The Turner Thesis and Mormon Beginnings in New York and Utah

THE TURNER THESIS and MORMON BEGINNINGS in NEW YORK and UTAH

BY ALEXANDER EVANOFF

INTRODUCTION

This paper will attempt to apply the Turner thesis to the following two problems, to determine:

1. Whether Mormon faith was of frontier origin, and whether or not it appealed mostly to non-frontier people. This is a twofold problem.

2. Whether the frontier in Utah produced democratic or authoritarian influences. Because it has been assumed that Mormon faith had its gestation, birth, and flowering under varying degrees of frontier conditions, Mormon history and institutions would seem to provide a rather ready-made, if not obvious, test case for the validity of Frederick Jackson Turner's ideas. And yet, it was not until Thomas F. O'Dea's The Mormons in 1957 that anyone attempted, in anything more than a casual way, to relate Turner's theory to Mormon history. However, as a sociologist, one who is unwilling to accept the divine origin of Mormon doctrine, O'Dea is more concerned with showing the cultural and social borrowings which he finds in Mormon life than actually attempting to determine whether or not Mormon democracy or Mormon individualism is a result of frontier conditions. Turner himself refers to the Mormons by name only once, and that in passing, and in connection with the Dunkard, the Icarians, the Fourierists, and similar idealists who sought out the western wilds in search of freedom.

THE TURNER THESIS

Before Mormon beginnings and institutions can be evaluated there must be some attempt at a definition of Turner's thesis. This is a rather difficult task, partly because the theory itself can be all encompassing and is not readily susceptible to satisfactory capsulization, and partly because the critics of Turner have so radically misrepresented the theory and abused it, that any presentation of Turner's ideas would be well-advised to take into some account what Turner's critics allege the theory to involve, as a kind of apologia for using or applying the theory at all.

Turner is accused of being an environmentalist and a mono-causationist. But the real animus against Turner by those who made such charges, particularly during the 1930's and into the 1940's, probably had little to do with whether he was an environmentalist or a mono-causationist; after all, many of Turner's critics who felt themselves "liberally" oriented and "progressively" minded were not particularly hostile to Darwin's conception of the influences of the environment. It is probably fair to say that the animus against Turner had nothing to do with whether or not Turner was a good Darwinian.

What apparently alienated Turner most of all in the minds of many of his critics, and caused them to suspect everything he had written as being profane in origin, was the friendly tone Turner adopted towards individualism and his assertion that American democracy was "born of no theorist's dream." In 1958 Ray Allen Billington, who has provided the most succinct, as well as complete, exposition of the Turner controversy, acknowledged that "No single statement in all of Turner's writings has been more vigorously disputed than his declaration that 'American democracy was born of no theorist's dream; it was not carried in the Sarah Constant to Virginia, nor in the Mayflower to Plymouth. It came out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier.' " Perhaps one can understand how the mind and temperament which thinks of itself as "liberal" may bristle at Turner's apparent dismissal of "theorist's" dreams. Turner had not displayed the proper reverence for "theorist's" dreams which some "liberals" may have hoped to find in right thinking scholars. Mr. Billington, himself, finds the statement lacking in "sobriety"; and although Mr. Billington is seemingly inclined to test truth by its admixture of levity or sobriety, he does not assert that

Turner's statement is in error because he recognizes that Turner readily acknowledges that nothing comes from nothing.

Turner does affirm that at the American frontier the bonds of custom are broken; but

There is not a tabula rasa. The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of custom each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and the freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons.

In the first chapter of his The Frontier in American History, and as early as the second paragraph, Turner asserts clearly enough that "All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized." A little later, the third page of the same work, as a matter of fact, he again asserts clearly enough that "Our early history is the study of European germs developing in an American environment." He has said, "Old organs will be utilized to express new forces, and so gradual and subtle will be the change that it may hardly be recognized."

Mr. Billington, who has accused Turner of being somewhat deficient in sobriety, is also good enough to come to Turner's defense in regard to this same charge. He says of Turner that

Certainly in his soberer moments he adopted a more realistic view, [when, for example, he asserted that] "the history of our institutions, our democracy, is not a history of imitation, or simple borrowing; it is the history of the evolution and adaptation of organs in response to changed environment, a history of the origin of a new political species."

It is not mandatory that Turner be defended by matching a sober assertion against one which is not, as does Mr. Ray Allen Billington. The "theorist's dream" passage, by itself, taken completely out of context, need not lead inevitably to an environmentalist interpretation. Taken out of context and in isolation, Turner's much attacked statement may be interpreted to aver nothing more than that American democracy is the result and the end product of the activities and aspirations of the American people rather than the product or formulations of one man carried somehow on the Sarah Constant or the Mayflower. The statement seems to affirm nothing more frightening than that American democracy differs from European democracy and that it would be rather difficult for Europe to export what it does not itself possess. But when the statement is taken in context, preceded, as it is, by a number of affirmations of the "germ" theory, and followed, as it is, by a number of affirmations of the "germ" theory, its misinterpretation would seem unjust.

Turner never denies the validity of origins and traditions, but he has set for himself the task of discovering what may have been the effect of the frontier upon American character and institutions. The critic of Turner's hypothesis is on much better ground if he points to a possible over-emphasis on environment. But, because a great deal of tracing to European sources had been done, Turner confined himself to an area of investigation which had been neglected. However, even when Turner is charged with over-emphasis he is sometimes unjustly treated and his point of view rather unfairly characterized and misrepresented. George Wilson Pierson feels that in Turner's theory "too small a role is allowed to man's own character and ambitions, to his capacity for change, and to the traditions and momentum of the society which came to use this free land. Thus the continent masters, destroys, commands, and creates — while man is surprisingly passive." Turner never really says that it is the continent that masters, destroys, commands, and creates. Turner put the burden of mastery, destruction, command, and creativity upon man. Man is never passive. Mr. Billington, a relatively nonpartisan historian, accepts the basic Turner ideas and makes the following assessment:

Most modern scholars ... would agree with Turner that the frontiersmen did develop certain unique traits, and that these have been perpetuated to form the principal distinguishing characteristics of the American people today. Americans display a restless energy, a versatility, a practical ingenuity, an earthy practicality to a degree unknown among Englishmen or other Europeans. They do squander their natural resources with an abandon unknown elsewhere; they have developed a mobility both socially and physically that marks them as a people apart. In few other lands is democracy worshiped so intensely . . . seldom in comparable cultural areas do they cling so tenaciously to the shibboleth of rugged individualism. Nor do residents of non-frontier lands experience to the same degree the heady optimism, the blind faith in the future, the belief in the inevitability of progress, that is a part of the American creed. These were pioneer traits, and they have become a part of our national heritage.

It should be unnecessary here to delve into the history of the controversy that the Turner hypothesis created, but it is necessary to give some substantiation to the validity of the Turner thesis as a hypothesis, because American scholars who know the Turner thesis do sometimes assume that the thesis is thoroughly discredited. So rather than accepting the thesis either as proved or disproved, let us assume the validity of the hypothesis and see whether or not it may be made to apply to Mormon experience.

WESTERN NEW YORK AND MORMON POPULARITY

From the birth of the Mormon faith in western New York to the removal of the church to the West, the mainstream of Mormon life may be said to have been conducted under frontier conditions. Mormon removal from western New York; to Kirtland, Ohio; to Far West, Missouri; to Nauvoo, Illinois; and finally to the Great Salt Lake Basin involved movement into frontier regions of increasing isolation. And according to the democratizing aspects of Turner's theory, such removal perhaps ought to have resulted in increasing freedom, individualism, and resentment of restraint among the Mormon faithful. The Mormon people might have been expected to become increasingly democratic with each move westward. But instead we find that the Mormons brought a theocratic government into operation from their very first entry into the bastions of the Intermountain West. From the moment they entered the most isolated and abandoned country they had ever settled, the Mormons instituted the most centrally directed and autocratic government they had known — the period of the Theocracy from 1847 to 1849.

If the Mormon people brought a theocratic government into the vast Great Salt Lake Basin, such a government and such an organization must have had its origins elsewhere. It is with the first beginnings of Mormonism in western New York, as well as the kind of people to whom Mormonism appealed, that this section of this report shall deal.

Since Mormonism is of native growth and native origin, the theocratic origins of Mormon life may be said to have come into existence under the purportedly democratic influences of frontier life. But Whitney R. Cross has seriously challenged the standard interpretation of Mormonism as a frontier religion. His challenge and supporting evidence was published in 1950 and formed a chapter in a significant book entitled The Burned-over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850. Mr. Cross characterizes western New York and the Palmyra region as a non-frontier region and Mormonism as a faith unappealing to frontiersmen. Mr. Cross's evaluation has remained unchallenged in the 5 years since the publication of his book. Thomas O'Dea, perhaps the best and closest Gentile observer of Mormon affairs, accepts Cross's evaluation in his 1957 study The Mormons. The importance of knowing whether western New York was a frontier region is this: If we can determine that a non-frontier community produced the Mormon faith with its autocratic or centralist tendencies, then the thesis of the democratic influences of the frontier can remain relatively intact, or little damaged. But, on the other hand, if we can determine that Mormonism originated on the frontier, it may be possible to say that the frontier was capable of producing autocratic and centralist tendencies as well as democratic tendencies, and thus perhaps weaken the applicability of the Turner hypothesis.

According to Mr. Cross the Palmyra region was not a frontier or a cultural backwash. He shows that the Palmyra and Manchester regions of western New York possessed between 20 and 60 persons per square mile during the 1820's. Palmyra during Joseph Smith's stay there had become a local market. Manchester, six miles to the south, possessed a library of 600 books. It had a school, "produced wool, flour, and paper in local mills, and operated a blast furnace." Twelve miles to the south of Palmyra was Canandaigua, which was one of the two oldest towns in western New York with schools, libraries, and churches. Less than 30 miles from the origin of Mormonism was Rochester, which had grown 512 per cent in population during the 1820's. Both Thomas O'Dea and Whitney Cross find that the Mormon faith originated in a region of western New York which they could not characterize as a frontier.

It may well be that the most urban and sophisticated region in the early history of the Mormon Church was the western New York area where there were no squatters' privileges. And yet in this area there were rather formidable frontier conditions; and though Mr. Cross believes that land valuation was excessively high, Joseph Smith's father was able to buy 100 acres of unimproved land just two miles south of Palmyra from the efforts of about a year's city labor. On this same land in another year's time, he built a log house and began clearing the forest. It took three men and a yoke of oxen five weeks to clear and sow a 10-acre field. And when the wheat was ripe, the farmers threshed it with the bare hoofs of cattle or with a flail. But even in this "cultured and settled" region, the wheat could not be sold and had a barter value of only 25 cents a bushel. Wheat was seldom a cash crop and had to be transported overland 200 miles east to Albany at prohibitive cost.

Mr. Cross's characterization of western New York as a non-frontier region does not concern itself with how Frederick Jackson Turner might have designated the area. If Turner's definition of frontier had been definite and unmistakable, there would have been little need for this discussion of western New York. On occasion Turner accepted the U.S. Census Bureau's definition of frontier as that area in which the population ranged from two to six persons to the square mile. But Turner did not want to give the term "frontier" a fixed meaning. Ray Billington characterizes Turner's shifting definitions of frontier in this fashion:

At one time the frontier to Turner was "the meeting ground between savagery and civilization," at another it might become "the temporary boundary of an expanding society at the edge of substantially free lands," or a "migrating region," a "form of society," a "stage of society rather than a place," a "process," or "the region whose social conditions result from the application of older institutions and ideas to the transforming influences of free land."

It would appear that Turner's broad and shifting definitions of "frontier" would be inclusive enough to include western New York. Thus Mormonism may be considered a frontier religion on the basis of its geographic origin. Mr. Billington has succinctly interpreted Turner's fluctuating definitions as follows:

the "frontier" was not a narrow line but a migrating zone of varying width, peopled by a variety of frontier types ranging from fur-trappers on the west to town-builders on the east . . . (and furthermore) the social devolution and evolution occurring within this zone varied with time and place depending on the nature of both the individuals and institutions entering the region and the environment awaiting them there.

And yet, the question of whether or not western New York was a frontier region is perhaps less significant than the fact that the center of Mormon interest and authority was never really in New York; as soon as Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon and gathered about 100 adherents, the Mormon Church moved west, and the center of its power and interest was located in such places as Kirtland, Ohio; Far West, Missouri; Nauvoo, Illinois; and the Intermountain West. The Mormon Church cannot be said to have grown or developed in New York State; about all that can be said is that it had its beginnings there. The church had really moved out of New York about as soon as it was formed. Additionally, because this is so, it seems rather rash for Mr. Cross to characterize Mormonism as a non-frontier religion solely on the basis of the social characteristics in western New York. He buttresses his evaluation of Mormonism as a non-frontier religion with the additional argument that Mormonism did not appeal to frontiersmen. He sees Mormonism as neither originating on the frontier nor appealing to frontiersmen. It would appear that the virile, independent frontiersmen could not submit himself to the autocracy and direction of the Mormon Church. Mr. Cross puts his case in this fashion:

The far greater gathering of converts from this area [western New York] came during the region's riper maturity, after Zion had removed to the West. And the recruits enlisted here and elsewhere far outnumbered those gained in areas of the Middle West where Mormon headquarters chanced from time to time to be located.

That the number of recruits from the East exceeded those from the Middle West is rather difficult, if not impossible, to prove; and, Mr. Cross does not really establish his case convincingly. Whitney Cross acknowledges that he has used the federal census of 1860 in his endeavor to establish the predominantly eastern origin and makeup of Mormonism, but that census does not really substantiate his case. The 1860 census shows that of the 27,490 native-born residents in Utah, 1,744 came from New York, while a somewhat larger number (1,796) came from Illinois. There were 1,551 who came from Iowa, 884 who came from Ohio, 862 who came from Pennsylvania. The states of New York, Illinois, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Ohio contributed 6,837, or better than half of the aggregate originating in the states of the Union. 16 Thirty-eight per cent of the aggregate population was born in the territories, namely, 15,968. Approximately 40 per cent of the population was under 13 years of age and therefore largely born in Utah or the territories. The nature of such statistics has not prevented Cross's affirming that "Mormonism should not be called a frontier religion in terms of the persons it appealed to any more than it should in terms of its origin."

NATIVE-BORN UTAHNS IN 1860*

My examination of the 1860 census would seem to indicate that well over half of the Mormon membership came from non-eastern states or territories. A glance at the table should confirm my estimate. Most nativeborn Mormons seem to have come from the Middle West. A significant factor which Mr. Cross does not take into consideration has to do with estimating the percentage of conversion as against density of population in each state. It would be of little avail to show that roughly the same number of converts came from Illinois as from New York if New York had twice the population of Illinois.

William Alexander Linn in The Story of the Mormons suggests that Joseph Smith left western New York because he could not get enough conversions there. Mr. Linn suggests that Joseph Smith's proselytizing efforts in western New York were not as productive as he had hoped. Before Joseph Smith had been able to convert more than 100 people, four of his Mormon missionaries had converted 127 persons within a brief two- or three-week period, and the number of converts had reached 1,000 within a short time. Mr. Linn believes that it was the proselytizing results in the West on the part of his missionaries that encouraged Joseph Smith to move west. Here is Mr. Linn's assessment: "A sufficient reason for the removal was the failure to secure converts where Smith was known, and the ready acceptance of the new belief among Rigdon's Ohio people."

It would probably be the better part of discretion to be skeptical of Mr. Cross's evaluation of the appeal of Mormon doctrine until his case has been established; and, the subject would perhaps warrant a closer examination than anyone has given it. Mr. Andrew Love Neff, the author of the useful and valuable History of Utah: 1847 to 1869 believes that "Whether foreign or domestic, all the regions from whence . . . [the Mormons] came represented advanced economic and culture areas." Precisely what Mr. Neff really meant by advanced economic and culture areas is not clear. The proportion and number of converts that came from such frontier areas as Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Michigan, even California seems to have been rather significant in relation to the number of people living there. And, much of that area during the Mormon sojourn in the Middle West was in large part frontier country falling within Turner's fluctuating and imprecise evaluation of "frontier."

In a certain sense major groups of the Mormon Church seldom lived in a "frontier" environment. Shortly after Joseph Smith's westward movement, the missionary efforts had become so successful that wherever the Mormons moved they came as a clear majority or soon became a majority, and perhaps no region into which they moved with their many numbers would have constituted a "frontier" region to Mr. Cross. But, this assumption may be incorrect because he acknowledges that "the church existed generally on the frontier and kept moving westward with the tide of settlement." In Jackson County, Missouri, the Far West and Independence establishments of the Mormons must have numbered close to 13,000 around June 1838, just eight years after the founding of the Mormon Church with its 100 members and 1,200 miles from the place of Mormon origin. Mormon troops in Far West, Missouri, numbered 1,200 to 1,500. We know that after the exodus from Far West the Mormons moved into Illinois and established Nauvoo, and within a few years the estimated population of Nauvoo and its environs was 15,000 with a militia of 2,000. Within a short time of the Mormon establishment of Nauvoo, what had been a relatively empty region became the most populous region in Illinois. Within a very few years of the incorporation of the Mormon Church in western New York, no matter what the region into which the Mormon people moved, it became an area of relatively dense population from the sheer strength in numbers of the Mormon people.

The belief that Mormonism did not appeal to frontiersmen may be due to a hasty appraisal of the deterrent effect on missionary activity which the fear, envy, and hostility the Mormons aroused in many people, who were their immediate neighbors, may have had. But hostility from some neighbors does not preclude the existence of friendly Gentile neighbors among whom recruitment may have been successful. Local hostility might be likely to bring sympathy for the Mormons in areas where they had not settled and perhaps a readiness to listen sympathetically to Mormon doctrine. We know that the people of eastern Illinois welcomed the Mormons with sympathy after troubles and harassment in Missouri had forced the Mormon removal.

Mr. Cross's hypothesis, which he asserts as fact, fails to consider the important matter of duration of recruitment activity in any given area. Evidence based on missionary activity during the 17-year period in the United States from 1830 to 1847 shows that missionary activity did not extend into two-thirds of Illinois until 11 to 17 years after missionaries had been active in most of New York. Almost no missionary work was done in Iowa prior to 1847, and none at all in Minnesota prior to 1847. Missionary activity in Wisconsin did not begin until 11 to 17 years later than in New York. There seems to be no evidence compelling enough to support Mr. Cross's hypothesis without some serious misgivings.

But, what does lend credence to Mr. Cross's belief is the large group of immigrants the Mormon missionaries were able to attract from England and the Scandinavian countries. The census of 1860 shows 12,754 foreign-born residents in Utah, whereas native-born numbered 27,490 or 68 per cent of the population. In June 1837 the Mormon Church established a mission in England and brought the whole European continent within reach of Mormon doctrine. Missions to Scandinavia were added in 1849. Thus the Mormons began their missionary endeavors in England and the European continent and achieved 12,754 converts from that richly populated area by the year 1860 after 23 years of effort; whereas at Nauvoo alone, before European immigration of Mormon converts had any importance, there were 15,000 with about 27,000 scattered within the boundaries of the United States in 1845, after 15 years of effort.

It is regrettable that Mr. Cross speaks with more assurance than the facts would warrant when he says, "Obviously, then, Mormonism should not be called a frontier religion in terms of the persons it appealed to, any more than it should in terms of its origin." Mr. Cross has not troubled to be concerned with percentage of population drawn from any region, or the duration of recruitment efforts in any area, and he has not attempted to define which areas of Mormon proselytizing constituted frontier areas in his opinion and which did not.

THEOCRACY 1847-1849 The Mormons in Utah may be said to have had four successive governments :

1. Theocracy 1847-1849.

2. Provisional government of the State of Deseret 1849-1851.

3. Territorial government 1851-1896.

4. Utah State government 1896-

An inquiry into the degree of democracy and the reasons for the absence of civil government during the theocracy of 1847 to 1849 shall concern us here. During this period nearly 10,000 Mormons lived closely together and "managed the entirety of . .. [their] economic and social affairs without the semblance of political government." The theocratic government did not spring full-blown in the desert. Its origins and the sources of its development, organization, and implementation are to be found in the revelations of Joseph Smith, in the hard and tortuous wanderings of the Mormon people, and in their relationship to their environment and its frequently hostile people. The history of such development during 17 years of wandering in the Middle West is too complicated to be treated here. But certainly, the relationship between church and people, and church and civil government, was subject to change both prior to the settlement of the Utah country, and after its settlement as well. It would be impossible to deal at all adequately with anything more than some aspects of the first two years of Mormon settlement in the Great Basin. The two-year period (1847-49) is selected for examination not because it is less complicated or involved than any other two-year period in Mormon history, but because it seems to offer a more serious stumbling block to the Turner thesis than any other period, before or since.

On the Mormons' arrival in the Great Salt Lake Basin late in July 1847, there were no constituted civil authorities to greet them. It was a rather forbidding, arid region about 1,000 miles from anywhere. Brigham Young and his people were aware that there was more attractive land west of the Sierras as well as in the Pacific Northwest. But, the forbidding, unpromising nature of much of the Intermountain region seemed to promise an isolation for individual development that more attractive regions could not have afforded. In the new environment, already established church agencies met all governmental requirements. The High Council made the laws. Instead of civil courts the bishop, High Council, and the First Presidency acted in such capacity. For the execution and enforcement of the law there was the Nauvoo Legion. Church tithes and offerings provided revenue.

The Mormons had finally found an extensive physical domain in which they hoped to grow and expand unmolested by Gentiles. Their numbers had grown to such an extent by 1847 that there was probably no other region where they could grow and develop as they wished to. In October of 1845 at a meeting in the almost completed temple at Nauvoo from which the Mormons were about to flee, Parley Pratt, one of the early scholars and philosophers of the Mormon movement, put the Mormon purposes and condition in these words:

One small nursery may produce many thousands of fruit trees, while they are small. But as they expand toward maturity they must needs be transplanted, in order to have room to grow and produce natural fruits. It is so with us. We want a country where we have room to expand, and to put into requisition all our energies and the enterprise and talents of a numerous, and intelligent, and increasing people.

The philosophy and ideas seem to be very much like Turner's thesis, particularly with the emphasis upon transplantation, freedom to develop energies and talents, and room.

The whole Mormon undertaking in the West assumed the existence of enough land and resources for all. And, Mormons found them in the Utah region along with the requisite isolation and freedom to develop as they chose. An unnamed speaker at the same meeting with Parley Pratt added:

We calculate to go the same people we are now; preserving the same principles which have caused us to grow and expand as we have done . . . and however much the people may seem disposed not to go, the sails are set, the wind is fair, and we are bound to weather the point, whether we will or not; for we are not at the helm... .

The Mormon faith, like the Puritan, had developed its principles and grown in a land which could no longer hold them. Both were built on the assumption that the church was divine and eternal, that they were under divine auspices; both needed isolation to develop; and both established theocratic government in a wilderness. But the differences (if not great, still differences) in the two theocracies would seem to uphold Turner's thesis of increasing democratization. According to Turner's theory the Puritans representing European "germs" evolving under frontier conditions would have to be less democratic and more class conscious than the Mormons, an offshoot of essentially Puritan origin benefitting during a long period from the democratizing influence of the frontier.

Class distinctions among the Mormons were relatively non-existent. The duties of church officials did not exempt them from labor on farms, or in business and industry. Church officers, during the early period, were expected to support themselves. The hierarchy of class distinctions that existed in Puritan theocracy was significantly less pronounced in Mormon society.

The church authority that was exercised in the settlement and organization of Utah was really quite permissive and partook more of the quality of voluntarism on the part of the people than ecclesiastical fiat on the part of the church. There was no civil or legal authority that could force a Saint to accept a 10- or 15-acre plot of land in the south of Utah if he chose to live in northern Utah. There was a good deal of land available everywhere, though limited by access to sources of irrigation. When the church found more people in any settled community than available land and irrigation possibilities of the moment would comfortably permit, it would ask for volunteers to settle vacant regions, previously explored, which could accommodate additional settlers. And, if a settlement at Moroni needed a blacksmith and the village of Manti had one blacksmith, as well as three other blacksmiths occupied as farmers, church authorities would present the needs of the new settlement at Moroni and ask for volunteers from Manti to meet such needs. The church was primarily dependent upon the willingness and free-will determination of the people to assist one another rather than upon arbitrary fiat.

Nevertheless, Andrew Love Neff, Mormon historian, finds it possible to observe that certain phases of the Puritan concept and viewpoint, which were losing their grip on the inhabitants of New England, were reborn and reinvigorated in the Utah desert. "In some respects," he has said, "it seemed that Brigham Young had picked up the thread of life where Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather had laid it down." Ecclesiastical officials in the Mormon Church are appointed or nominated by the presiding officers of the church, but their selection does not become effective until voted upon favorably by the Saints. But such approval was a routine matter, and the authority of the prophet-president and his nominee was not much endangered by this practice. Yet, both Mormon and non- Mormon commentators agree that frontier conditions were such as to leave individual initiative and decision not much impaired. Thomas O'Dea finds that "The initiative of the rank and file was hardly impaired, and the new country with its challenge to individual hardihood and ingenuity offered an outlet to talents that counterbalanced the restriction often associated with . . . authoritarian rule." Although much of the Mormon colonization was directed by church authority, the first villages settled in the Salt Lake Valley grew up undirected, and unplanned, as individual initiative dictated, as was usually the case with other American settlement. Furthermore, the early period of settlement could not be minutely directed by one man.

Had Mormon inclination been more strongly oriented toward authoritarianism, separatism, and ecclesiastical primacy than it was, we might have expected the establishment of a church-state in the West, free from civil authority. It would seem that 1,000 miles from anywhere in the Great Basin area, the Mormons could have instituted whatever social or national organization they pleased. They were nominally squatters on Mexican territory. The United States had no legal jurisdiction over them. The Mormon Church seems to have had a very excellent opportunity of proclaiming its independence of the United States, of Mexico, or of any other temporal power. Population statistics indicate that there were about 30,000 Mormons in the United States — 11,000 of them were in Utah by 1850. 36 In the vastness of the West they might possibly have formed an actual church-state, recognizing no authority but itself, had the will to do so been there. Texans had proclaimed their freedom without the impetus of Zionism which motivated the Mormons. And yet, the Mormons retained their loyalty to the United States and to the principle of the division of church and state, and in 1849 organized a state government and a state constitution which they hoped would bring it admittance into the United States as an equal member with the other states.

Richard T. Ely, in his Harper's Monthly article, "Economic Aspects of Mormonism," has made perhaps the most amusing observation on Mormon authoritarianism and centralism: "So far as I can judge from what I have seen, the organization of the Mormons is the most nearly perfect piece of social mechanism with which I have ever, in any way, come in contact, excepting alone the German army." Mr. Ely further finds that unrestrained individualism could not have succeeded in Utah because of the necessity for irrigation. The pre-existent qualities and institutions of the Mormons seemed to be ideally suited to successful endeavors in Utah. He avers that: "The agriculture pursued was irrigated agriculture, which for its success is dependent upon a compact society, well knit together. Individualism was out of the question under these conditions, and in Mormonism we find precisely the cohesive strength of religion needed at that juncture to secure economic success." Mr. Ely's statement, of course, does nothing more than affirm Turner's earlier comments on what the con- ditions of the arid West exacted in the way of social organization. Here is Turner speaking three months earlier than Ely in the Atlantic Monthly:

. . . But when the arid lands and the mineral resources of the Far West were reached, no conquest was possible by the old individual pioneer methods. Here expensive irrigations works must be constructed, cooperative activity was demanded in utilization of the water supply, capital beyond the reach of the small farmer was required. In a word, the physiographic province itself decreed that the destiny of this new frontier should be social rather than individual.

To sum up what has gone before. In a significant sense it can be said that at no point in Mormon history did the frontier produce autocratic institutions into church practices without accompanying free and democratic civil institutions, except for the period from 1847 to 1849, when it might be said that forbidding frontier conditions demanded the utilization of a pre-existent church organization which was augmented by the democratically oriented civil constitution of 1849.

CONCLUSION

This paper has attempted to discover whether western New York was a frontier region. Whitney Cross's description of western New York emphasizes non-frontier aspects; however, Turner's definition of frontier would seem to be broad enough to encompass the western New York area in question. As for the appeal of Mormonism, it seems to have appealed about as well to frontiersmen as to Englishmen. Mr. Cross does not seem to be on unequivocal ground when he says that Mormonism did not appeal to frontiersmen and that it was not of frontier origin.

The Utah beginnings show a necessary use of church authority in the beginning, though still with a good deal of individual initiative. Mormon experience shows an early reinstatement of civil authority and a recognition of the necessary and desirable division of church and state. Mormon response to environment would seem to be in accord with Turner's expectations.

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