Of Pride and Politics: Brigham Young as Indian Superintendent

Utah Historical Quarterly

Vol. 46, 1978, No. 3

Of Pride and Politics:Brigham Young as Indian Superintendent

BY FLOYD A. O'NEIL AND STANFORD J. LAYTON

WHEN BRIGHAM YOUNG RECEIVED his appointment as ex officio superintendent of Indian Affairs for Utah Territory in September 1850, the outlines of Mormon-Indian relations had already been defined. The Mormons had clearly demonstrated their determination to claim the land they needed for settlement, regardless of Indian resistance, and to protect their foothold in the Great Basin at all costs. Although the rhetoric of Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, and others contained the promise of accommodation and respect for the Indians, at that moment Young was pursuing a policy of extermination against the Utes of Utah Valley. Under his direction, and extending well beyond his tenure as superintendent, the Mormons continued to crowd the Indians off choice land, using force as necessary, until 1869 when the Utes were finally relocated to the Uintah Reservation and the other Indians were expelled from the territory or confined to its remote corners.

Upon its surface, the history of Mormon-Indian relations differs little from that of the broader American experience. It is the familiar story of clashing cultures centered around possession of the land and characterized by sporadic warfare, hasty promises poorly understood, and eventual displacement of the fragmented natives by the more numerous and determined whites. Yet, as with Mormon history generally, just when things seem to be typically American the unique has a way of asserting itself and begging for analysis. Mormonism's stormy midwestern experience, its New England heritage, its scriptural base, and its schizophrenic view of government in the nineteenth century combined to create its own script that was acted out on the Utah stage during the first generation of permanent white settlement. The producer and director, quite naturally, was Brigham Young.

Persecution of the Mormons by hostile neighbors in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois is a story familiar enough to escape recounting here. The essential point is that when the Mormons arrived in the Great Basin, then outside U.S. boundaries, they brought with them an abiding resolution to redeem the land, create a comfortable home, and never again to be driven away by intolerant neighbors—white or red. "When we first entered Utah," Brigham Young reflected in 1853, "we were prepared to meet all the Indians in these mountains, and kill every soul of them if we had been obliged so to do." Little wonder that the Mormons' early years in Utah were ones of direct and violent confrontation with the Indians. 2

But during their forcible displacement of the Indians, the Mormon leadership experienced a certain crisis of conscience—a crisis born of the Book of Mormon promise that the Indians would be redeemed through the influence of the gospel, a promise that rested uneasily against the reality of the frontier situation demanding immediate displacement of the natives. The Mormons did not know how long redemption might take, but they understood clearly enough that time was of the essence in their own settlement process. Further, they reflected considerable confusion about the dynamics of the redemption process. Yet this much is certain: the philosophy of the Mormons toward the Indians was anchored to the redemption concept. This concept may have served to temper the natural violence of displacement, but it also acted in tandem with Brigham Young's contemptuous attitude toward government officials to create at high federal levels feelings of distrust and eventual hostility toward his Indian policy. These federal officials never understood the redemption urge and viewed Mormon missionary activity suspiciously. Specifically, and perhaps not without justification, they saw it as a form of tampering with the Indians whereby the natives came to draw a distinction between the Mormons, who were their friends, and the non-Mormons, who were not. By the same token, Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders made little or no effort to explain their Indian policy to the appointed officials. The end result was an atmosphere of distrust and a breakdown of communication that served all interests poorly. The following pages carry the highlights of that story.

I

Redemption was rooted in the Book of Mormon's theory of the origin of the American Indians. Descendants from Laman, rebellious son of Lehi whose family had sailed from the Old World to the American continent in the seventh century B.C., these people grew distant from the teachings of God and came to assume a "dark and loathesome" countenance. Becoming fierce and warlike, they succeeded over a period of centuries in annihilating their righteous, lighter-skinned brethren. The Lamanites then continued in their primitive and degenerate state, remote from the redeeming influence of Christianity, until their discovery by the Europeans.

The concept of the Indians as a fallen people was not new. Indeed, its most articulate expression occurred in seventeenth-century New England where the Indians and the wilderness were viewed as manifestations of the devil. But whereas the Puritans of that time and place approached the challenge of redemption with trepidation, the Mormons, their intellectual heirs, approached it with verve and optimism. "The Lord has caused us to come here for this very purpose," claimed Orson Pratt in 1855, "that we might accomplish the redemption of these suffering degraded Israelites." Picturing the Indians as being someday filled with the wisdom of God and building a great city, Pratt continued: "It is a great privilege indeed (and we are indebted to their fathers for it,) that we enjoy being associated with them in the accomplishment of so great a work."

To the Mormons, then, redemption of the Indians (Lamanites) was a prophecy to be fulfilled and a scripture to be vindicated. They began missionary work among the Indians almost immediately, and superficial results were soon visible. In a Twenty-fourth of July parade at Mormonestablished Fort Supply in 1856 a group of dutiful Indians carried a large banner proclaiming "We shall yet become a white and delightsome people." Similar occurrences were fairly common in the territory during those early years of Mormon settlement.

Redemption of the Indians, like redemption of the earth, was a literal concept with the Mormons and was occasionally expressed in the same imagery. "The Lamanites will blossom as the rose on the mountains," asserted Apostle Wilford Woodruff in 1873. "Their chiefs will be filled with the power of God and receive the Gospel, and they will go forth and build the new Jerusalem, and we shall help them." Similar imagery is visible in the frontier eloquence of W. W. Phelps, reflecting in 1851 upon the significance of the new University of Deseret:

Here let the filthy degraded Israelite of America, the poor Indian, come and unlearn his corruptions and errors; sip at the fountain of sense distilled from the flowers of Zion, till by its life-regenerating powers, he becomes white, delightsome, and holy.

Despite the questionable assumptions underlying Phelps's pronouncement, his view of redemption is representative for its focus on education as an essential ingredient. Orson Pratt, George A. Smith, and Brigham Young were others who emphasized literacy as an important step in the total redemption process. Additionally, Young placed considerable emphasis on practical education—especially in the domestic and agricultural arts—as important facets of redemption. From this emerged the widespread Mormon policy of adopting Indian children into their homes and of experimenting with Indian farms.

The practice of adoption received much of its initial impetus from the Mormons' desire to rescue Indian children from the Mexican slave trade. For a time, outright purchase of these hapless children was the method employed to gain their custody. In reviewing this practice before the territorial legislature, Gov. Brigham Young justified it as "a relief and a benefit." Noting that purchase involved expense, Young advocated the establishment of an indentured servitude system whereby these children would repay their new masters through service. Contrary to the face of things, he asserted, this was not just "a new feature in the traffic of human beings," but was an effective vehicle for redemption born of benevolent and humane motives.

The number of Indian children indentured or adopted into Mormon homes is not known but was apparently substantial. The practice continued well after the Mexican slave trade was halted and was a logical extension of Young's growing belief that redemption would occur only with a complete reordering of the Indians' value systems. This, of course, was also the reason for establishing Indian farms. As early as 1851, after having visited the Pahvants of Millard County and having noted their practice of raising a few vegetables each year, Young urged the commissioner of Indian Affairs to establish a farm there, inducing the Indians "to follow the peaceful avocation of herding or cultivating the soil, and abandoning their wilder and more dangerous exploits of predatory warfare. . . ." He continued to monitor the progress of Indian farms in the territory and remarked on it often. "The idea of cultivating the earth for a subsistence gains slowly among them [the Indians]," he wrote in 1855 "for it is very adverse to their habit of idleness." Nevertheless, he concluded, "their necessities reason strong with them, and furnish forcible reasons why they should pursue the peaceful avocations of Agriculture. ..." A year later he was even more sanguine, observing that three Indian farms were being successfully operated and that the Indians of the territory seemed to be inclining more and more toward the civilized agricultural life.

But the Mormon sponsorship of Indian farms was at best tentative and ambiguous. This was not due to any lack of operating premises or assumptions. The difficulty with farms, rather, lay in their expense. When Brigham Young realized that the federal government would not underwrite the cost, he shifted the emphasis of his policy away from farming and back toward the short-range expedient of presents and relocation. After 1855 the primary efforts expended in support of Indian farms came from the dedicated and energetic federal appointee, agent Garland Hurt. In the end, he, too, was forced by government penury to abandon that ideal.

Lofty as the redemption ideal may have seemed to the nineteenthcentury church leadership, it was tied to other factors that militated against success. The first, previously mentioned, was that of time: the Mormons felt that colonization could not wait on the development of a cooperative attitude among the Indians. A second factor was the inevitable gulf that separated the rhetoric of the leadership from the natural inclination of Mormonism's rank and file: not all the settlers were convinced that Indians could be redeemed or that effort ought to be expended in that direction. Another important factor was the nature of the assumption on which redemption rested: i.e., that the Mormon culture was clearly superior to the Native American culture and that the Indians would benefit from adopting it as their own. Reduced to its basic terms, redemption meant Anglo-Americanization. Ezra T. Benson, reflecting on the progress he had made in redeeming his adopted Indian boy, concluded: "True, he yet has some of his Indian traits, and I presume it will be some time before they are all erased from his memory." The Mormon experience, then, had become the American experience, and for the Indians the result was typically devastating. Near the end of the first generation of pioneering in the Great Basin, after twenty-five years of direct experience with the Indians, Brigham Young vented the feelings of failure and frustration that were then beginning to rest heavily on the collective American consciousness:

... I will say to our government if they could hear me, "You need never fight the Indians, but if you want to get rid of them try to civilize them." How many were here when we came? At the Warm Springs, at this little grove where they would pitch their tents, we found perhaps three hundred

Indians; but I do not suppose that there are three of that band left alive now. There was another band a little south, another north, another further east; but I do not suppose there is one in ten, perhaps not one in a hundred, now alive of those who were here when we came. Did we kill them? No, we fed them. We brought their children into our families, and nursed and did everything for them it was possible to do for human beings, but die they would.

The failure of redemption, visible to Young in 1871, exacted a high toll from the Utah Indians. Ultimately they were deprived of their land but were not equipped with the skills or motivation to function effectively in the Anglo-American society. This troubled Brigham Young. In an extraordinary pronouncement in 1856, he admitted of the Mormon encroachment on Indian lands, "We are now their neighbors, we are on their land, for it belongs to them as much as any soil ever belonged to any man on earth; we are drinking their water, using their fuel and timber, and raising our food from their ground." This is not to suggest that Young ever had any thoughts about returning the land to them, but he did suffer pangs of conscience and felt the Indians should be compensated. For this, he looked directly to the federal government. He had always felt that the government should shoulder the entire expense of Indian relations and had said so in a number of ways on many different occasions. The irony is that at the very time Brigham Young sought that political favor he was subverting the best hope for it by a callous disregard for public relations with federal Indian officials appointed to Utah Territory. From that failure in public relations came a series of misunderstandings, offended egos, and precipitous actions cascading over each other in a headlong plunge toward crisis. Not until 1858, with the arrival of the Utah Expedition and Young's removal from the offices of territorial governor and Indian superintendent, did that particular drama end.

II

When Joseph Holeman arrived in Utah Territory to assume his duties as Indian agent in August 1851, he immediately communicated with Brigham Young and pledged his support and cooperation. Young reciprocated in the pledge of cooperation and gave instructions to Holeman in regard to a treaty-making council with the Indians to be held at Fort Laramie. Both men commented on the dearth of instructions from the commissioner of Indian Affairs and seemed anxious to share an openand frank relationship with each other. Initial impressions were favorable in both cases, and, by November, Young was representing Holeman to the commissioner as a conscientious, economy-minded administrator and a "gentleman [who] has spared no pains to make himself useful."

But the honeymoon was short-lived. Perhaps Young resented Holeman's intrusion in the delicate question of land ownership. Holeman had been quick to see this as a source of irritation with the Indians and had written to the commissioner that the Mormon displacement of the Indians from "the most fertile and best lands in the Territory" had put the Indians in a hostile mood. He had further expressed a similar complaint to Young, urging that "some arrangement should be made with them[the Indians], by which their rights, as well as those of the Government, should be distinctly understood." Perhaps Young sensed in Holeman a growing resentment over the fact that government money spent on presents for the Indians of Utah was accruing to the benefit of a particular church. In any event, an incident occurred in December 1851 that confirmed Holeman in his belief that Young was not an honorable man. It was a silly incident—one that could have been easily prevented by the superintendent and one that reveals how reckless Young had become in his public relations with federal officials.

Just prior to leaving Salt Lake City to attend the council at Laramie in August, Holeman had been visited by Henry R. Day, an Indian subagent, who sought information on funding an interpreter for the purpose of explaining the council to the Indians of Utah and trying to interest them in attending. Holeman referred him to Superintendent Young for an answer. A short time later two prospective interpreters, Dimick Huntington and E. W. Vanetten, called upon Holeman with the same query. He referred them to Superintendent Young. They left but returned shortly and again pressed Holeman for a commitment. The agent informed the two men emphatically that he had no authority in the matter and would not employ them at any price. He then departed for Laramie. Upon his return to Salt Lake City four months later he was presented a bill by Vanetten for services performed as an interpreter. Confused by the matter, Holeman referred the man to Young. The next day Vanetten reappeared with the news that Young expected Holeman to pay the bill. Holeman then sought a certificate from Young that Vanetten's services had in fact been performed. No certificate was forthcoming. Instead, within a matter of hours, the local constable served Holeman with a summons. He was subsequently hailed into court, had a judgment rendered against him, and saw his government carriage confiscated.

Understandably chagrined, Holeman wrote a passionate letter to the commissioner of Indian Affairs detailing the particulars of the incident and voicing an opinion of Brigham Young that was becoming increasingly familiar:

His orders are obeyed, without regard to the consequences—and whatever is to the interest of the Mormons that is done, whether it is according to law or to the interest of the Government or not. From all the circumstances, I feel well assured, that he was at the head of this suit of Vannetton against me. He wished to show his people that he was sincere in his expressions of contempt toward the Government and her officers here, by having them annoyed in every possible manner, in order to force them to leave the Territory, or succumb to his will.

Although Holeman continued in his role of Indian agent for another year and a half, his relationship with Brigham Young was tense and awkward after the interpreter incident. His letters to Washington became increasingly critical of Young's Indian policy, a fact that did not escape the latter's attention. For the remaining year of Holeman's tenure, he and Young had very little to do with each other.

J. H. Holeman remains an elusive spirit for the historian. In certain respects he fits the mold of the typical carpetbagger: proud, arrogant, and opportunistic. He was not the type of personality naturally liked, especially by Brigham Young. W T ithal, Young could ill afford to have him as an enemy. Holeman was a man of influence. He was able to gain a sinecure for his son in Utah, succeeded in getting himself appointed district attorney for Utah Territory in 1854, and at the time of decision proved to be one of the "reliable sources" listened to by Commissioner of Indian Affairs J. W. Denver in denouncing Brigham Young and relieving him as Indian superintendent for Utah Territory.

Another of those sources was subagent Henry R. Day, who arrived in Utah Territory on July 19, 1851. By proclamation from Superintendent Young he assumed responsibility for the Parvan Agency "to include all within the limits of the Territory west of the Shoshone nation; and north of the South line of the Parvan Valley." This was a large and significant area, covering much of western and central Utah and encompassing Paiutes, Pahvants, and the band of Utes led by Walkara.

Upon Day's first meeting with the Indians of his subagency he was struck by their hostility toward the Mormons. "Old Chief Sou-ei-ette," he recounted, "[raised] himself up to his full height [and] said to me, American-good! Mormon-no good! American-friend—Mormon-Kill- Steal - " One should not conclude on this basis, however, that Day necessarily sympathized with the Indian position. Indeed, his advice to the commissioner was to send a delegation of these Indians to Washington in order to impress upon them the power of the government. It does not appear that his primary differences with Brigham Young were over policy.

But differences there were. After six months Day left the territory for a time, insisting that it was impossible to perform his duties "in consequence of the open hostility manifested publicly and privately by the Governor and the Mormon Community to the Government of the United States and its officers sent out to Utah Territory." He later decided to return to the territory but sought authorization from the commissioner of Indian Affairs to act independently of Superintendent Young. This authorization was not granted and Day remained dissatisfied. He continued to function as subagent until early 1853 and continued to reflect bitterness toward Brigham Young and the Mormons in his official correspondence.

In late summer of 1853, Edward M. Bedell arrived in the Salt Lake Valley as successor to J. H. Holeman. He and Brigham Young seemed to get off to an amicable start with each other, and in his first communication to Commissioner Manypenny he commented that "their [sic] is not a more loyal set of people, or inhabitants within the United States" than Utah's white population. He also seconded Brigham Young's judgment that a more generous appropriation should be allocated the superintendency. But knowledge of whatever direction this propitious beginning was destined to take is forever denied the historian. Bedell left for a trip east after a few months of service and died on the return journey.

The most intriguing personality among the various officials appointed to service in the Utah Indian superintendency was undoubtedly Dr. Garland Hurt, Bedell's successor. A Kentuckian like Holeman, but more idealistic and less political, he arrived in Salt Lake City on February 5, 1855, during the height of the excitement attending the Steptoe investigation of the Gunnison massacre. He lent some assistance to Steptoe but from the outset shied away from the public spotlight, preferring instead to work directly with the Indians, particularly in the establishment of farms and the production of livestock and crops. Brigham Young was pleased on all counts, and, again, his early assessment of Hurt was complimentary.

But Hurt, as Holeman and Day before him, did not long reciprocate, and within a few months his official correspondence reflected dissatisfaction with the superintendent. To a greater extent than either Holeman or Day, Hurt expressed many of his feelings frankly to Young. His basic grievance was that the Mormons were putting too much effort into missionary work among the Indians and not enough effort into teaching the Indians domestic skills sufficient to ensure their survival within their rapidly changing world.

Hurt was not opposed to missionary activity per se and in fact felt it had served the Indians of California well. His complaint, rather, was that the Mormons were using it for undesirable ends. Specifically, he charged that the missionaries were creating a mischievous distinction in the natives' minds between Mormons and Americans and that deliberately or innocently the missionaries were taking advantage of the Indians, for self-serving purposes, once conversion and good will had been obtained.

Quite likely, Hurt had an incomplete understanding of the Mormon notion of redemption. Otherwise he would have seen the futility of protesting missionary activity. Or perhaps he did grasp the concept but could see, as Brigham Young was beginning to see and would later acknowledge, that redemption was not working to the benefit of the Indians. In any event Garland Hurt quickly perceived the continuing devastation of the Utah Indians and commented on it openly both to Superintendent Young and to Commissioner Manypenny. Visiting the Shoshones of the Humboldt Valley in August 1855, he was struck by their desperate condition and communicated to Young their lament that white emigrants had so depleted the game of the area that there was nothing left for them to eat but "ground squirrels and piss ants." Destitute as their condition was, they survived the winter better than the Gosiutes of Tooele County. In March 1856 Hurt, after investigating the latter situation, advised Young that "of about fifty there were not more than a dozen squaws and only three children that had survived the winter."

Brigham Young was deeply disturbed by these reports, and his letters to the commissioner of Indian Affairs became increasingly strident in their demand for adequate appropriations to alleviate this suffering. He did not find a particularly sympathetic ear. The commissioner had already concluded, from numerous sources but especially the reports of Holeman, Day, and Hurt, that the desperate conditions faced by the Indians had come as a direct result of Mormon encroachment. By the middle of 1855 relations between the commissioner and the superintendent had become badly strained.

The mid-1850s was not an easy time in Utah Territory. Nature was stingy with her rains but generous with her grasshoppers, and the anxious pioneers looked on in frustration as their harvests fell to disappointing levels. In the meantime, large numbers of immigrants were pouring into Salt Lake Valley. The Mormon leaders urged their followers to treat the Indians kindly and to feed them as resources would allow, but the natural competition for limited food supplies meant increasing destitution for Utah's natives.

As the condition of the Indians became more and more desperate, so did the tone of Hurt's reports to the commissioner. In March 1856 he expressed regret over the Indians' expulsion from their "favorite spots of land" and predicted a "horrid state of war and bloodshed" unless they were soon protected on reservations. In September he criticized Young's policy toward the Indians as one "calculated to fill their minds with expectations that could not be realized and which instead of bettering their condition, tended rather to lull them into supiness [sic] and leave them in the end in a worse condition than they were when we found them." In October he accused the Mormons of having occupied "the whole of their lands (except mountains)" and having depleted the game that the Indians were dependent upon, "leaving them to starve or fight."

During the next months events moved quickly toward a denouement. Through the crisis year of 1857 Brigham Young's failures in public relations became visible at every turn. The most significant manifestation, of course, came from President Buchanan himself. In justifying the Utah Expedition he said, in part, of Young:

As superintendent of Indian affairs he has had an opportunity of tampering with the Indian tribes, and exciting their hostile feelings against the United States. This, according to our information, he has accomplished in regard to some of these tribes, while others have remained true to their allegiance, and have communicated his intrigues to our Indian agents.

Secretary of War John B. Floyd had similar thoughts. "Of late years," he remarked of the Utah Expedition in his December report, "a well grounded belief has prevailed that the Mormons were instigating the Indians to hostilities against our citizens, and were exciting amongst the Indian tribes a feeling of insubordination and discontent."

But the most intense expression came from the commissioner of Indian Affairs, then J. W. Denver, who released a floodgate of bitterness and specific grievances in a long, animated letter to Young in November. After chastizing the superintendent for having overspent by $31,000 his appropriation for the previous fiscal year he accused him of having deliberately created a distinction in the minds of the Indians between the Mormons and other citizens of the United States to the end of teaching them "that the former were their friends and the latter their enemies." He accused Young of treason in other particulars, implied that he had seriously violated his oath as a federal official, and concluded with a stinging reminder that the commissioner's office had found much fault with his conduct in the past, that it did so now, and that he was not to think otherwise. The tone of Commissioner Denver's letter left no doubt that Young's removal from the position of Indian superintendent was imminent.

Ill

Except for the loss of salary and loss of authority to direct federal expenditures for the superintendency, Brigham Young was little affected by his removal from that position. He continued to be the de facto director of Indian affairs in Utah, negotiating treaties and other settlements with the Indians, sending missionaries among them, advising the settlers on how to deal with them, directing the territorial militia during the Black Hawk War, and continuing the process of displacement. It follows, naturally, that the Indians themselves were affected barely, if at all, by the change.

In retrospect, the story of Brigham Young's attitude toward his federally appointed agents and subagents is best told in terms of its impact on President Buchanan's decision to dispatch the Utah Expedition. But it is also interesting for what it reveals of Brigham Young's personality. At the time discussed here, it was a personality proudly defiant, arrogant, even reckless in its disregard for federal authority. It is a measure of these traits that in 1854, when the critical Joseph Holeman was being listened to in Washington, Young's strategy was to discredit if not defame him. Similarly, when Garland Hurt felt it necessary to flee the territory for fear of his life in 1857, Young seemed genuinely surprised—apparently quite unaware of, or indifferent to, that official's alienation.

The irony of the situation is that Superintendent Young and the agents in question held similar views on the substance of Indian policy. Some differences persisted on procedural matters, but the greatest differences were purely personal. Had Young taken a few minutes upon occasion to personally confer with these people, to seek their counsel on important matters, to clarify his views on the flow of authority, and to have explained the theological notion of redemption and the reasons for missionary activity among the Indians, the crisis-filled and tragic year of 1857, which colored the entire fabric of Utah's territorial history, may well have taken a different course.

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