in the middle of a shallow valley, fifty-eight hundred feet above sea level, carpeted with lush green sedges and bunchgrass gone to seed. Just beyond this high oasis on the edge of the Great Basin, the trail dropped sharply down into the scorching wastes of the Mojave Desert. Given the hundreds of miles of hot, hard country that stretched ahead of them, the emigrants must have been grateful for the opportunity to rest and graze their stock in such a verdant setting.

* Although the valley seems originally to have been named the Mountain Meadow, most maps refer to it as “the Mountain Meadows,” in the plural, and the slaughter that took place there is almost universally known as “the Mountain Meadows massacre.”

The temperature dipped into the forties when the sun went down. At daybreak, after rousing themselves from their bedrolls, the group huddled around campfires to warm their hands and to cook. The crisp morning air smelled of sagebrush and juniper smoke. No one suspected they were about to be attacked; the Arkansans hadn’t even bothered to circle their wagons the night before, as they customarily did on the trail.

“Our party was just sitting down to a breakfast of quail and cottontail rabbits when a shot rang out from a nearby gully,” Sarah Frances Baker Mitchell recalled eighty-two years after the event, “and one of the children toppled over, hit by the bullet.” That first gunshot was the beginning of a furious surprise assault that would fatally wound seven Arkansans before the day was out. Although Mitchell was only three years old at the time, the horrors of that morning—and the even greater horrors of the week to come—were seared into her memory.

The emigrants quickly circled their wagons into a defensive corral, dug in as best they could, and returned fire, repelling the first wave of assailants. They assumed they were being ambushed by Indians, a conjecture that seemed to be confirmed by glimpses of dark-skinned men in war paint shooting at them. As it happened, most of the attackers on that initial morning of what would become a five-day siege were indeed Paiutes, but others were Mormons from nearby settlements who had simply painted their faces to look like Indians. And commanding the assault was a well-known Latter-day Saint: forty-four-year-old John D. Lee, a battle-tested veteran of the troubles in Missouri and Illinois, as devoted to the church and its leaders as any Mormon alive.

Although Lee was a blustery, brown-nosing martinet beloved by few of his peers, Brigham Young felt genuine affection for him and valued his unfaltering obedience. Back in Nauvoo, shortly after assuming leadership of the church, Brigham had adopted him in an esoteric Mormon ritual, making Lee his symbolic son, and in 1856 he’d appointed Lee “Farmer to the Indians,” the prophet’s personal ambassador to the Southern Paiute tribe.

To comprehend why Lee—an American citizen—would be leading an attack on an American wagon train, one has to look back to the beginning of that summer and consider the shock waves of panic and fury that roiled Deseret when word arrived that a hostile army was amassing to the east.

Porter Rockwell was carrying a load of mail from Utah to Missouri when he learned of the impending American military action against the Saints. Near what is now the eastern border of Wyoming, he encountered the mayor of Great Salt Lake City (as the capital of Utah was then known), his friend Abraham Smoot, who was headed west with a herd of cattle. Smoot told Rockwell that the Mormons’ mail contract with the U.S. Postmaster had been abruptly canceled, and that federal troops were mustering at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, with orders to march on the Kingdom of God.

Rockwell immediately turned around and, accompanied by Smoot and two other companions, headed back to Utah to alert Brigham. Pausing at Fort Laramie, the Destroying Angel hitched a buckboard to the two fastest horses in the Mormon corral, then drove the animals hard all the way to Great Salt Lake, making the 513-mile trip in just over five days. On July 24, Pioneer Day, Rockwell and Smoot told Brigham of the coming invasion just as the Saints were kicking off a huge celebration to mark the tenth anniversary of their arrival in Zion; Brigham announced the electrifying news to the Pioneer Day gathering just after sunset. The crowd reeled, reacting with a mix of confusion, apprehension, and rage.

Standing before twenty-five hundred of his subjects, Brigham assured them that they need not fear the army of the United States, for the Saints were sure to prevail. “We have borne enough of their oppression and hellish abuse,” he bellowed, “and we will not bear any more of it… In the name of Israel’s God, we ask no odds of them.” The commonwealth of the Latter-day Saints, he brashly declared, “henceforth constituted a new and independent state, to be known no longer as Utah, but by their own Mormon name of Deseret.”

Brigham had actually been aware for more than a month that federal troops were en route to Utah, but had withheld the news until Pioneer Day for maximum dramatic effect. For the better part of a year, in fact, he’d been stockpiling arms and drilling his crack militia, the Nauvoo Legion. After the Pioneer Day announcement, he simply accelerated preparations for the defense of Deseret. And the cornerstone of this defense, says historian Will Bagley, “was to rally Utah’s Indians to the Mormon cause.”

The inspiration for Brigham’s military strategy came directly from Mormon scripture: according to
The Book of Mormon,
the Indians of North America were descended from the Lamanites, and as such they were remnants of the same ancient tribe of Israel to which Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni had belonged. The Lamanites, of course, had rejected the teachings of Jesus, waged war on the Nephites, and eventually killed every last one of them—crimes that had resulted in God cursing the Lamanites with dark skin. Scripture nevertheless taught that the Lamanites/Indians would once again become “a white and delightsome people” when, during the Last Days before the return of Christ, the Latter-day Saints converted them to Mormonism.
The Book of Mormon
indeed prophesied that the Lamanites, once redeemed, would join forces with the Mormons to vanquish the Gentiles, and thereby usher in the Great and Dreadful Day of the Lord.

This momentous alliance between Mormon and Lamanite, Brigham was certain, was about to become a reality, paving the way for the Second Coming. He had reached this conclusion as soon as the Saints had arrived in the Great Salt Lake Valley, when he’d realized that the Mormons’ new homeland was in the midst of the Lamanites. God’s plan seemed to be unfolding just as it had been prophesied in
The Book of Mormon.

It hadn’t occurred to Brigham, though, that the Lamanites might balk at playing their divinely ordained role. The Indians were sometimes willing to act as mercenaries and attack “Mericats” on behalf of the “Mormonee”* in return for a share of the plunder, but they never considered the Saints to be their allies. The Indians regarded the Big Captain and the rest of the Mormonee as merely the lesser of two hideous evils—and sometimes not even that.

* Indians made a clear distinction between Mormons (whom they called “Mormonee”) and other Americans (referred to, in the phonetic rendering of the Paiutes, as “Mericats”).

Despite the Indians’ lack of enthusiasm for fulfilling their prophetic calling, Brigham used every means at his disposal to enlist them in his campaign against the Gentiles. And when the spoils were sufficiently enticing, the Indians obliged. Numerous Gentile emigrants passing through Utah reported that their horses and cattle were driven off by Indian raiders, only to show up later in Mormon corrals. If the Indians fell short of the Saints’ millennial expectations that they would function as “the battle axe of the Lord,” when the Lamanites could be induced to do the Mormons’ bidding they were, nevertheless, a potent weapon.