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Sex, Subalterns, and Steptoe: Army Behavior, Mormon Rage, and Utah War Anxieties
Sex, Subalterns, and Steptoe: Army Behavior, Mormon Rage, and Utah War Anxieties
By WILLIAM P. MACKINNON
“I would rather lie in their path ten or twenty years, thereby blocking up their way than let them enter our peaceful city, or settlements with the train of Hell which follows after and is already in their midst.”
– Lieut. Gen. Daniel H.Wells (Echo Canyon) to BrighamYoung (Salt Lake City), November 21, 1857
With the Utah War’s sesquicentennial commemoration now under way, this is an opportune time to re-examine that conflict’s complex origins, prosecution, and impact. The purpose of this article is to shed light on the ways in which the social conduct of the U.S. Army’s Steptoe Expedition of 1854-1855 created a civil affairs atmosphere so poisonous that it aggravated deteriorating Mormon-federal relations while stiffening Brigham Young’s resolve to bar the U.S. Army from Utah. The misadventures of the Steptoe Expedition did not cause the Utah War. However, they added mightily to the Mormons’ anxiety over their treatment by the U.S. government in general and the U.S. Army in particular. Once Mormon-federal relations reached the flash point during the spring of 1857, this wholly avoidable incident played a now-obscure role in the tragedy that followed.
This Utah war sketch from Harper’s Weekly, May 22,1858,offers one interpretation of how federal soldiers were received in Salt Lake City.
FROM AUTHOR’S COLLECTION.
When Capt. and Brevet Lieut. Col. Edward Jenner Steptoe arrived in Salt Lake City on August 31, 1854, with about 325 men and more than 800 animals, his was the fourth and largest army detachment to visit Utah since the Mormon arrival. Each of three earlier detachments had generated small-scale but nonetheless unsettling incidents in the arena that the army today calls “civil affairs.”
The first case involved a three-day visit to Salt Lake City during August 1849 by 1st Lieut. Robert M. Morris and a small detachment of soldiers and civilian packers en route to California. During their stay there was allegedly a melée involving Morris’s men and town constables over a Mormon woman. Nine years later, in the middle of the subsequent Utah War, Apostle George A. Smith characterized what happened as a rape attempt.1 In the second incident, during March 1850, 2nd Lieut. George W. Howland, an officer assigned to the Stansbury Expedition’s survey of the Great Salt Lake, departed Utah via Oregon Territory and California with a former plural wife of Brigham Young’s First Counselor Heber C. Kimball. 2 The third incident, during the winter of 1853-1854, touched Brigham Young’s own family when a member of the ill-fated Gunnison Expedition, Sgt. John Tobin, struck up an awkward social relationship with Alice Young, one of the governor’s daughters. After his army discharge Tobin instead married Sarah Jane Rich, a daughter of Apostle Charles C. Rich later abandoned by Tobin. Historians have until recently mistakenly attributed the subsequent assassination attempt against Tobin to his earlier interest in Alice Young.3 None of these incidents were reported to army headquarters by either the commanders involved or by territorial governor Brigham Young.
The Steptoe Expedition was ordered west from Fort Leavenworth during the summer of 1854 without adequate preparation. The detachment lacked an understanding of the need for firm, vigilant leadership sensitive to Mormon apprehensions, although President Franklin Pierce later commented that “... he had lectured both him [Steptoe] & Judge Kenney [sic] in relation to these matters several times before their departure...” for Utah. 4
Since the visit by the Stansbury Expedition of 1849-1850, Congress had formed Utah Territory and sanctioned President Millard Fillmore’s appointment of Brigham Young to a four-year term as its governor, superintendent of Indian Affairs, and militia commander. Notwithstanding this arrangement, Mormon-federal relations rapidly grew more complex and negative in multiple ways for various reasons. Suffice it to say that the pinch points of this deteriorating relationship had grown to encompass virtually every aspect of the territorial-general government interface: postal service, the court system, the evenhandedness of criminal justice, Indian relations, disposition of public lands, the expenditure of congressional appropriations, and—above all else—the quality of federal appointees to territorial offices. Aggravating these conflicts were such other issues as accusations of Mormon disloyalty, the varying treatment of transcontinental emigrants, Brigham Young’s sometimes inflammatory rhetoric, and the Latter-day Saints’ public disclosure of the religious principle of plural marriage (polygamy) in August 1852.
At the heart of much of this tension was a fundamental disagreement over the appropriateness of a Mormon attempt to establish Utah as an autocratic theocracy in anticipation of the Second Coming of Christ. This thrust took place in the midst of an American political system that viewed Utah as a territorial ward of Congress intended to function under republican principles of government. 5
Why, then, were Steptoe and a detachment of U.S. Army troops in Utah during 1854-1855? During April and May 1854, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis and the army issued a series of orders directing Steptoe to do three things: deliver a large number of veteran artillerymen, raw dragoon recruits, and eight hundred horses and mules to army garrisons on the Pacific Coast; aid Utah’s civil authorities in some unspecified way in the apprehension of the Indians responsible for the October 1853 massacre of Capt. John W. Gunnison’s topographical engineering party along the Sevier River; and determine a better route from the Salt Lake Valley to California. In recognition of the scope of his expedition, the army assigned Steptoe to this command in his brevet rank of lieutenant colonel rather than in his regular grade of captain. Contrary to the belief of some historians, Steptoe was not sent west to replace Brigham Young as governor, although throughout the summer and fall of 1854 President Pierce wrestled with the question of whether or not to reappoint Young as his four-year term expired. 6
What Brigham Young knew of Col. Steptoe’s orders and when is unclear. On May 12, Utah’s territorial delegate in Congress, John M. Bernhisel, had alerted Governor Young that Steptoe was coming, but he described the colonel’s mission vaguely and incompletely. Delegate Bernhisel, the War Department, and Steptoe himself expected that the expedition’s stay in Salt Lake City would be relatively brief before pushing on for California, but by the time Steptoe reached Fort Kearny the jaded condition of his animals forced him to signal Washington that wintering in Utah might be necessary. 7
With Steptoe’s arrival in Salt Lake City on August 31, the governor first realized that his command—nine officers as well as about 175 enlisted men and 150 civilian camp followers—intended to winter over.8 Two weeks later 2nd Lieut. LaRhett L. Livingston, West Point class of 1853, shed light on the matter of mission in writing to his father in the Adirondack hamlet of Lewis, New York.
What Lieut. Livingston revealed with this news was that Steptoe had not yet fully briefed Superintendent of Indian Affairs Brigham Young about his mission, a communications if not diplomatic lapse that must have generated tension in the governor’s office given the deep suspicions that greeted the far smaller Stansbury Expedition upon its 1849 unannounced arrival.
Almost immediately after reaching Utah, Col. Steptoe and a large portion of his detachment marched south from Salt Lake City to make a show of force among the Indians suspected of responsibility for the death of John W. Gunnison and his men. An unfortunate by-product of this trek was that it left supervision of that portion of Steptoe’s command remaining in Salt Lake City largely to a cadre of young second lieutenants unburdened by demanding duty. These recently commissioned officers promptly surveyed the city’s social scene with mixed reactions. On September 16, 1854, Lieut. Livingston commented to his father,“As to the inhabitants, [I] have not learned anything of them yet.” 10 But his brother officer, 2nd Lieut. Sylvester Mowry, was more active, wide-ranging, and soon disruptive in both his observations and plans.
BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT
Mowry, West Point class of 1852, described his new surroundings and activities in a series of letters written to Edward Joshua (“Ned”) Bicknall, a fellow townsman of Providence, Rhode Island. Bicknall was a thirty-five year-old married man fourteen years older than bachelor Mowry, and was employed as general manager of C.C. Mowry, the family’s commission house.11 Indications are that Bicknall served in the role of Mowry’s long-distance, non-judgmental mentor, confidante, and financial advisor. Mowry, in turn, provided a flow of off-color letters to liven up what was the probably otherwise unexciting routine of a Rhode Island businessman of the Victorian era.
In his September 17, 1854 letter, Mowry gave Bicknall his first impressions of Mormon society, most of which focused on polygamy and his own social plans. Describing Heber C. Kimball’s Sunday admonitions to both troops and Mormon women about the perils of fraternization, Mowry commented pungently, “The whole looked very much as if he and Brigham were afraid we were going to f—k our way through the town. Perhaps we shall.” Fatefully, Mowry then reported that in less than a month he had drawn a bead on a member of Governor Young’s own extended family, Mary J. Ayers Young, the twenty-year-old English-born wife of Joseph A. Young: “Brigham’s daughter in law is the prettiest woman I have seen yet. Her husband is on a mission and she is as hot a thing as you could wish. I am going to make the attempt and if I succeed and don’t get my head blown off by being caught shall esteem myself some.”12 Having stated his own intentions, Mowry then turned to a critical description of polygamy, noting: “There are a great many disaffected persons here. Many women who rebel against the plurality wife system. Brigham’s daughter among others. She says Salt Lake City needs only to be roofed in to be the biggest whore house in the world.” 13
On a more serious tone, Mowry reported favorably to Bicknall that “The people here are social, gay and like every thing like parties. There are to be three dancing parties this week. Good music and pretty dancers.... Many pretty women well dressed on occasion give a charming air to all their assemblies at the Tabernacle or Chamber ...” He then closed by venting his frustrations, “... if it were not for their damnable system of espionage – better than that of the old Inquisition or Napoleon’s police— we could get along well. They are jealous lecherous and revengeful in all that concerns women I believe. It will require tact and shrewdness on the part of woman and man to conduct an intrigue successful[l]y, but I think it can be done....” 14
Months later First Counselor Heber C. Kimball described this scene acerbically to his missionary-son William: “Last fall, after Col. Steptoe with his command came in here, with Judge [John F.] Kinney, Mr. [U.S. Attorney Jacob] Hol[e]man, and many others of the poor devils, we treated them as gentlemen should be treated and invited them to our parties and habitations and feasted them and tried to make something of them. While doing this, they began to play with some of the skitty wits, alias whores.”15 The swift result was cautionary warnings to women during Sunday services and a gradual, selective implementation of the familiar Mormon practice for dealing with unwanted visitors—shunning or leaving them “severely alone.”
On October 27, Lieut. Livingston provided a description of such shunning while unwittingly shedding light on army behavior that helped to reinforce it: “The [enlisted] men are very troublesome in the City and I don’t know as we will ever get them straight. I have been on a court [martial] this morning to try six cases of drunkenness and it is a thing that is recurring all the time.”16 Livingston had good cause for his lamentation as indicated by the records of Privates Michael T. Hoey and Francis McEneny. Hoey had been court-martialed three times, twice during the last ten days of September, for a variety of offenses including drunkenness, disorderly conduct, and leaving his sentry post. McEneny was languishing under arrest in solitary confinement and was considered a confirmed drunkard and “at best a nuisance to the company.” 17
How, then, did Mormon leaders view Steptoe and his men? During the fall of 1854, they seem to have drawn a distinction between Col. Steptoe and all others. For example, Thomas Ellerbeck’s comments on December 1 reflected this ambivalence when—unaware of Mary J. Ayers Young’s growing notoriety—he wrote to her husband in England, “Col. Steptoe…is quite gentlemanly in his deportment, anxious that his men should conduct themselves with propriety, not making themselves an annoyance to the good citizens of Salt Lake; he wishes the Mayor, in consequence of their appearing drunk so much in the streets to assist him in his endeavors to debar them from liquor.” 18
On December 21, Heber C. Kimball described the $400,000 that the Steptoe Expedition was pumping into Utah’s economy and commented that Steptoe “... is quite a gentleman and a friend, as also are some of his subordinates. ... It was getting to be a little hellish [here], but it is getting to be more heavenly now.”19 In later years bogus accounts surfaced that on Christmas day 1854 Brigham Young had entrapped Steptoe in a compromising situation involving Mary J. Ayers Young and another Mormon woman. There is no evidence that the incident occurred or that Governor Young ever merchandised such a story.20 To the contrary, Young consistently described the colonel privately and publicly as a “gentleman.” On December 28, 1854, three days after the alleged entrapment incident,
Apostle George A. Smith “... visited Col. Steptoe, & had a good half hours chat with him on the Russian [Crimean] War Engineering &c The Col remarked on leaving it was the happiest chit chat he had had in a Long time.”21 Even in the midst of the most upsetting period of the civil affairs imbroglio that later developed, Apostle Orson Hyde commented to Brigham Young that “Col S appears like a gentleman,” but he added the important qualifier that “some of his officers cannot bear a justly minted rebuke for their corruption and lisentious [sic] practices.”22 Perhaps the most colorful testimony on Steptoe’s conduct came from the expedition’s principal libertine, Lieut. Mowry, who commented that, “Everybody has got one”—meaning female companions— “except the Colonel and Major.”23
LDS CHURCH HISTORY LIBRARY
And so as year-end 1854 approached, there was great ambivalence in Salt Lake City, with Mormon leaders attempting to be sociable to Steptoe and his officers while severely restricting un-chaperoned army access to Mormon girls and women.
On December 27, Lieut. Livingston wrote to inform his father that he had spent Christmas day not festively but in rough-and-tumble riot control duty:
While LaRhett Livingston updated his father, his brother officer provided Ned Bicknall with his version of year-end activities in Salt Lake City. After describing the Christmas day brawl, Lieut. Mowry moved on to consider optimistically more genteel pursuits: “... We have every reason to believe that the authorities and the well judging part of the community are favorably disposed towards us and have done and will do every thing in their power to make our stay pleasant – except in the case of admitting us quickly to the society of their women. In this they are inflexible and perhaps wisely so for gallantry and polygamy are congenial associates.” 25
After informing Bicknall that Chief Justice Kinney had honored Steptoe and his officers at an affair on December and that the governor was also hosting a party on New Year’s Day, he reported the status of his pursuit of Mary J. Ayers Young:
With this intrigue as background, Mowry then lamented that he was a marked man and described Mormon attempts to counter his advances:
On December 30, the day before Sylvester Mowry wrote to Ned Bicknall, more than forty leading citizens of Salt Lake City’s non-Mormon community, including Col. Steptoe and all of his officers, signed a petition to President Pierce that tracked a similar one just adopted by Utah’s legislative assembly. Both petitions urged Brigham Young’s reappointment as governor on grounds that he was the man best qualified for the position. It was a strange turn of events, for among the signers were some of Young’s most severe critics. 27
Ever after Mormon leaders and some historians have pointed to this petition as proof positive of Governor Young’s effectiveness, loyalty, and broad local support across religious lines. Why did the officers of the Steptoe Expedition and even Young’s critics sign it? Multiple reasons have been advanced, but perhaps they signed as a mere courtesy, recognizing that the governor would be their host at a lavish party the following day. Four months later Steptoe had severe misgivings about his participation, repented, and privately told President Pierce, “You will probably remind me that I wrote differently once & recommended the reappointment of Govr Young: It is true, but I was not so well informed then as now, and have already explained to you why that recommendation was made.”28
Unknown to anyone in Utah, two weeks before this petition circulated President Pierce had nominated Steptoe to be Utah’s governor, and the Senate had confirmed his appointment on December 21. Why Steptoe? Young himself had written to Pierce shortly after his March 1853 inauguration to note that no non-Mormon, non-resident would accept a federal appointment in Utah, an assertion that prompted Young to then self-nominate for his own reappointment. Among Pierce’s alternatives to Young, Steptoe was not an obvious or early gubernatorial prospect. Delegate Bernhisel later told Brigham Young, “I suppose the appointment will be entirely unexpected to Colonel Steptoe, and I have reason to believe that the President had never thought of appointing him until he received the letter from him [probably in November 1854] in which he spoke in flattering terms of you and the people of our Alpine home.” Also influential, in Pierce’s view, was the November receipt of an October 1 letter written by Utah Chief Justice John F. Kinney advocating Young’s replacement by Steptoe. Once Pierce decided to replace Young and Steptoe came to his mind as a possible governor, what probably came into play was the apparently close bond between the two men. They had served together during the Mexican War, Pierce as commander of a New England volunteer brigade and Steptoe as a subaltern. More importantly, Steptoe had helped Pierce mightily during his 1852 presidential campaign by refuting a damaging story that Pierce had shown cowardice when provoked by a drunken officer during a card game in Mexico City. 29
On February 7, 1855, Lieut. Livingston noted that press reports from California carried unofficial news of Col. Steptoe’s selection: “It was received by us with some rejoicing, for being on the spot, we can see & appreciate the fun. Whether he will accept it or not I do not know. Whether or no it seems to us like a conquest over this overbearing people, & no doubt they will take it very hard.” Livingston added: “We form a part of the subject of their discourse, nearly every Sunday & they have gone so far as to tell all their females, that if they went with us, they should be cut off from the Church & eternally d—d.” Filled with optimism, Livingston added, “Under the present State of affairs they will haul down a little & make an exception in favor of the Army Officers at least.”30 With news of Steptoe’s gubernatorial appointment circulating unofficially, Young was sometimes philosophical rather than bitter and seemed to become more cordial in his relations with the colonel.31 His often-blunt counselors Heber C. Kimball and Jedediah M. Grant declined to follow suit. President Kimball proudly described their outspoken behavior to his absent son William:
As winter wore on and the Steptoe Expedition made plans to depart Utah for California, the most serious civil affairs complexities changed character. They shifted from matters of public drunkenness, brawls, inappropriate male-female contacts at elegant suppers, and disrupted street promenades to the even more volatile issue of how many women would flee from their families and from Utah with the troops. During the months of April and May 1855, this issue unfolded with a large number of married as well as single women—perhaps as many as one hundred—leaving Utah for California under the army’s protection. Here was the 1850 case of Lieut. Howland, writ large with a commensurate explosion on the part of embarrassed and enraged Mormon leaders.
On April 27, Lieut. Mowry reported to Ned Bicknall how this dynamic played out in Brigham Young’s own family. Mowry wrote not from Salt Lake City but from an army bivouac in Rush Valley, the isolated winter livestock range to which Col. Steptoe had banished him for his own protection. There Mowry consoled himself with the company of not Young’s daughter-in-law but Amanda Matilda Tanner, a fourteen-year-old who, with two of her sisters, would soon leave for California:
Mowry then described the social activities of his brother officers: “More than half of the women want to leave with us or with somebody. Everybody has got one except the Colonel [Steptoe] and Major [Reynolds].The Doctor [Assistant Surgeon Horace R. Wirtz] has got three [—] mother and two daughters. The mother cooks for him and the daughters sleep with him. ..”
He continued with an account of an imbroglio involving the expedition’s quartermaster, Rufus Ingalls, and thirteen-year-old Rachel Nowell, an embroilment so egregious that it nearly involved gunplay and did spill into Salt Lake City’s courts:
Thus exited the Steptoe Expedition, with its commander still undecided about his gubernatorial commission and vowing to make up his mind once he got to California. During the late spring and summer of 1855, Steptoe’s letters to President Pierce were so ambiguous and conflicted that Pierce ultimately had to conclude that beneath the Hamlet-like musings Steptoe was telling him “no.” Rather than run the risk of further political embarrassment by presenting the Senate with a new nominee, Pierce took no further action on Utah’s governorship.35 This mechanism had the effect of continuing Young in office until a successor was sworn, which Steptoe had not been. Pierce’s inactivity, in effect, left the issue for his successor, James Buchanan, to address anew in 1857. 36
When the Steptoe Expedition departed Utah for California in May 1855, Heber C. Kimball shed light on the identity of a few of what he called “skitty wits, alias whores” who accompanied the army:
Miss Stayner was twenty-two year old Elizabeth Stayner of Guernsey, in the English Channel Islands. She had immigrated to Utah in 1853, arriving two years before her parents and other members of her family. What followed her departure from Utah has the flavor of a Victorian morality play with Brigham Young – despite his earlier rage – playing a role that he frequently displayed in individual cases of transgression by hapless parishioners, that of the pastoral rescuer. On February 26, 1856, Miss Stayner’s father informed Young that “I have had several letters from her of late [from San Francisco], in which she expresses a wish to return here to see her Parents.” He asked for Young’s help “in recovering our (at present) lost child.”The governor responded to this plea by writing immediately to Miss Stayner, encouraging her to make her way to Carson Valley from San Francisco where she could place herself under the protection of Orson Hyde. He then charged Apostle Hyde with furnishing “a way for her to return to her much afflicted parents.” 38 Notwithstanding this arrangement, Elizabeth Stayner remained in California, married Lumen Wadhams in 1857, and disappeared from historical notice after 1860 at which time she was raising a family in San Francisco.
Even in Ireland, Mormon missionaries like James Ferguson followed with alarm the social and moral impact of the Steptoe Expedition, including its disruptive departure for California. Ferguson’s biographer, notes that
“Upon learning that a friend’s wife had left the territory with Lt. Col. Edward Steptoe’s soldiers, he surmised that she had been ‘seduced, no doubt by those hell hounds ... Their very look is a basilisk’s 39 that devours and kills, and the air they breathe is poisonous. Oh, my Jane, won’t you teach my little ones to hate them and walk and talk with none but those that God allows.’” 40
With all of their concern about the army’s behavior and disruptive departure, what Mormon leaders probably did not realize was the intensity of Colonel Steptoe’s own anxiety over the collapse of Mormon-military relations. Once out of Salt Lake City and en route to California, Steptoe confessed to the army’s adjutant general in Washington, “I am highly gratified at being able so early to leave this city for the growing ill-feeling of the inhabitants towards the troops was fully reciprocated by the latter—gave me constant uneasiness. A street riot some 4 mo ago in which more than 100 men on each side were engaged. I have not felt assured of quiet for a single moment.” 41
Left behind in Salt Lake City was Steptoe’s undoubtedly nervous quartermaster, Capt. Rufus Ingalls. After several days of legal maneuvering and the payment of an enormous legal fee, Ingalls wriggled out of the charge of attempting to abduct Miss Nowell. In the process he rendered an abject written apology to the girl’s mother in which he commented, “... your daughter returns to you as pure in every respect as when she left the City.”42 Free of his legal entanglements, Ingalls immediately left Salt Lake City on the northern route and caught up with Steptoe’s command outside Carson Valley, as did coincidentally Apostle Orson Hyde. There—in Steptoe’s camp —Ingalls slapped Hyde and drew a revolver on him in retaliation for comments the apostle had made in Salt Lake City over the Rachel Nowell affair. Only the colonel’s intervention prevented bloodshed. 43
The civil affairs havoc created by the Steptoe Expedition during 1854-1855 had multiple by-products, including perhaps the onset of the Mormon Reformation in 1856. Most importantly, it was a watershed that prompted a reappraisal by Brigham Young of Utah’s relationship with the central government. The result was his aggressive, outspoken rejection of what he considered the most objectionable (colonial) aspects of the American territorial system.44 Perhaps, most ominously, the deteriorating relationship with Washington brought with it a determination by Young to bar U.S. troops from re-entering Utah because of their inevitable proximity to Mormon women.
By the time Col. Steptoe’s detachment had left the Salt Lake Valley for California in the spring of 1855, this attitude about the army had gelled in Young’s mind, although he expected the federal government to try to garrison Utah soon, perhaps as early as that fall. Later in September Young was still so enraged that he told two visiting Europeans that Judge Kinney had “... aided the troops of Colonel Steptoe in carrying off women belonging to the Saints. In this forcible abduction the conduct of the American officers, he said, was considered so abominable, that were they to return to the Salt Lake, war would immediately be declared against them; or if fresh troops were to come, the inhabitants would hold no communication with them, either in the way of social intercourse or trade.”45 The Brooklyn Daily Eagle’s editor found Mormon rage over the conduct of Steptoe’s troops to be amusing rather than the harbinger of future conflict that it was:
This prospective prohibition on any further U.S. Army presence in Utah was a highly provocative position for a federally sworn American territorial governor. Nonetheless, it was the stance that Governor Young chose beginning in the summer of 1855. It is interesting that Young chose to channel his views on this matter primarily through months of volcanic Sunday discourses rather than to lodge a vigorous formal protest over troop misconduct with Secretary of War Jefferson Davis. On other serious matters, including sexual misconduct, Young had complained to Washington in the past and would continue to do so in the future. But with respect to the Steptoe Expedition, he was officially silent.
The closest thing to a Mormon protest over the conduct of Steptoe’s detachment was a detailed and largely accurate recitation of what had taken place during the winter of 1854-1855 that appeared in the church’s Manhattan newspaper. On July 14, 1855, The Mormon published a long pseudonymous letter written in Salt Lake City on April 29 by “C.D.”“C. D.” was probably a Mormon insider, if not leader, rather than an itinerant non-Mormon New Yorker who just happened to have wintered over inSalt Lake City.47 For all of its verve, “C.D.’s” letter was, nonetheless, an obscure compilation of disruptive behavior published in an infrequently read newspaper; it was no substitute for a direct presentation of a territorial governor’s views to the War Department.
Perhaps the governor kept his own counsel in the Steptoe matter because he was embarrassed as well as enraged that his own family was involved. Compounding these emotions was the sensitivity over the tenuous nature of his gubernatorial continuance as well as perhaps his awareness of Eastern disapproval of Mormon marriage practices if not sexual behavior. Because Brigham Young did not protest to Washington about what he considered to be army misconduct in Salt Lake City, the War Department remained oblivious to the reception awaiting the next military detachment sent to Utah.
In the short run, this lack of insight by Washington officials precluded a judicious assessment of the biases inherent in the highly anti-Mormon reports sent up the chain of command by both Lieut. Mowry and Capt. Ingalls from California in 1855. That both officers had axes to grind through such reports—along with some astute observations—was lost on senior leaders in Washington.48 Longer term, it also meant that President Buchanan, Secretary of War Floyd, and General Winfield Scott initiated the Utah Expedition two years later without any clear understanding of Brigham Young’s probable reaction to the unannounced approach of twenty-five hundred troops and several times as many civilian camp followers. Small wonder then, that Secretary of War Floyd grew queasy after he had launched the Utah Expedition in July 1857. He sent a confidential agent to the expedition’s commander in Kansas to ask such fundamental but un-probed questions as, “What is likely to be the reception the troops will meet with in Utah?” 49
The Utah Expedition’s initial commander, Brevet Brig. Gen. William S. Harney, understood the volatility of such a situation. Having earlier fathered an illegitimate daughter while on duty in isolated Wisconsin Territory and in the process of conceiving another while stationed at Fort Leavenworth during 1857, he urged the War Department to delay the push into Utah until the spring of 1858. Harney did so partly because “... the close proximity of our men to the Mormon women that a winter’s residence in Utah would necessitate, could only be injurious to discipline and might be productive of disaster.” 50
As Elder Samuel W. Richards traveled eastward across the plains in August 1857 on a mission to brief Thomas L. Kane in Philadelphia and then the leaders of the British Mission in Liverpool on Mormon war plans, he passed through the U.S. Army garrison at Fort Kearny, Nebraska Territory. There he encountered behavior among the troops ordered to Utah that confirmed Brigham Young’s worst apprehensions:
Such undisciplined barracks and campfire talk of rape, plunder, and lynchings—promptly reported to Brigham Young by multiple agents in addition to Elder Richards—all but guaranteed significant Mormon anxiety and a stiffening of Mormon resistance during the summer of 1857. Here was a dynamic as costly and tragic as it was avoidable.
With the approach of an army expedition more than twenty times the size of Col. Steptoe’s detachment, Brigham Young feared not only a repetition of social adventures among Mormon women by individual officers but the potentially uncontrolled depredations of large bodies of enlisted men and teamsters, the campfollowers whom Chief Justice Eckels described to a U.S. Senator as “St. Louis wharf rats.” Although Young’s concerns may have been extreme, they were not groundless.
But it was the camp followers more than the troops whom Brigham Young dreaded.After spending nearly a week with the governor in Salt Lake City during early September 1857, U.S. Army Capt. Stewart Van Vliet reported to the War Department that Young “. . . had no objection to the troops themselves entering the Territory; but if they allowed them to do so, it would be opening the door for the entrance of the rabble from the frontiers, who would, as in former times, persecute and annoy them.”52 On September 15, 1857, the day after Captain Van Vliet left Salt Lake City to return to Fort Leavenworth, Young took formal action to bar the U.S. Army from Utah. In a proclamation that described the Utah Expedition and its camp followers as “a hostile force . . . an armed mercenary mob,” Young decreed martial law and forbade “All armed forces of every description from coming into this Territory under any pretence whatever.” Although the governor did not mention Mormon women explicitly, he partially justified his decree in terms of “Our duty to ourselves—to our families. . . .” 53
As the fall wore on and the Utah Expedition approached Fort Bridger— the point beyond which Brigham Young and Lieut. Gen. Daniel H. Wells authorized the use of lethal force against the army—Wells described their adversary:
With the Utah Expedition snowed in for the winter at Fort Bridger, Nauvoo Legion Major Seth M. Blair sought help from his old comrade-in-arms from the Texas Revolution, U.S. Senator Sam Houston. To Houston, Blair sent a long, florid letter on December 1 constituting a litany of Mormon complaints about the U.S. Government and its army. Among them was anxiety over the safety of Mormon women:
Two days after Major Blair wrote to Senator Houston, an American Mormon serving in the British Mission, wrote pseudonymously as “B” to address the same subject. He predicted “scenes of rapine and plunder” as U.S. troops sought to “... ravish with impunity our wives and daughters, scattering pollution, disease, moral degradation and death in their train. . . .”56 And so the lessons in leadership and civil affairs sensitivities that should have flowed from the earlier Steptoe Expedition went unlearned with lamentable consequences during the early stages of the Utah War. It was a conflict during which Capt. Rufus Ingalls gratuitously offered from his post on the Columbia River a long memorandum setting forth the most effective route by which to invade Utah Territory from the Pacific Coast. He did so asserting that he was no friend of the Mormons and that he had no desire to return to Utah Territory.There is no sign that anyone in the army’s hierarchy in San Francisco or Washington during the Utah War had the perspective to view Ingalls’ suggestions as anything other than the selfless, professional inputs of an energetic, self-starting army quartermaster. 57
Memory of the affronts and embarrassments associated with the Steptoe Expedition troubled Brigham Young even three years later in the midst of the Utah War. On April 16, 1858, as Young implemented the move south of the Latter-day Saints and contemplated his pending negotiations with Utah’s new governor, Alfred Cumming, and Thomas L. Kane, he took time to visit the Church Historian’s office. There he recited a recent dream, a nightmare that featured Col. Albert Sidney Johnston, whom he had never met, as well as his old nemesis Lieut. Sylvester Mowry, who was not even in the army or Utah at that point. It was a dream in which Johnston and Mowry fired five or six shots at Young after Mowry asserted “... its my privilege to kill Brigham Young.”58
Notwithstanding his desire to avoid the place, Rufus Ingalls did indeed return to Utah. He did so in 1866 as a major general and the army’s deputy quartermaster general, having been sent there by his former West Point roommate Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. Ingalls’ assignment was to assess a conflict between Gen. Patrick Connor and one of his quartermaster officers at Fort Douglas. Because Ingalls came out in opposition to Connor, Brigham Young’s bitter enemy, there are signs that he had several cordial meetings with President Young during that visit. In his report, Ingalls, understandably, ignored his own past contribution to federal-Mormon controversy, yet made the amazing comment that “many vile, false and malignant things had been reported to the nation about the Mormons.” Even more surprising was President Young’s 1866 assurance to Ingalls, “I shall be pleased to hear from you ... and shall be happy also to see you here again. ...”59 It is tempting to consider how much of Rufus Ingalls’ decisions and behavior on this trip to Utah were rooted in an embarrassed recollection that eleven years earlier he had written to the irate mother of a thirteen-year-old Mormon girl, “I beg to pledge you in my word of honor ... that your daughter returns to you as pure in every respect as when she left the City.”60 Significantly, as Young and Ingalls met in 1866, that tell-tale letter rested not in the private possessions of Rachel Nowell’s family but rather in Brigham Young’s office files.
NOTES
William P.MacKinnon is an independent historian and management consultant from Santa Barbara, California,and an Honorary Life Member of the Utah State Historical Society.The first volume of his two-part documentary history of the Utah War (At Sword’s Point) was publishing in 2008 by the Arthur H. Clark Co.,an imprint of the University of Oklahoma Press.This article is an adaptation of a paper presented at the 2006 annual meetings of the Mormon History Association and Utah State Historical Society.The author thanks the Quarterly’s anonymous readers,Patricia H.MacKinnon,and Ardis E.Parshall for their helpful comments and support.Copyright 2008 by William P.MacKinnon.
1 E.Cecil McGavin, U.S.Soldiers Invade Utah (Boston:Meador Publishing Co.,1937),236.Lieut. Morris’s silence about this affair in his diary and report to the War Department has led historian Will Bagley to challenge the veracity of George A.Smith’s later description of such an incident.Interestingly, Salt Lake City Mayor Jedediah M.Grant described a brawl in town involving army troops during December 1854 as Utah’s “first disturbance of the public peace.”Will Bagley to William P.MacKinnon, email of January 9,2007.Jedediah M.Grant to Edward Jenner Steptoe,December 26,1854,Brigham Young Collection,Church History Library,Family and Church History Department,The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.Hereafter,LDS Church History Library.
2 Brigham D.Madsen,ed., Exploring the Great Salt Lake:The Stansbury Expedition of 1849-50 (Salt Lake City:University of Utah Press,1989),268-70.
3 For further clarification see Ardis E.Parshall,“‘Pursue,Retake & Punish’:The 1857 Santa Clara Ambush,” Utah Historical Quarterly 73 (Winter 2005):64-86.
4 Pierce’s admonition is described in John Taylor (New York) to Brigham Young,April 11,1855, Brigham Young Collection,LDS Church History Library.
5 For a summary of these conflicts,see David L.Bigler,“A Lion in the Path:Genesis of the Utah War, 1857-1858,” Utah Historical Quarterly 76 (Winter 2008):4-21.
6 For the lobbying efforts on Brigham Young’s behalf with President Franklin Pierce,see Brigham Young to Franklin Pierce,March 30,1853,John M.Bernhisel to Franklin Pierce and John M.Bernhisel to Brigham Young,August 8,1854,Thomas L.Kane to Franklin Pierce,September 3,1854,and John M. Bernhisel to Brigham Young,September 8;November 14,17,18;December 14,1854,all in Brigham Young Collection,LDS Church History Library.
7 John M.Bernhisel to Brigham Young,May 12,1854, ibid;and Brevet Lt.Col.Edward J.Steptoe to Col.Samuel Cooper,June 27,1854,Dale L.Morgan research notes (“War Dept.– Steptoe Letters”), Madeline R.McQuown Collection,Marriott Library,University of Utah,Salt Lake City.
8 The roster for Steptoe’s detachment has never been published.The expedition’s officers came from a mixture of four regiments and staff departments.From the Third U.S.Artillery there were Capt.and Brevet Lieut.Colonel Edward J.Steptoe;1st Lieut and Brevet Maj.John F.Reynolds;Capt.Rufus Ingalls;2nd Lieut.Sylvester Mowry;2nd Lieut.LaRhett L.Livingston;2nd Lieut.John G.Chandler;and 2nd Lieut. Robert O.Tyler,as well as 2nd Lieut.Benjamin Allston,First Dragoons,and Asst.Surgeon Horace R. Wirtz,Medical Department.Edward J.Steptoe to Brigham Young,December 27,1854, ibid
9 LaRhett L.Livingston to James G.Livingston,September 16,1854,LaRhett L.Livingston Letters, Beinecke Library,Yale University.
10 Ibid.
11 For a brief biographical sketch of Ned Bicknall (sometimes “Bicknell”),see Thomas Williams Bicknell, History and Genealogy of the Bicknell Family (Providence,R.I.,1913),74-77.
12 Sylvester Mowry to Edward J.Bicknall,September 17,1854,typed transcription in Stanley S.Ivins Papers,Utah State Historical Society,Salt Lake City.Expurgated excerpts from this and other Mowry letters have been published in William Mulder and A.Russell Mortensen,eds., Among the Mormons:Historic Accounts by Contemporary Observers (New York:Alfred A.Knopf,1958),272-78.As Mowry reported it, Joseph A.Young had been called to the British Mission because he had “...raised hell so he was sent off to arrest the scandal of his debaucheries....”
13 Based on the context,Mowry probably meant to attribute this remark to Brigham Young’s daughterin-law (presumably Mary J.Ayers Young) rather than to a “daughter”whom some historians have mistakenly assumed was Alice Young.This provocative sentence became semi-famous after its first publication in Irving Wallace’s biography of a disaffected Brigham Young spouse, The Twenty-Seventh Wife (New York: Simon and Schuster,1961),15.Without attributing the thought to any individual,Lieut.Livingston repeated the “whorehouse”perception of Mormon society in different language to his father in LaRhett L.Livingston to James G.Livingston,October 27,1854,LaRhett Livingston Letters,Beinecke Library.
14 Ibid.
15 Heber C.Kimball to William Kimball,May 29,1855,Journal History,LDS Church History Library.
16 LaRhett L.Livingston to James G.Livingston,October 27,1854,LaRhett L.Livingston Letters, Beinecke Library.
17 2nd Lieut.Sylvester Mowry (Salt Lake City) to Asst.Adj.Gen.E.D.Townsend (Benecia,Calif.), November 19,1854,Records of the Department of the Pacific,Letters Received (1854-1858),text courtesy of Mr.Val Holley,Washington,D.C.Mowry sought authorization to discharge these two privates.
18 Thomas Ellerbeck to Joseph A.Young,December 1,1854,Brigham Young Collection LDS Church History Library.Ellerbeck was one of Brigham Young’s clerk-bookkeepers.His note to Young’s son was in the form of a postscript added to the father’s letter of the same date.
19 Heber C.Kimball to William Kimball,December 21,1854, Millennial Star (Liverpool),17 (April 21, 1855):250-53.
20 For the most even-handed summary of the historiography of this alleged episode,see B.H.Roberts, A Comprehensive History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Century I,6 vols.(Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press,1930) 4:184 note 5.See also Nels Anderson, Desert Saints:The Mormon Frontier in Utah (Chicago:University of Chicago Press,1966),147-48 and 163 note 15.
21 Historian’s Office Journal, entry for December 28,1854,LDS Church History Library.
22 Orson Hyde to Brigham Young,June 19,1855,Brigham Young Collection,LDS Church History Library.
23 Sylvester Mowry to Edward J.Bicknall,April 27,1855,typed transcription,Ivins Papers,Utah State Historical Society.The “major”was Brevet Maj.John F.Reynolds.
24 LaRhett L. Livingston to James G. Livingston, December 27,1854,LaRhett L. Livingston Letters, Beinecke Library.
25 Sylvester Mowry to Edward J.Bicknall,December 31,1854,typed transcription,Ivins Papers,Utah State Historical Society.
26 Ibid.
27 On the eve of the Utah War, Utah Territorial Delegate John M. Bernhisel repeatedly used this petition with President James Buchanan to argue on behalf of Brigham Young’s retention as governor. The document was first published during the war in Deseret News, September 2,1857,264/2-3.
28 Edward J.Steptoe to Franklin Pierce,April 25,1855,quoted in David H.Miller,“Brigham Young, Edward J.Steptoe,and the 1854-55 Gubernatorial Controversy,”unpublished paper,Utah State Historical Society annual meeting,September 1978,11.Copy in author’s possession courtesy of Professor Miller.
29 Brigham Young to Franklin Pierce, March 30,1853,Brigham Young Collection, LDS Church History Library; John F. Kinney to Franklin Pierce, October 1,1854,Morgan Research notes, McQuown Collection, Marriott Library, University of Utah; Peter A.Wallner, Franklin Pierce: New Hampshire’s Favorite Son (Concord,N.H.:Plaidswede Publishing,2004),223-25.
30 LaRhett L.Livingston to James G.Livingston,February 7,1855,LaRhett L.Livingston Letters, Beinecke Library.
31 For a good summary of Brigham Young’s changing views of the governorship during this period,see Leonard J.Arrington, Brigham Young:American Moses (New York:Alfred A.Knopf,1985),246-48.
32 Heber C.Kimball to William Kimball,May 29,1855,Journal History,LDS Church History Library.
33 Sylvester Mowry to Edward J. Bicknall, April 27,1855,typed transcription in Ivins Papers, Utah State Historical Society. In 2007 the original of this letter and another of Mowry’s “Dear Ned” notes was acquired by the Marriott Library, University of Utah. Mary J. Ayers Young remained in Salt Lake City and was reunited with Joseph A. Young in 1856 when he returned from the British Mission just in time to take part in the rescue of the Willie and Martin handcart companies. After his death she married Louis Demotte Bunce, moved to California, and died at age eighty-seven near Los Angeles in 1921.For an interesting interview with her about her views of the Utah War and Mountain Meadows massacre, see “Brigham Young’s Home a Dove Cote, Says Wife of Son,” Los Angeles Herald, April 11,1919.
34 Sylvester Mowry to Edward J.Bicknall,April 27,1855,Ivins Papers,Utah State Historical Society.
35 John M.Bernhisel (Washington) to Brigham Young,December 18,1855,Brigham Young Collection, LDS Church History Library.
36 In 1951 Dale L.Morgan offered the following reasons why Steptoe declined the governorship.“He was an officer in a career service,from which he would have had to resign to accept the governorship. That governorship would continue only during the pleasure of the President,and Pierce’s term was already half run.Politically speaking,if his ambitions were political,a territorial governorship was a dead end;historically such appointments were employed for paying political debts,and no man with a future,or ambitions to have one,was eager to take on such a job….”Dale L.Morgan to Madeline R.McQuown, September 11,1951,McQuown Collection,Marriott Library,University of Utah.
37 Heber C.Kimball to William Kimball,May 29,1855,Journal History,LDS Church History Library.
38 Thomas Stayner to Brigham Young,February 26,1856;Brigham Young to Elizabeth Stayner,March 1,1856;and Brigham Young to Orson Hyde,March 3,1856,all in Brigham Young Collection,LDS Church History Library.
39 A mythological reptile whose gaze was spellbinding and whose breath was fatal.
40 Will Bagley, “A Bright,Rising Star”:A Brief Life and a Letter of James Ferguson ... (Spokane:The Arthur H.Clark Co.,2000),17.Ferguson – soon to be the Nauvoo Legion’s adjutant general – was writing to his Utah wife,Jane R.Ferguson.
41 Steptoe to Cooper,April 25,1855.Morgan research notes,McQuown Collection,Marriot Library, University of Utah.
42 Capt.Rufus Ingalls to Nancy F.H.Butterfield,April 17,1855,Brigham Young Collection,LDS Church History Library.
43 Orson Hyde to Brigham Young,June 19,1855, ibid
44 One manifestation of this reappraisal was Brigham Young’s extraordinary day-long, two-part discourse of February 18, 1855,aptly titled “The Constitution and Government of the United States – Rights and Policy of the Latter-day Saints,” Journal of Discourses,2:170-78.Later published in pamphlet form, this sermon is now a collector’s item. See copy in Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
45 See Brigham Young to John Taylor,July 25,1855,Taylor Family Collection,Marriott Library, University of Utah;Jules Remy and Julius Brenchley, A Journey to Great-Salt-Lake City,2 vols.(London:W. Jeffs,1861) I:206-7.For speculation by Steptoe as to a future army garrison for Utah,see Edward Steptoe (New York) to Elias Blackburn (Provo),November 3,1855,Brigham Young Collection,LDS Church History Library.The broader context for this issue is discussed in MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point,Part 1:A Documentary History of the Utah War to 1858 (Norman:The Arthur H.Clark Co.,2008),49-52.
46 Editorial, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (New York),September 12,1855.
47 “C.D.”(Salt Lake City) to the Editor (New York),April 29,1855,“Salt Lake Correspondence,” The Mormon,July 14,1855,3/3-5.
48 See Capt.Rufus Ingalls to Brevet Maj.Gen.Thomas S.Jesup,August 25,1855 in David A.White, comp., News of the Plains and Rockies 1803-1865,vol.5 Later Explorers,1847-1865 (Spokane:Arthur H. Clark Co.,1998),288-301;Lynn R.Bailey,“Lt.Sylvester Mowry’s Report on His March in 1855 from Salt Lake City to Fort Tejon,” Arizona and the West 7 (Winter 1965):329-46.
49 Secretary of War John B.Floyd to Maj.Ben McCulloch,July 8,1857,Records of the Secretary of War,Letters Sent,Record Group 107,National Archives,Washington.
50 The circumstances surrounding the birth of Harney’s illegitimate daughters are discussed in George Rollie Adams, General William S.Harney:Prince of Dragoons (Lincoln:University of Nebraska Press,2001), 36;John D.Rutledge to William P.MacKinnon,email,February 13,2003;“My Relationship to General Harney,”http:// homepage.mac.com/ wieganbr/Harneyrelationship.html (accessed March 26,2002). William S.Harney (Fort Leavenworth) to John B.Floyd,June 7,1857,Records of Adjt.Gen.’s Office, Letters Received,Record Group 94,National Archives,Washington.
51 Samuel W.Richards (Liverpool) to Orson Pratt,October 4,1857,“Latest from Utah,” Millennial Star (Liverpool),Vol.19 no.42 (October 17,1857):668-71.
52 Capt. Stewart Van Vliet (Washington) to Secretary of War John B. Floyd, November 20,1857,U.S., Secretary of War, Report of the Secretary of War,35th Cong.,1st Sess.,1857-58,Senate Ex.Doc.11,38.
53 Proclamation of Gov.Brigham Young,September 15,1857, ibid.,32-33.
54 Daniel H.Wells (Echo Canyon) to Brigham Young,November 21,1857,Brigham Young Collection, LDS Church History Library.
55 Seth M.Blair (Salt Lake City) to Sam Houston (Washington),December 1,1857,“The Mormon Question,” New YorkHerald,March 2,1858,1/4-5.
56 Letter from “B”(Southampton,England),December 3,1857,“A Mormon Letter.An American Mormon on a Mission in England Feels Bad – Is Ready for a Fight or a Life in the Mountains,a la Nimrod ...Interesting Intelligence About Utah and the Mormons,” New York Herald,January 24,1858, 1/4-6,2/1-6.
57 Capt.Rufus Ingalls (Fort Vancouver,Washington Territory),memorandum for Lieut.Col.Thomas Swords (San Francisco),December 29,1857,Collection of Western Americana,Beinecke Library,Yale University.
58 Entry for April 16,1858,Historian’s Office Journal,1844-1997,LDS Church History Library. Sylvester Mowry died in London in 1871 and was buried in Providence,Rhode Island,after a colorful post-army career as a developer of a silver mine,as a prime mover in the early 1860s movement to carve the Arizona district out of western New Mexico Territory,as a Confederate sympathizer during the Civil War,and as a rake in San Francisco social circles.Historian B.Sacks,who dubbed Mowry a “flamboyant voluptuary,”summed up his career and character in “Sylvester Mowry:Artilleryman,Libertine, Entrepreneur,” The American West ,1 (Summer 1964):14-24,79.Col.Steptoe,while in Washington Territory in 1858,suffered one of the army’s most disastrous defeats of the Indian war campaigns,retired with damaged reputation in November 1861,and died in July 1865.
59 Brigham D.Madsen, Glory Hunter:A Biography of Patrick Edward Connor (Salt Lake City:University of Utah Press,1990),164-65;Brigham Young to Rufus Ingalls,September 28,1866,Brigham Young Collection,LDS Church History Library.Interestingly,as Young’s son,Willard,entered West Point in 1871, the father asked Gen.Ingalls to serve as a sort of mentor.After Willard graduated and was commissioned, Brigham Young continued to believe that “...Gen’l Ingalls’kindly feelings and interest will be of great benefit and encouragement to Willard in his future course in our nation’s army.”Young to Ingalls,May 20, 1871,and Young to Ben Holladay,July 27,1875,Brigham Young Collection,LDSChurch History Library. Ingalls died a bachelor in 1893.Rachel Nowell’s fate after 1855 is unknown.
60 Rufus Ingalls to Nancy F.H.Butterfield,April 17,1855,Collection of Western Americana,Beinecke Library,Yale University.
