THE NON-MORMON PRESENCE IN EARLY CACHE COUNTY Utah is to day enveloped in a cloud of darkness more dense than that we looked upon from the mountain-top. As the light of our Christian land falls upon it, it reflects back no splendors. —C. P. LYFORD, 1886
\J tah's unusual position as a state with a predominant religion often forces a separate consideration of those who are not of that faith, especiady in the nineteenth century. So much of Utah's history, including that of Cache County, is a story of politics, economics, and religion intertwined. Great numbers of Latter-day Saints moved to the vadeys of the mountains in what they considered their gathering to Zion and hoped their isolation would allow them to govern and worship as they pleased. They remembered the persecution they had suffered in Missouri and Illinois when they had moved into areas where numerous settlers not of their faith already lived. Their prophet and his brother had been martyred, hundreds had given their lives in the trek to Utah, and now their God had blessed them with isolation in the mountains. They, like the Old Testament Israelites, had found their promised land. When the federal govern130
