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Up Your Mission: Mormon Colonizing along the Little Colorado River, 1870-1900. By CHARLES S. PETERSON. (Tucson, Ariz.: T h e University of Arizona Press, 1973. xii + 309 pp. $9.50.)
Mormon plans for colonizing northern Arizona took shape in the early 1850s. Exploratory visits southward began no later than 1855, and by 1873 migration was well underway. Having learned the dangers of evangelizing amidst the unregenerate, the Saints sought refuge in the desert. Isolation would insure Mormons a majority and permit their institutions to flourish. Moving down the Little Colorado River in stages, colonies were formed at Moenkopi and T u b a City east of the Grand Canyon. While hardships and a dedication to shared purposes bound immigrants to each other, it was the United Order — Mormon socialism — that was expected to keep Mormons cooperatively together once settled. Resembling other socialistic, communalistic ventures of the period, the Orders expressly eschewed private property and the open market in favor of a Rousseauite equalitarianism imbued with millennial expectations. Orders were set u p at a number of villages along the Lower Little Colorado. Those at Sunset and St. Joseph lasted into the 1880s. All were dreary failures. Work was rotated among the membership, and compensation was often distributive. Responsibility and incentive were thereby minimalized with the inevitable result that authority was increasingly centralized. If men did not own their property neither did they fence it. T h e cows were in every-
body's corn when it was nobody's turn to shoo them out. Pursuing an Owenite literalness in economic theory, the Saints also aspired to Shaker-like uniformity in dress and manners. At Sunset the monocratic Lot Smith dispensed equalitarian sandwiches, sermons, and spankings from the head of his "long table." More devoted to the interests of the group than to group idols, Smith made Sunset prosper even while permitting the Order to fail. U n d e r his leadership "property rather than union" (p. 122) became the basis of village
life. Peterson turns from the Orders to other examples of Mormon socialism. H e discovers that "cooperation was a labored product. . . . Mormons . . . never successfully put aside the countering tendencies of personal interest" (p. 124). Proposing to test the motivational impact of what he calls "ideologic voluntarism," Peterson undertakes an analysis of two Mormon efforts to employ unified and egalitarianized manpower as an instrument for achieving group power vis a vis the Gentile world. Specifically the Mormons established a merchandising cooperative, the Arizona Cooperative Mercantile Institution ( A C M I ) . They also organized Mormon workers into a "union" of sorts in order to deal with the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad. In 1880 Mormons went eagerly to work for the Atlantic and Pacific. T h e plan was to
