Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 80, Number 2, 2012

106 IN THIS ISSUE

108

Conflict and Fraud: Utah Public Land Surveys in the 1850s, the Subsequent Investigation, and Problems with the Land Disposal System

By

Thomas G. Alexander

132

Hammering Utah, Squeezing Mexico, and Coveting Cuba: James Buchanan’s White House Intriques

By

William P. MacKinnon

152

The Utah Batteries: Volunteer Artillerymen in the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, 1898-1899

By Brandon Johnson

173

Saving Their School: The 1933 Transfer of Dixie College as an Indicator of Utah’s Changing Church and State Relationships

By Scott C. Esplin 192 BOOK REVIEWS

Robert Silbernagel. Troubled Trails:The Meeker Affair and the Expulsion of Utes from Colorado Reviewed by Robert S. McPherson

Nathaniel R. Ricks, ed. “My Candid Opinion”: The Sandwich Islands Diaries of Joseph F. Smith 1856-57

Reviewed by Ronald G. Watt

Claudia L. Bushman, ed. Pansy’s History: The Autobiography of Margaret E. P. Gordon, 1866-1966

Reviewed by Linda Thatcher

J. Edward De Steiguer. Wild Horses of the West: History and Politics of America’s Mustangs

Reviewed by Kent Petersen

Veda Tebbs Hale. “Swell Suffering”: A Biography of Maurine Whipple Reviewed by Lyman Hafen

Phillip L. Fradkin. Everett Ruess: His Short Life, Mysterious Death, and Astonishing Afterlife

David Roberts. Finding Everett Ruess: The Remarkable Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer Reviewed by Gary James Bergera

IN THIS ISSUE

Questions of who owns the land, how it is to be distributed, and how ownership can be maintained are issues that have marked Utah’s history, and, it can be argued, all history from the earliest days. In our Spring issue, land and geography serve as dominant themes.

When settlers arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in July 1847, all the land south of the 42nd Parallel, today Utah’s northern border, was Mexican territory. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on February 2, 1848, transferred Utah and the rest of the American Southwest to the United States. But Utah did not legally exist until the federal government created the Utah Territory in September 1850. Before private citizens could obtain legal title to the newly occupied land, a public land survey was required. For Utah, that survey began in July 1855. However, the individuals charged with conducting the survey soon became involved in political controversies that threatened their work, even their safety. The motives, competence, and loyalty of those early federal surveyors, administrators, and clerks were often challenged. Our first article for this issue describes the problems and disputes that marked the early land disposal system in Utah.

Our second article addresses another aspect of land ownership as it relates a fascinating tale of President James Buchanan’s designs to acquire Cuba. Even before the beginning of his term as United States President in 1856, Buchanan had

COVER: An 1882 graduate of West Point, Major Richard W. Young was commander of the Utah Batteries in the Philippines. During World War I, Young was promoted to brigadier general. He died in Salt Lake City on December 27, 1919. UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY.

IN THIS ISSUE (ABOVE): Staff of the Salt Lake Tribune loaded in a stagecoach for a parade on May 15, 1898, to send off volunteers for the Spanish-American War. Among the volunteers were four members of the Tribune staff. UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY.

(OPPOSITE): Homecoming parade in Salt Lake City on August 19, 1899, for Spanish-American War veterans. UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY.

expressed a desire to acquire Cuba from Spain. That sentiment was shared by many other American citizens who sought to acquire Cuba for the purpose of expanding American slavery and who believed it a part of the nation’s Manifest Destiny to acquire the land that divine providence had intended for the United States. However, the way to Cuba began in Utah then followed into Mexico but ended short of the intended goal.

Buchanan’s desire for Cuba could have been fulfilled nearly a half century later as the United States entered the Spanish-American War in 1898 to expel Spain from Cuba. Although Cuba was no longer associated with the expansion of slavery, it had another value in what has been described as an era of Imperialism as more powerful nations sought to acquire territorial possessions for economic reasons. To illustrate America’s noble intent, Congress passed the Teller Amendment indicating that freeing Cubans from Spanish oppression was its sole goal and the United States would not take possession of the island. However, half a world away the Philippine Islands, which had been under Spanish rule since the sixteenth century and not mentioned in the Teller Amendment, became the scene of further military action. In the Philippines, United States soldiers, including volunteers from Utah, fought first against Spanish forces and then their own Filipino allies. Our third article describes the involvement of Utah soldiers in the conflict.

Our final article for this issue brings us back to Utah as politics, economics, religion, and education mixed together to give a most interesting account of the transfer of Dixie College, founded in 1911 by the LDS church as the St. George State Academy, to the State of Utah. While the epicenter of the conflict was in Utah’s Dixie, the shocks spread throughout the state to such diverse communities as Cedar City, Ephraim, Price, and Ogden. The integration of Dixie College into Utah’s higher education system has proven a wise decision made by political leaders during the Great Depression. Today, Dixie State College is a keystone in the economic growth and the enhanced cultural life of southern Utah.

Conflict and Fraud: Utah Public Land Surveys in the 1850s, the Subsequent Investigation and Problems with the Land Disposal System

BY THOMAS G. ALEXANDER

Between July 1855, when Surveyor General David H. Burr opened the Utah Surveying District office in Salt Lake City and April 1857, when he and several other federal officials fled the territory, the people of Utah and federal appointees engaged in heated and often violent controversies. No conflict created more distress than the battles over federal

A group of men with their surveying equipment at a campground at Oak City in Millard County.

Photograph taken by Harry Shipler, June 7, 1909.

Thomas G. Alexander is the Lemuel Hardison Redd, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Western American History at Brigham Young University and a Fellow of the Utah State Historical Society. I appreciate the assistance of William P. MacKinnon, the comments of W. Paul Reeve, and the critique of three anonymous reviewers.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

land surveys. As settlement in Utah proceeded, conflicts of varying causes and magnitudes ensued. Conflicts with survey officials led to violent attacks by Utahns on the surveyors and clerks and to charges by the surveyors and other federal officials that Utahns had rebelled against federal authority. President James Buchanan agreed with the charges of rebellion, removed all of the Utahns from appointive offices, and appointed a group of outsiders to territorial government positions. He also sent a military force to escort the appointees to Utah. Later investigations by the General Land Office showed that Burr’s deputies had conducted fraudulent surveys. These investigations also substantiated some of the complaints made by Utahns. Moreover, the frauds required expensive resurveys and clouded land titles. This article investigates the controversies and their results.

By the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican War, the United States acquired most of the American Southwest. In September 1850 Congress organized much of the Mexican Cession as Utah Territory. Since the federal government owned all of Utah’s land, original titles to real property came from the United States.

During the 1850s, and indeed throughout the entire late nineteenthcentury, Utah experienced problems in the administration of public lands both similar to and different from those of other Western territories.1 Many settlers throughout the West found that the land laws designed for the Midwest failed to address western conditions. The 1841 Preemption Act permitted the purchase of 160 acres of farm land for $1.25 per acre, and the Homestead Act of 1862 granted title to the same sized farm for a small filing fee. Congress had designed these laws for regions blessed with adequate growing-season rainfall. Most of the area west of the hundredth meridian lacked such rainfall.2

By using various methods some settlers could obtain larger acreages. Many purchased land with scrip issued to veterans or to land grant colleges. Some bought land in railroad grants, and not a few used dummy entrymen.3 After the passage of the Deseret Land Act in 1877, settlers could purchase 640 acres before land surveys were completed.

Settlers in the semi-arid West who relied on their families for labor often found it difficult to irrigate and operate a farm any larger than sixty to seventy acres with available and affordable technology. An 1889 study by

1 Because of the generally negative connotation of the terms Mormon and Mormonism in the nineteenth century, because of the frequent argument from the assumption of Mormon exceptionalism, and because problems in Utah were similar to those found elsewhere, I have frequently used the terms Utah and Utahns.

2 On public lands see: Paul W. Gates, History of Public Land Law Development (Washington, D. C.: GPO, 1968); Thomas G. Alexander, A Clash of Interests: Interior Department and Mountain West, 1863-1890 (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1977), 7-8, and chapters 3, 6, and 9; Dean L. May, Three Frontiers: Family, Land and Society in the American West, 1850-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlementand Administration of American Public Lands, 17891837 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968).

3 Gates, History of Public Land Law, 440-43

Frederick Haynes Newell showed that farmers irrigated an average of sixty-eight acres in the semi-arid states, which was the average in Utah.4

Congress enacted different land rules for settling towns and cities. The 1844 Townsite Act authorized cities to patent up to 320 acres (a half section, one mile by half a mile). A revised act of 1867 allowed up to three sections (1920 acres—three miles by three miles) for cities up to five thousand inhabitants. By the time the Utah land office opened in March 1869, Salt Lake City’s 12,400 citizens had already spread beyond that limited area, and because of its large size, in 1870 Congress passed a special act allowing larger areas.5

Until 1869, none of Utah’s 82,000 inhabitants had even a squatter’s right to the land they occupied. After years of lobbying, Utah Congressional Delegate William H. Hooper secured General Land Office (GLO) and Congressional support for a land office in Salt Lake City. The land office opened in 1869.6

Congress had authorized land offices in Idaho Territory in 1866 and Montana and Arizona Territories in 1867. All three territories had been organized after the establishment of Utah Territory, and all three had smaller populations.7

Largely because of the large and cohesive Mormon population, historians have tended to emphasize the conditions that made Utah different from other territories. With certain exceptions, however, settlers staked out land for acquisition in the Beehive Territory just as they did in other places.8 Historians have cited ad nauseam in one form or another Brigham Young’s statement of July 25, 1847, that no one should “sell neither should He buy any but evry man should [have?] his land measured of to him for City & farming purposes what He could till.”9 In addition, some have also cited

4 F. H. Newell, Report on Agriculture by Irrigation in the Western Part of the United States (Washington, D. C.: GPO, 1894), vii, 1-5. See also Gustive O. Larson, “Land Contest in Early Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 29 (October 1961): 317; and George Thomas, The Development of Institutions Under Irrigation: With Special Reference to UtahConditions (New York: Macmillan, 1920).

5 14 U. S. Statutes at Large 541 (March 2, 1867) and 16 Statutes at Large 183 (July 1, 1870).

6 Congressional Globe, 40th Cong., 2nd Sess., June 3, 1868, 2813-14; Larson, “Land Contest,” 323; 15 U. S. Statutes at Large 91 (July 16, 1868).

7 14 U. S. Statutes at Large 77 (June 27, 1866), and 14 U. S. Statutes at Large 542 (March 2, 1867).

8 On the disputes that led to the Utah war see: Will Bagley, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002); David L. Bigler, Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon Theocracy in the American West, 1847-1896 (Spokane: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1998); John Gary Maxwell, Gettysburg to Great Salt Lake: George R. Maxwell, Civil War Hero and Federal Marshal among the Mormons (Norman: Arthur H. Clark, University of Oklahoma Press, 2010); Norman L. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict, 1850-1859 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); Donald R. Moorman and Gene A. Sessions, Camp Floyd and the Mormons: The Utah War (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992); William P. MacKinnon, At Swords Point: Part 1, A Documentary History of the Utah War to 1858 (Norman: Arthur H. Clark, University of Oklahoma Press, 2008); Juanita Brooks, The Mountain Meadows Massacre (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1950); Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958); and Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr., and Glen M. Leonard, Massacre at Mountain Meadows (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

9 Wilford Woodruff, Wilford Woodruff’s Journal ed. Scott G. Kinney 9 Vols. (Midvale: Signature Books, 1983-1985), 3:236. See also Larson, “Land Contest,” 310; and Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom,46.

the deeds signed during the abortive consecration movement of the mid-1850s which assigned title to lands to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon Church), as evidence of church members’ subservience to Young. In fact, however, neither Young nor the church actually took title to the property. Moreover, local county selectmen (generally called commissioners today), who, as Jeffery Johnson has shown were generally local citizens—not high church leaders or general authorities — ordinarily regulated the distribution of land. That they were also locally prominent people only makes Utah Territory more rather than less like other territories. In addition, people began quite soon after settlement to buy and sell locally recognized customary titles to land.10

Instead of keeping land off the market or placing it under Young’s control, the Utah legislature passed a law in 1852 to facilitate private ownership and sale of real property. This law, that Governor Young approved, provided a color of title that offered some assurance that the actual occupants could identify property on which they lived and had made improvements. The 1852 act authorized county surveyors to conduct cadastral surveys of parcels of land, title to which county courts (generally called commissions today) transferred to occupants on payment of a small surveying and recording fee. Original and subsequent title holders could sell and transfer the land, their improvements, and these titles through quitclaim deeds and surveying certificates. Such legislation, the local people hoped, would insure a right to the land to those who actually occupied it and guard against claim jumping until the federal government authorized its legal acquisition.11

In effect Utah’s laws had the same motivation as the claims associations organized in the Midwest to protect actual settlers against the intrusions of later immigrants, speculators, and claim jumpers. These associations generally provided “a title registration system,” prior to the organization of county governments. If the land a settler actually occupied did not match the boundaries of the subsequent federal rectangular surveys, the registration provided a means of conveying land to the actual settlers. Paul Gates, the preeminent authority on land issues, argues that “it is doubtful whether any important sales of public lands were held between 1835 and 1860 at which such combinations did not function, and almost invariably they accomplished their objectives.”12

Unlike the claim associations, however, Utah’s customary titles relied on a territorial statute and the actions of the county authorities, rather than a voluntary association of land holders. Since they recognized that the county titles had only customary authority and they reached only as far as the people

10 Leonard J. Arrington, Feramorz Y. Fox & Dean L. May, Building the City of God: Community and Cooperation among the Mormons (2nd ed.; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 63-78; Jeffery O. Johnson, “Was Being a Probate Judge in Pioneer Utah a Church Calling?” Paper presented at the Mormon History Association Conference, Casper, Wyoming, May 27, 2006.

11 Larson, “Land Contest,” 312-13.

12 Gates, History of Public Land Law, 236-37.

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

willingly recognized them, local officials memorialized Congress and various administrations to extend the national land laws to Utah Territory.13

In addition, the legislature tried to regulate orderly access to resources, such as timber for construction, which generally grew in the mountains rather than on valley property as it did in the Midwest and parts of the Pacific Coast. As Leonard Arrington has shown, they did this through laws granting stewardship over canyons with access to timber to county courts or to prominent individuals. Instead of granting monopolistic control, however, these grants contained restrictions that required citizens’ access, subject to payment of tolls to defray the cost of building and maintaining access roads.14

During the 1850s, Presidents Franklin Pierce in 1853 and James Buchanan in 1858 both recommended the extension of the land disposal laws over Utah. Congress declined to pass the necessary enabling legislation, however, whether because the government had not extinguished any Indian titles in Utah, or because of anti-Mormon prejudice, or both, is unclear.15 The failure to extinguish Indian titles made Utahns illegal occupants not only on public lands but also on Native American lands as well.16

Opening the surveying district in 1855 by newly appointed territorial surveyor general David H. Burr, offered some hope of restoring order. Before his appointment, Burr was recognized as a renowned lawyer and cartographer mapping in the United States, Great Britain, and India.17

Like other surveyors general, Burr negotiated contracts with deputy surveyors who did much of the field work. Among those he hired were his son Eugene, as chief clerk, his two sons, Frederick H. and David A. along with Joseph Troskolawski, Columbus L. Craig, and Charles Mogo as deputy surveyors.18

The GLO’s published instructions to Burr and other surveyors general required deputies to survey lines for townships, sections, and quarter sections. Deputies were instructed to implant monuments of substantial wooden or stone posts deeply in the ground on township, section, and

13 Milton R. Hunter, Brigham Young, the Colonizer (Independence, MO: Zion’s Printing and Publishing, 1945), 147; Dean L. May, A People’s History of Utah (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press), 116; Robert A. Sauder, “State Versus Society: Public Land Law and Mormon Settlement in the Sevier Valley Utah,” Agricultural History 70 (Winter 1996): 57-89.

14 For example: Larson, “Land Contest,” 313. See also Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 53-54.

15 James Buchanan, Second Annual Message to Congress on the State of the Union, December 6, 1858, in http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29499 (Accessed January 10, 2011); Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of Utah, 1540-1886, The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume 26 (San Francisco: The History Company, 1889), 485.

16 For Indian land conflicts see W. Paul Reeve, Making Space on the Western Frontier: Mormons, Miners, and Southern Paiutes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006).

17 Maxwell, Gettysburg to Great Salt Lake, 120.

18 Ibid.; Caleb B. Smith to Commissioner, General Lane Office (hereinafter GLO), August 27, 1861, Department of the Interior (hereinafter: ID), Lands Letterbook, No. 7 (hereinafter: Lands, No. 7), Records Group (hereinafter RG) 48, National Archives and Records Service, Washington, D. C. (hereinafter DNA); MacKinnon, ed. At Sword’s Point, Part I, 66 identifies Joseph Troskowlawski as one of the surveyors, I have, however, used David Burr’s spelling—Troskolawski.

Public land surveys were essential before homesteads could be acquired by settlers. This family constructed the first house in the Blue Creek settlement in northern Box Elder County.

quarter section corners. They were to write field notes describing the location of the corners and the lay of the land. They were to deposit charcoal, stone, or a charred stake, called memorials, beneath the monument and to raise mounds of earth around the monuments, around which they were to dig a square trench to a spade’s depth. At fourteen inches from each of the four sides of the trench they were to dig pits.19

GLO regulations required Burr to check the surveys, maps, and field notes for accuracy and conformity to regulations. Clerks in his office copied the field notes and transferred the information to plat maps which the land office later used to designate land for sale. The GLO also deposited a copy of the field notes and plat maps in Washington, D. C. By the spring of 1857, when Burr suspended surveys because of the Utah War, deputies had surveyed more than 2.5 million acres on nine contracts.

During Burr’s tenure as surveyor general, controversies over his actions and those of his employees and contractors led to verbal and sometimes violent physical conflicts with Utahns. Some Utahns filed a series of sworn affidavits alleging fraudulent surveys.20

19 For a reproduction of the 1855 surveying instructions see C. Albert White, A History of the Rectangular Survey System (Washington, D. C.: Bureau of Reclamation, Department of the Interior, 1983), 457-500, especially 461-63 for dimensions of the various markers.

20 MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, 110. For the affidavits see: Acting Commissioner of the General Land Office to Samuel C. Stambaugh, June 22, 1869, GLO, Correspondence of the Surveyors General of Utah, 1854-1916 (Hereinafter: Correspondence, Utah), DNA, RG 49, M1110, Roll 48.

Burr detailed some of the surveyors’ and others’ complaints in a letter to the commissioner of the GLO shortly after his arrival in 1855. He objected to the extent of Utah’s cities by citing the size of Salt Lake City, and he alleged that Brigham Young controlled all the property by reproducing a copy of one of the deeds signed during the abortive United Order movementof the 1850s.21

In May 1856, Burr again complained to the GLO, this time about Utahns’ trespass on public lands. Late in January 1857, James Cummings, the clerk of Utah’s U. S. Territorial Supreme Court; Acting U. S. Attorney, Hosea Stout; and Territorial Marshal, Alexander McRae confronted Burr with a copy of his letter, which they had most likely obtained illegally. The three of them asserted the right of Utah settlers to occupy the public lands. In an argument similar to that used by squatters on lands in the Midwest, they said “that the country was theirs, that they would not permit this interference with their rights.” They told Burr to stop writing such letters and said that they would always know if he did so again, most likely because they had illegal access to the U. S. mails.22

In August 1856, Burr complained to GLO Commissioner, Thomas A. Hendricks, about violence against his employees. He said that William A. Hickman had directed three men to beat up and kill Troskolawski, but that William H. Hooper and Thomas Williams had intervened to save the deputy surveyor. In spite of Hooper’s and Williams’ situation as prominent Latter-day Saints and business partners of Brigham Young, Burr argued that “high authority” had counseled Hickman to mount the attack.23

Burr also forwarded a letter of August 1856 from Craig, charging the Utahns with poisoning the minds of the Indians against the surveyors and the government. Craig said the Utahns had told the Indians the surveyors

21 Burr to G. C. Whiting, September 30, 1855, with attachment, House Executive Document 71, 35th Cong., 1st Sess., (hereinafter HED 71), 123-24.

22 David H. Burr to Thomas A. Hendricks, February 5, 1857, HED 71, 118.

23 David H. Burr to Thomas A. Hendricks, August 30, 1856, HED 71,114-15. Andrew Jenson, ed. Church Chronology: A Record of Important Events . . . 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1914), 92.

UTAH

STATE

“were measuring out the land in order to take possession of it, and would drive away the Mormons and kill the Indians.” The Indians, however, “said that they did not believe these stories, for the Mormons talked double.”24 The Utahns who contacted the Indians probably said the government wanted to take their land because they wanted the Indians’ support in disputes with the federal surveyors. Further, the Utahns were angry with the federal government for not opening a land office.

Craig also detailed some disagreements with the Utahns over trespasses by surveyors on planted fields. The Deseret News, the LDS church’s organ, had recommended that the settlers complain to the courts when trespass occurred. In general, however, Craig said that the surveyors had “hitherto met with no difficulty with them.” He had, however, received a judicial writ from the mayor of Payson complaining of trespasses. He had ignored it.25 Such conflicts seem to have amounted only to verbal jousting, because the Utahns really wanted the lands surveyed so they could obtain legal titles.26

In a letter submitted to the U. S. Attorney General on March 20, 1857, by Utah Judge John F. Kinney, Burr outlined further objections to conditions in Utah. Declining to consider Utahns as American citizens—which they were—Burr argued that they yielded “implicit obedience” to Brigham Young’s commands as law, while “trampling on the dearest rights of American Citizens.” Burr argued that members of the legislature obeyed Young explicitly and that they disregarded the laws of the United States. Burr also listed a number of complaints of conditions relevant to public lands. These included “grants of water, timber, &c the property of the U. S.” to prominent individuals. The grants, he argued, compelled “the settler . . . to pay the Grantees for all the timber and fire wood they use.” And, the “County Courts Control all the timber, water privileges and so forth.” He recommended that the federal government review laws the legislature passed and reject the “obnoxious ones.” He suggested also that the government establish a newspaper to “disseminate correct information.” Such measures together with “a small military force,” Burr believed would reform Utahns. He deplored grants to “Minions of the Priesthood” of “herd grounds,” in “neighboring Valleys . . . .” He said these grants, that he urged the government to annul, compelled “the settler to pay for pasturing his Cattle on the Public Domain.” He also charged that grantees had driven off some of the settlers who located on the public lands.27

Returning to a theme in his 1855 letter, Burr argued that the limits of

24

C. L. Craig to David H. Burr, August 1, 1856, HED 71, 116-17.

25 Ibid., 117.

26 Charles W. Moeller to editor, St. Louis Republican, June 26, 1857, New York Times, July 27, 1857. C. Albert White, Initial Points of the Rectangular Survey System (Westminster, CO: Publishing House, 1996), 320-21, 324.

27 Statement of David H. Burr to Attorney General Jeremiah Black, delivered March 20, 1857, by John F. Kinney, Records Relating to the Appointment of Federal Judges, Attorneys and Marshals for the Territory and State of Utah, 1853-1901, Pierce’s Administration, 1853-57, RG 60, DNA, Microfilm 680, Reel 1.

the cities “are very extensive.” The leaders had done this, he said, to bring “as many of the Settlements as possible under the municipal regulations and ordinances.”

Burr also complained of other matters. These had to do with tax exemption for churches, remission of taxes and other tax laws, school tax votes, regulation of liquor, liens against property for debt, jurisdiction of the probate courts, inheritance laws, numbering of ballots, ferry grants, and limitation on the citation of precedents in court cases.

On March 28, 1857, Burr sent another letter from Utah explaining that he anticipated possible interference with his surveyors from Young and other church leaders because of their statements opposing the surveyors work, but he reported that none had taken place. Burr said, however, that Mogo had taken a large force of guards to accompany him on his surveys. He charged also that the Mormons had pulled down the houses of some who apostatized from the LDS church, and that all the federal judges except George Stiles had fled the territory and that Stiles too, intended to leave. He had thought the threats idle until the recent Parrish-Potter murders in Springville. He insisted that Brigham Young had ordered the murders. He wrote that he and the other federal officials would leave if they could have protection. However, Burr concluded, that he had remained in Utah in spite of threats against himself.28

The charge that Young ordered the Springville murders is at best controversial since the available evidence does not demonstrate Young’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Moreover, after Young learned of the murders, he met with Alvira Parrish, the widow of one of the victims and mother of another. When she explained what had happened, he insisted on his ignorance of the matter, and ordered the local leaders to return her husband’s property.29

Young, however, had been preaching with extreme imprudence, which may well have led Bishop Aaron Johnson in Springville to believe that he approved the murders of William and Beeson Parrish if they tried to leave the city. Young had given a number of violent sermons in which he preached Blood Atonement, the idea that Christ’s atonement did not cover all serious sins, and that the blood of such sinners must be shed to fulfill the atonement. In addition, he had compiled a list of twenty-eight suspects which he sent to President George A. Smith, a member of the church’s First Presidency, and Territorial Delegate John M. Bernhisel in July 1856, asking for further information about the people. One critic has called this “a hit list,” but there is no evidence that it was anything other than a request for information. The list included David H. Burr, and a number of

28 Burr to Hendricks, March 28, 1857, HED 71, 118-20. Compare Polly Aird, “‘You Nasty Apostates, Clear Out’: Reasons for Disaffection in the Late 1850s,” Journal of Mormon History 30 (Fall 2004): 129-207 29 Polly Aird, “‘You Nasty Apostates,” 173-91. Polly Aird and William MacKinnon have disagreed with my use of reasonable doubt.

deputy surveyors including his two sons and Joseph Troskolawski.30

In June 1857, Burr arrived in Washington, and again detailed his complaints against the people of Utah. He complained about the threats aimed at federal officials by Cummings, Stout, and McRae. He mentioned that the Utahns asserted “that the country, and all that appertained to it belongs to them; that their exertions had made it what it was; that they had earned it, and were determined to keep it, and would permit no interference with their rights.” He said that “Danites” had failed to mob and to destroy his office only because of “dissensions among the leaders.”31

Soon after Burr arrived in Washington, he learned in a letter from his clerk, C. G. Landon of attacks on his office staff. These resulted in the beatings of two clerks and attacks aimed at Mogo by a mob Burr characterized as “Danites.” Landon reported that the attack was by “a posse of Mormons” led by Richard Petit and Joseph A. Thompson. Landon wrote that after being beaten, he hid in a storeroom owned by merchant William Bell before fleeing to Placerville, California, where he was recovering from his beating.32 The Petit-Thompson attack apparently occurred in an attempt to locate and punish deputy surveyor Charles Mogo. Mogo, himself, had already fled to Laramie, leaving his pregnant wife, Margaret, who later

30 On Blood Atonement, see MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part I, 54; On Potter-Parrish see Aird, “You Nasty Apostates,” 173-91. One of the reviewers of this paper called Young’s list a “hit list,” but there is no evidence that it was anything other than a request for information since the cover letter to Bernhisel says that that is what it was.

31 Burr to Hendricks, June 11, 1857, HED 71, 120-21.

32 Burr to Hendricks, October 19, 1857, C. G. Landon to David H. Burr, September 18, 1857, HED 71, 121-28; William Bell to David H. Burr, March 1, 1858, White, Initial Points, 323.

Map of the proposed Indian Reservation south of Utah Lake on Spanish Fork Creek completed as part of the survey of the Utah Territory by David H. Burr.

arrived at Fort Bridger carrying her dead baby. Mogo subsequently served on the grand jury empanelled in December 1857 at Camp Scott by Justice Delana Eckels. The jury returned indictments for treason against Brigham Young, a number of other Mormon leaders, and a thousand unnamed persons. However, President James Buchanan’s amnesty proclamation invalidated the indictments. There is, however, considerable doubt the indictments were legal since Eckels empanelled the jury with people at Fort Bridger and Camp Scott, rather than according to law from the rolls of Utah property owners. The United States Supreme Court later ruled that judges had to follow Utah law in empanelling juries.33

Clearly, the charges that Burr made about the regulation of public lands and local grants of control over resources were partly true. His characterization of the attackers as “Danites” is clearly suspect. Leonard Arrington, who made a careful study of the problem, has concluded that although an organization of Danites existed in Missouri, no such organized body of assassins existed in Utah.34 Like people in other Western territories, Utahns experienced violence, but it was not generally centrally directed except during the Utah War.35

Moreover, as Arrington wrote, like the Midwestern land claim associations, Utahns used the customary titles and grants of land and resources to secure rather than prevent access for actual settlers. He points out that Utahns based such regulations on precedents they had learned in New England settlements. They viewed such regulations and grants “‘as a means of averting interminable controversies over this prime essential in food and crop production under arid conditions.’”36 In addition local authorities, on occasion, required settlers with excessive land to redistribute it to those with less or no land.37

In addition, Burr’s objections offered only one side of the controversy over land distribution and use and the activities of his surveyors. Utah citizens responded with their criticism. Critical of what he viewed as the superficiality of the surveys, territorial governor Young complained to Utah’s Congressional Delegate John M. Bernhisel calling the federal surveys “a great humbug.” He said that they were “of no earthly benefit.” The surveyors, he said, “stick down little stakes that the wind could almost blow over.” They had not, Young said, planted proper substantial post or stone monuments with memorials such as pits and subsurface charcoal to designate corners as regulations required. Within five years, he predicted, no

33

Burr to Hendricks, September 20, 1856, and Landon to Burr, September 18, 1857, HED 71, 117-18, 122-23; MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part I, 471-474; Clinton v. Englebrecht, 80 U. S. 434 (1874).

34 Leonard J. Arrington, Brigham Young, American Moses (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1985), 5, 65, 250.

35 Scott K. Thomas, “Violence Across the Land: Vigilantism and Extra Legal Justice in Utah Territory,” (M. A. Thesis, Brigham Young University, 2010).

36 Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 50-51, 54. Arrington quotes A. L. Neff, History of Utah, 1847 to 1869 (Salt Lake City, 1940), 255.

37 Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 90-91.

“vestige of all they do will be left to mark where they have been.”38

In a letter to George A. Smith, John Taylor, and John Bernhisel, Young elaborated, calling Burr a “snarling puppy,” and charging the surveyor general with “swindling the Government extensively.” Questioning Burr’s ability “to run a line,” he labeled the surveys conducted by his deputies as “not worth a groat.” After taking jabs at Burr’s sons and “Trosky” (probably Troskolawski), he bridled that “in five weeks,” surveyor “Mosheo” (probably Mogo) had surveyed lines said to be “3500 miles” long. He also said that hearsay accused Mogo of killing a man in St. Louis. He believed that the deputies knew exactly what they had done since he believed that they had boasted openly “of swindling the Government.”39

Moreover, the GLO had already recognized Troskolawski’s penchant for conducting fraudulent surveys. In 1853 he had surveyed in California and after he left, the California surveyor general discovered his frauds. He reported them to the GLO, and Commissioner Hendricks ordered Burr to withdraw Troskolawski’s commission. 40 Later, Troskolawski launched his own riposte in the New York Herald wherein he said little about the fraudulent surveys, but rather complained about the attacks on federalagents and about the Mormons’ polygamous practices.41

Utahns, however, issued sworn affidavits complaining of the frauds. Affidavits came from businessman and later territorial delegate Hooper, who alleged the incompetency of Charles Mogo and his collusion with Burr. Thomas W. Cooke, a Salt Lake City carpenter, complained of the fraudulent surveys. Charles W. Moeller, one of Burr’s clerks detailed fraud and incompetency on the parts of the surveyors, the clerks, and Burr himself. Moeller’s affidavit is questionable, however, because he later repudiated it in a sworn affidavit before Judge Eckels.42 Moeller’s retraction is problematic, however, since subsequent investigations substantiated many of the charges in his original letter. They also corroborated the affidavits of Hooper and Cooke.

In spite of these affidavits, anti-Mormon prejudice and the charges made by federal officials supported by their patrons in Washington led the federal government to ignore for the time being these complaints of fraud and superficiality in Burr’s surveys. Instead, the administration seems to have lumped Burr’s allegations with those of others such as Kinney and Judge William W. Drummond to conclude that the Utahns had rebelled against the federal government. Such charges led to the dispatch of 2,500 troops—

38 Brigham Young to John M. Bernhisel, n.d. in Larson, “Land Contest,” 315-16.

39 Brigham Young to George A. Smith, John Taylor, and John M. Bernhisel, January 3, 1857, MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, 66.

40 White, Initial Points, 311-12.

41 New York Herald, May 24, 1857.

42 Acting Commissioner to Samuel C. Stambaugh, June 22, 1859, GLO, Utah Surveyor General, DNA, RG 49, M1110, Roll 48; White, Initial Points, 320-21, 324.

perhaps the “small military force” Burr had called for—as a posse to accompany Governor Alfred Cumming and other federal officials to replace the Utahns who held federal appointments. All this occurred without notifying Young of his removal as territorial governor. Thereafter, the federal government appointed no Mormons to territorial offices until 1893, except Hosea Stout, who served as Utah’s Attorney General from 1862 to 1866.43

On reflection, after the Utah War of 1857-58, President James Buchanan seems to have understood there might be problems with the surveys. In June 1857, after Burr returned to Washington, the Interior Department put him on leave and declined to reappoint him. In 1859, after the Utah War, Buchanan sent his friend Samuel C. Stambaugh of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, as a new surveyor general. Stambaugh had orders to investigate the charges made about the surveys that Burr’s deputies had conducted.44

Stambaugh’s investigation and subsequent investigations by surveyors revealed that Burr’s deputies had perpetrated massive frauds on the federal government and the Utahns. This investigation focused first on the surveys of Charles Mogo, who had been the apparent object of the earlier PetitThompson attack. Operating under Burr’s directions, Mogo had surveyed 320,000 acres in central and southern Utah. Burr had approved his surveys both of agricultural and grazing land, though surveyors could not legally survey grazing land. Stambaugh found, as the Utahns had charged, that Mogo had either planted no stakes or small ones, no mounds or insubstantial ones and no trenches, pits, or subsurface memorials as required by written GLO instructions.45

Stambaugh reported that his investigation of Burr’s actions “disclosed disregard, on the part of the late surveyor general, of the laws governing the surveys.” The “examination of the surveys . . . [showed] remissness on the part of that officer [Burr] in not providing proper checks upon his deputies.” Stambaugh reported his findings to GLO Commissioner J. M. Edmunds, who transmitted them to Interior Secretary Caleb B. Smith.46 Mogo had already defended himself in a letter to GLO Commissioner Thomas A. Hendricks in February 1858 in which he denied that he had

43 On Burr and the Utah War see, Bigler, Forgotten Kingdom, 55. The 1893 appointee was Charles C. Richards, a son of LDS Apostle George F. Richards.

44 On judges and the Utah War see, Thomas G. Alexander, “Carpetbaggers, Reprobates, and Liars: Federal Judges and the Utah War,” The Historian 70 (Summer 2008): 209-38. On Burr being placed on leave see William MacKinnon to Thomas Alexander, April 8, 2011, copy in the author’s possession.

45 On stone monuments, see Willis Drummond to C. C. Clements, April 21, 1873, GLO, Utah Letter Book, No. 1, RG 49, DNA, Washington, D. C.

46 On Stambaugh’s work, see J. M. Edmunds, Commissioner of the GLO to Caleb B. Smith, Secretary of the Interior for 1861 in http://cprr.org/Museum/Land_Office_1861.html (Accessed: July 27, 2010)

The GLO ordinarily allowed $15 per mile for standard lines, $12 per mile for township lines, and $10 per mile for section and quarter-section lines. See Willis Drummond to C. C. Clements, April 21, 1873, GLO, Utah Letter Book No. 1, RG 49, DNA, Washington, D. C. Burr, however, allowed rates as high as $20 per mile. White, Initial Points, 312.

ʼ

conducted fraudulent surveys. Secretary Smith authorized payment to Mogo for the survey of 5,000 acres of agricultural land even though Stambaugh’s investigation had shown that the corner monuments were either inadequate or nonexistent.47

Four years later, Lincoln’s Interior Secretary John P. Usher reexamined Smith’s ruling and authorized a larger payment to Mogo for surveys of 12,800 acres. Stambaugh said that Mogo had surveyed 5,000 acres of agricultural land, but Mogo’s field notes had classified an additional 7,800 acres as agricultural. Usher authorized the payment on the basis of Mogo’s field notes rather than Stambaugh’s investigation. Moreover, Usher ruled that Burr’s deputies needed to follow only the general guidelines in congressional law rather than GLO regulations. This ruling authorized the payment for the inadequate or nonexistent corner monuments.48 Although Stambaugh found extensive fraud in the surveys, department instructions hampered him in his attempt to make a complete examination of the work done by Burr’s deputies. GLO Commissioner Joseph Wilson ordered him to investigate only those areas against which specific charges of malfeasance had been made. He denied Stambaugh’s request to reestablish defective markers, and also denied Stambaugh’s request to hire competent local surveyors to assist in the examination. 49 Ignoring Wilson’s orders, Stambaugh hired territorial surveyor general Jesse Fox to assist him, and in December 1860, Wilson, now a lame duck because of the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln in November, ordered Stambaugh

47 See Mogo to Thomas A. Hendricks, attachment in Acting Commissioner to Stambaugh, June 22, 1859, GLO, Utah Surveyors General, RG 49, DNA, M1110, Roll 48.

48 Caleb B. Smith to J. M. Edmunds, August 27, 1861, GLO, Utah Surveyors General, RG 49, M1110, Roll 48; John P. Usher to J. M. Edmunds, August 1, 1862, ID, Lands 7, RG 48, DNA.

49 Joseph S. Wilson to Stambaugh, February 18, 1860, GLO, Utah Surveyors General, RG 49, DNA, M1110, Roll 48.

A bird

s eye view of Richmond, Cache County, in 1875.

to explain why he had done so.50

Most seriously, Stambaugh allowed his office procedures to deteriorate and permitted his chief clerk to take an extended leave. Stambaugh failed to submit his 1859 annual report on time, his correspondence became extremely sloppy, and he failed to complete the reports on some of the examinations promptly. Moreover, Stambaugh was the appointee of a Democratic administration, and in August 1861, the Lincoln administration removed him and appointed Samuel R. Fox of Madison, Wisconsin, as his replacement.51

Fox served for less than a year before Congress combined the Utah surveying district with Colorado’s and moved the office to Denver. In consolidating the district, Commissioner Edmunds pointed out that although deputies had surveyed 2.5 million acres in Utah no one had purchased any land.52 Edmunds undoubtedly knew that Utahns hadn’t acquired any land because Congress hadn’t opened a land office to offer public lands for sale. Both Edmunds and the Colorado Surveyor General falsely asserted that the Utahns did not want to purchase public land.53

William H. Hooper, Utah Territorial Delegate to Congress who secured a land office for Salt Lake City.

The canard that Utahns did not want a land office or failed to purchase public lands earned a rebuke from the territorial legislature and Utah’s Congressional Delegate. In 1868, Delegate Hooper introduced legislation, which was enacted to reopen surveys and the Utah Surveying District, and to open a land office. The Deseret News editorialized: “We know that our enemies have taken especial pains to circulate the idea that we do not want to have a Surveyor-General or a Land Office here—that we do not want to acknowledge the rights of the Government to give us titles to our lands.

50 Wilson to Stambaugh, December 19, 1860, GLO, Utah Surveyors General, RG 49, DNA, M1110, Roll 48.

51 J. M. Edmunds to Stambaugh, April 9, and May 29, 1861, and Edmunds to Samuel R. Fox, August 15, 1861, GLO, Utah Surveyor’s General RG 49, M1110, Roll 48.

52 J. M. Edmunds to Samuel R. Fox, April 14, 1862, GLO, Utah Surveyors General Letter Book No. 1, pp. 237-38, RG 49, DNA.

53 Secretary of the Interior, Annual Report, 1863, Report of the Commissioner of the General Land Office (J. M. Edmunds), 57; Secretary of the Interior, Annual Report, 1865, Report of the General Land Office, John Pierce, Report of the Surveyor General of Colorado, Utah, and Idaho, 103; George A. Smith, John Taylor, Charles Turkee, Memorial of the Utah Legislature Approved January 27, 1868, House Miscellaneous Document 71, 40th Cong., 2nd Sess., Serial Set 1349; Deseret News, December 3, 1867, in Journal History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, MS, Archives of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah (Hereinafter JH); Deseret News, January 1, 1868, in JH.

54 Deseret News, January 1, 1868, in JH.

But by such false-hoods they hope to prejudice those in power against us, and prevent us from obtaining our rights.”54

It was not until 1869, however, in spite of the public knowledge of the fraudulent surveys under the Burr regime, that Congress made the first appropriations for new surveys in Utah. That year John A. Clark, who had previously served as Surveyor General of New Mexico, moved to Utah as the surveyor general. He began the surveys in areas along the two Transcontinental Railroad lines in northern Utah to help the railroad companies obtain their land grants.55

Shortly after he arrived in Salt Lake City, Clark continued the investigationsbegun by Stambaugh of Burr’s survey and field notes and office files. In a report to Land Office Commissioner Wilson, Clark responded with surprise that “any of . . . [the surveys] should have been received and approved by the Surveyor General, or paid for by the Department, for they bear inherent evidence of dishonesty and fraud.” He picked Township 1 South, Range 1 West, which included stretches of the meandering Jordan River, surveyed by Burr’s son Frederick “as a specimen of the whole.” Frederick Burr had designated the corners of his traverse, but had established no corner monuments, as regulations required. After examining the survey results and the field notes, Clark concluded that Frederick Burr had run only part of the survey on the ground. The remainder he had apparently concocted in his head.56

Commenting on Burr’s surveys in general, Clark found that his “Deputy Surveyors generally surveyed the township lines and established corners by raising a little mound of earth or sand six inches to a foot high, with sometimes a post.” They apparently planted no substantial wood or stone monuments, memorials, trenches, or pits to mark the location of the corners, as the GLO’s regulations required. And, Clark found that instead “of running the subdivision lines regularly, they run [sic] two or three lines across the township, establishing corners thereon as above[from which] they obtained some knowledge of the interior of the township from which they made up the field notes. No surveyor general in their [his] examination, should have been deceived by their notes, for they bear evidence upon their face of fraud and dishonesty sufficient to condemn them.”57

Clark and his successors also re-established some of the corners that Burr’s deputies had failed to mark. In re-establishing the principal meridian, base line, and correcting parallels, Clark’s surveyors and subsequent deputies found that Burr’s deputies had failed to plant many of the corner monuments, again as required by published regulations. The new deputies planted stones for the corners.58

55 John A. Clark to Joseph S. Wilson, May 26, 1869, GLO, letters received (H65521), RG 49, DNA.

56 John A. Clark to Joseph S. Wilson, January 20, 1869, GLO, letters received (H53162), RG 49, DNA.

57 Clark to Wilson, January 20, 1869, GLO, letters received (H53162), RG 49, DNA.

58 White, Initial Points, 326-27.

Incredibly, however, after considering Clark’s report, GLO Commissioner Joseph S. Wilson called the differences between what Clark found and Burr’s surveys, “trifling irregularities,” and therefore, could not reject the surveys without better evidence. Wilson opined that the lapse of seven to fifteen years may have caused some obliteration of the survey and the monuments. He also pointed to an error made by Clark’s draftsman in reviewing one of the Jordan River’s meanders.59

Several things seem evident from the rejection of Clark’s investigation. Clark made a mistake by providing examples rather than detailing all of the frauds in the various surveys as Stambaugh had done with the Mogo surveys. This is perhaps understandable because unlike Stambaugh, Clark had begun supervising and examining new surveys while Stambaugh had only the job of conducting an investigation. Commissioner Wilson, however, made a serious and costly error of his own by declining to credit Clark’s evidence of the absence of survey monuments, memorials, trenches, and pits, and Clark’s information on the failure to run the section and quartersection lines and to establish corners for the 36 sections in each township. Clark was right, the building of small piles of dirt or sand and the occasional planting of posts did not constitute permanent corners. Surveying regulations and standard practice required the erection of substantial monuments, trenches, and pits. These were absolutely necessary to avoid costly resurveys, and to provide evidence so that land purchasers could determine the location of property lines on the ground. Contrary to Wilson’s assertion, these corner markers, even had they been made with substantial posts rather than stone should have survived for decades and not have disappeared in seven to fifteen years as the unmarked corners or the small dirt mounds or stakes had done. After 1870, surveyors had to plant a stone rather than wooden monument, and at least since 1930, surveyors have planted steel pipes filled with concrete as monuments.

Because the GLO rejected Clark’s recommendation and accepted surveys by Burr’s deputies, with the exception of some of Mogo’s, the condition of surveys and by extension titles in Utah remained in chaos for some time. In an attempt to correct the fraudulent surveys, in January 1869, Clark recommended the resurvey of Burr’s deputies’ work. Wilson rejected Clark’s request, pointing out that Clark could authorize only the resurvey of Mogo’s rejected surveys because he could not legally use congressional survey money for resurveys. Resurveys, Wilson wrote, required a special appropriation.60

Other federal officials and elected Utah officials worked together, futilely, to try to secure funds to undo Burr’s mischief. In February 1869, George

59

Joseph S. Wilson to John A. Clark, February 25, 1869, GLO, Utah Letter Book No. 1, RG 49, DNA.

60 Joseph S. Wilson to John A. Clark, January 29, 1869, GLO, Utah Letter Book No. 1, pp. 271-72, RG 49, DNA.

A. Smith, president of the territorial council, Orson Pratt, speaker of the territorial house who had established the intersection of the prime meridian and base line for surveys in Utah, and Edwin Higgins, acting governor of Utah Territory, memorialized Congress, asking for $55,000 for surveys and another $60,000 for resurveys. Smith and Pratt were Mormons, but Higgins was not. These three dignitaries pointed out that Burr’s surveys of public lands in Utah were:

so loosely and fraudulently made, and the corners when pretended to have been erected were of such a character that at the present time there is hardly a township, section, or quarter section corner in the entire territory which can be identified; that a resurvey is absolutely necessary in order that the people may be enabled to avail themselves of the provisions of the preemption and homestead laws in entering their lands; that without such resurvey by the government it will be impossible for the settlers, with few exceptions, to identify and describe according to the plots or surveys the legal subdivisions embracing their improvements.61

In March 1869, Utah Congressional Delegate, William H. Hooper introduced a memorial from the Utah legislature asking for money for resurveys.62

In August 1870, long after Congress failed to appropriate additional funds, Courtland C. Clements, previously registrar of the Salt Lake City land office replaced John Clark as Surveyor General. Clements had no money for resurveys, and only $25,000 for surveys and $18,000 for office expenses.63

To his intense dissatisfaction, Clements also ran into Mogo’s faulty surveys. In early 1872, Clements submitted the results of a survey by Augustus D. Ferron of Township 13 South, Range 5 East in central Utah. Ferron resurveyed a township that Mogo had surveyed in 1856 and Burr had approved on February 25, 1857. After comparing the two surveys, the GLO asked Clements to find out why “the topography of the country on the two plats of survey are [were] so entirely different as to throw discredit upon one of the surveys.”64

61 George A. Smith, Orson Pratt, and Edwin Higgins, Memorial, February 15, 1869, House Miscellaneous Document 21, 41st Cong., 1st Session, Serial Set 1402.

62 Congressional Globe, 41st Congress, lst Session, March 22, 1869, p. 196.

63 For appropriations for Utah, see Alexander, Clash of Interests, Table 3, p. 187.

64 W. W. Curtis to C. C. Clements, April 10, 1872, GLO, Utah Letter Book No. 1, p. 384, RG 49, DNA, Washington, D. C.

Orson Pratt, speaker of the Utah Territorial Assembly who established the intersection of the prime meridian and base line for surveys in Utah.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Clements dispatched J. H. Cox and John F. Sanders along with Ferron to examine the township that Ferron and Mogo had surveyed. The three of them went over the ground and questioned the oldest settlers in the area; all said that they had never seen a stake or a corner in the area. Clements concluded: “When I consider that several townships returned as surveyed by Charles Mogo about the time he claims to have surveyed this township, were rejected on account of fraud, I am led to question the correctness of any of his work.”65

An examination of the plats of Ferron’s survey and subsequent surveys of different portions of the township show that Ferron’s is most likely the accurate survey. Current Bureau of Land Management (BLM) survey plats for the township include surveys of portions of the township by Ferron, Adolph Jessen, H. D. Page, and J. M. Lentz in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and other more recent surveys. The records list Mogo’s fraudulent survey as well, but it is blanked out with the notation that it is unavailable!66

In an apparent attempt to prevent frauds like those associated with the Burr administration, in 1873 GLO Commissioner Willis Drummond sent detailed instructions to Clements. “In your instructions to Deputy Surveyors,” he wrote, “you will require them in every instance to establish the corner boundaries in a permanent manner, and to describe them fully in their notes…The description ‘established as per instructions,’” he said, “is not considered sufficient, and you will therefore direct them to state in the field notes the size and diameter of the posts; depth set in the ground, or the length, breadth, and thickness of the stone, the size of the mound with the length width and depth of the pits, which must correspond with the requirements of the Manual of Surveying Instructions.”67

Clements also tried to meet the needs of Utah settlers. He forwarded a letter from James H. Martineau, Cache County Surveyor, on the needed resurvey of 20,000 acres because old surveys had been obliterated. Relenting to some degree, the GLO ruled that Clements could authorize resurveys where absolutely necessary to restore lines for future surveys. This was easier for Clements to justify in Cache County because Burr’s deputy surveyors had conducted some of the previous surveys in irregular patches. The GLO commissioner also authorized Martineau to conduct resurveys using the field notes of surveys by Burr’s deputies providing that the settlers paid the costs. Some apparently did so in order to secure clear titles to their land. This, of course, threw the burden of paying for Burr’s frauds on the local community.68

65 C. C. Clements to Willis Drummond, April 17, 1872, GLO, letters received (I93141), RG 49, DNA; W. W. Curtis to Fred Chase, April 10, 1872, Utah Letter Book, No. 1, pp. 385-88, RG 49, DNA.

66 The plat maps for these surveys are on line in the Bureau of Land Management web site.

67 Willis Drummond to C. C. Clements, April 21, 1873, GLO, Utah Letter Book, No. 1, RG 49, DNA.

68 C. C. Clements to Joseph S. Wilson, March 28, 1870 (H97037), GLO, letters received, DNA; Wilson to Clements, April 14, 1870, Utah Letter Book No 1, p. 311, RG 49, DNA.

In 1873, Nathan Kimball, an Indiana native and Civil War major general, assumed the surveyor general’s post. He served until his appointment as Ogden’s postmaster in 1877.69 He pointed out to Land Office Commissioner Willis Drummond that surveyors had surveyed only parts of many townships, often without regard to the rectangular survey system. He warned, that resulting “conflicting and irregular” surveys could “require re-surveys at an additional cost to the Government.”70

Most important, Kimball recognized the inapplicability of current federal land laws to the semi-arid region and that under existing law and conditions, large acreages would remain unsold. “Under existing laws, no one can obtain title to public lands excepting under the pre-emption and homestead laws, limiting the settler to 160 acres, and requiring actual settlement.” These laws compel selections “along and near the springs and streams, where irrigation can be had at little cost, thus leaving the upper or mesa land, equally as valuable, unoccupied and unsold, because of the greater labor and cost of irrigation.” He urged Congress to amend the law to “permit the sale for cash.” Purchasers would use their money to make the lands productive, he argued, while returning “millions of dollars to the national and State treasuries.”71

In part, the problem of the failure to survey and sell usable lands resulted from the laws which prohibited the survey of any land suitable only for grazing. Mogo and Burr had tried to survey such lands, but the GLO rejected these surveys. In spite of the laws, as indicated, settlers simply drove their livestock onto such land. In 1877, Arizona Surveyor General John Wasson clearly saw the problem created by this law. He recognized that amendments to the law which would permit the survey of grazing land would meet the needs of settlers who worked as ranchers rather than as crop farmers.72

Some ranchers in the Arid West took advantage of the 640 acres authorized by the Desert Land Act of 1877 to buy land. Often, farmers with limited means irrigated up to 80 acres, and herded livestock on the remainder. Some used these holdings as a base as they grazed their livestock

69 Maxwell, Gettysburg to Great Salt Lake, 272; S. S. Burdett to Nathan Kimball, July 30, 1875, GLO, Utah Letter Book No 2, RG 49, DNA; Nathan Kimball, “Report of the Surveyor General of Utah” in Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 1874, 156, ibid. 1875, 250.

70 Nathan Kimball to Willis Drummond, February 18, 1874 (K87352), GLO, letters received, RG 49, DNA.

71 Nathan Kimball in Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 1876, p. 278.

72 John Wasson to J. A. Williamson, July 17, 1877, GLO, letters received (M79081), RG 49, DNA.

James Henry Martineau a pioneer surveyor in Utah.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

illegally on public lands or fashioned a larger ranch as family members filed on additional acres.73

In 1916, Congress recognized the legitimacy of ranching with the passage of the Stock Raising Homestead Act that permitted ranchers to homestead 640 acres suitable for grazing.74 Even 640 acres was far too small for a respectable ranch, and most ranchers continued to graze their livestock on public lands. In fact, the debates on the Stock Raising Homestead Act turned on the question of whether 640 acres was sufficient for herd grounds.

Congress, however, opted for public ownership of most semi-arid grazing land. It established national forests under provisions of the General Revision Act of 1892, and the Forest Service Organic Act of 1897. Congress organized the remainder of the public lands suitable for grazing under the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act. (Today, the Forest Service and the BLM, the Grazing Service’s successor, continue to regulate grazing on federal lands.)

Federal rectangular surveys served as the basis for land designation in the United States. Utah’s surveys during the 1850s were the beginning of the designationof plots of land not only for private, but also for public use. Clearly, as we have seen, they present a both sordid and violent story.

For instance, a dispute over grazing land flared up in central Utah’s Rush Valley in August 1859. Utahn Daniel Spencer had been grazing livestock on the land prior to the arrival of the army that now claimed it as a military herd ground. Howard Spencer, Daniel Spencer’s nephew, confronted a military unit sent to remove his uncle’s herds. Whether provoked or not, the confrontation led Sergeant Ralph Pike to bash Howard Spencer over the head with his rifle butt. A surgeon at Camp Floyd saved Spencer’s life. Weeks later, in retribution, Howard Spencer shot and killed Pike before a crowd in Salt Lake City as the sergeant emerged from a judicial hearing. In vengeance, soldiers from Pike’s unit trashed Cedar Fort, a small Utah town several miles north of Camp Floyd. Spencer escaped at the time, but in 1889 was apprehended, tried and acquitted for the murder.75

In October 1866, a dispute over lands in Salt Lake City led to the murder of Dr. J. King Robinson. Robinson had constructed a workshop, and was planning on constructing a hospital at Warm Springs, a public park in the northwestern section of Salt Lake City. The city’s police tore down Robinson’s workshop and warned him not to try to build another. Though claimed as a public park, because no land office had yet been opened in Utah, Warm Springs was still legally public land. The city administration considered Robinson a claim jumper. Robinson, however, hired Robert N.

73 Gates, History of Public Land Law, 639-40.

74 Ibid., 512-16.

75 Moorman and Sessions, Camp Floyd and the Mormons, 253-56.

Baskin as an attorney to file a suit against the police and the city. After he instituted the suit, an unknown person called Robinson from his bed at midnight on the pretext of taking him to assist someone who was injured in a mule accident. The man led him to the corner of Main and Third South, where he was brutally murdered. No one was ever brought to trial for the murder.76

What role might proper surveys and the prior opening of a land office have played in these two incidents? In the Spencer-Pike incident, it would most likely have played no role. Daniel Spencer could not legally have acquired the land both because the federal government did not sell grazing land, and because Col. Edward J. Steptoe had designated the land as a military reservation in 1854 when he was in the territoryto investigate the earlier massacre of Captain John W. Gunnison and his survey party. Had a land office opened, it would probably not have mattered.

Had a land office been opened, Salt Lake City might have included Warm Springs within the city’s boundaries as a public park. The historical record does not reveal whether the city would have incorporated Warm Springs as part of its half section under the 1844 Townsite Act. Clearly, however, many residentsof Salt Lake City considered Robinson a claim jumper on a public park. After the federal government passed the 1870 Salt Lake Townsite Act, which authorized Salt Lake City officials to claim more land than allowed earlier in townsite acts, Salt Lake City designated Warm Springs as a public park. We will never know if any connection existed between the murder of J. King Robinson and the government’s failure to extend the land laws to Utah.

Grave marker in the Fort Douglas cemetery for Dr. J. King Robinson who was killed in Salt Lake City in October 1866 in a dispute over land.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

76 Robert N. Baskin, Reminiscences of Early Utah (Salt Lake City: Privately Printed, 1914), 13-16.

Vague federal land laws led to conflict over ownership of what most considered public rather than private property such as Salt Lake Cityʼs Warm Springs, whose public bath house is shown here.

In retrospect, Utahns passed through exceedingly difficult days during which they occupied public land and watched federal land surveys and awaited the opening of a land office. They witnessed both fraudulent and inadequate surveys under David Burr’s administration. They suffered through the results of those surveys as they paid for new surveys while trying to purchase land after the belated opening of a land office in 1869.

While approving fraudulent surveys, Burr shot complaint after complaint to Washington about the actions of Utahns. It seemed that the hatred Mormons had incurred in the Midwest followed them to Utah with the federal officials. In return, the Utahns retaliated against Burr’s office staff and deputies with violent attacks. The Buchanan administration sent an army to quell a “rebellion.” In defense of Buchanan, we should note that he sent some of the correspondence of surveyors to Congress without comment, which Congress published. The response is understandable given the outrageous rhetoric of Brigham Young and other leaders, and the murders such as those of William and Beeson Parrish and Duff Potter. In the long run, however, the belated investigations substantiated the Utahns charges of fraudulent surveys.

It may be possible to separate the fraudulent surveys from Burr’s charges that the Utahns were breaking the law in their uses of public lands and resources. Many of those charges were true, but the actions of Utah’s American citizens were similar to those of American settlers elsewhere in the Westward Movement. Settlers occupied land and used resources they did not own virtually everywhere. They also used various means to preserve

land and resources for original settlers and prevent their acquisition by subsequent arrivers, speculators, and claim jumpers.

It is deplorable that Utah criminals took the law into their own hands in a number of cases. These include the violent attacks on many of Burr’s employees and the murders of Ralph Pike and J. King Robinson.

Nevertheless, it is also true that the Utahns told the truth about the activities of Burr and his deputies. The fraudulent surveys cheated the federal government and clouded Utah land titles. It required a series of post-Utah War investigations to substantiate that fact and to begin to correct the frauds. Unlike the allegations of Brigham Young’s approval of the Potter-Parrish murders, the investigations revealed no reasonable doubt of the fraudulence of these surveys.

The question remains why would someone with a sterling career as a cartographer sanction such activity? Some possibilities seem relevant. Burr had experience as a cartographer rather than as a land surveyor. This was his first experience as a surveyor general. Cartographers can map the land with an alidade, plane table, and stadia board. These tools are sufficient for maps but not accurate enough for land surveys. In fact, in September 1855, shortly after he arrived in Utah, perhaps failing to understand the need for a higher degree of accuracy, Burr asked permission to use a geodetic technique, as a cartographer might, rather than the rectangular system, as required in land surveys. The GLO denied his request. 77 Perhaps age contributed to Burr’s failings since at age 52 when he came to Utah, Burr was already an old man. Life expectancy in 1850 was only 38.3 years.78 Whatever the cause, Burr and his deputies cost the treasury a great deal of money and the people of Utah considerable inconvenience and expense as well.

77 Thomas A. Hendricks to David H. Burr, November 19, 1855, Correspondence, Utah), DNA, RG 49, M1110, Roll 48.

78 On life expectancy see: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html.

Hammering Utah, Squeezing Mexico, and Coveting Cuba: James Buchanan’s White House Intriques

By WILLIAM P. MACKINNON

We must have Cuba. We can’t do without Cuba . . .

— James Buchanan to Secretary of State John M. Clayton, April 17, 18491

I think in the next ten years we will have plenty to do in the war line –Mormon war, civil broils and strife … and other exciting topics, and last a war with Spain, resulting in the conquest of Cuba.

— Former Capt. William T. Sherman to Rep. John Sherman, January 18582

When President James Buchanan’s prosecution of the Utah War snagged upon unexpected, embarrassing Mormon resistance in early October 1857, the administration scrambled to rescue its Utah Expedition. Its response was to organize a massive, tactically risky spring attack on the Salt Lake Valley from California and Oregon Territory as well as across the

A New York political cartoon from 1858 depicting a nervous James Buchanan writing a valentine to Miss Cuba under the watchful eye of Uncle Sam.

William P. MacKinnon is an independent historian residing in Montecito, California. He is a Fellow and Honorary Life Member of the Utah State Historical Society, and during 2010-2011 was President of the Mormon History Association. He thanks Patricia H. MacKinnon and Ardis E. Parshall of Salt Lake City for their editorial and research help.

1 Buchanan to Clayton, April 17, 1849, James Buchanan Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, included in John Bassett Moore, ed., The Works of James Buchanan, Comprising His Speeches, State Papers, and Private Correspondence. 12 vols. (New York: Antiquarian Press, Ltd., 1960) 8: 361.

2 William T. Sherman to John Sherman, January [?] 1858. Rachel Sherman Thorndike, ed., The Sherman Letters: Correspondence between General and Senator Sherman from 1837 to 1891 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894), 64.

Plains from military posts in Kansas and Nebraska territories.3

The purpose of this article is to probe the unexploited evidence that while Buchanan worked to reinforce the Utah Expedition from the Pacific Coast, he was secretly intriguing to use this thrust by Winfield Scott, the army’s general in chief, to advance a longstanding personal and diplomatic agenda heretofore unrecognized as linked to the Utah War. The president’s plan was to stimulate a mass Mormon exodus to Sonora, Mexico, at the point of a bayonet followed by acquisition of much of northern Mexico and Cuba through a combination of diplomatic and military gambits.

Although much of this presidential scheming was deferred, if not stillborn, by the spring of 1858, it is worth examining today as another illustration of the extent to which Utah’s history — including that of her conflicts with the U.S. government — has long been linked to forces that were regional and international as well as local in character. By examining James Buchanan’s administrative behavior, fantastic as it may seem today, Utahns also acquire a more complete understanding of the politicalmilitary pressures brought to bear on the territory during 1857-1858. Equally important, this incident sheds light on presidential leadership style during the fateful national secession crisis only three years later.

As presidential historian Michael Beschloss reminds us, though, it is not easy “… to dramatize a nonevent. Telling a tale that unfolded in conflicts behind Washington’s closed doors is more difficult than recounting the boom and bang of battlefields.”4

When James Buchanan assumed the presidency on March 4, 1857, “the Mormon problem” — what to do about Brigham Young and his highly controversial governance of Utah Territory — was so low among the president’s priorities that there was no discussion of it in his inaugural address. Yet, for reasons discussed elsewhere, within three weeks Utah had unexpectedly become a burning issue, with Buchanan resolving to replace Young and immersed in determining the size of the military force needed to escort the new territorial governor to Salt Lake City.5

If, on his arrival at the White House, Buchanan was not focusing on

3 The Utah War of 1857-1858 was the armed confrontation between the administration of President James Buchanan and the civil-religious leadership of Utah Territory led by Governor Brigham Young, second president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was a conflict that pitted Utah’s large, experienced territorial militia (Nauvoo Legion) against nearly one-third of the U.S. Army. The most recent brief description of the war is William P. MacKinnon, “Utah War,” essay in Mormonism, A Historical Encyclopedia, W. Paul Reeve and Ardis E. Parshall, eds. (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2010), 120-22. The most complete narrative and documentary histories of the war are: David L. Bigler and Will Bagley, The Mormon Rebellion: America’s First Civil War, 1857-1858 (Norman: Arthur H. Clark Co., 2011); Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict 1850-1859 (1960; rpt., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1: A Documentary History of the Utah War to 1858 (Norman: Arthur H. Clark Co., 2008).

4 Michael Beschloss, “Missile Defense,” review of Neil Sheehan’s A Fiery Peace in a Cold War in New York Times Book Review, October 4, 2009.

5 MacKinnon: “Causes of the Utah War,” The Vedette, Newsletter of the Fort Douglas Military Museum Association (Spring 2007): 3-6; At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 99-137; “And the War Came: James Buchanan, the Utah Expedition, and the Decision to Intervene,” Utah Historical Quarterly 76 (Winter 2008): 22-37.

Utah, the acquisition of international territory in furtherance of American “Manifest Destiny” was on his agenda. With typical indirection, the new president included in his inaugural address the thought that, “It is our glory that, whilst other nations have extended their dominions by the sword, we have never acquired any territory except by fair purchase … Acting on this principle, no nation will have a right to interfere or to complain if, in the progress of events, we shall still further extend our possessions.”6

With respect to America’s immediate neighbor to the south, it is well to remember that during the Mexican War James Buchanan had served as President Polk’s secretary of state. At war’s end he was embroiled in the provocative debate over annexing all of Mexico and supervised the development of the treaty by which Mexico lost one-third of her territory to the United States.

Within weeks of his inauguration — on the day that the Utah Expedition began its march west — Buchanan secretly ordered John Forsyth, his minister to Mexico City, to seek a treaty with Mexico. By Buchanan’s terms, unsanctioned by an adjourned Congress, the U.S. would pay Mexico up to fifteen million dollars to purchase a vast northern region while clarifying American transit rights earlier established to build a railway across Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec. With Mexico hyper-sensitive to American pressure and again teetering on the brink of revolution, Forsyth was so shocked by the aggressive tone of these instructions that he declined to communicate Buchanan’s offer to the Mexican government until forced to do so the next November. The leading historian of U.S.-Mexican relations of the period characterizes the president’s quest for Mexican territory as rapacious (“despoiling”) to the point of brutality.7

Buchanan’s interest in Cuba, a slave-holding Spanish colony, predated his focus on Mexico, rooted as it was in the country’s longstanding fascination with the island that began soon after the American Revolution and intensified throughout the nineteenth century.By the time Buchanan was Polk’s secretary of state the United States offered to buy the island for the then enormous price of one hundred million dollars, a proposition that Spain rejected contemptuously.8 Motivated by Cuba’s strategic location off the mouth of the Mississippi River, close proximity to Florida, and attractiveness to adventuresome European powers, an expansion-minded Buchanan was quoted as saying, “We must have Cuba...We shall acquire it by a coup d’état at some propitious moment, which...may not be far distant.” Shortly after leaving the state department in 1849, Buchanan

6 Moore, ed., The Works of James Buchanan 10:113.

7 Cass to Forsyth, July 17, 1857, in Donathon C. Olliff, Reforma Mexico and the United States: A Search for Alternatives toAnnexation, 1854-1861 (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1981), 87. See also William Ray Manning, ed., Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States: Inter-American Affairs, 1831-1860 (Washington: U.S. Department of State and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, 1939), 234-38.

JAMES BUCHANAN

advised his successor, “We must have Cuba. We can’t do without Cuba, & above all we must not suffer its transfer to Great Britain.” Before long, the notion had become embedded in the partisan sectional debate over the extension of American slavery.9

Five years later, in 1854, James Buchanan—by then U.S. minister to Great Britain—was again at the center of American intrigue over Cuba. While President Franklin Pierce was strongly committed to acquiring the island, he was befuddled as to how best to proceed given the uproar over the expansion of slavery unleashed that year by Pierce’s embroilment with the Kansas-Nebraska Act. To clarify the Cuba issue without further aggravating sectional tensions, Secretary of State William L. Marcy quietly instructed the U.S. ministers to Spain (Pierre Soulé of Louisiana), Great Britain (James Buchanan of Pennsylvania), and France (John Y. Mason of Virginia) to develop a Cuban acquisition policy for the administration to consider. Buchanan assured his volatile colleague, Soulé, that “... there is no citizen of the United States more anxious than myself for the accomplishment of this object in a fair and honorable manner.”10

A meeting between the three diplomats took place in October 1854 in Ostend, Belgium, to draft the requested memorandum. At the heart of this document were multiple rationalizations for American interest in Cuba, especially her strategic location commanding the mouth of the Mississippi River and the potential for a bloody Haitian-like slave revolt on the island under the harshness of continued Spanish control. Among the most controversial passages of the Ostend Manifesto were those in which Buchanan, Mason, and Soulé jointly asserted that if Spain refused their recommended offer of up to $120 million, “by every law, human and divine, we shall be justified in wresting it from Spain …”11 Buchanan privately expressed the personal view to Secretary Marcy that the acquisition of Cuba was “a necessity,” one for which “... we ought to be willing, if necessary, to risk a war.”12

Almost immediately this meeting became the subject of widespread international controversy, especially in the United States, an embarrassment that forced the Pierce administration to disavow the Ostend Manifesto. In the face of this incident, all efforts to acquire Cuba came to a halt in somewhat the same fashion as did President Pierce’s simultaneous but unrelated attempts to replace Brigham Young after Brevet Lt. Col. Edward

8 Louis A. Perez, Jr., Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

9 Elbert B. Smith, President Zachary Taylor: The Hero President (Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 2007), 188; Buchanan to Clayton, April 17, 1849, Moore, ed., The Works of James Buchanan 8:361.

10 Buchanan to Soulé, September 26, 1854, James Buchanan Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, excerpted in Amos Ettinger Aschbach, The Mission to Spain of Pierre Soulé, 1853-1855: A Study in the Cuba Diplomacy of the United States (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1932), 347.

11 Buchanan, Soule, and Mason, Memorandum to Marcy, October 18, 1854, Moore, ed., The Works of James Buchanan 9:267-73.

12 Buchanan to Marcy, October 31, 1854, ibid., 9: 260-66.

Jenner Steptoe’s embarrassing refusal to accept Utah’s governorship in the spring of 1855.13

Yet if Franklin Pierce lacked constancy in the face of obstacles, James Buchanan was often tenacious, especially if he thought he could proceed secretly and the matter at issue advanced his political agenda. Not long after his inauguration, Buchanan picked up where his predecessor left off with respect to Cuba and Utah.

The president’s minister to Spain, an Iowan with the appropriately imperial name Augustus Caesar Dodge, recognized this doggedness. In late September 1857, he wrote Buchanan from Madrid, “The acquisition of Cuba I am well aware from your early and unflagging advocacy of the measure, is one which will be cherished and promoted throughout your entire administration. . . . [but] I can see little or no probability of our acquiring Cuba by any diplomatic means heretofore employed at this court and without a change in the ways and means.” 14 In December, almost as on cue from Minister Dodge, Buchanan returned to Cuban matters and did so with the recommended unconventionality.

Sir William Gore Ouseley. This self-portrait pencil sketch c. 1830 depicts Ouseley as a young man diplomat-artist.

It was a month of multiple challenges for the president during which Minister Forsyth was simultaneously dealing with Mexican rage over Buchanan’s recently delivered treaty demands of the prior July as well as the onset of a full-blown revolution. In Washington, Buchanan himself was grappling with aggressive congressional demands for information about the Utah Expedition’s origins and cost in the wake of the Panic of 1857.

On December 13, 1857 — literally as Buchanan was about to invite Thomas L. Kane to the Executive Mansion to discuss his intent to mediate the Utah War — the president met secretly with another lawyer from Philadelphia, Christopher Fallon.15 In Fallon’s case, the presidential agenda

13 MacKinnon, “Sex, Subalterns, and Steptoe: Army Behavior, Mormon Rage, and Utah War Anxieties,” Utah Historical Quarterly 76 (Summer 2008): 227-46.

14 Dodge to Buchanan, September 26, 1857, quoted in Louis Pelzer, Augustus Caesar Dodge: A Study in American Politics (Iowa City: State Historical Society of Iowa, 1909), 228-29. When Congress reconvened in early December 1857 after a nine-month recess, it was in an accusatory, finger-pointing mood since during the previous spring it had neither been consulted nor involved in the now troubled Utah Expedition. At this point Congress was not yet aware of Buchanan’s treaty instructions to Forsyth in Mexico City.

15 For the origins of Kane’s 1858 mission to Utah and his prefatory Washington meetings with Buchanan in early November and late December 1857, see MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 405-13, 485-87, 494-512.

was a plan to dispatch him to Madrid as the quiet vanguard of a renewed effort to buy Cuba.

Christopher Fallon, a forty-eight-year-old U.S. citizen of Irish parentage, Spanish birth, and Philadelphia residence, was closely connected to members of the Spanish royal family as a financial advisor. Fallon had no governmental standing, although, because of his profession and place of residence, he was known not only to President Buchanan but unquestionably to Kane as well as to the president’s two closest Utah War advisors in Philadelphia, U.S. attorney James C. Van Dyke and lawyer Robert Tyler, son of former president John Tyler.16

What Buchanan asked Fallon to do during their clandestine meeting on December 13 was to sound out the cash-strapped Spanish king about his willingness to sell Cuba to the United States. The obvious implication was that part of any purchase price would find its way to the royal coffers as well as to the Spanish national treasury. Coincident with these overtures in Madrid, Fallon’s instructions directed him to begin discussions with European bankers about financing the purchase, a necessity inasmuch as Buchanan had neither discussed Cuba with Congress nor sought its authorization for such an acquisition. There is a distinct possibility that neither Secretary of State Cass nor Buchanan’s trusted secretary of the treasury, Howell Cobb, were aware of Fallon’s mission. It is a significant indication of Buchanan’s deviousness that he privately enlisted Fallon in such a gambit only five days after sending his annual address to Congress without a reference to Cuba. In the “Private & Confidential” instructions that Buchanan gave Fallon, he assured his agent that “Both you & those with whom you converse may rely with confidence upon my silence & discretion.”17

Thus at year-end 1857 Christopher Fallon sailed east to Madrid, Thomas L. Kane headed west to Utah via Panama and California, and to the south John Forsyth witnessed the slide of Mexico into chaotic revolution. Unlike the cabinets of Presidents Pierce and Lincoln, which bracketed his, James Buchanan’s department heads included no diarist, and the president himself did not keep a journal. With Buchanan presiding schoolmaster-like over informal cabinet luncheons on a near-daily basis, much of his administration’s business was handled conversationally rather than through an exchange of interdepartmental memoranda. Ever the cautious lawyer and political creature, Buchanan often responded to incoming mail or sensitive matters either face-to-face or not at all. With these restricted

16 For the Utah War roles of Van Dyke and Tyler, see MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 39, 122-25, 410, 479-80, 485-87, 494-98, 505-06; and 122-24 and 132, respectively.

17 Buchanan to Fallon, December 14, 1857, Moore, ed., The Works of James Buchanan 10:165; also James Buchanan Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. For a description of Fallon and how he went about his ultimately unsuccessful negotiations, see Sarah Agnes Wallace and Frances Elma Gillespie, eds., The Journal of Benjamin Moran, 1857-1865. 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948) 1:209, 278, 280, entries for December 31, 1857, March 27 and 31, 1858.

resources and the president’s guarded, convoluted personal style, there is a paucity of surviving material shedding light on Buchanan’s inner thoughts during the Utah War.18

While this thin written record is the key to determining much of why and what President Buchanan did during this period, it is based on notes kept by credible visitors to the Executive Mansion who interacted directly with Buchanan or one of his cabinet officers. In many ways, the most valuable accounts flowing from such insiders were the long, newsy Washington dispatches written to Brigham Young at least monthly by Utah’s territorial delegate in Congress, Dr. John M. Bernhisel. Yet with respect to the Utah War, Bernhisel’s reports have limitations since he seemed intimidated by Buchanan, avoided contact with him at key junctures, and once even withdrew from Washington during a crucial period.19

Another source potentially even more valuable to historians than Bernhisel’s reporting were the dispatches generatedby Washington-based European ambassadors for their foreign secretaries. Like journalists, the job of these diplomats was, among others, to report on major American events, economic conditions, and governmental issues relevant to their home country. Unlike newspaper reporters, foreign envoys often had direct access to the president as well as to Secretary of State Cass. For example, at one critical juncture in the fall of 1857 a dispatch written by Edward A. de Stoeckel, Russian minister to Washington, immediately following a meeting with Buchanan shed light on the president’s frustrations with “the Mormon problem” and his reactions to rumors of plans for a mass Mormon exodus to Russian America (Alaska). It was an important dispatch that helped trigger Tsar Alexander II’s decision in December 1857 to authorize negotiations to sell Alaska to the U.S. rather than risk its seizure by Brigham Young without compensation.20

During 1857-1858, one of the more interesting writers of diplomatic dispatches in Washington was the envoy closest to President Buchanan — Sir William Gore Ouseley. He was an old British friend from Ouseley’s

18 Buchanan’s secretary-nephew described his orderly but circumscribed office routine in James Buchanan Henry, “Biographical Sketch,” Moore, ed., The Works of James Buchanan 12: 323-27.

19 Bernhisel’s reports are in the Brigham Young Collection, LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City. For his ambivalence about contact with Buchanan see MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 120-21.

20 Ibid., 441-44; Gene A. Sessions and Stephen W. Stathis, “The Mormon Invasion of Russian America: Dynamics of a Potent Myth,” Utah Historical Quarterly 45 (Winter 1977): 22-43.

President James Buchanan.

posting to Washington in the late 1820s while Buchanan was still in Congress and Buchanan’s assignment as head of the Pierce administration’s diplomatic legation in London during 1853-1856. In the midst of the Utah War — at about the time of Lot Smith’s October 1857 raid, when Buchanan first became aware that the Utah Expedition was beleaguered and needed reinforcements — Ouseley arrived in Washington. He was on his way to a diplomatic post not in that city but rather in Central America. Nevertheless, Ouseley dallied in Washington unofficially for nearly twelve months, and quickly assumed the role of presidential confidant — even confessor — on international matters. That Ouseley succeeded in forging such an intimate tie with President Buchanan so rapidly was attributable to multiple factors: the length of their friendship; their similarity in age; the diplomat’s charm and that of his American-born wife; their mutual connection to the Roosevelt family of New York; Buchanan’s isolation as an aging bachelor virtually alone in the Executive Mansion; the multiple political pressures besetting the president; and Buchanan’s significant lack of confidence in his ineffectual secretary of state, Lewis Cass.21

Ouseley’s unaccredited presence in Washington during 1857-1858 is itself a complex story laced with ambiguity, intrigue, and manipulation. When Ouseley left Great Britain in October 1857, his post was to be in Central America. His charge was to resolve a series of outstanding diplomatic issues that had grown out of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850 to impact negatively the British-American relationship in the western Caribbean and the adjacent republics of Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Honduras. Technically Ouseley was only passing through Washington in 1857 as a transient, seeking American approbation for his mission and awaiting the tactically advantageous time to take up his negotiating assignment in Central America. From the distance of London, the waspish secretary of the American legation commented, “The General [Cass] is in a mist [fog] about Ouseley’s Mission, which I am not surprised at, for I don’t believe Ouseley himself knows what he is about, or what he was ever sent to Washington for.”22

Notwithstanding Buchanan’s protestations to the contrary, there are signs that early in his presidency he had arranged a temporary perch in Washington for Ouseley and his American-born wife because of his affinity for the couple. To British envoy Lord Francis Napier, Tenth Baron of Merchistoun, President Buchanan commented, “I had been very intimate

21 For biographical information about Ouseley and the origins and dynamics of his relationship with Buchanan see “William Gore Ouseley,” essay in Wikipedia , http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/William_Gore_Ouseley (accessed, March 7, 2011); James J. and Patience P. Barnes, eds., Private and Confidential: Letters from British Ministers in Washington to the Foreign Secretaries in London, 1844-67 (Selinsgrove, PA.: Susquehanna University Press, 1993), 182-94. Also relevant with respect to the president’s relationship with Ouseley’s superior in London is Frederick Moore Binder, “James Buchanan and the Earl of Clarendon: An Uncertain Relationship,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 6 (July 1995): 323-41.

22 Wallace and Gillespie, eds., The Journal of Benjamin Moran, 1857-1865, 1:305-06, entry for May 4, 1858.

with him & his lady during my residence in London. I entertained a very warm regard for both.”23

The seemingly open-ended, ambiguous nature of Ouseley’s presence in Washington and his obvious camaraderie with Buchanan created significant tensions, if not rivalry, in the capital’s British legation. These dynamics also spawned American press speculation as to whether Lord Napier or Ouseley carried the relationship between the two governments, especially since Ouseley also held the diplomatic rank of envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary. During the winter of 1857-1858, a Washington belle described Ouseley as the “Knight of the Mysterious Mission.” 24 In his dispatches to the British secretary of state for foreign affairs, George William Frederick Villiers, Fourth Earl of Clarendon, Ouseley disavowed intent to fuel these perceptions. He provided examples of how, to the contrary, he had taken steps to arrange intimate social contacts between Lord Napier’s young family and Harriet Lane, Buchanan’s niece and White House hostess. Nonetheless, the more Ouseley protested his selflessness and emphasized access to Buchanan, the more he subtly rationalized the merits of further delaying his departure for Central America. Implicit in this maneuvering was Ouseley’s message to Lord Clarendon about the value of his ability to report on Buchanan’s thoughts about not only Central America but Mexico, Cuba, and — unexpectedly — Utah. If Ouseley was not viewed by Lord Clarendon as the indispensable man in Washington, it was through no lack of trying on his part.

The medium for Ouseley’s reportage from Washington was a series of episodic dispatches written to Clarendon at his explicit invitation and marked “Private & Confidential,” a formal label signaling a higher sensitivity than even those more routine reports designated “Secret.”25 With his reports so marked and written on a special-sized paper signifying their importance, Ouseley’s dispatches were transmitted directly to Clarendon through an elaborate, three-stage trans-Atlantic courier system that by-passed the public postal services of both the United States and Great Britain. It was a delivery system worthy of a security conscious Brigham Young, who adopted similar procedures for sending and receiving his most sensitive letters across the United States and Europe.26 Understanding the arrangements by which confidential dispatches from Ouseley were encouraged by Lord Clarendon

23 Buchanan, Memorandum of a Conversation with Lord Napier, October 19, 1857, Moore, ed., The Works of James Buchanan 10:124-26.

24 Virginia Clay-Clopton and Ada Sterling, ed., A Belle of the Fifties: Memoirs of Mrs. Clay, of Alabama, Covering Social and Political Life in Washington and the South, 1853-66 (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1905), 134.

25 British diplomats stationed abroad did not feel free to send such non-routine, often-personal correspondence to the secretary of state for foreign affairs (in this case Lord Clarendon) without an explicit invitation by him to do so. Buchanan, from his diplomatic days in London, adopted the British practice of labeling his most sensitive correspondence “Private & Confidential” as with his December 14, 1857, letter to Christopher Fallon about acquiring Cuba discussed above.

26 MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 29-30.

and then couriered to him is crucial to evaluating the candor as well as importance of these reports.

When Lord Clarendon left office in March 1858, he took Ouseley’s dispatches with him as private property. Accordingly, they came to rest in Clarendon’s personal papers rather than in the official files of the foreign office eventually accessible to the public in London’s National Archives.Consequently, the Ouseley material was and is sequestered; as such it remains largely unexploited.Today, these dispatches are under the control of the present Earl of Clarendon and are, in effect, on loan by him to Oxford University’s Bodleian Library.

Sir William Gore Ouseley at about the time of his 1857-1858 visit to Washington D.C.

Because of space limitations what appears below are excerpts from only two of Ouseley’s dispatches from the opening months of 1858, those most relevant to the Utah War.27 His reports provide a unique glimpse of James Buchanan and his cloistered White House world as he dealt with widely separated events heretofore viewed as unconnected. Here the president reacted in November 1857 to news of Lot Smith’s October raid in Utah; formulated his military response and presented it to Congress in December; simultaneously dispatched Christopher Fallon to Spain to buy Cuba and met with Thomas L. Kane about his intended mediation mission to Salt Lake City; coped with the rise of Benito Juarez and revolution in Mexico; and posted a reluctant General Scott to California to open a second front against the Mormons to hammer them from the Pacific Coast.

On January 23, 1858, in the midst of all these presidential activities, Sir William Gore Ouseley confided to Lord Clarendon:

I dined the other day with the president. This was not a private party but a large dinner. I was the only Englishman, I believe the only foreigner present. When the party was about to break up Miss Lane had, or affected to have something to say to my wife, and asked her to remain. 28 When the other guests were gone the President took me up to his room “to smoke a cigar” and a long interview and some apparently

27 The author thanks the Earl of Clarendon and Mr. Collin Harris, Superintendent, Department of Special Collections Reading Rooms, Bodleian Library, Oxford University, for access to and a photocopy of these holograph materials. For convenience, they are presented here as drawn from Barnes and Barnes, Private and Confidential, 182-94 rather than from the originals in what Bodleian Library designates the “Clarendon Deposit.” At the Bodleian, the original dispatches of January 23 and February 15, 1858, are catalogued as MS Clar. dep.c. 83, fols. 371-74 and 385-88, respectively.

28 Buchanan often used Harriet Lane to facilitate his interpersonal manipulations.

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

confidential conversation of a desultory but not an uninteresting character ensued. Among the subjects he spoke of [was] the Mormons and the troubles in Utah. He said that he had upwards of two thousand of the “best troops” ready to act against them in the spring; that they would probably migrate into British possessions and he wished me joy of them.29 He added that any number of volunteers were ready to march against the Mormons from California but that the Governor had decided upon not calling for their services. I asked why, he replied that “all the Mormons would be massacred if the Californians marched against them.” He did not wish this and it was better to let them leave the country.30 (Yet General Scott is about to proceed to California ostensibly to conduct operations against the Mormons). Possibly there is an intention of directing or forcing the movement of the Mormons so as to serve the purpose of the U.S. Government in Mexico. …

It is fascinating to correlate Ouseley’s comments about Buchanan and Mexico with the fact that on January 18, five days before this dispatch, Delegate Bernhisel had written to Brigham Young to report that he had visited the president and that Buchanan had unexpectedly dropped his objections to the rumored possibility of a Mormon exodus from Utah to Mexico.31

On February 15, 1858, Ouseley reported again to Clarendon, this time to relay an account of what he had learned in confidence from Buchanan about the linkage between the president’s prosecution of the Utah War and his two highest priorities other than preservation of the Union — seizure of northern Mexico and the acquisition of Cuba by purchase or conquest:

The designs of the President respecting Cuba have met with an unexpected check in the refusal of Congress to allow the increase of the army or to appropriate funds for the [Utah] expedition of General Scott to the Pacific coast une die [at the same time].32

29

Here Ouseley reports a reaction by Buchanan to press speculation of a Mormon mass exodus to the Pacific Coast in language consistent with that attritubed to the president in reporting two months earlier by Stoeckel to the Russian foreign minister following his meeting with Buchanan about the same rumor. Buchanan’s independently recorded comments to Stoeckel give credibility to Ouseley’s reporting of the same subject to Clarendon. MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 442.

30 Ibid., 107. Since March 1857, Buchanan had feared that a full public awareness of inflammatory language from Mormon leaders would unleash an uncontrollable, violent public backlash, especially (but not exclusively) from California, where some, but certainly not all, residents still harbored resentment over their treatment while migrating through Utah. For perceptions by transients of ill-treatment in Utah see David L. Bigler, ed., A Winter with the Mormons: The 1852 Letters of Jotham Goodell (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Tanner Trust Fund, 2001). By January 1858, rage in California over the Mountain Meadows massacre had added to this volatility.

31 Bernhisel to Young, January 18, 1858, Brigham Young Office Files, CR 1234/1, Box 61, Fd 2 (Reel 71), LDS Church History Library.. The envoy also described the extent to which prolonged congressional obstinence over funding for an expanded Utah Expedition was unwittingly threatening the viability of this presidential scheme.

32 For a discussion of Gen. Winfield Scott’s scheduled departure for the Pacific Coast to organize a move against Brigham Young from California and Oregon – a thrust to be undertaken over Scott’s objections and at the insistence of Buchanan and Sec. of War Floyd – see MacKinnon, “Buchanan’s Thrust from the Pacific: The Utah War’s Ill-Fated Second Front,” Journal of Mormon History 34 (Fall 2008): 226-60; reprinted with revisions in The California Territorial Quarterly 82 (Summer 2010): 4-27. Scott abruptly canceled his trip and on February 4, 1858 – the literal eve of his scheduled departure – so notified Col. Albert Sidney Johnston without explanation other than to say that there would be no move against Utah from the Pacific. In 2007, when the author first drafted this study of a second front for the Utah War, he was no more aware of the Ouseley-Buchanan discussions than had been Gen. Scott a hundred and fifty years earlier.

It may seem that there is little direct connection between an expedition ostensibly against the Mormons or involving relations with Mexico and plans for the acquisition of Cuba. The latter however is the real object; the other is subsidiary to it and serves to mask the real movement 33 The intention as to the Mormons was to bring about their emigration to Sonora [Mexico] and thus to turn their rebellion to account by making them pioneers for future annexation [Texas-like] under a quasi-military colonial system, that General Scott was partly to inaugurate without however being aware of the full scope of the project for the execution of which he was to be one of the instruments.34 His [Scott’s] personal [wartime] experience and former relations with [President] Santa Anna and other leading men in Mexico was also to be used to the furtherance of the objects of the U.S. in profiting by the [Mexican] difference with Spain. In all these matters, the increase of the army and a large appropriation for expenditure by the Executive, would have enabled the President when this Session [of Congress] is over to begin to carry into effect his grand object.35 I look upon it as only deferred and should not be surprised if before Congress disperses the President should obtain the means he covets for a purpose on which he deems absolute silence to be as yet necessary. He will find other ostensible motives to cover his real object. The building and equipment of several war steamers now actively in progress, ostensibly for service on the African station [as anti-slavers] and to reinforce the Gulf of Mexico squadrons have, I more than suspect, reference to the same purpose. The real intention as to the Mormons is to buy them out which will it is said cost two or three millions of dollars, and the surplus of the appropriation would have given the Executive means for commencing the execution of its real plans [for Mexico and Cuba].36

Buchanan’s reported intent to try to steer a mass Mormon migration to Mexico rather than to the Pacific Northwest must have been a vast relief to Ouseley. For months the British had worried that the longstanding Mormon interest in Vancouver Island was being rekindled.37 Three days after Ouseley sent his February 15 dispatch to Lord Clarendon, the alarmed

33 Emphasis added. As early as November 24, 1857, in the midst of administration plans to reinforce the Utah Expedition, Ouseley had reported to Clarendon, after meeting with Buchanan, “the key in short to his whole system of govt. negotiations & foreign policy is to be found in the one absorbing long-cherished plan of the later years of his life – viz., the acquisition of Cuba during the term of his own Presidency” [emphasis Ouseley’s].

34 For a discussion of the extent to which Gen. Scott was often unaware of what troop movements President Buchanan and Secretary Floyd were ordering during the Utah War, see MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 95-97, 129-33.

35 When Buchanan initiated the Utah Expedition during the spring of 1857, Congress had just adjourned. Ouseley here anticipates that Buchanan would again undertake a military intervention, this time in northern Mexico, without the complexity of congressional involvement.

36 For press speculation that Buchanan and Delegate Bernhisel were engaged in buy-out discussions and Bernhisel’s cryptic signal to Brigham Young that he was involved in some such sort of highly secret gambit to resolve the Utah War, see “Important from Washington,” Dispatch, New York Herald, February 2, 1858, 4/5; Bernhisel to Young, June 29, 1858, Brigham Young Office Files, CR 1234/1, Box 61, Fd 2 (Reel 71), LDS Church History Library.

37 For the interest of Mormon leaders, including Joseph Smith, in this area during the Nauvoo period, see Ronald K. Esplin, “’A Place Prepared’: Joseph, Brigham and the Quest for Promised Refuge in the West,” Journal of Mormon History 9 (1982): 85-111; J.B. Munro, “Mormon Colonization Scheme for Vancouver Island,” Washington Historical Quarterly 25 (1934): 278-85; Richard Bennett and Arran Jewsbury, “The Lion and the Emperor: The Mormons, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and Vancouver Island, 18461858,” BC Studies 128 (Winter 2000/2001): 37-62. Napier to Clarendon, November 16, 1857, Foreign Office, Public Record Office (National Archives), London; copy in Manuscript Division, U.S. Library of Congress; MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 441.

British colonial secretary in London cornered the U.S. minister, George Mifflin Dallas, at a royal reception and “… entered upon the topic of the [presumed] intention of the Mormons to migrate into the territory held by license by the Hudson Bay Company. He said if they once get there it would be difficult to get rid of them, notwithstanding the expressed repugnance of the Queen to have such ‘horrid creatures’ among her subjects.”38

Ouseley’s February 15, 1858, dispatch to Lord Clarendon was stunning in the complexity of the scheming that it attributed to Buchanan. The only study known to have commented upon this report summarized Ouseley’s conclusion as being to the effect that Buchanan had “hoodwinked” an unwitting Congress into considering the possibility of increasing the military budget. He did so by using “the Mormon problem” as a stalking horse for his real objectives to Utah’s south, Mexico and Cuba.39

From Buchanan’s comments to Ouseley it is clear that the president believed that annexation of some or all of Mexico could follow the establishment of a critical mass of Americans in Mexico along the lines of the break-away that had unfolded in the gigantic Mexican state of Tejas y Coahuila during the Texas Revolution of the 1830s. As historian Donathan Olliff — an authority on revolutionary Mexico — sees it, Buchanan viewed his objectives in Mexico “... as achievable by either of two methods, by purchase or by settlement of large numbers of United States citizens in the subject areas. … A large Yankee population could result in annexation by the will of the inhabitants, as had happened in Texas.” 40 Olliff was oblivious to the possibility of tens of thousands of Mormon refugees becoming such a “Yankee” influx, but James Buchanan was not. And so Brigham Young’s Move South, plotted for weeks and announced in Salt Lake City on March 21, 1858, takes on special significance.41

How Buchanan could believe that a southbound Mormon diaspora to Sonora — stimulated by military pressure from a Utah Expedition reinforced by General Scott from the Pacific Coast — would be willing to re-affiliate with the United States, is an intriguing mystery. Brigham Young had already been down that road after being driven out of Illinois and migrating to Mexico’s eastern Alta California (Utah) beginning in 1847. Ten years later Young still chafed over the approach of the Utah Expedition in the face of LDS participation in the Mexican War through the U.S. Army’s Mormon Battalion. To expect Young to flee to Sonora in 1858 at the point of American bayonets and then call for annexation by the United

38 Susan Dallas, ed., Diary of George Mifflin Dallas; while United States Minister to Russia 1837-1839, and to England 1857 to 1861 (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1892), 241, entry for February 18, 1858.

39 Barnes and Barnes, Private and Confidential, 193.

40 Olliff, Reforma Mexico and the United States, 113.

41 The Move South was the exodus ordered by Brigham Young of an estimated thirty-thousand Mormon refugees from northern Utah to a holding pattern in Provo during April-June 1858 in anticipation of the Utah Expedition’s entrance into the Salt Lake Valley once it had received supplies, remounts, and reinforcements from Kansas, New Mexico, and possibly even California.

States as Texans had done fifteen years earlier, is counterintuitive. Utah’s Brigham Young was not Texas’s Stephen F. Austin, although one of the Utah Expedition’s anonymousdragoon privates saw it differently: “It is thought by many that the movement in Utah is a mere feint to attract public attention, while the administration is preparing for a blow at Mexico, under the guise of protection as laid down in Sam Houston’s revolution. This may be correct,and will account for the President’s anxiety to raise regular troops instead of volunteers to carry out the Mormon War. . . . It is evident that Old Buck is ‘spoiling for a fight,’ and intends to try his hand somewhere. Some are [contemptuous] enough to insinuate that the old man, having lived so long without getting a wife, is envious of Brother Brigham’s success among the ladies, and takes this mode of venting his rage.”42

Then there is the matter of Mexico’s likely reaction to such a humiliating chain of events. Normally such a scenario would trigger a war between the two states involved, as it had between Mexico and the United States in 1846 following American annexation of Texas. On the other hand, the chaos in revolutionary Mexico starting in January 1858 was such that Buchanan may have believed that he could risk forcing his will on that country as France’s Napoleon III later would do in sending an army into Mexico in 1864 to restore order and install an emperor and as President Woodrow Wilson would do in seizing and briefly occupying the Mexican port of Veracruz during 1914.

The means by which Buchanan planned subsequently to spring from Mexico to his apparent main objective, Cuba, is even more elusive. Unfortunately, the Cuban part of this expansionist billiards game was a scenario on which Ouseley did not report further. It appears based on Christopher Fallon’s mission, the arguments of the Ostend Manifesto, and

42 Private “Utah,” Letter of May 28, 1858, to the Philadelphia Daily Evening Bulletin, June 8, 1858, published in Harold D. Langley, ed., To Utah with the Dragoons and Glimpses of Life in Arizona and California 1858-1859 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1974), 20-21. The author’s research in the Mexican governmental archives for 1857-1858 is not yet complete. A partial survey of this material yields a diplomatic picture as chaotic as the country’s political instability. The Mexican legation in Washington episodically reported on Mormon affairs simply by relaying American press reports. There are no signs of Mexican diplomatic interfaces with President Buchanan of the type enjoyed by the ministers of Great Britain and Russia discussed above.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Brevet Lt. General Winfield Scott.

Buchanan’s subsequent correspondence — that in early 1858 the president planned to purchase Cuba from a distressed and distracted Spain and, failing that, to consider taking the island forcibly, perhaps in the wake of an American-stimulated revolution on Cuba, as would actually happen in 1898. Notwithstanding the significant cash needs of Spain’s government and royal family, Fallon’s discussions failed later in 1858 in the face of hypersensitivity in Madrid over the blow to Spanish pride associated with any potential loss of Cuba.

How reliable was Sir William Gore Ouseley as a reporter of Buchanan’s inner thoughts and plans? To what extent can the president’s private conversations with him be taken at face value? The answers to these questions are important, for the Ouseley to Clarendon dispatches constitute the sole insider account of a comprehensive Buchanan plan to manipulate reinforcement of the Utah Expedition from the Pacific Coast to advance a billiards-like agenda involving a mass Mormon exodus to Sonora followed by American military intervention in northern Mexico and the acquisition of Cuba.

On a broad basis, one way to think about Ouseley’s reliability is to consider the totality of his record as a career diplomat before arriving in Washington during the fall of 1857. To that point, the only known negative was a murky incident decades earlier that led to his relief from a post in Brazil by the foreign office, an episode in which Ouseley was later found to have been in the right.43 The subsequent willingness of Lord Clarendon to send Ouseley to first Washington and then Central America to resolve the highly sensitive Clayton-Bulwer Treaty impasse — a problem not of Ouseley’s making — appears to indicate that by 1857 he was in good, if not high, standing at the British foreign office. Rumors of his posting to Central America via Washington prompted one New York newspaper to comment that, “… the choice indicates a disposition, on the part of the British Government, to conduct this delicate and protracted negotiation to a peaceful and mutually satisfactory result.” After noting with approval Mrs. Ouseley’s American birth, the paper added, “He has ever since manifesteda steady and intelligent interest in the affairs of this country.”44 From this record it could be argued that there is no reason not to accept Ouseley’s reports as an accurate recording of what President Buchanan told him.

On a more specific level, it should also be noted that the envoy’s account of Buchanan’s views on Mexico and Cuba are consistent with the president’s earlier positions as well as those that he took after the Utah War. Furthermore, Ouseley’s recording of Buchanan’s views on Utah in late November 1857 were not only directionally consistent with those that the president expressed at that time to the Russian ambassador, they closely track the presidential language on this subject that

43

“William Gore Ouseley,” essay in Wikipedia. 44 “A Special Minister to be Appointed for the United States,” New York Times, October 29, 1857.

Minister Stoeckel reportedto his superiors in St. Petersburg. Ouseley’s comments on Buchanan’s deviousness in sending a lessthan-informed General Scott to California, is an accurate reading of Buchanan’s propensity to manipulate situations and people. Another example of such behaviorwas the president’s awareness on December 26 that Thomas L. Kane intended to discuss exodus with Brigham Young without revealing to Kane that any such Mormon flight to Mexico would perhaps be followed by a Buchanan-arranged intervention there. It was such lack of forthrightnessin Buchanan’s year-end dealings with Kane that prompted his wife, Elizabeth, to record in her diary that Thomas’s brother, Pat, and several former friends of Buchanan considered the president’s conduct to be what they termed “Buck all over.”45

Yet, if Ouseley is to be considered an accurate source, it must be with the caveat that he was a self-interested one. The envoy’s dispatches to Lord Clarendon are garnished with frequent recitations of his valuable access to Buchanan, especially vis-á-vis that of his presumably less-connected Washington rival, Lord Napier. So heavily did Ouseley wield the trowel of self promotion that in London Benjamin Moran, the prickly but powerful secretary of the American legation and a Buchanan protégé from Pennsylvania, reacted with ridicule to one of Ouseley’s dispatches to which he became privy.46 Moran’s comments may reflect jealousies within the lower level of London’s diplomatic community more than serious flaws in the accuracy of Ouseley’s dispatches. Nonetheless, they should serve as a cautionary note signaling the need for historians to put Ouseley’s

45 MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 508.

46 Wallace and Gillespie, eds., The Journal of Benjamin Moran, 1857-1865, 1:420, entry for September 2, 1858.

This political cartoon from 1854 highlights diplomat James Buchananʼs role in drafting the Ostend Manifesto which called for the acquisition of slaveholding Cuba by the United States.

observations to the test of healthy skepticism and energetic cross-checking before accepting them without reservation.

Awareness through Ouseley’s dispatches of presidential planning for a secret, complex chain of events designed to start in Utah and end in Cuba raises an important question. Should historians now consider an additional conspiracy theory alongside the several traditional ones that have lamentably shrouded the Utah War’s origins?47 Is it possible that Buchanan initiated the Utah Expedition in March 1857 to advance international expansion — American Manifest Destiny — rather than simply to restore federal authority in Utah? Such an interpretation by conspiracy theorists will almost inevitably arise, with a broader awareness of Ouseley’s dispatches taken together with Buchanan’s reference to territorial acquisitions in his inaugural address and his secret July 17, 1857, treaty instructions for Minister Forsyth. Such a new conspiracy theory would be an unfortunate distraction, and should not gain credence once reawakened fascination with the Buchanan-Ouseley dialogue falls into a broader context.48

The evidence suggests that Buchanan’s long-term pursuits of Mexico and Cuba while intense, were not factors in the Utah Expedition’s origins. At that time — March 1857 — replacing Brigham Young and restoring federal authority were the president’s objectives.49 However, once Buchanan realized in mid-November 1857 that effective Mormon military resistance was a reality and that he would have to reinforce the Utah Expedition, armed confrontation in the Rockies and Great Basin provided a field for manipulation. This opportunity led to presidential fantasies, if not scheming, about California, Utah, northern Mexico, and Cuba. The need to reinforce the Utah Expedition in 1858 provided an opportunity — one that stimulated Buchanan’s more devious instincts. In early 1858 a second front for the war — a large thrust from the Pacific — to force Brigham Young out of Utah and south into Mexico, provided the means to scratch two presidential itches: Buchanan’s “Mormon problem”; and his need to expand the United States to fulfill its Manifest Destiny.

Naturally a scenario of this character also raises questions as to whether a

47 The longstanding conspiracy theories – none substantiated – by which Buchanan supposedly launched the Utah Expedition to enrich the army’s freighting firm of Russell, Majors and Waddell; distract the nation from civil conflict in “Bleeding Kansas”; or respond to a proto-Confederate cabal in his cabinet seeking to weaken the federal government by draining the Treasury and scattering its army to the West, are discussed in MacKinnon, “125 Years of Conspiracy Theories: Origins of the Utah Expedition of 1857-58,” Utah Historical Quarterly 52 (Summer 1984): 212-30; Richard D. Poll and MacKinnon, “Causes of the Utah War Reconsidered,” Journal of Mormon History 20 (Fall 1994): 16-44. When the author published these studies he was unaware of the Ouseley dispatches, which did not surface until publication of the Barnes’s book Private and Confidential in 1993.

48 Potentially adding fuel to such an unsupportable conspiracy theory is the coincidence by which the man whom Buchanan sent out in late 1858 as U.S. minister to Spain was William Preston of Louisville, Kentucky,Col. Albert Sidney Johnston’s father-in-law and Secretary of War Floyd’s cousin. Preston’s charge was to succeed where Fallon had failed in acquiring Cuba, a mission in which he too was unsuccessful.

49 MacKinnon, “And the War Came,” 22-37; At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 99-135.

demonstrably devious President Buchanan misled, if not duped, not only General Scott but Thomas L. Kane and Brigham Young as well. It is likely that at Christmas-time 1857, Kane told Buchanan that when he reached the Salt Lake Valley and met with Young, he intended to broach the subject of a mass Mormon exodus from Utah.50 Yet the president apparently chose not to comment on Kane’s plan at that time, thereby allowing Kane to sail west oblivious to the broader Utah-Mexico-Cuba scheme the president would soon confide to Ouseley. If and how Kane and Brigham Young subsequently discussed an exodus is unknown, but less than two weeks after Kane arrived in Salt Lake City on February 25, 1858, Young cryptically informed both Delegate Bernhisel in Washington and the president of the Mormon British Mission in Liverpool that he was continuing to keep his “eyes” on Russian Alaska.51

On March 21, 1858, with a northern route for escaping the Utah Expedition unexpectedly precluded by the recent Indian attack on the Mormon outpost at Fort Limhi, Oregon Territory, Young abruptly announced a change in policy. He would flee and continue to search for elusive oases in western Utah’s White Mountains rather than continue plans to fight the army. The initial destination for thirty-thousand southbound Mormons was Provo, with the location of the ultimate haven undisclosed. This was to be the largest movement of refugees in North America since the removal of Acadians from Nova Scotia after the French and Indian War and of British Loyalists from the U.S. to Canada during the American Revolution. On his return to Philadelphia and Washington in May 1858, Kane told a westbound New York Times reporter whom he encountered on the trail that he believed the Mormons’ destination to be Mexican Sonora.52 It was a region that James Buchanan formally asked the U.S. Senate to sanction seizing six months later in December 1858, albeit without Brigham Young’s help and, as it turned out, without Congress’s either.53

Whether James Buchanan succeeded with such intrigue is one issue;

50 MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 501-03.

51 Young to Bernhisel and Young to Asa Calkin, both March 5, 1858, Brigham Young Office Files, CR 1234/1, Box 60, Fd 7 (Reel 70) and Box 18, Fd 10 (Reel 26), respectively, LDS Church History Library.

52 Richard D. Poll, “The Move South,” BYU Studies 29 (Fall 1989): 65-88. The ultimate destination of this migration has never been established. Occasionally Young hinted that Sonora was to be the targeted haven, but he never said so clearly, and movement toward such a destination would have been highly problematic, if not seemingly impossible. In late May 1858, an eastbound Kane encountered James W. Simonton, a New York Times reporter, at Sweetwater Bridge, Nebraska Territory, and gave him the impression that Young, whom he had just left, was heading for Sonora. “The Mormons. Colonel Kane’s Statement on the Way Home from Salt Lake City.” Dispatch of May 23, 1858 by “S” [Simonton], New York Times, June 25, 1858. Later, an anonymous letter-writer in Washington speculated, “… is it not more than probable that KANE was first sent out [to Utah] by the Administration, with the hope that the Mormon emigration south might contribute towards the acquisition of Sonora and Chihuahua?” Anonymous, Letter, July 19, 1858, New York Times, July 20, 1858, 1/2. Unknown at this time, of course, was Kane’s counsel in the 1870s that Young should consider a mass exodus to Mexico in response to tightening of federal enforcement of the polygamy statutes.

53 Buchanan, “Second Annual Message to Congress,” December 6, 1858, Moore, ed., The Works of James Buchanan, 10: 256.

This 1856 political cartoon portrays James Buchanan and his desire for Cuba—as identified on the lapel of his jacket.

that as president he briefly entertained such plans, and pursued them manipulatively and clandestinely, is another matter. As researchers address anew the linkage between the Utah War and James Buchanan’s foreign scheming, the Utah War may be seen in its true lights. It was a massive armed confrontation with regional (western) and international sweep, rather than an episode narrowly confined to Mormon Utah. In this connection it is well to remember that muchmaligned James Buchanan was not just a parochial Pennsylvania politician. During the Mexican War he had been President Polk’s secretary of state, and under Presidents Jackson and Pierce, Buchanan had been American minister to Russia and Great Britain, respectively.

President Buchanan has been depicted as doddering, passive, indecisive and blundering—especially when matched against a supposedly strategically brilliant Brigham Young. Perhaps this was the president who faltered so disastrously during the secession crisis of 1860-1861, but during the opening year of his administration, James Buchanan was scheming, devious, secretive, manipulative, and — above all else — an interventionist, rather than feckless.54

In late March 1857, Thomas L. Kane wrote to Brigham Young to describe Buchanan as “a timorous man,” and only two months earlier Young had confided to Kane the view that, “We are satisfied with the appointment of Buchanan as future President, we believe he will be a friend to the good, that Fillmore was our friend, but Buchanan will not be a whit behind.”55 Both men may have seriously misjudged how keen the

54 The most recent examination of Buchanan’s temperament, administrative style, and actions as president is Michael J. Birker and John W. Quist, eds., James Buchanan and the Coming of the Civil War (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, forthcoming). One of the chapters included in this volume is William P. MacKinnon“Prelude to Armageddon: James Buchanan, Brigham Young, and a President’s Initiation to Bloodshed.”

55 Kane to Young, ca. late March 1857, Thomas L. Kane Papers, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, California; Young to Kane, January 7, 1857, Brigham Young Letterpress copybook transcriptions, 1974-78

JAMES BUCHANAN

presidential appetite for adventure at their expense was and how sharp his teeth could be in pursuing it.

On September 14, 1857, as Brigham Young released his fateful gubernatorial proclamation of martial law in Utah Territory, George Mifflin Dallas, the American minister in London, wrote to Secretary of State Cass to describe the aggressive, acquisitive image in Great Britain and Europe of James Buchanan’s administration. The occasion for this report was diplomatic speculation, including Ouseley’s, that political chaos in Mexico would prompt an attempt by Spain to reassert its sovereignty over that country and that this distraction would, in turn, facilitate American seizure of Cuba. Dallas’s portrait of a United States led by James Buchanan featured an American leader who was neither timid nor benign. From Europe, Buchanan’s America was viewed as an impending avalanche — “a belligerent individual to be encountered wherever there is a muss, and who cannot be put down.”56

Because Sir William Gore Ouseley was not formally accredited by the British government to the United States during 1857-1858, historians of Mormonism and the American West have not associated him with a military campaign in Utah. For the most part, such analysts have been oblivious even to Ouseley’s temporary presence in Washington, let alone its significance. By the same token, diplomatic historians, primarily riveted on the intrigues in foreign chancelleries, have been wholly unaware of the Utah War, if not Mormonism itself. Lost in the process has been an appreciationof the confidential discussions of armed confrontation in Utah and its international linkages that unfolded at a critical juncture between a simpatico British diplomat and a lonely bachelor-president over Cuban cigars and tumblers of Old Monongahela whiskey in James Buchanan’s White House office.57

(“Romney transcripts”), MS 2736, vol. 3, 273-77, LDS Church History Library. Both letters may also be found in MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 115 and 74-76. Ironically, Young would later suggest to Kane (without knowing of Utah’s place in Buchanan’s 1858 schemes) that the American Civil War could be halted through an international diversion “to annex Mexico to the United States and then go on and annex the Central States of [Latin] America, Cuba—all the West India Islands—and Canada? What can we do to help you in this matter?” Young to Kane, September 21, 1861, Brigham Young Papers, CR1234/1, Box 19, Fd16 (Reel 28), LDS Church History Library.

56 Dallas, Dispatch (#146) to Cass, September 14, 1857, A Series of Letters from London 1:202-03.

57 So alarmed was the British government over the vast but unpredictable implications of a possible army-driven, mass Mormon exodus from Utah toward the Pacific coast, it instructed the Royal Navy “to afford the Assistance of H[her] M[ajesty’s] Ships for the prevention of a violent & forcible landing of the Mormons, in the event of your being called upon to do so by HM Consul General [in Honolulu] as requested by the [Kingdom of Hawaii’s] Secretary of State.” See “Contemplated Emigration of Mormons from Utah to the Sandwich [Hawaiian] Islands.” Memo from British under secretary of state for foreign affairs, June 8, 1858, found in Rear-Admiral Robert L. Baines, commander Pacific station (Peru), to secretary of Admiralty board (London), July 22, 1858; ADM 1 (Correspondence and Papers of the Admiralty, and Ministry of Defence, Navy Dept.), Box 5694, Bundle Y, Item 156, British National Archives, Kew.

The Utah Batteries: Volunteer Artillerymen in the

Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, 1898-1899

By BRANDON JOHNSON

In April 1899, a knot of volunteer soldiers from Utah milled expectantly outside the fortified Filipino settlement of Malolos, waiting for the order to open fire on the town with their 3.2-inch rifled cannons. Malolos had been a buoyant place the previous autumn, welcoming a steady stream of constitutional delegates tasked with founding an independent Philippine Republic. Now, the city, perched near the azure curl of Manila Bay, was the new nation’s besieged capital, a highly symbolic target for the Utahns and their comrades in the U.S. Army’s Eighth Corps. The westerners’ eagerness for action apparently showed. According to one member of the unit, the artillerymen wended their way through “dense woods, bamboo thickets and over all manner of formidable obstacles” on the march to Malolos, trembling with the “excitement of expectation.” When they finally bivouacked for the night in sight of the trenches that ringed the town, “the battery boys” from Utah “threw themselves down anywhere for a good rest in preparation for the hot work which surely awaited the artillery in the morning.”1

The war the Utah men were waging was a crusade for empire. They and their compatriots

Troops from Utah in Cuartel de Meisie, the Philippines, 1898.

Brandon Johnson lives in Virginia and works in Washington, D.C. He wishes to thank his father, Hal Johnson, for his research assistance on this article.

1 A. Prentiss, ed., The History of the Utah Volunteers in the Spanish-American War and in the Philippine Islands (Salt Lake City: W. F. Ford, 1900), 295.

had come to the Philippines as self-appointed liberators; they left having created a colonial regime ruled from Washington. For centuries, the cluster of islands named for Spain’s King Philip II had been a cog in the monumental Spanish imperial machine that, at its height, spanned a significant chunk of the Americas and stretched from the Pacific Rim’s western margins to the shores of Europe. Over the years, however, that oncepowerful engine wore down, leaving Spanish hegemony vulnerable to nationalist movements across the empire. While early nineteenth-century revolutionaries, including Simón Bolivar and José de San Martín, carved new nations out of Spain’s dying domain in the Western Hemisphere, the Filipino nationalist cause stayed weak and the Philippines remained bent under the Spanish yoke for nearly another hundred years. The revolution came slowly to the Philippines, and when the Filipinos finally imbibed the spirit of independence at century's end, they seemed unstoppable.

By mid-1898, the Filipino Army of Liberation, estimated at between 15,000 and 40,000 men and led by ardent nationalist Emilio Aguinaldo, had the Spanish bottled up in Manila. The last step for the insurgent leader and his ragtag band was to descend on the city and deliver the coup de grâce But Aguinaldo's revolutionary army would never have the chance to land their final blow. In July 1898, troops of the American Eighth Corps (including the Utah volunteers) landed near Manila, the vanguard of an expeditionary force bent on avenging what they believed was Spain’s surreptitious bombing of the U.S.S. Maine at Havana, Cuba, and, more important for the Filipinos, dismantling what was left of the Pacific flank of Spain's decrepit empire. (A few months earlier, on April 25, 1898, the United States Congress had passed a formal resolution declaring war on Spain.) The Americans muscled their way into the battle against the Spanish, and then once Spain was defeated, they turned on their erstwhile Filipino allies.2

The men of the artillery units known as the Utah Batteries played a crucial role in the wars against the Spanish military and Aguinaldo's insurgent government, yet their story is relatively unknown. After helping defeat the Spanish in the Philippines, they became key players in the military campaign against the Army of Liberation, fighting around Manila, on the Marilao River, and at Malolos alongside their fellow Americans.

For the Utah volunteers, however, the wars against the Spanish and Aguinaldo’s Filipino nationalists had an added importance. In 1898, their state—named the nation's forty-fifth on January 4, 1896—was a mere two years old, making the war against Spain (and then the war against the Army of Liberation) the first that Utahns could participate in as citizens of a bona fide state. This fact is made more significant by the intense internal strife

2

Brian McAllister Linn, The Philippine War, 1899-1902 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2000), 18-23, 42.

that had rocked Utah over its near halfcentury history as a territory. Statehood only came after a period of intense social and political discord that pitted Mormon Utahns against federal officials and elements of Utah's non-Mormon population. Military occupation; a constantly revolving lineup of governors, judges, and federal officers; hotly contested elections; harsh anti-polygamy raids; and an increasingly well-known massacre of overland migrants by Mormon settlers at Mountain Meadows had marked the contentious territorial period. Over the years, the federal government closely monitored happenings in the Great Basin, going so far as to empower, under the authority of the Edmunds Act of 1882, a five-member Board of Registration and Election (otherwise known as the Utah Commission) to oversee voting in the territory. Under the national microscope, Mormons and non-Mormons both claimed the mantle of oppressed innocence: Mormons argued they were the victims of federal excesses and the machinations of “Gentile” schemers at home, while non-Mormons alleged that only the federal presence in the territory stood between them and their total subjugation at the hands of the Mormon majority. Statehood, when it came, reformatted Utah’s political landscape, brought Mormons and non-Mormons together into the prevailing national Republican and Democratic parties, soothed (if only briefly) federal angst over Utah's “Mormon problem,” and pushed the former territory into the arena of mainstream political and social discourse. Of course full reconciliation in Utah may not have been a truly realistic

A group of Utah soldiers during the Spanish-American War.

possibility, even after the compromises that led to statehood were finalized. Most Utahns at least seemed to recognize, however, that in addition to having to actually get along, they had a part to play together as participants in the grand American "pageant." And, once war came, what better way to signal the fledgling state's newfound national feelings, reasoned Utahns of all stripes, than to volunteer to fight for Uncle Sam.3

For the state's Mormons especially, such feelings were new. Prior to the war against Spain, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints had practiced what D. Michael Quinn has termed “selective pacifism,” choosing to respond to calls for military mobilization on a case-by-case basis. In the 1840s, Brigham Young had allowed Mormon men to enlist in the war against Mexico, but when the Civil War broke out less than twenty years later, Young resisted any involvement of Utah's Latter-day Saint population in the conflict, due in no small part to James Buchanan's heavy-handed 1857 dispatch of an army of occupation to Utah. This “Utah War” effectively propelled the LDS church into embracing pacifism; there was no way the Mormons would fight for a government that had sought to control them at the point of a bayonet.4 Later, when Brigham Young finally acceded to Abraham Lincoln’s request to have armed Mormons at least guard the overland mail routes while civil war raged in the East, the Latter-day Saint prophet pointedly declared that “all this does not prove any loyalty to political tyrants.”5 Statehood in 1896 and the political sovereignty that came with it, however, radically modified the way Utah Mormons perceived their civic responsibility to mobilize for war. Though some Mormon leaders, including apostles Matthias Cowley and Brigham Young, Jr., viewed the possibility of war with Spain with more than a little anxiety, the church’s official stance

3 The story of Utah’s territorial era is complex, and historians have spilled a lot of ink telling it. See Gustive Larson, The "Americanization" of Utah for Statehood (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1971); E. B. Long, The Saints and the Union: Utah Territory during the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981); Edward Leo Lyman, Political Deliverance: The Mormon Quest for Utah Statehood (Urbana:

of Illinois Press, 1986); and David L. Bigler, Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon Theocracy in the American West, 1847-1896 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1998).

4 D. Michael Quinn, "The Mormon Church and the Spanish-American War: An End to Selective Pacifism," Pacific Historical Review 43 (August 1974): 342.

5 Journal of Discourses, X, 107 (discourse delivered on March 8, 1865), quoted in Quinn, "Mormon Church and the Spanish-American War," 351.

University

Charles R. Mabey, Utahʼs governor from 1921-1925, in his Utah National Guard uniform during his service in the Spanish American War.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

was for its members to stand with the nation and fight alongside their non-Mormon neighbors. 6 Pro-war feelings ran strong among ordinary Utahns of all backgrounds. Schools were closed, “Old Glory” was unfurled and flown “in every conceivable place,” and when troops posted to Utah's military installations began leaving for distant battlefields, “refined ladies passed through the [troop] trains, grasping [the soldier’s] hands with fervor and giving them words of praise and encouragement.” Citizens of the Union's youngest state seemed to rediscover their identity as Americans, and their “pent-up” nationalist feelings “at last found a vent and the fire of patriotism flamed high in every soul.”7

Utah was undergoing a surge of nationalist sentiment not unlike what the rest of the country was experiencing. The Spanish-American and Philippine-American conflicts were the first full-scale wars the United States waged since the Civil War had pitted American against American. For good or ill, the overseas conflicts provided a patriotic pretext for national reunion. Exuberant citizens cheered the soldiers marching to battle and heartily hailed Commodore George Dewey’s resounding defeat of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on May 1, 1898. In the words of one historian, “it was war again, with all the thrills, few of the promised perils, and, to universal satisfaction, with the blue and gray reunited.” Another scholar has put the reunifying potential of the war even more starkly. War against Spain (followed by war against the Filipinos) “was uniting the American people in a way they had not known in more than a generation. It promised to erase the last scars of the Civil War and Reconstruction.” He was clearly

6 Quinn, "Mormon Church and the Spanish-American War," 357.

7 Prentiss, Utah Volunteers in the Spanish-American War, 24-25.

Utah soldiers on the firing line near Caloocan, the Philippines, 1898.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

overstating the curative power of armed conflict; the wounds inflicted by slavery, civil war, and racism were far too deep for a relatively short foreign war to heal. Nevertheless, Americans from every region and section fought side-by-side in the new national conflict, and President William McKinley did go out of his way to appoint a few high-profile former Confederates— including Fitzhugh Lee (nephew of Robert E. Lee and a general in the Confederate cavalry) and Joseph Wheeler (also a Confederate cavalryman and general in the Civil War’s western theater)—to senior military posts, perhaps hoping to help along the project of national reunification.8

The patriotic flame sparked by the war burned brightly among Utah's men. President McKinley issued a call on April 23 for 125,000 volunteers from “the several States and Territories,” apportioned according to population and committed to two years of service, to augment the regulars already deployed to fight the Spanish. Utah’s quota, according to Secretary of War Russell A. Alger, would be one troop of cavalry and two batteries of light artillery. (Several other units later increased the original allocation.)

Obediently, Governor Heber Wells put out the call for 500 men from around Utah to fill the quota, instructing the state’s National Guard to fill as much of the requirement as it could; he also appointed a handful of recruiting officers to canvass the state and make up the difference. Religious leaders, including the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, encouraged followers to join up, and by May 5, a scant few weeks after McKinley issued his call for volunteers, the work of recruitment in Utah was done. Governor Wells declared that “the patriotism of the State was so aflame that there were on the grounds of the mustering rendezvous … more than twice as many volunteers as were needed to fill the quota designated.”9

Wells was only half right, though, when he suggested that national feeling was the reason his fellow Utahns enlisted to fight in a foreign war. History has repeatedly shown that men—particularly young men—can be attracted to war for a variety of reasons beyond patriotic fervor, including a hankering for adventure, heroic ambition, the desire to prove one’s “manliness,” or to defend an ideal. In the case of the war against the Spanish and Filipinos there were also ideological reasons for conflict, particularly reasons rooted in racial and ethnic doctrine. White AngloSaxon America represented the force of world progress, wrote Utah editor A. Prentiss in his volume on the state's volunteer soldiers, while the Spaniard’s character was marked by such unenviable and backward traits as “bloodimindedness” and “militarism.” No doubt Prentiss was echoing the thoughts of more than a few of Utah's volunteers when he wrote that

8 Frank Freidel, The Splendid Little War: The Dramatic Story of the Spanish-American War (Short Hills, NJ: Burford Books, 1958), 27; and G. J. A. O'Toole, The Spanish War: An American Epic—1898 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 196.

9 Prentiss, Utah Volunteers in the Spanish-American War, 25-30.

“when two such human antagonisms as Spanish and American character” found themselves on opposite sides of the controversy over Spain’s rule in Cuba and the Philippines, “a conflict was as inevitable as is the production of a spark by sharp contact between flint and steel, and the fierceness of that conflict would be in exact ratio to the intensity of the difference in the nature of the two elements.”10

Evidence that this worldview bled over into how the Utahns understood their subsequent war against Aguinaldo’s Army of Liberation can be found in the words of Richard Young, senior officer in the Utah Batteries. The Filipinos, he sniffed, “are absolutely incapable of self-government, being half barbarous, and each tribe considers every other one its natural prey.” Young concluded that American troops had come to the Philippines to put down Spanish militarism, but they had stayed to civilize the place. “If we should recall our forces,” he asserted, “they [the Filipinos] would destroy each other in the race for supremacy, millions [in] American and foreign capital would be lost, and hundreds of foreign residents would be massacred.” Editor Prentiss agreed with Young. The Filipinos were like children, he argued. It would “be about as sensible to expect [them] to establish and maintain a genuine republic, as it would be to demand of the primary department of one of our public schools the establishment and maintenanceof a daily newspaper.”11

10 Ibid., 14-15.

11 Ibid., 214, 220.

UTAH

Volunteers from every walk of life and every corner of the state rushed to join the batteries. According to one source, “Mormon, Gentile and Jew, Republican, Democrat and Populist; high, low, rich and poor” filled the batteries’ ranks. The officers in both artillery units, many of whom came over to the Utah Batteries from service in the National Guard, hailed mostly from Salt Lake City (all of them in Battery A and three-fourths of them in Battery B), though when it came to non-commissioned officers and other enlisted men, the makeup of the two units diverged. Battery A was almost evenly split between residents of Salt Lake City and men from other parts of the state; two-thirds of its sergeants were Salt Lakers, but only around a half of its other enlisted men hailed from the state's capital city. In Battery B, by contrast, two-thirds of the sergeants were from communities other than Salt Lake City, while more than four-fifths of the other enlisted men were from outside Utah’s capitol city. (Places like Provo, Ogden, Mercur, Ephraim, Gunnison, Bountiful, and Park City were well represented in Battery B.)12

Making their way to Salt Lake City and a makeshift camp on Fort Douglas’s lower parade ground, the volunteer artillerymen mustered-in on May 3. The mass of greenhorns who lined up at the camp surgeon’s door for their induction physical, wrote Charles Mabey, a corporal in Battery A and Utah's future governor, was a mixed bag of “farmers fresh from the plow, cowboys from the plain, miners from the mountains, blacksmiths from the forge, students, teachers, doctors, [and] bookkeepers.” Nowhere near ready to go to war, the raw recruits needed training, and drilling began immediately on the camp's parade ground. (Shortly before the sinking of the Maine, the Utah National Guard had acquired eight 3.2-inch B & L rifled cannons, the core of the batteries' weaponry, giving them a chance to practice their gunnery skills.) In the end, though, the training regimen was cut short. The men took their military oaths after a mere six days in camp and became soldiers. Only seventeen days after mustering they were on their way to Camp Merritt near San Francisco to prepare for shipping overseas. Throngs of well-wishers greeted them on the city’s streets and jammed the platforms at the railroad depot. To the tune of “My Country ’Tis of Thee” and other patriotic songs, the still green artillerymen stepped aboard a heavily-decorated train and set out for the West Coast.13

The ranking officer in Battery A was Richard Whitehead Young to whom Governor Wells had awarded a captaincy. By Utah Mormon standards, Young possessed a pedigree second-to-none: as Brigham Young’s grandson, he possessed a cachet few others in the state could claim. He also was no military neophyte, having graduated fifteenth in his class from West

12 Ibid., 29-30, 394-402. These numbers are drawn from the units' original muster rolls and were included in the Prentiss book.

13 Charles R. Mabey, The Utah Batteries: A History (Salt Lake City: Daily Reporter Company, 1900), 120-30; Salt Lake Tribune, May 21, 1898.

Point and having served on the staff of Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, who was perhaps best known for temporarily commanding Union forces at Gettysburg in 1863. For a time, Young also served as acting Judge Advocate for the army’s Department of the East. (A letter of recommendation for the position characterized him as possessing “high legal accomplishments, sound judgment, rare industry and a clear perception of legal principles.”) And the new captain knew his way around big guns, thanks to a stint with a frontier artillery detachment. In 1889, he left the military for civilian life—first to practice law and then to accept the editor’s post at the Salt Lake Herald—but he immediately volunteered to return to the army when war with Spain erupted. His light moustache, thin mouth, and penetrating eyes projected martial seriousness—a gravitas Mormon historian and theologian B. H. Roberts paid homage to when he wrote that Young, “conducted himself as a knight sans peur et sans reproche [without fear and without reproach].”14

Young’s counterpart in Battery B, Captain Frank A. Grant, was neither a Mormon nor a native Utahn. Born in Canada, Grant hailed from Kingston, Ontario, which he eventually left for Detroit, intent on making a new life for himself in the United States. In Detroit, he became an American citizen, and worked as a steamship pilot on the Great Lakes, before moving west to settle in Utah. Like Young, he, too, was no newcomer to military affairs, having graduated from Canada’s Kingston Military College and having served as a colonel in the Utah National Guard. His men liked him. One private in Battery B exclaimed that “if a fellow was in trouble, or wanted any favor, even if it was to borrow a dollar, some one would always say ‘Go to … Grant, and he will fix you up.’ He will do anything for the boys.”15

Supporting the two captains was a cadre of experienced lieutenants. In Battery A, the three junior officers were George W. Gibbs, whose service in the national guards of Massachusetts (where he was an infantryman), Montana (as captain of a cavalry troop), and Utah (as a major of artillery) meant he was a particularly seasoned officer; William C. Webb, an immigrant from England; and Ray C. Naylor, who eventually earned a promotion to the Battery B executive officer slot.16 Grant’s original junior officers in Battery B were Edgar A. Wedgewood, John F. Critchlow, and Orrin R. Grow, all veterans of the Utah National Guard. (When Young was promotedto the rank of major and given overall command of both batteries, Wedgewood took his place at the head of Battery A, while Critchlow ended the war as Battery B’s captain when Frank

14 Mabey, Utah Batteries, 102-103; Richard W. Young to the President of the United States and Jeff Chandler to William C. Endicott, Richard Whitehead Young Papers, Box 1, Folder 3, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City; Prentiss, 369-71.

15 Mabey, Utah Batteries, 103-105; Prentiss, Utah Volunteers in the Spanish-American War, 375-78.

16 Mabey, Utah Batteries, 178, 108-10, 112-13; Prentiss, Utah Volunteers in the Spanish-American War, 39092.

Grant was advanced to the rank of major.)17 The Utahns’ stay in California was shortlived, but they seemed to make the best of it. Red Cross volunteers gave the batteries “a royal welcome” when they arrived.18 And, of course, the soldiers had time to hone their martial skills by drilling. But they were also given liberty to explore Camp Merritt and its surroundings. Isaac “Ike” Russell, a private in Battery A, and a friend of Charles Mabey, had enough free time to collect seashells and mail them to his sisters in Utah. “Tell Sam [his brother] to give you one of them, and tell him to be careful of the one in the envelope for it will break if you look at it,” Russell instructed. “Tell him also to keep the rocks safe as they are fossils I don’t want to lose.” (The young soldier seemed oblivious to the dangers that awaited him in the Philippines; he was too preoccupied with the “very pretty things” he was going to send home once he got there.) Almost as soon as they arrived at Camp Merritt, however, the men of the batteries were on their way again, this time halfway around the globe. On June 15, 1899, after loading their guns, caissons, limbers, and other gear on the three ships that would carry them to the Philippines—the Colon, the China, and the Zealandia—Batteries A and B of the Utah Light Artillery sailed to war.19

Ike Russell had received a letter from his brother Sam just prior to the convoy setting sail. His lengthy response to the note, which he wrote from the Colon, provides us with an evocative glimpse into the emotional distress

17 Mabey, Utah Batteries, 19, 105-108, 110-11; Prentiss, Utah Volunteers in the Spanish-American War, 37981, 388-89.

18 Mabey, Utah Batteries, 19.

19 Isaac Russell to his sisters, Isaac Russell Papers, Box 1, Folder 1, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City. (Isaac K. Russell Papers hereafter referred to as IKRP.)

Filipino soldiers captured at Calcoon.

and physical deprivations he and his fellow soldiers suffered on the way to the Philippines. “I read yours [the letter from home] just as the ship pulled out of San Francisco and have just finished reading it,” he wrote to Sam. “Reading it the thirteenth time in search of a little more news—drinking it down and licking the cup as it were. We are now riding along just out of sight of land. A dense fog is coming up from the west and covering the ocean. It is concealing the ships one from another and it gives me a feeling of misty blueness which conceals my soul from myself.” The melancholia Russell felt was surely compounded by the physical suffering inherent in riding the waves across the fickle Pacific Ocean. On one occasion, motion sickness overtook Russell and “he double timed it to the edge of the deck. First my supper went over to the fish, then my dinner, then ten minutes intermission (I hoped it was over), and up came everything within me— gastric juice—bile everything—having nothing left to throw up I threw up my job and went to bed on starvation rations. O the misery of those two days!!” He was at the mercy of the ship’s movements: “I lay on my bed with my feet proped [sic] against the sides and my hands firmly clenching the railing above. The ocean outside roared and rocked in good stile [sic]. A fierce rain storm fell continually and—! Well you can guess the rest. It tossed the little ship like it were a shingle. It rolled and rocked and plunged and jumped and reared and rose and fell.” At one point the ship’s rocking became so unbearable that Russell contemplated jumping overboard—or so he wrote in his letter from the Colon. Sickness, however, was only one of many trials Russell and his compatriots had to tolerate. According to one historian, men slept on moldy straw mattresses, ate spoiled food, and endured ill-fitting uniforms and shoddy underclothes. (Army Quartermaster General Marshall Ludington had issued lightweight canvas uniforms to the Eighth Corps, which the men swore were nearly as hot as the regulation blue wool shirts and pants.)20

A little more than a month after leaving port, the transports carrying the artillerymen and their colleagues in the Eighth Corps’ advance party rode at anchor off the shores of Cavite, southwest of Manila. The Americans skulked around the barracks at Cavite until they were finally moved July 29 to a series of trenches the Filipino rebels had dug around Manila. Having convinced the Filipinos to shuffle to their right, the Eighth Corps—made up of regular infantry units and volunteer regiments from Utah, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Oregon, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Kansas, California, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Washington, Wyoming, Tennessee, and Iowa— shouldered into a narrow southern stretch of the line sandwiched between Manila Bay and a humid, festering swamp. Conditions were terrible. Mud, rain, heat, snipers, and Spanish raids made life in the trenches hellish;

20 Linn, Philippine War, 14; Graham A. Cosmas, An Army for Empire: The United States Army in the SpanishAmerican War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971), 202; Isaac Russell to Samuel Russell, June 5, 1898, Box 1, Folder 2, IKRP.

clothes rotted on the soldiers' bodies. Opposite the Americans lay Blockhouse 14 and Fort San Antonio de Abad, two fortified nodes on the Spanish defensive line. All the Americans appeared able to do was to stare at the seemingly impenetrabledefenses; Admiral Dewey, who had so artfully put Spain’s Pacific fleet on the bottom of the bay in May 1898, now claimed he lacked the firepower to support an advance against Manila.21

It was not long before the Utahns, ensconced in the trenches, had their first taste of combat. Around 11:30 on the night of July 30, Spanish infantry raided the American line, their German-made Mauser rifles, according to one source, “singing venomously.” The men from Utah, joined by elements of a regular infantry unit and the Tenth Pennsylvania Infantry, returned fire.

21 David J. Silbey, A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American

Wang, 2007), 44-49; Linn, Philippine War, 22-23.

War (New York: Hill and

Spanish American War volunteers from Bountiful. Seated on the left is Charles R. Mabey who donated photographs and other materials relating to Utahʼs involvement in the Spanish-American War to the Utah State Historical Society.

On August 19, 1899, Utah Governor Heber M. Wells presented to Major Richard W. Young 355 medals like the one shown in this photograph. The medals were then presented to Utahns who had served in the Philippine Campaign. Each medal carried the engraved name of the recipient.

Gunners from Battery A, led by Sergeant J. O. Nystrom, sprayed the Spanish ranks with shrapnel, firing fifty-seven shells in all. According to one historian, Corporal Charles Varian, shirtless and “sweating like a man who was working for his life,” coolly “managed his piece like a veteran.” Only one Utah man was wounded and none were killed. A few weeks later, on August 13, Major General Wesley Merritt (who commanded Eighth Corps until he was relieved of command in late August and replaced by Major General Elwell Otis) ordered a general attack on Manila. Dewey’s cruisers and gunships in the bay unexpectedly came through with an hour-long supporting barrage, as did the Utahns’ light guns. In the space of a few hours, the American infantry, enduring the lashing fury of a tropical rainstorm, swept over the enemy’s fortifications and through Manila’s suburbs into the city itself, where they were pleased to encounter a white flag. The short First Battle of Manila was over.22

There was a second battle for Manila to come, this time fought by the Americans and Filipinos—once allies, now turned enemies. General Merritt had instructed Emilio Aguinaldo to stay out of Manila when the Americans went in, a directive the Filipino leader ignored. As the American troops moved forward, so too did elements of the Army of Liberation, racing to beat the Eighth Corps into the city they had nearly captured on their own. In the end, the competing forces forged an informal agreement: the Americans would occupy the city proper while the Filipinos, stunned and feeling betrayed, would be allowed to control the suburbs. Elsewhere around the world, in Spain’s far-flung outposts, U.S troops had been equally successful, and within a few months the Spanish were fully subdued, opening the way for American policymakers to broker a peace from a position of immense strength. But with peace came questions, including what to do next with the Philippines.23

Although President McKinley’s administration had not resolved to annex

22 Mabey, Utah Batteries, 22-23; Linn, Philippine War, 23-24; Silbey, War of Frontier and Empire, 48; Ivan Musicant, Empire By Default: The Spanish-American War and the Dawn of the American Century (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998), 567-71.

23 Linn, Philippine War, 25.

the Philippines prior to sending American troops to the islands, the mounting influence of American expansionist ideology in the 1890s gave McKinley and others the political cover they needed to advocate for long-term occupation of the archipelago. For expansionists there was ample precedent for America looking to the Pacific to “fulfill” her colonial aspirations. In 1893, a scant few years before the war against Spain, white planters, with ties to the American sugar industry, had overthrown Hawaii’s Queen Liliuokalani and then sued to join the United States; five years later, Congress obliged them by passing a joint resolution that made Hawaii an American territory.24 The Philippines were on the road toward a similar fate. Now that the United States held Manila (in spite of the continued presence of Aguinaldo and his revolutionaries ringing the city), McKinley and other policymakers decided that the logical next step would be to subdue the rest of the island cluster. Advisors had warned McKinley that his party—the Republicans—stood to lose the 1898 congressional elections if the president incurred the public's wrath by letting the Filipino people go their own way. So on October 25, 1898, McKinley cabled American diplomats in Paris who were working to cement a treaty with Spain. “My opinion,” he wrote, “is that the well considered opinion of the majority believes duty requires we should take the Philippines.”25 Not surprisingly, Aguinaldo would have none of it, and quickly turned his army against his country’s new occupiers.

For good or ill, the Utah artillerymen were fully engaged in advancing America's expansionist policy in the Philippines. At first, both sides settled down and watched each other, wary of potential treachery. Boredom and disease stalked the American troops inside Manila, while anger and frustration infected the Filipinos outside. Isolated skirmishes became the norm, and each side grew to detest the other. According to Corporal William Riter, the Utah volunteers “began to form a strong dislike” for the Filipino soldiers, “a dislike so strong that the men were only too glad to relieve the monotonous life of guard duty by meeting them in combat.” They got their wish on the night of February 4, 1899, when the Filipinos rose up against the Americans. The majority of the Utah men had stayed in Manila since the Spanish capitulation; only a few detachments, including a platoon from Battery A under William Webb, had been sent out on the defensive line that ringed Manila. (The batteries were no longer segregated units: the previous August, army higher-ups had brought them together under a single battalion commander, Richard Young.) Now, the men of the battalion, hearing the clatter of Mauser rifles around the city, found themselves hitching up their guns and rushing off to key points on the front line. Young took one detachment north in the direction of Caloocan, while

24

50. 25 Quoted in

56.

Silbey, War of Frontier and Empire,

Silbey, War of Frontier and Empire,

another group under E. A. Wedgewood rumbled off toward the eastern suburb of Sampaloc.26

Some of the worst fighting swirled around Webb and his detachment at Santa Mesa, northeast of Manila. Webb’s platoon, with its two 3.2-inch guns, had joined the First Nebraska Infantry on what was perhaps the most vulnerable section of the American line. Not only did the San Juan River surround the position on three sides, but the Filipinos also held both the high ground around it and two blockhouses on its left flank. The Nebraskans and Utahns were terribly exposed. When the fighting started on February 4, the Filipinos rapidly infiltrated the American lines, forcing the artillerymen to keep from firing their guns for fear of hitting their own men in the dark. At morning’s first light, though, they let loose with their cannons, stopping a Filipino advance across the San Juan Bridge. Charles Mabey wrote that at this point, “the position of the artillery became perilous” because the Filipinos around the bridge, along with riflemen in the blockhouses and a nearby convent, “centered a galling fire on the big guns.” Their “leaden missiles rained” down on the Americans, killing two of the artillerymen—Corporal John Young, who was shot through the lungs, and Private Wilhelm L. Goodman, who was hit in the head.27

As Ike Russell discovered, violence had also broken out in the heart of Manila. Russell had been living a life of relative ease in the city, following a January discharge from the army. The night of February 4, he was at the theater “when the noise of battle rang through the place,” he wrote in a letter home. “I rushed for barraks [sic] and found the city as I sped through the streets, all arush with our men.” Revolutionary agents had infiltrated the city’s neighborhoods, arming and training secret militias that Aguinaldo planned to use against the Americans. The scene on Manila’s streets was chaotic. Buildings were burning out of control; knife-wielding guerrillas were rushing sentries, and well-hidden snipers were picking off American soldiers brave enough to venture outside. “The rocks of the road,” Russell wrote, “glistened where bullets hit them, the tin roofs rattled where bullets plowed through them.” Making his way through the tumult, he soon realized he was not the only American trying to deal with the surprise insurgency. Men from the Thirteenth Minnesota Infantry were “taking their station” and preparing to tamp down the revolt, while the First Kansas Infantry was falling in and “double timing” for a local district. Finally, Russell found himself outside the barracks that housed the Utah artillerymen. Nearly deserted, they were held only by a small guard contingent led by Lieutenant George Gibbs. “I … ran to my old bunk,” Russell recalled, “where my soldier clothes were still lying. In a moment I was a soldier again and out in the road. My arms had been turned in. I had only a

26 Linn, Philippine War, 26-41; Silbey, War of Frontier and Empire, 59-66; Prentiss, Utah Volunteers in the Spanish-American War, 219, 405-407; Mabey, Utah Batteries, 38-39.

27 Mabey, Utah Batteries, 39-40; Linn, Philippine War, 44-48.

[R]emington rifle which I had saved from the taking of Manila, and my pockets full of ammunition.” Eventually he met up with Lieutenant George Seaman and made his way to the northern stretch of the front line near Caloocan. He spent the rest of the day running wounded to the rear and carrying ammunition to the men on the line.28

This welcome home arch in honor of Utahʼs Spanish-American War volunteers was constructed of papier-mâché and located on Salt Lake Cityʼs Main Street at Second South.

There was a stark brutality to much of the fighting swirling around Manila, as both sides embraced a no-holds-barred style of combat. Filipino soldiers with bolo knives charged the American lines, cutting and slashing as they went. In one case, a knife-wielding Filipino, only steps away from Ike Russell's position, “sliced” a Kansas volunteer’s arm to the bone, while another Filipino grabbed the man around the neck and “stabbed for his heart.” Russell was also wounded in the fray. When he finally caught up to the Kansan, he saw that the severely wounded man was “a pretty sight of carved humanity.” It was clear the Kansas soldier was bleeding to death, so

28 Isaac Russell to Samuel Russell, March 5, 1900, Box 1, Folder 7 IKRP; Linn, Philippine War, 58. It is not entirely clear why Russell was discharged from the army in January 1899, though it appears that it probably had something to do with his editing of the American Soldier, a Manila newspaper, and that it may have been a disciplinary measure. According to his March 5, 1900, letter to Samuel recounting his exploits in the Philippines, he closed the American Soldier down on January 5 under "orders from my commanding officers, the result of statements published in America over my signature." The Filipino insurrection started barely a month later in February, suggesting that though Russell was no longer in the army, he had dragged his feet in cleaning his belongings out of the barracks and his officers had not pushed the issue.

Russell secured the injured man a ride to the hospital. Later, Russell himself went to the rear to have his own wound dressed. The hospital was nearly empty when he arrived, but casualties from around Manila soon came pouring in. “The gutters ran red all day,” wrote Russell, “and a force was continually flushing them to stop them from being clogged up.” In the nearby house that served as a makeshift army morgue, “the bodies piled up. Men in red drenched browns, not khaki but just brown jeans, laid [sic] in stiff lines along the floor. The chaplains tried to close their eyes and fold their hands but they came in numbers too great.”29

Not even non-combatants were spared in the carnage. Russell watched as women and children "ran helter skelter for our lines, stooping and praying every time a shell shrieked over them." One especially ill-fated Filipino woman, recalled Russell, "appeared in the road directly in front of one of our guns just as it was fired. It took both her legs off at the knees." Major Richard Young and Sergeant Harry Young, a second cousin and Battery A's quartermaster, walked out in the midst of the firing, picked the injured woman up, and sent her to the rear. (Harry Young had been a physician in civilian life and could tend to her wounds.)30

One of the key positions the Americans were eager to take lay just up the road from Santa Mesa. Months before, Aguinaldo's forces had shut down the Marikina waterworks, Manila’s key source of water. Now, elements in the Eighth Corps were keen to get the works up and running again, if only to make the city more livable. Webb and Gibbs joined their commands for the offensive on the works. The fighting was fierce. A passage from Webb’s logbook reveals both the aggressive tactics he employed to strike the Filipino line near Marikina and the racially-charged language he used to describe the native army: “February 6th, Monday, at 1:30 p.m., the First Nebraska, [Lieutenant George] Gibbs and my guns started to advance on the pumping station. We (the artillery) just went along with the firing line, and now and then opened fire on the niggers [Filipinos] to start them running, and we just took the works (the pumping station) without losing a man, and the niggers lost eighty-five dead.” Rather than bombarding the Filipinos from emplacements in the rear, as contemporary military doctrine seemed to dictate, Webb put his men and guns directly on the firing line. The artillerymen would unleash a few rounds, and then drag their guns forward as the infantry advanced and fired again.31

Among the casualties in the Marikina battle was Harry Young. He had been shot and stabbed, and his body had been stripped. A gash, presumably inflicted with a bolo knife, extended from his arm all the way to his waist. Ike Russell, who was not about to let the minor wound he suffered earlier in the day keep him in the hospital, was searching for his fellow Utahns

29 Isaac Russell to Samual Russell, March 5, 1900, Box 1, Folder 7, IKRP.

30 Ibid.

31 Webb quoted in Prentiss, Utah Volunteers in the Spanish-American War, 238; Linn, Philippine War, 56.

along the front lines near Marikina, when he encountered a group of Americans who wanted to “take a dead officer to town.” Surrendering his wagon to them, Russell saw them "pack a small, dark body, almost naked" into the back of the coach before he realized that it was the doctor. “I was no longer brave,” Russell later confessed. “Harry Young was dead. It was hardly possible.”32

On the other end of the battle line, near Caloocan, elements of the Utah artillery force were providing support to an attack engineered by Brigadier General Arthur MacArthur, father to Douglas MacArthur, famed World War II-era defender of the Philippines. The Filipinos rushed the American line at Caloocan, coming to within 150 yards of breaching the position. But they were no match for the “awful thunder of the big guns.” The Utahns stood their ground, pounding the rushing native waves with captured Spanish Nordenfelt cannons. “At times,” Charles Mabey wrote evocatively, “the powder-begrimed Utahns were in advance of the main line, carrying death into the very teeth of the foe.” In his official report on the Caloocan battle, Major Young commended his officers and men “most heartily and without distinction” for their work. “The amount of labor done by them,” he gushed, “in dragging guns and constructing earthworks has been prodigious and it has always been done cheerfully. All have been fearless. Compelled to advance along open roads, usually in plain view of the enemy, without the opportunity of concealment, they have unshrinkingly served their guns. It has, too, been a feature of these operations that in

32 Mabey, Utah Batteries, 42; Isaac Russell to Samuel Russell, March 5, 1900, Box 1, Folder 7 IKRP.

Utah veterans of the SpanishAmerican War march during a homecoming parade on August 19, 1899.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

every advance the guns have gone forward practically on the line of skirmishers.”33

The Second Battle of Manila raged for two weeks, but finally subsided in late February as the Americans drove Aguinaldo and his army north out of the city. The battle was a clear victory for the Eighth Corps; one historian characterized the Filipino defeat as a shock to the system of the Army of Liberation. But the fighting had exacted a high toll in human lives and destroyed property. By the time the American provost guard finally pacified Manila on February 23, wide swathes of the city and suburbs were little more than smoldering ruins, and American commanders were already looking forward to launching a spring offensive against the bloodied and demoralized Filipino army.34

The new post-winter campaign focused on destroying Filipino resistance and occupying the politically significant Malolos; the town, though, did not lend itself to easy capture. It lay only about ten miles north of Manila along the coastline railroad, but, as historian Brian McAllister Linn has pointed out, to take the capital the Americans would have to “advance against a natural defensive position dotted with villages, scrub thicket, bamboo, marshes, and rice paddies; it would cross six major rivers, several without bridges, as well as innumerable creeks, gullies, and estuaries.”35 Undeterred, the Americans jumped off on March 25, 1899, sweeping northward through San Francisco de Monte, where Raymond Naylor led his artillery detachment in a dramatic charge unsupported by infantry. Next Bagbag fell, then Polo; bone-tired, worn out by incessant combat, the Utah artillerymen slept among the gravestones in the La Loma churchyard. Days later, the Americans breached the line of the Marilao River, thanks in part to the Utahns’ cannons. When a squad of Kansans successfully flanked the enemy, it was the westerners’ big guns that pounded the opposite shore and covered their assault. (In Brian Linn’s estimation, what should have taken days—namely the breaking of the Filipinos’ Marilao defenses—took only hours.) By April 28, a little more than a month after opening the campaign, the men of the Utah Batteries and their fellow soldiers stood on the outskirts of Malolos, waiting to deliver their own coup de grace. 36

After the long, intense fight for Manila and the early battles of the spring campaign, the clash at Malolos must have felt like something of an anticlimax to the Utah battery men. During the night, the men of the Eighth Corps dug in and the Utahns carefully emplaced their 3.2-inch B & Ls, their captured Nordenfelts, and their Hotchkiss revolving guns to have the greatest effect in the morning's battle. With first light, the artillery opened up on the Filipino entrenchments, the “yawning big guns” roaring “over the

33 Mabey, Utah Batteries, 45; Prentiss, Utah Volunteers in the Spanish-American War, 250-51.

34 Silbey, War of Frontier and Empire, 98; Linn, Philippine War, 59-60.

35 Linn, Philippine War, 92.

36 Mabey, Utah Batteries, 59-62; Linn, Philippine War, 93-97.

plain.” The response from the Filipino side was feeble, motivating the American infantry to move forward and clear the trenches. According to Mabey, “all morning a long curling line of smoke could be seen from the distance arising from the heart of the city. When the artillery swept into the city side by side with the rigid column of infantry they found half the place in ruins.” The streets were virtually empty, and the church, which earlier had doubled as a congressional hall for the fledgling Filipino republic was burning. When the men of the Utah Batteries reached the central plaza, they parked their guns and were accorded the singular honor of raising the American flag over the battered Filipino capital. Malolos had fallen quickly. The Utah men moved on to a series of smaller actions in the nearby towns of Quingua, Santo Tomas, San Fernando, Candaba, and Morong. But they would not stay on far beyond the Malolos battle. By July 1, 1899, they found themselves on the transport Hancock , bound for home via Yokohama, Japan.37

The Hancock nosed into San Francisco Bay on July 29, and the men of the battalion were given quarters in the Presidio. Back in Utah, plans had hurriedly been made to send a few members of the governor's staff to meet the troops, and a citizens’ committee had arranged for a special train to bring the artillerymen back home. After mustering out in mid-August, the Utah men boarded their eastbound train and made their way home to expectant family and friends. Governor Heber Wells, joined by a jubilant crowd, welcomed them to Ogden on August 19, and then accompanied them south to Salt Lake City, where the celebration over their return reached fever pitch. Pulling into the capital city, the former soldiers “saw flaming streamers, flags fluttering and hats waving; they heard the diaphanous shriek of the steam whistles, the blaring of bands and the din of thousands cheering—all mingled in one chorus of praise and rejoicing.” Descending from the train, the men marched to Liberty Park, passing under a “gayly [sic] decked” arch specially-made for the occasion. At the park, dignitaries made their obligatory speeches and each volunteer received a silver medal commissioned by the legislature to commemorate their service in the Philippines. Then the men of the Utah Batteries, one by one, fell out and went home to swap stories with loved ones. According to Charles Mabey, when the Utah artillerymen “slept that night there were in their dreams no spectral visions of distant battlefields. All that was closed.”38

Mabey had it wrong. For Utah’s battery men the Philippine-American War was hardly a “closed case.” True, they had been physically delivered from the battlefield, but the war ground on, consuming more American and Filipino blood, and taking on a darker, more sinister cast. Defeated on the conventional battlefield, Aguinaldo and his army took to the jungle as

37 Mabey, Utah Batteries, 63-76; Linn, Philippine War, 99; Prentiss, Utah Volunteers in the Spanish-American War, 295-98, 356.

38 Mabey, Utah Batteries, 97-101; Prentiss, Utah Volunteers in the Spanish-American War, 358-68.

guerillas, and the American military naturally pursued them. But as the conflict extended into 1900, then 1901, and finally 1902, a new style of warfare emerged, marked by summary executions, the practice of imprisoning Filipino civilians in concentration camps, and the dreaded “water cure” (a form of torture not unlike the “waterboarding” of our own time). The Utahns had truly been lucky to avoid these later years of the conflict. Nevertheless, it is hard to believe that all the Utah men slept soundly at night following their tour in the Philippines. Some of them certainly paid a high psychological price for their time in the service, and undoubtedly suffered tremendously on their return home; the war they had fought was violent and bloody enough to stalk their dreams and conjure unwanted visions of red-tinged battlefields. For that price, however, they (and by extension, Utah) had moved a long way toward joining the American cultural and political mainstream. They had eagerly answered Uncle Sam’s call, fought alongside their fellow citizens, and abetted the extension of their nation’s “new empire” into the Pacific. For that, they could finally be welcomed fully into the national fold.

Saving Their School: The 1933 Transfer of Dixie College as an Indicator of Utah’s Changing Church and State Relationships

By SCOTT C. ESPLIN

The settling of southern Utah is a story of obedience, as men and women of faith followed a prophet’s call to populate a remote desert outpost. In a few short years they transformed the desert into a social oasis, complete with farms, businesses, churches, a temple, and, importantly, schools. Chief among them was the St. George Stake Academy (later known as Dixie College and more recently Dixie State College of Utah), obediently founded at the call of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints President Wilford Woodruff in 1888. Formed out of the cauldron of the anti-polygamy crusade and the quest for Utah statehood, Dixie College struggled through an on-and-off existence until it was firmly established as a church-run junior college in the 1920s. However, while the saints were transforming the desert, the church was transforming its educational policy. In the late 1920s, leaders decided to remove the LDS church from private education, turning the schools over to the state or discontinuing them altogether. Dixie College felt the effects of the decision as officials and residents scrambled to respond.

The St. George Stake Academy building, which was constructed 1909-1911, was transferred to the state of Utah in 1933.

Scott C. Esplin is Assistant Professor, Church History and Doctrine, Brigham Young University.

The citizens of St. George who, a generation earlier had obediently followed the prophet’s counsel to settle, resisted attempts to close their school. The lobbying that ensued, including negotiations between church leaders in Salt Lake City and community leaders and back-room political alliances between school officials and anti-prohibition political parties, reflects a significant change in relationships between the LDS church and its people. The eventual 1933 transfer of Dixie College to the state of Utah is a fascinating window into the character of southern Utah’s citizens and the transformations that occurred within Utah society during the early twentiethcentury. In some ways, the community voice that emerged continues today as the school fights regional rivals seeking to become southern Utah’s premier educational destination.

For nearly four decades, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints embarked on an ambitious educational policy of providing for both the spiritual and secular needs of its youth. Following a directive by church President Wilford Woodruff that “the time has arrived when the proper education of our children should be taken in hand by us as a people,” the saints followed this counsel.1 From 1888 to the late 1920s the faith operated as many as fifty-seven secondary schools stretching from Canada’s Knight Academy in the north to Mexico’s Juarez Academy in the south.2

1 Wilford Woodruff, Letter to the Presidency of St. George Stake, June 8, 1888, in James R. Clark, ed., Messages of the First Presidency (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1966), 3:168.

2 Enumerating the church academies is problematic because some were short lived, with little formal organization. However, as many as fifty-seven schools operated within formally erected school buildings and dozens of others operated for several years, meeting in borrowed accommodations. Researchers at Brigham Young University preparing a university exhibit on church education have recently identified as many as fifty-two schools operated by the church following President Woodruff’s 1888 directive. Thirtyfive of these schools were called stake academies. In addition, twenty-two other secondary schools existed, often called seminaries because a corresponding academy already existed in the stake. These are not to be

Dixie College Gymnasium built in 1915-1916.

Known as the academy system, the schools were established in response to federal anti-polygamy legislation that removed local control over the Utah territorial superintendent of schools office, giving this federally appointed officer power to “prohibit the use in any district school of any book of a sectarian character or otherwise unsuitable.” 3 Though financial strain continually dogged their educational endeavors, the members of the St. George LDS Stake heeded the call, operating the St. George Stake Academy from 1888-1893, and its more permanent successor, what became Dixie College, beginning in 1911. Originally begun as a secondary school, Dixie College followed the path marked by sister institutions Brigham Young Academy and Weber, Snow, Ricks, and Gila Normal Colleges by adding teacher training in 1916, thereby becoming Dixie Normal College. Seven years later, it added additional post-secondary offerings, becoming Dixie Junior College.

While Dixie expanded its educational offerings, LDS church leaders examined alternatives to the expensive private school endeavor. This reexamination was spurred in large measure by a contemporaneous restructuring of Utah’s public education system. The Free Schools Acts of 1872 and 1873, long a source of conflict between LDS church leaders and those of other faiths reappeared before the Utah legislature in 1890. Opposed by previous church presidents including Brigham Young and John Taylor, the 1890 bill was ultimately supported by church leaders when U.S. Senator George F. Edmunds threatened to introduce congressional legislation granting federal control over Utah’s public school system.4 LDS Apostle Abraham H. Cannon summarized both the church position and its political power during the era,

In view of the present perplexing school laws which were enacted contrary to the advice of President Young and other[s], and which are anything but good, it was thought best to go a little further and prepare the very best school law possible and then submit it to this Council. The establishment of free schools by our people it is thought will have a good effect among the people of this nation in proving that we are the friends of education. Free schools will therefore be established.5

After the law was passed, public schools flourished, as tax receipts quadrupled while attendance rose 23 percent.6 Free public schools, coupled

confused with the present church education endeavor known by the same name. Finally, a series of ten elementary schools, also known as seminaries, existed in the Mormon colonies of northern Mexico during the time period.

3 Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887, cited in C. Merrill Hough, “Two Schools in Conflict: 1867-1890,” Utah Historical Quarterly 28 (April 1960): 127. The article provides a discussion of the conflicts that led to the formation of the church academy system.

4 Frederick S. Buchanan, Culture Clash and Accommodation: Public Schooling in Salt Lake City, 1890-1994 (San Francisco: Smith Research Associates, 1996), 22. For an extensive analysis of LDS church opposition to free public schools. See Stanley S. Ivins, “Free Schools Come to Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 22 (October 1954): 321-42.

5 Abraham H. Cannon cited in Buchanan, Culture Clash and Accommodation: Public Schooling in Salt Lake City, 1890-1994 (San Francisco: Smith Research Associates, 1996), 22.

6 Ivins, “Free Schools Come to Utah,” 341-42.

with a restriction against church influence in education, was formalized six years later when the Utah State Constitution required, “the Legislature shall make laws for the establishment and maintenance of a system of public schools, which shall be open to all the children of the State and be free from sectarian control.”7

The Free Schools Act and the Utah State Constitution prepared the way for secondary school growth as public high schools burst onto the Utah education scene early in the twentieth century, quickly attracting large numbers of Latter-day Saint students from families unable or unwilling to pay for their children to attend tuitionsupported church academies. In 1900, the state had six public high schools (Salt Lake City, Ogden, Park City, Brigham City, Nephi, and Richfield), only two of which, Salt Lake City and Ogden, boasted student populations of more than sixty-five. Only five years later, the state reported thirty-three public high schools.8 To provide religious education for these public school students, the church created the released-time seminary program in 1912. The growth of the seminary system matched that of public high schools in Utah, quickly expanding from serving seventy students at Salt Lake’s Granite High School the first year to teaching 3,272 students in twenty high schools by 1920. A decade later, it serviced nearly 26,000 students.9 The statistical

7 Utah State Constitution, Article III, cited in Richard W. Young, Grant H. Smith, and William A. Lee, eds., The Revised Statutes of the State of Utah, in force Jan. 1, 1898: Revised, Annotated, and Published by Authority of the Legislature (Lincoln, NE: State Journal Company, 1897). See also Stanley S. Ivins, “A Constitution for Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 25 (April 1957): 95-116.

8 E. J. McVicker, Third Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Utah (Salt Lake City: State of Utah, Department of Public Instruction, 1900), 25-26.

9 Historical Resource File, 1891-1989, Church History Library, Family and Church History Department, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Church History Library, Salt Lake City, hereinafter cited as LDS Church History Library.

The Dixie College Science Building. Construction began in 1928.

DIXIE STATE COLLEGE LIBRARY, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

success of the seminary alternative, coupled with its financial savingsfor the church, spelled trouble for the academies. In 1920, church school administrators commented on the system’s failings. Because it was “manifestly impossible . . . to increase the number of academies” in spite of calls from “not a few stakes” that it be done, leaders declared, “the limit of Church finances . . . has definitely limited the number of academies.” In their place, they sought “some plan . . . that might have more general application than the present system.” 10 Dr. Joseph F. Merrill, LDS Church Commissioner of Education, summarized several of the challenges presented by the extensive academy system. “The Church Board of Education and the Church’s leading educators and thinkers in many fields had long realized that Churchoperated academies were a financial burden and were performing a limited service, geographically at least,” Merrill reported.11 Discussion began regarding alternatives.

In 1920, church leaders announced their solution: the elimination of private academies in competition with the state’s public school options. By 1924, twelve church schools across the Intermountain West were closed or transferred to state control.12 The only schools remaining, aside from the Juarez Academy in Mexico, were those such as Dixie that had expanded to

10

Church Board of Education minutes, cited in Kenneth G. Bell, “Adam Samuel Bennion, Superintendent of L.D.S. Education, 1919-1928,” (Master’s thesis, Brigham Young University,1969), 52.

11 Joseph F. Merrill, “A New Institution in Religious Education,” Improvement Era, January 1938: 12.

12 The first three schools transferred to their respective states were Idaho’s Cassia Academy, Arizona’s St. Johns Academy, and Alberta, Canada’s Knight Academy in 1921. Three Utah schools, Castle Dale’s Emery Stake Academy, Fillmore’s Millard Stake Academy, and Beaver’s Murdock Stake Academy, were transferred to the state of Utah the following year. Seminary and Institute Statistical Reports, 1919-1953, LDS Church History Library.

Joseph F. Merrill, an LDS Apostle and Commissioner of Church Education who led the effort to transfer schools to the state.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Anthony W. Ivins, a St. George resident and benefactor who, as a member of the LDS Church First Presidency, worked to preserve Dixie College.

include some form of college work. In 1926, the church began reconsidering even the survival of these schools after it formed the first college seminary, the Institute of Religion at the University of Idaho that year. This collegiate seminary option, coupled with growing fiscal concerns, led to energetic debate within the LDS Church Board of Education regarding the fate of church schools. As a former faculty member and principal of the Weber Stake Academy, David O. McKay strongly lobbied for the preservation of church schools, eventually casting the lone vote against their closure.13 Ultimately, however, church president Heber J. Grant vocalized his concern, “I am free to confess that nothing has worried me more since I became President than the expansion of the appropriation for the Church school system.”14 Though not announced publicly at the time, the decision was made in 1926 to close church schools.

As the church’s financial conditions worsened in the late 1920s, the church expedited its schoolclosure policy. In spite of the situation, school leaders in St. George tried to put a positive spin on their prospects, encouraging students and community leaders to avail themselves of the opportunity, during the economic distress, of furthering education. At the beginning of the 1930-31 school year Dixie College President Joseph K. Nicholes wrote board members, optimistically outlining the school’s future. Asking officials to “lend your influence . . . amongst all your people to urge boys and girls to come to school,” Nicholes stressed, “The financial pressures of hard times only impress upon us the more the need of educational opportunities.” Praising “continued generosity of the

13 David O. McKay, Church Board of Education Minutes, March 23, 1926, cited in Centennial History Project Papers, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. McKay’s opposition was centered in his belief that church junior colleges could train teachers for the newly formed seminary program and also in concern that the success of the seminary and institute programs had not yet been “clearly demonstrated.” He recommended that “the local people involved in the junior colleges should be consulted and won over to any proposed eliminations before definite decisions are made.” See Church Board of Education minutes, February 20, 1929, cited in William Peter Miller, Weber College – 1888 to 1933 Collection, LDS Church History Library. See also Church Board of Education minutes, February 20, 1929, cited in the William E. Berrett Research Files, Church History Library, Salt Lake City. See also Gregory A. Prince and William Robert Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005), 183.

14Heber J. Grant, Church Board of Education minutes, February 23, 1926, cited in Miller, Weber College – 1888 to 1933 Collection, LDS Church History Library.

Church,” he boasted “a bigger and better program of study than ever before.”15

That outlook changed dramatically, when, in December 1930, the school found itself in the fight of its academic life. That month, Commissioner Merrill wrote Dixie College Board of Trustees President Edward H. Snow, informing him that the Church Board of Education had decided that “all of our junior colleges—Ricks, Weber, Snow, Dixie, and Gila—shall cease to function as Church-supported institutions either in 1932 or 1933. In other words, June 1933 is the latest date at which any of these institutions shall exist as Church-supported schools.” Clarifying the time frame, Merrill explained that at least two schools would be closed in the summer of 1932, “whether the respective State Legislatures act or not.” This was “true particularly of the schools in Utah,” though the Board hoped “that there will be no closing of junior college opportunities in the communities where the above-named colleges exist, but this is a responsibility that is being passed on to the public.” Explaining the reason for the closure, Merrill tied it to the growth of the seminary system, which could provide religious instruction more economically than church schools. He called upon Snow to “support the decision of the General Board” and to “do whatever can be done to get the public to provide for a continuation of junior college facilities” in St. George.16

As expected, word about the decision quickly spread. J. William Harrison, a member of the Dixie College faculty on leave at Iowa State University, questioned President Nicholes about it just two weeks later. “I see that Brother Merrill has passed sentence again, and it looks as though they mean business this time,” Harrison observed. He praised the church for its pioneering efforts in establishing the school but felt “the State should be criticized very severely if they do not take up the work where the Church leaves it off.”17 Attempting to ease Harrison’s concerns, Nicholes responded with hope that the announcement didn’t really apply to Dixie. He indicated that when the decision was first announced, it “caused considerable consternation amongst us locally . . . but . . . we had advice to the effect that we might justly entertain hope for Dixie College. What this hope may bring to us, I can not say,” Nicholes concluded. But “do not worry. My faith is that time will take care of our just needs.”18

What gave Nicholes hope is unclear. He may have had some assurance that the church would support the school on a temporary basis, because in

15 Joseph K. Nicholes to Members of the Board of Trustees of Dixie College, August 5, 1930, Dixie College Records, 1888-1932, LDS Church History Library.

16 Joseph F. Merrill to Edward H. Snow, December 27, 1930, Dixie College Records, 1888-1932, LDS Church History Library.

17 J. William Harrison to Joseph K. Nicholes, January 10, 1931, Dixie College Records, 1888-1932, LDS Church History Library.

18 Joseph K. Nicholes to J. William Harrison, January 12, 1931, Dixie College Records, 1888-1932, LDS Church History Library.

February 1931 he wrote, “I believe that if we can keep our schools going ten more years that by that time everything will be secure. It appeals to me that Dixie College should certainly be cared for on whatever Junior College bill that is passed. I think the Church would be willing to support us until such time as the state could take us over even if the time were lengthened out to as much as ten years.”19 Whatever assurance Nicholes may have felt he had, it was apparent that Commissioner Merrill and the church board were serious about discontinuing support for schools, regardless of the time frame, and St. George officials knew it.

The decision to close required transferring the schools to their respective states. However, closing the schools was one thing, getting the states to assume the burden of financially supporting them during economically trying times was another. Convincing the legislature to act became the challenge. Keeping him advised on the situation, Nicholes again wrote Harrison in February 1931, “Our effort with the present Legislature is to have Dixie College taken over by the State School System within a definite number of years and to have the Church maintain the school in its present form until that definite timearrives. If we can succeed in this measure, we shall be very happy.”20

19 Joseph K. Nicholes to Edward H. Snow, February 14, 1931, Dixie College Archives, Dixie State College of Utah, St. George, hereinafter cited as Dixie College Archives.

20 Joseph K. Nicholes to J. William Harrison, February 12, 1931, Dixie College Records, 1888-1932, LDS Church History Library.

DIXIE

LIBRARY,

While Dixie’s friends worked on its behalf, rivals lobbied against it. Fighting for a limited piece of the budget pie sparked infighting, particularly in southern Utah, where competing schools felt pressure to split limited regional resources amongst the small population. Fifty miles to the north, in equally rural Cedar City, the state sponsored the Branch Agricultural College (B.A.C.), a regional offshoot of the state school system. With the possibility of Dixie receiving state support, the schools faced a battle for limited financial resources. As far away as Ames, Iowa, Harrison sensed the potential for competition. “I fear if we go out,” Harrison reflected, “our Cedar friends will kill the fatted calf. If we were not competing with them for students they could possibly make a school out of the B.A.C.”21

Nicholes likewise sensed the threat. In February 1931, he expressed his fears, “I have been informed by hearsay method that the President of the Agricultural College, Dr. E. G. Peterson and the Director of the B.A.C., Mr. Henry Oberhansley are using their influence to create the impression that B.A.C. can adequately care for the educational needs of Southern Utah, and that the State would be benefited by the close of Dixie College.”22 Conflict between the two schools was complicated by the joint representation the area received in the legislature, as Iron and Washington Counties shared a state senator during the 1930s. Knowing it couldn’t argue for its own persistence at the expense of the school in Cedar City, Dixie leaders argued instead that both should be kept. Continuing his letter to Snow, Nicholes wrote about the joint educational needs of the schools in southern Utah. “I feel certain that the future well-being of both Dixie College and B.A.C. is a mutual problem,” Nicholes noted. Believing the two schools were “too far removed from college educational centers to have an experience and a future growth without each other,” he asked Snow to “press upon [their Senator] the great need of maintaining both B.A.C. and Dixie College for the ultimate good of Southern Utah.”23 With the goal of higher education opportunities in both Cedar City and St. George in mind, the political process of saving the school began.

Negotiations initially centered on getting a junior college bill passed, whereby the legislature would assume responsibility for Weber, Snow, and Dixie Colleges. Nicholes wrote local board of trustee members, as well as local ecclesiastical leaders, asking them to “use your influence with your State Representative at this time to the end that Dixie College will be recommended in whatever bill is passed for the maintenance of Junior Colleges in our State. A letter from you to your Senators and Representatives will do much to further this desired end.”24 The college’s

21

J. William Harrison to Joseph K. Nicholes, January 10, 1931, Dixie College Archives.

22 Joseph K. Nicholes to Edward H. Snow, February 14, 1931, Dixie College Archives. 23 Ibid.

24 Joseph K. Nicholes to Board of Trustees members, February 12, 1931, Dixie College Records, 18881932, LDS Church History Library.

friends complied, pressuring the legislature for support. Hurricane LDS Stake President Claudius Hirschi reported, “I am today writing our two representatives urging that they support the proposition not only with their votes but by actively sponsoring the move. We, in this section, feel keenly the need of this institution and will gladly support any effort to hold it in this vicinity.”25

Complicating the proposed junior college bill was the improbability of receiving state support for three schools. With limited statewide resources, the possibility existed for infighting between the three church schools themselves. Weber, Snow, and Dixie could either choose to fend for themselves or unite, coming in as a group. In Salt Lake City, church leaders feared the latter, worrying that asking too much might scare the legislature away from accepting responsibility for any of the schools. Influential members of the St. George community like Edward H. Snow shared the fear. “I am of the opinion,” Snow cautioned Nicholes, “that our representatives will serve us better if they will help Snow and Weber get what they want and I wish you would adroitly write them that in all probability the holding out for a Junior College for us might jeopardize Snow and Weber, which you do not want to do.”26

Obediently, school officials backed off from Dixie’s inclusion in the proposed junior college bill of 1931, confident that the school would receive church assistance if Weber and Snow became state-sponsored institutions. In fact, church board of education minutes indicate that in late March 1931, “many civic organizations, chambers of commerce, etc. from southern Utah . . . telephoned the Governor asking him to approve the bill,” in spite of its excluding Dixie.27 Nicholes noted this change in attack, writing Hurricane Stake President Hirschi that “the attitude of the Church officials” was “they would be delighted to get rid of the financial responsibility of Snow College and Weber College and Ricks College at this time.” If relieved of the other schools, “they will feel satisfied to carry Dixie College until a future legislature meets.” Nicholes reported that this attitude had been conveyed to school and government officials from Church officials themselves.28

Church influence came from ardent supporter of the college Anthony W. Ivins, counselor in the church’s First Presidency and former resident of

25

Claudius Hirschi to Joseph K. Nicholes, February 20, 1931, Dixie College Records, 1888-1932, LDS Church History Library.

26 Edward H. Snow to Joseph K. Nicholes, February 17, 1931, Dixie College Archives.

27

Church Board of Education minutes, March 31, 1931, William Peter Miller, Weber College – 1888 to 1933 Collection, LDS Church History Library.

28 Joseph K. Nicholes to Claudius Hirschi, February 25, 1931, Dixie College Records, 1888-1932, CHL. The survival of Ricks College during this era is an interesting story as well, as attempts to transfer the school to the state of Idaho were repeatedly rebuffed by the Idaho legislature. Eventually, the school remained under church control through the sacrifice of local residents and the support of David O. McKay, who joined the church’s First Presidency in 1934. See Jerry C. Roundy, Ricks College: A Struggle for Survival (Rexburg: Ricks College Press, 1976).

St. George. With church leaders negotiating behind the scenes, a bill narrowly passed the legislature in 1931, transferring Snow College to the state on July 1, 1932, and Weber College to the state on July 1, 1933.29 Dixie continued to receive church support, waiting for a future legislative session to solicit state aid. Though warned by Commissioner Merrill that there would be no increase in budget in the coming years, the college accepted this proposition over the closure alternative. Having saved the school, at least temporarily, President Nicholes was relieved, as were local legislators. State Representative David Hirschi summarized the tone of the battle, “I have been in almost constant contact the past two years with the representatives of wealth whose hearts seem as cold as ice and as hard as stone, when considering questions of relief for the poor and the oppressed.”30

The First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints at the time the Church Academics were transferred to state ownership. From left to right: Anthony W. Ivins, Heber J. Grant, and Charles W. Nibley.

Having escaped the scare of 1931, Dixie College was forced to face the financial realities ahead. Still, Nich oles held out hope. Keeping faculty member J. William Harrison informed of these developmentswhile studying in Iowa, he declared, “It has been noised about that the Church is

29 M. Lynn Bennion, Mormonism and Education (Salt Lake City: The Department of Education of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1939), 195. General Church Board of Education minutes emphasize active participation by the First Presidency and members of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles regarding the transfer of church schools to the state. Anthony W. Ivins championed the cause for St. George while David O. McKay, former teacher at Weber College, lobbied on behalf of the school in Ogden. Records report frequent discussion of the issue during the early months of 1931, including an assignment that Joseph F. Merrill was sent to the governor by the First Presidency to report that “the First Presidency would be very pleased if he would sign the junior college bill.” This apparently came because of rumored division amongst church board members regarding the legislation. See Church Board of Education minutes, March 31, 1931, William Peter Miller, Weber College – 1888 to 1933 Collection, LDS Church History Library. At the local level, supporters of Snow College reported resorting to bribing fellow legislators with legs of lamb in exchange for support for their school. See Albert C. T. Antrei and Allen D. Roberts, A History of Sanpete County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Sanpete County Comission, 1999), 206.

30 David Hirschi to Joseph K. Nicholes, March 1931, Dixie College Records, 1888-1932, LDS Church History Library.

not altogether satisfied with getting rid of its Church schools, its junior colleges, so that by the time the clouds clear away, and we enter this new period of Church school work, the schools may be better founded than ever in their history. At any rate, I am still hopeful, especially for the BYU and for Dixie.”31

By 1933 the church saw the benefit of the junior college transfer and decided to push for similar resolution regarding the St. George institution. Again, Commissioner Merrill, then a member of the church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, led the charge. Like the 1931 battle, political negotiations, both with the legislature and the church, dominated the process. The result highlights the determination of St. George residents to preserve their school and the transition that occurred within church and state relationships.

The first indication that Dixie College was going to be discontinued came in a March 4, 1932, letter from Commissioner Merrill. Dixie College board minutes indicate that the letter “called attention to next year’s being the last year in which our school would function.”32 This surprised board members who noted that “last year the papers announced that the Church schools would close in 1933 but no disposition of Dixie College, specifically, had ever been announced and all the notice we had had was the general announcement through the papers.” 33 Apparently, Merrill was moving forward with his plan to close all schools by June 1933.34 This came in spite of Dixie’s removing itself from the junior college transfer bill in exchange for an understanding that it would continue as a church school.

College representatives sought church input concerning the situation. In early January 1933, Nicholes met with Commissioner Merrill about the proposed closure. Merrill reiterated “his determination to see the Dixie College close,” noting that he had been “brought into his position as Commissioner of LDS Education for the express purpose of closing the LDS Junior colleges and of furthering the LDS Seminary work.” Nicholes countered, reminding Merrill that two years previous Dixie College would have been written into the junior college bill with Snow and Weber, had not the First Presidency intervened, asking Dixie to “cease to have herself included with Snow and Weber colleges.” In exchange, the church agreed to “carry Dixie College under her own leadership.” 35 Commissioner Merrill disagreed.

Not finding a sympathetic ear in Merrill, Nicholes went above him to First Presidency member Anthony W. Ivins. He reported that Ivins “did not

31 Joseph K. Nicholes to J. William Harrison, April 15, 1931, Dixie College Records, 1888-1932, LDS Church History Library.

32 Minutes of the St. George Stake Board of Education, 71, Dixie College Archives.

33 Ibid, 72, 34 Joseph F. Merrill to Edward H. Snow, December 27, 1930, Dixie College Records, 1888-1932, LDS Church History Library.

35 Personal notes of Joseph K. Nicholes, Dixie College Archives.

entertain the same interpretation as Dr. Merrill neither with respect to actions by the Church Board of Education nor did he sympathize with Dr. Merrill’s determination to close Dixie College.”36 Later the same day, Nicholes wrote Ivins a summary of his arguments, which were read at the next Church Board of Education meeting. They included emphasis on the importance of church schools for rural communities as well as a reminder about the perceived previous agreement. “Two years ago, when Snow and Weber colleges were made State schools,” Nicholes reminded church officials, “Dixie College was agreeably left out of the bill only after our lobbying committee and President Snow had received assurance that Dixie College’s future would be cared for by the Church. This cooperation seemed necessary to the success of the bill, and was in harmony with advice from the First Presidency.”37

In spite of their efforts, church opposition to continuing Dixie College was firm. Following the board meeting where Ivins presented Dixie’s case, Commissioner Merrill wrote Nicholes again, reiterating his position that “Dixie College will not be continued next year as a Church institution.”38 As an alternative, Merrill proposed turning the school into a “first-class union high school.” He promised five thousand dollars in church aid for each of the next two years which, in addition to state-provided equalization funds, would more than adequately finance a public high school lacking in the region. He also offered the entire physical plant to the college board which he proposed they rent to local school officials for one dollar a year. 39 College leaders opposed the idea. Having experienced junior college status for over a decade, few were anxious to see the option removed. Appealing again to the First Presidency, Ivins responded, “It seemed impossible to put a ‘dent’ in Dr. Merrill’s ‘armor.’” He expressed little hope to save the school, but encouraged Nicholes and others to approach the state legislature “and to do all that [they] could” to get Dixie accepted as a state junior college.40

36 Ibid.

37 Joseph K. Nicholes to Anthony W. Ivins, January 3, 1933, Dixie College Archives.

38 Joseph F. Merrill to Joseph K. Nicholes, January 6, 1933, Dixie College Archives.

39 Ibid.

40 Personal notes of Joseph K. Nicholes, DSC; see also Douglas D. Alder, A Century of Dixie State College of Utah (St. George: Dixie State College, 2010), 57.

Henry H. Blood, Governor of Utah from 1933 to 1941, when Dixie College was acquired by the state.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Nicholes immediately turned to the political process, putting all the college’s efforts behind lobbying the legislature. Though initially optimistic, the process quickly became discouraging. By the end of January 1933, Nicholes reported that members of the county board of education “made several contacts with legislators while at the State Capitol and have returned full of depression. . . . They believe that our efforts to retain the college are practically useless.”41 Undaunted, Nicholes turned to community leaders. Trying to unite friendly members from neighboring communities in the cause, he solicited the Cedar City Chamber of Commerce, the Cedar City Rotary Club, and southern Utah chapters of the American Legion, asking that they support the transfer.42 In addition, he polled friends on the State Board of Education, hoping to ascertain Dixie’s chances for state-supported status. Friend and board member John C. Swenson wrote, “I think perhaps that some members of the State Board are not in favor of Junior Colleges at all, but certainly I have heard nothing against the Dixie College.”43

Like the 1931 closure crisis, the proximity of the Branch Agricultural College in Cedar City worked against Dixie’s hope for state support. Dr. M. J. Macfarlane, a physician in the neighboring town and ardent supporter of the Cedar City school, informed Nicholes that his efforts “would only do harm to your prospects as well as the future of this institution which, after all, is the institution to which Southern Utah will have to look for its college work in the future.” Though pessimistic about the region sustaining two junior colleges, Macfarlane did express “hope that the State can come to the rescue in the form of a subsidy for your institution,” especially if it preserved Dixie College as a high school.44

In addition to seeking regional backing and attempting to influence the legislature, Dixie College representatives lobbied the other state junior colleges for support. Seeking to solidify the temporary state support accorded them by the 1931 legislature; Weber and Snow were negotiating in 1933 for permanent status. Dixie College approached their sister institutionswith similar desires. Promising the support of southern Utah representatives, arrangements were made to include Dixie in any bill involving Weber and Snow. The senator from Washington County “made it plain . . . that any effort to leave Dixie College out of a State Junior College program would be considered unfriendly towards Dixie College interests and would meet with opposition both in the House and in the Senate.”45 Dixie was adamant about their inclusion because they feared that junior college legislation “would be closed for years.”46

41 Joseph K. Nicholes to William O. Bentley, January 31, 1933, Dixie College Archives.

42 Ibid.

43 John C. Swenson to Joseph K. Nicholes, February 13, 1933, Dixie College Archives.

44 M. J. MacFarlane to Joseph K. Nichols [sic], February 6, 1933, Dixie College Archives.

45 Personal notes of Joseph K. Nicholes, Dixie College Archives.

This public and private posturing for state college status did not sit well with Commissioner Merrill. Hearing of proposed legislation making Dixie a state junior college, Merrill expressed concern to the St. George leaders. In particular, he worried that their efforts would “jeopardize favorable action on the proposition to continue Snow and Weber as State junior college[s].” He expressed concern that conditions were not right for a state school in St. George, believing rival communities like Richfield, Price, or Vernal merited one first. Merrill called upon “the friends of Dixie College [to] desist from an effort to get the college at St. George continued under public auspices,” lend their support to Snow and Weber in their bid for state junior college status, and accept his previous offer that the school be transformed into a public high school.47

After meeting with St. George leaders about these concerns, Merrill was informed of Dixie’s threat to undermine junior college legislation if not included. He followed up, strongly warning the southern Utah contingency about their efforts. “We told you very frankly our fears were that while there was no chance of the State taking Dixie over, your application might have a detrimental effect on the efforts that were being made in behalf of Snow and Weber.” Concerned that “this thing is getting out of your control,” Merrill cautioned that Snow and Weber would be receiving no additional church aid and, if “failure results” in their effort to receive state support, he was “not at all sure but that the Church will withdraw the generous offers it has already made in behalf of a school at St. George.” This included the free use of the physical plant for a Washington County public high school and the additional five thousand dollars a year for two years from the church to defray costs. Clearly bothered that school officials had gone to the legislaturein opposition to the other church schools, Merrill again asked Dixie to support Snow and Weber “independent of whether the friends of these institutions promise you support or not.” Calling, “the time . . . wholly inopportune” for St. George to have a state junior college, he pled with school officials to “look at this proposition from a state-wide point of view rather than a narrow local one.”48

46 Minutes of the St. George Stake Board of Education, 79, Dixie College Archives.

47 Joseph F. Merrill to William O. Bentley, February 3, 1933, Dixie College Archives.

48 Ibid., February 9, 1933.

J. Bracken Lee, Governor of Utah from 1949 to 1957, sought to close Dixie College or return it to the LDS Church.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

In spite of Merrill’s appeals, Dixie College leaders went ahead seeking state sponsorship. Opposing publicly stated church interests, they went so far as to negotiate support from groups lobbying to end the national prohibition of alcohol, a major issue facing the state legislature in 1933. Statewide, opinion was strongly divided on prohibition, with LDS Church President Heber J. Grant openly lobbying to preserve the ban while delegates from communities seeking to benefit from the sale of alcohol sought to overturn it. In particular, representatives from Price, a town struggling like many others because of the national economic depression, were anxious to repeal the ban. “Horsetrading” reportedly occurred, as Washington County representatives agreed to support Carbon County delegates in repealing prohibition and in a future bid for its own junior college in exchange for support of Dixie’s inclusion in the proposed junior college bill.49

For its part, Weber College accepted a third institution in the school transfer legislation. Bothered by aspects of the 1931 legislation that granted it state status, Weber hoped that reopening discussion of the junior college bill to include Dixie might allow them to revise the arrangement. Snow College, on the other hand, appears to have been less supportive, though eventually they, too, acquiesced.50 As expected, the strongest opposition came from representatives of neighboring Iron County, which felt that state support for Dixie might jeopardize Cedar City’s own Branch Agricultural College (B.A.C.). Supporting the B.A.C., Wilford Day, state senator from Parowan, vociferously lobbied that the two schools in southern Utah were unnecessary.51

In spite of the opposition, the actual transition went smoother than many had feared. Though Utah Governor Henry H. Blood, a fiscal conservative especially troubled by increased expenditures during difficult economic times, vetoed the original legislation because it appropriated twelve thousand dollars to Dixie, community officials successfully lobbied the legislature to have House Bill 58 reconsidered. Receiving a pledge of temporary community support for the college, funding was struck from a bill that the Governor hesitatingly approved. 52 The school successfully negotiated the transfer, giving the entire physical plant, valued at more than two hundred thousand dollars, to the state. In exchange, the state accepted

49 Douglas D. Alder and Karl F. Brooks, A History of Washington County: From Isolation to Destination (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Washington County Commission, 1996), 249.

50 Alder, A Century of Dixie State College of Utah, 59. See also Alder and Brooks, A History of Washington County, 248.

51 Alder and Brooks, A History of Washington County, 248.

52 Alder, A Century of Dixie State College of Utah, 59-60. Governor Blood is an interesting study in contrasts. A faithful Latter-day Saint, he was familiar with the church academy system having attended Provo’s Brigham Young Academy. Prior to his election as governor, he served as stake president in the North Davis Stake and later as an LDS mission president in California. Politically, Blood lobbied for federal New Deal funding while opposing expansion of some state programs in Utah. Educationally, he approved legislation transferring Snow, Weber, and Dixie Colleges to the state and oversaw the creation of a junior college in Price but vetoed legislation for similar schools in Richfield and Roosevelt. See Miriam B. Murphy, “Henry H. Blood,” in Utah History Encyclopedia, ed. Allan Kent Powell (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994), 45-46.

David O. McKay, opposed the transfer of church schools to the state and considered reassuming responsibility for Dixie College during his tenure as Church President.

Dixie together with Weber and Snow Colleges on the condition they provide no financial support for the St. George school for the next two years. In March 1933, the Miles Bill passed the Utah legislature, making Dixie College a state junior college. Working out the legal intricacies of the transfer, the state accepted the deed on July 1, 1933, leasing it back to the community of St. George for two years so as not to incur operating costs.53

53

“State Takes Deeds to Normal Colleges,” The Salt Lake Tribune, June 18, 1933. Agreeing to provide future financial support, the state benefited greatly from the transfer. The value of the physical plant and real estate in 1933 was estimated at two hundred thousand dollars,“Dixie College Plant,” Dixie College Archives. Furthermore, it kept secondary and post-secondary schooling available in St. George, a program that, during its last year of church support, served 222 junior high students (9th and 10th grades), 153 senior high students (11th and 12th grades), and 172 junior college students. See “Dixie College Enrollment Budget for 1932-33,” Dixie College Archives, The transfer of Weber, Snow, and Dixie to the State of Utah included a provision that, should the state choose to cease operation of the schools as educational institutions, ownership would revert back to the church. Interestingly, this possibility nearly became a reality when, in December 1953, Governor J. Bracken Lee signed legislation transferring the three schools back to the church. This came after indication from Church President David O. McKay and his counselor, J. Reuben Clark, Jr., that “if they were turned over to the Church, we should be pleased to operate them.” While Dixie residents enthusiastically supported the idea, supporters of McKay’s former institution, Weber College, strongly opposed the action. Joining with supporters of Carbon College, who also faced closure, they succeeded in getting a referendum placed on the November 1954 ballot, where voters blocked the transfer by a 3-2 margin. See Prince and Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism, 183-87. In Weber County, 22,879 votes were cast in favor of retaining state status and 6,042 against. See Richard C. Roberts and Richard W. Sadler, A History of Weber County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Weber County Commission, 1997), 303. In St. George, the results were overwhelmingly the opposite, with 2,649 citizens voting to block the referendum and move forward with the transfer of state schools back to the church. In Dixie, only 427 people voted to maintaint state support for the schools. See Alder, A Century of Dixie State College of Utah, 114.

The school survived without two years of dedicated state college funding through sacrifice, careful budgeting, and generous church assistance. The Dixie Education Association, a non-profit community action group, sprung into action, soliciting community donations, often given in-kind, to offset costs.54 Nearly twenty-two thousand dollars in Washington County school funds went to the school because, as both a junior college and a high school, the institution served secondary school students. Finally, in spite of its opposition to Dixie’s seeking state college status, the church kept its promise of financial support, giving nearly $7,500 annually until the state would reconsider appropriations in 1935. 55 First Presidency member Anthony W. Ivins, a former St. George resident and long-time community benefactor, was likely the key in keeping church funding flowing.56

While the transfer of Dixie College to the State of Utah seems like “much ado about nothing,” the story highlights important transitions in Utah’s educational tradition. Significantly, it marks the philosophy that guides Latter-day Saint Church education, a policy recently summarized by Church Commissioner of Education Elder Paul V. Johnson, “It is the policy and practice of the Church to discontinue operation of such schools when local school systems are able to provide quality education.”57 Instead of providing separate systems aimed at protecting the youth from state influence, the church augments public systems with religious instruction. This policy and practice was established by the church in the 1920s and 1930s and has been implemented, as it was in St. George, ever since.

More importantly, the story highlights a transformation within Latterday Saint society itself. In the 1890s, St. George and other rural Utah communities obediently implemented programs like stake academies, even when they may have been fiscally burdensome or even unnecessary. Central control and obedience to authority were hallmarks of nineteenth-century Mormonism and, ironically, the source of its greatest conflict. 58 This integration of religion, politics, society, and economy into a single non-pluralistic community, as historian Thomas G. Alexander put it, “was simply unacceptable to Victorian America.”59

54 Alder, A Century of Dixie State College of Utah, 63.

55“State Leases Dixie College to St. George,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 20, 1933; “State to Acquire Two Colleges at Saturday Meeting,” Deseret News, June 16, 1933.

56 Alder, A Century of Dixie State College of Utah, 65.

57 Quoted in Leann J. Walton, “New Zealand Church College to Close,” Church News, July 8, 2006, 11, emphasis added.

58 Territorial Chief Justice Elliot F. Sanford summarized the opposition to church influence in Utah, “We care nothing for your polygamy. It’s a good war-cry and serves our purpose by enlisting sympathy for our cause; but it’s a mere bagatelle compared with other issues in the irrepressible conflict between our parties. What we most object to is your unity; your political and commercial solidarity; the obedience you render to your spiritual leaders in temporal affairs. We want you to throw off the yoke of the Priesthood, to do as we do, and be Americans in deed as well as name.” Cited in Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 182-83.

59 Thomas G. Alexander, Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890-1930 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 14.

By the 1930s, a new phase in Mormonism was evident. Leaders in communities like St. George worked for local interests to preserve their school, even opposing efforts and counsel from the church generally, all without personal repercussion. 60 Furthermore, while highlighting the church’s reduced regional control, the story also demonstrates reduced church political influence, as Dixie College successfully brokered an arrangement with other interests in the state to accomplish its goal, opposite that of central church leadership.

Dixie College’s transfer from church to state sponsorship reveals much about the citizens of St. George and their relationship with their faith. It indicates the importance they placed on education and the sacrifices they were willing to make to preserve it. Importantly, the story also highlights a significant aspect of Utah culture. As one of the public’s largest and most influential programs, education strongly reflects societal values. Frederick Buchanan summarized the role education plays as social indicator, “Public schools mirror the societies that maintain them, however much we would wish otherwise. Although reformers have over the years tried to make schools shape the ‘good society,’ their efforts have been frustrated by the inescapable fact that schools tend to follow, rather than precede, social and cultural change.”61 For the community of St. George individually and the church generally, the 1933 transfer of Dixie College to the State of Utah reflects a transformation in the priorities of twentieth century Utahns.

60 In fact, in spite of the strong differences of opinion, the church kept its promise of financial support while Joseph K. Nicholes, Dixie College president who successfully led the charge to transfer the school to the state, transferred to Brigham Young University where he continued a prominent teaching career.

61 Buchanan, Culture, Class, and Accommodation, 286.

BOOK REVIEWS

Troubled Trails: The Meeker Affair and the Expulsion of Utes From Colorado.

By Robert Silbernagel. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2011. xxiii + 253 pp. Paper, $24.95.)

I BEGAN SKEPTICAL: another book on the Meeker affair, the battle at Milk Creek (1879), and the expulsion of the Utes from Colorado to Utah (1881). There has been plenty already written—Robert Emmit’s The Last War Trail (1954), Marshall Sprague’s Massacre (1957), Mark Miller’s Hollow Victory (1997), Peter Decker’s The Utes Must Go (2004), and now another. What could possibly be said that has not already been part of the discussion? I was surprised that at the end of the first fifteen pages Meeker was dead, the battle against the cavalry pretty much over, and the five hostages—three women and two children—whisked away for three week’s captivity in the hands of the White River (Yamparika) Utes. Obviously, the heart of the book lay elsewhere.

While there were many Ute and Anglo personalities threading their way through this narrative, the author wisely selected four for emphasis: Josephine Meeker, daughter of murdered Agent Nathan Meeker; Nicaagat, Ute warrior and leader; She-towitch (Susan), Ute heroine and friend of Josephine; and Charles Adams, former Ute Agent, rescuer of the captives, and negotiator during later treaty agreements. Each one played a unique role in this drama. Josephine, although she watched the Utes kill her father at the agency, nevertheless enjoyed friendships among some of the Indians and provided a detailed account of her captivity, a tale for which she later became famous. Nicaagat, opponent of the agent, was yet determined to maintain peace even after the conflict against the cavalry at Milk Creek was well underway. Anxious to iron out issues, he intelligently attempted to resolve problems even when antagonized by government negotiators. She-towitch, a determined woman, protected the captives, assisted Josephine in her trials, and later became a short-lived national celebrity at a time when public sentiment vilified most Indians. Charles Adams, one of the few white men knowledgeable about Ute culture, played an important role in obtaining the captives’ release but later proved instrumental in expelling these Native Americans to Utah. All of these complex characters were caught in difficult circumstances ripe with conflict.

A second thread running through the narrative is an on-location mapping of sites where events occurred. Where exactly did the Utes travel and camp while moving about with their hostages and where did couriers and military units move during the pursuit? Fashioned from a series of seat-in-saddle trips, Silbernagel provides believable reconstruction that ties topography to historic account. For the buff who relishes identifying the locale where the action unfolded, this is welcomed detail not found

elsewhere. Readers familiar with the region will appreciate the sense of immediacy it creates.

This book is recommended as a companion piece to the others mentioned above. To the author’s credit, it is not a rehash but fresh insight into certain aspects of this twice-told tale. A close reading of the previous works highlights the valuable contribution this book makes in further understanding the complex series of events that pushed a relatively peaceful Indian group from the beautiful, mineral-rich mountains of Colorado to the high deserts of Utah. There is no question that the incident served as primary excuse to solve the “Indian problem” for one state while creating a new set of problems for a neighboring territory. More importantly, this series of events unsettled physically and psychologically a group of people who still live with decisions made over one hundred years ago. That understanding, in itself, makes the reading worthwhile.

ROBERT S. MCPHERSON

“My Candid Opinion”: The Sandwich Islands Diaries of Joseph F. Smith 1856-1857. Edited by Nathaniel R. Ricks. (Salt Lake City: The Smith-Pettit Foundation, 2011. xxiv +143 pp. Cloth, $100.00.)

A HISTORIAN WILL TAKE a diary and interpret it, making certain assumptions because of his or her knowledge and background. Then that individual will write it up and allow us to read it. A diary is closer to the source. It tells us exactly what the person who wrote it is thinking. The person who reads the diaries is getting the real thing, written and expressed as the individual wanted it. Is the diary simply a list of events with little or no explanation or is it more? An editor will publish it with explanations of the names and nebulous points. Unlike the document as written, Nathaniel R. Ricks, the editor, gives the reader certain helps: an excellent introduction that explains something about Joseph F. Smith, details that may not be in the diaries so we can understand the entries better, Joseph F.’s feelings, and answers to some of the questions raised by the author.

To find out these answers one must always read the footnotes. Ricks also gives us a list of prominent characters in the diaries. We can all be thankful for this excellent list.

Following the introduction and the prominent character list, is the primary source, the diary itself. We quickly find out that missionary work was much different then than it is now. Joseph F. Smith does not knock on doors. Rather, he reads and preaches, and then investigators ask for baptism.

Utah State University, Eastern—San Juan Campus

The members bring their neighbors to meetings or else the curious come because they have heard about a meeting.

If one thought that all Mormon presidents were perfect from the beginning, we find through these diaries that Joseph F. is very prejudiced toward the Hawaiian natives. He thinks they are lazy, noncommittal, and sinful. They say one thing and proceed to do something else. His missionary diary shows that he was a very strong minded person, and his later life bears that out. Joseph F. is not as expressive as we would like him to be. Yet, he is better than most missionary diarists. He explains where he is at, when he preaches, and his opinions of the native people. He also tells about what he ate and the difficulty, at times, of finding enough to eat. He may have expected the members to feed him, but it was not beneath his dignity to work for his food.

Is it important that this diary be published? The answer, of course, is yes. It tells the youthful views and experiences of a very important person in the history of the LDS church. The reader should know that reading the Deseret News was an important part of Smith’s missionary life. The newspaper printed the sermons of the brethren in Salt Lake City, and Smith studied them in great detail-—on occasions spending an entire day reading the newspaper. Through this study he gained a great knowledge of LDS doctrine and teachings that served as the basis of the teachings of the church which will be the basis for the rest of his life. However, that aspect of his missionary experience is not explained. Also, I wish the editor would have given us a little more background about missionary work by other Christian religions. More especially, were there other religious groups in the islands besides the Calvinists and Catholics? Except for those two small shortcomings I think this is a valuable book that is needed to understand a man of Joseph F. Smith’s stature.

RONALD G. WATT South Jordan

Pansy’s History: The Autobiography of Margaret E. P. Gordon, 1866-1966.

Transcribed and Edited by Claudia L. Bushman. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2011. Xviii + 326 pp. Cloth, $34.95.)

THE UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS SERIES “Life Writings of Frontier Women” adds another impressive editor to its list. Claudia L. Bushman has authored and edited several books including Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah. She taught American studies at Columbia University and Mormon studies at Claremont Graduate University from 2008-2011.

Bushman’s contribution to this series is a discovery that most historians only dream about—her Grandmother Gordon’s autobiography “Family History”—uncovered in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections in the Brigham Young University Harold B. Lee Library in 2002. Margaret Elizabeth Schutt Gordon “Pansy” started writing her autobiographical “Family History” in 1928 when she was sixty-two-years-old and added to it sporadically for thirty-six years.

Pansy’s narrative reads like a novel—her life was very complicated and involved extensive travel. Born January 29, 1866, to Henry and Eliza Schutt in Bingley, Yorkshire, England, Pansy considered her childhood in rural English towns to be ideal. In 1876, when she was ten years old, her father accepted a teaching position with the Church of England’s Church Missionary Society to Metlakahtla, British Columbia, Canada, to teach the “Christianized Indians” (2). Bushman speculates that most likely the family expected someday to return to England to live, but this was never to happen and Pansy’s adventure commenced. Pansy wrote: “And began a new life as different from the one lived in England as was possible to imagine” (41). The family lived in Canada until 1882 when they moved to Salt Lake City to stay with her mother’s sister Christiana Venables Vernon Smith. In 1883, the family again moved for another teaching position at Henvey’s Inlet, a small settlement near Lake Huron, Ontario, Canada.

About 1885 the Schutt family returned to Salt Lake City where they were baptized into the Mormon church. In 1889, the family moved to Meadowville, seven miles southeast of Pickleville in Rich County, to try their hand at farming. Pansy found a position teaching school in Laketown, which she held for several years. She met a local man—James Frater Gordon to whom she became engaged in 1891. On July 13, 1893, at the age of twenty-seven she wed James in the Logan Temple. In 1897, her sister Fannie Vernon Schutt married James’ brother Robert John Gordon. Pansy’s two sons James Kenneth and Henry Fairfax were born in Meadowville.

In the spring of 1899, James and John Gordon and their families were called on missions to help settle Stirling, Alberta, Canada. Pansy wrote: “We all felt some sadness at leaving a home in which we had been so happy, but a static existence in a place like Meadowville was out of the question—It was a sacrifice in some ways to me—the furniture I had worked for & enjoyed had to be disposed of” (127). With ambivalent feelings they arrived in Canada in August 1899, where other family members eventually joined them. Their two daughters, Annie Hortense and Jean Vernon, were born in Stirling. In October 1906, after years of struggling to make a living, Pansy and James decided to move to Raymond. In 1915, they left Canada and moved to Salt Lake City and from there to California where a married daughter, Hortense, and her husband Blaine Steed were living. In the

spring of 1927, Pansy made use of her genealogy training at the Los Angeles Public Library and eventually she received more genealogical training in Salt Lake City. In September 1934, Pansy was asked by LDS California Mission President Alonzo Hinckley to head genealogy work, a calling which she held until 1945. She lived until October 3, 1966, when she died in San Francisco at the age of one hundred.

Since “Family History” is not a continuous work Bushman supplements it with chapter introductions, letters, diary excerpts, and footnotes. Bushman also includes a biographical introduction, genealogy charts, maps, many photographs, a chronology and appendix, and an ever helpful index. Since Pansy identifies many people, short biographical sketches would have been helpful, as would have a brief history of the places where she lived. Somewhat confusing is the inconsistent use of both names—Pansy and Margaret—throughout the book.

“Family History” provides insight into the somber reality of trying to make a new life in a new country. Pansy faced many health, family, and financial problems in her life, but she was not afraid to travel long distances or live in less than satisfactory conditions in the hope of improving future circumstances. Greatest of all, Pansy’s “History” illustrates the importance of her family as they worked at maintaining their family unit through their many hardships.

LINDA THATCHER Salt Lake City

Wild Horses of the West: History and Politics of America’s Mustangs. By J. Edward De Steiguer. (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2011. xiii + 249 pp. Paper, $24.95.)

“WILD HORSES, with swiftness, strength and freedom, have always had the power to evoke passion. From Lascaux’s cave artists in southwestern France fifteen thousand years ago to modern Americans, the image of wild horses running free on the open plain has inspired the human spirit and captured the soul like few things in nature.... Yet while wild horses may be an inspiration to many, to others (especially those who rely on America’s western federal lands for their livelihood) they are a curse on the land”(1). These thoughts provide the thesis for the book—the history of the horse, the passion the wild horse invokes in many people, and that there are others who just want them eliminated from the western scene.

Part One of the book discusses the origin and evolution of the horse from an animal nearly sixty million years ago with four toes that was slightly more than a foot in height to the modern one-hoofed horse standing five feet or more in height.

During most of the last Ice Age equines were located on all the major land masses. However by the end of the Ice Age, approximately twenty thousand years ago, the equines became extinct on the American continent and probably would have died out in Eurasia if they had not been domesticated by humans.

Most ancient civilizations eventually domesticated the horse. Some made more successful use of horse than others, but warfare seemed to be the dominant motivation for the use of the horse.

Part II of the book discusses the introduction of the horse to the western hemisphere. The first horses came in 1493 with the second voyage of Christopher Columbus. The horses brought to America were from Andalusia, the southernmost region of Spain. They were probably a result of crossing the Barbs brought by the Moors from North Africa with native Spanish horses. They were small horses that possessed agility, strength, and courage.

The author describes how the Spanish settlement spread horses from the island of Espanola, to present-day Mexico and north through the American southwest. Catholic missions established in Mexico, California, Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico had herds of horses. Some escaped and became wild horses.

When Lewis and Clark made their expedition from St Louis to the Pacific Ocean, most of the Indian tribes they encountered had horses which they had obtained by trading with and stealing from the Spanish and from other tribes. “The Indians of North America after acquiring horses developed what is regarded as one of the world’s great equestrian cultures. Within a short time, Indians passed from terrified amazement of these ‘elk dogs,’ or ‘big dogs,’ as they first called horses, to a mastery unsurpassed in the history of civilization”(78).

By 1890, the Indian, the bison, and the Spanish mustang had all but disappeared from the Great Plains. The Spanish mustang as a pure type was gone from the plains, but was later rediscovered in a few remote and geographically isolated havens in the Far West.

Part three of the book discusses the ongoing politics of the wild horse with a special emphasis on the story of Velma Bronn Johnston, better known as “Wild Horse Annie.” Her story begins in 1950. As she was driving to work one morning in Reno, Nevada, she found herself at a stoplight alongside a cattle truck filled with wild eyed mustangs, many of them cut and bleeding. She had heard stories of the wild horses being chased by aircraft and then hauled in trucks to a processing plant to be turned into pet food. Now she knew the stories were true.

She spent much of the next three decades trying to save these animals that she came to love. She spoke out in public against the Bureau of Land Management and livestock interests. Her efforts were successful. In 1955 Nevada enacted a law that prevented the pursuit of wild horses by aircraft

and motorized vehicles. In 1959, President Eisenhower signed a nationwide bill into law similar to the Nevada law. Finally, in December 1971, the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act became the law of the land.

The passage of the bill did not end the controversy. Wild horses reproduce rapidly and the law does not provide satisfactory methods for handling the excess horses or addressing the issue of overgrazing on allotted areas, and conflicts with ranchers that run cattle on federal lands.

Edward De Steiguer makes it quite clear where his sympathies lie, but he has written a very readable book that covers the complete history of the horse and gives a well-balanced discussion of the current political and physical problems in administering the Wild Horse and Burros Act and in taking care of the horses and the lands they inhabit.

KENT PETERSEN Ferron

“Swell Suffering:” A Biography of Maurine Whipple. By Veda Tebbs Hale. (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2011. xiii + 457 pp. Cloth, $31.95.)

ST. GEORGE, UTAH, was home to two of Mormon literature’s most famous writers: Juanita Brooks and Maurine Whipple. Both women transcended not only the isolation and insulation of their desert childhoods, but also the constraints of womanhood in a man’s world of letters. Both courageously and artfully mined the history and folklore of southwestern Utah and told the story of Mormon settlement without shying away from its most sensitive subjects. And both, to one degree or another, experienced the ostracism that can result from writing frankly about those subjects. It is not surprising, then, that over the last half-century since their most important works were published, many people outside academia have confused one with the other. Levi Peterson helped diminish that problem with publication of his masterful biography of Juanita Brooks in 1988. Now, Veda Tebbs Hale has put to rest any possibility of confusing these two icons of Mormon literature with publication of her thoroughly penetrating biography of Maurine Whipple.

Swell Suffering: A Biography of Maurine Whipple, tells us just about everything we want to know about the author of one of the great Mormon novels, and a lot of things we might rather have not known. Hale, like most who knew Maurine Whipple well, has approached her subject with highest admiration for the one book Whipple is famous for, and a sense of exasperation for the difficult and chaotic aspects of her personal life. By the time you’ve waded through the endless circle of ups and downs in Whipple’s life, you wonder if that life merited the twenty years Veda Hale put into

researching and writing this exhaustive account. And then you consider The Giant Joshua, the one great book Whipple produced at the pinnacle of her life and you realize, as Hale did, that the life story of the woman who wrote that book should be told, as honestly, as forthrightly and as unvarnished as she told the Mormon story of polygamy. When it comes to the life of Maurine Whipple, everything points toward and back to The Giant Joshua

This is a Cinderella story, heavy on the ashes. A small town Mormon girl dreams of life, love and acclaim in the literary world. In her late thirties the acclaim came for Maurine Whipple as a perfect storm of circumstances culminated with publication of her masterpiece. But love is fleeting, and the “Happily Ever After” that is supposed to follow never quite materialized. The perfect storm never formed again. For decades, readers have wondered what happened to the much talked about sequel(s) to The Giant Joshua. Veda Hale has come as close as we will likely ever get to the answer to that and many other questions about this enigmatic woman. Drawing from numerous interviews with Maurine and her contemporaries, and delving deeply into Whipple’s papers at Dixie State College and the L. Tom Perry Special Collections at Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library, Hale has compassionatelyand objectively pieced together the writer’s life.

It is Whipple’s one great success that lies at the heart of the story—how an aspiring writer overcomes isolation and provinciality to gain national prominence. How in one book she captures the essence of life in a small Mormon settlement and turns it into a story that grips the imagination of a national readership and, to different degrees, offends the sensibilities of the descendants of the people she wrote about. Underlying and overarching it all is the tragedy of a gifted writer who throughout her life desperately seeks acceptance—a place where she can truly belong. It is a search that winds through a life of desperate neediness, fractured family relationships, physical frailty, unmet aspirations, and unrequited love.

Hale depends heavily on many of Whipple’s surviving letter drafts. She does an admirable job of analyzing and documenting the available information. The human being Hale portrays here will ring true to the old-timers of St. George who knew Maurine Whipple. And Hale’s painstaking research will help them begin to understand the eccentricities they saw in the woman who lived out the remainder of her life beneath the vermilion cliffs she so dearly loved. Many of them, as well as anyone who has read The Giant Joshua, will be interested to learn that Maurine Whipple never completely turned her back on the culture that spawned her, and died in full fellowship of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

LYMAN HAFEN Zion Natural History Association

Everett Ruess: His Short Life, Mysterious Death, and Astonishing Afterlife.

By Philip L. Fradkin. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011. xvi + 280 pp. Cloth, $24.95), and Finding Everett Ruess: The Remarkable Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer. By David Roberts. (New York: Broadway Books, 2011. xxx + 396 pp. Cloth, $25.00.)

EVERETT RUESS was a twenty-year-old Los Angeles-based adventurer who vanished in November 1934 while trekking southeast of Escalante, Utah. He has since emerged in the popular imagination as a mythic wunderkind firmly ensconced in the pantheon of misunderstood artists.

In 1982, W.L. “Bud” Rusho published Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty, a best-selling compilation of some of Everett’s correspondence and artwork. Later, Rusho edited Wilderness Journals of Everett Ruess (1998), Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty and Wilderness Journals (1998), and The Mystery of Everett Ruess (2010). With the publication of the first full-scale, book-length biographies of Everett, released separately by two national publishers, 2011 may well be remembered as a milestone in Everett Ruess studies.

The first is mountaineer-journalist David Roberts’s Finding Everett Ruess; the second is Pulitzer Prize-winner Philip L. Fradkin’s Everett Ruess. Each book covers similar territory, while still offering its author’s own approach, analysis, and interpretation. Roberts’s fast-paced study showcases an investigative journalist’s preoccupations, detailing Everett’s short life, tragic disappearance, and Christopher and Stella Ruess’s attempts to find out what happened to their second son. It is the more judgmental of Everett’s youthful prejudices and missteps. It offers an extended heart-wrenching narrative of the victimization of Everett’s parents at the hands of a string of confidence men seeking to profit from their grief and hope.

Much to Roberts’s credit, he does not shy away from his own controversial investigations, beginning in the late 1990s, into Everett’s disappearance, including the sensational news in 2009 that he and others had finally succeeded–where others had repeatedly failed–in identifying Everett’s remains, cached in a crevice in southeastern Utah, and subsequent confession that they, and the forensic and DNA experts they had relied upon, had been mistaken. Roberts’s mea culpa makes for some of his book’s most fascinating reading. One senses how painful it must have been for Roberts to have the Ruess family, perhaps feeling exploited by the emotional experience, intentionally exclude him from any involvement in retesting the DNA samples thought to have been Everett’s.

Fradkin’s analysis is more academic and scholarly, complete with footnotes and endnotes. (Roberts’s book lacks these finding aids, making it

sometimes frustrating for readers interested in knowing the source for a particular quotation.) Fradkin’s treatment is also the more traditionally biographical in scope and structure. Fradkin plumbs the documentary sources more completely, thereby offering a fully informed, nuanced analysis and appreciation of Everett. (Thanks to Everett’s family, Everett’s papers are now housed in the Marriott Library at the University of Utah. The Marriott Library also recently acquired Fradkin’s own papers.)

Both writers are trenchant, knowledgeable narrators, conversant with the written sources as well as with the physical landscapes that dominated Everett’s existence. Under their gaze, Everett emerges as a precocious, thoughtful, if occasionally self-absorbed, adolescent drawn to the natural world, whose beauty he hoped to capture in images (photographs, water colors, and linoleum block prints) and words (poetry, letters, diaries, and essays). Everett’s constant attempts to communicate the seemingly indescribable beauty he encountered both powered and frustrated the intensely felt creativity to which he struggled desperately to give expression. He also longed for satisfying, intimate companionship, but this too seemed to be forever unattainable. Everett’s last known words, “Nemo 1834,” left in stone, speak to his admiration of Jules Verne’s misanthropic “Captain Nemo,” to its Latin meaning, “No man,” and, sadly, to how Everett may have come to see himself at the end of his life.

Like others before them, Roberts and Fradkin hazard some speculation as to Everett’s state of mind, including the possibility that he suffered from the early stages of a bipolar, or manic-depressive, disorder, as well as to questions regarding Everett’s sexual orientation. Roberts is the more skeptical of such approaches. “It is more important,” he suggests “to attend to all the nuances of his attraction to various friends and strangers than to label him as gay or bisexual. In the same way, the mood swings speak for themselves, and to deduce that Everett had a bipolar disorder does little or nothing to aid our understanding of this complicated and articulate young adventurer” (105). Fradkin, on the other hand, deftly draws upon psychology as a tool for better understanding Everett. Fradkin’s discussion, which builds upon and adds to previous treatments of these subjects, is subtle yet illuminating. Given Roberts’s interest in trying to better understand the states of mind of some of his other past subjects I suspect that, if pressed, Roberts might concede that a careful, probing analysis of Everett’s mental state could aid our understanding of him. Still, not everyone might agree, as Fradkin discovered when Everett’s surviving nephews and nieces, after they learned of Fradkin’s psychological interpretation, withdrew their cooperation regarding his biography.

Roberts and Fradkin both display sensitivity in considering the contours of Everett’s multi-faceted personality. Roberts broaches Everett’s apparent

fear of intimacy, wondering if such “tension lay at the core of the insatiable wandering loner he was fast becoming” (61). He also reads one of Everett’s letters to his older brother, Waldo, as alluding to suicide. (Fradkin seems not to read suicide into the same letter.) That Everett’s father reached such a possibility, even if he ultimately r ejected it, points to the value in scrutinizing Everett’s state of mind, as best reconstructed through a careful examination of his letters and diaries.

The same may be said of a discussion of Everett’s sexuality. Both authors know that Everett censored himself when writing to his parents. Given his brother Waldo’s apparent homophobia, it is not surprising that Everett may have concealed some especially private areas of his life from his own family. Consider, for example, that in a letter to a friend Everett used the term “homosexual love,” and not some pejorative phrase. Also revealing is Everett’s admission to Frances Schermerhorn of what seems to have been a sexual encounter only months before he disappeared: “True, I have had many experiences with people, and some very close ones, but there was too much that could not be spoken. I had a strange experience with a young fellow at an outpost, a boy I’d known before. It seems that only in moments of desperation is the soul most truly revealed” (Fradkin, 64). I’m not necessarily offering a judgment as to Everett’s sexuality. I simply believe it would be a mistake not to pursue hints such as these and others in attempting to get a better handle on Everett. Clearly, a next logical step in Ruess studies would be a comprehensive, definitive, accurate edition of all of Everett’s known writings.

Roberts also examines more closely those portions of Everett’s handwritten diaries that, at some point and for some reason, were deliberately erased. This deleted material, which Roberts speculates may have been removed by Everett himself (though arguments could be made for the involvement of his parents, as well), represents one of the more tantalizing mysteries regarding Everett.

Roberts devotes some of his later treatment to events following Everett’s disappearance, including the intriguing possibility that some of Everett’s lost diaries and letters–which, Roberts seems to imply, were probably stolen–may actually be locked away in the personal safes and libraries of one or more private collectors. Fradkin touches on some of these issues, but he is more interested in Ruess family dynamics after Everett’s disappearance, particularly the emotional toll as Waldo tried to hold his father responsible, while Christopher looked instead to blame his wife Stella.

Fradkin uses his last chapter to dissect Roberts’s and others’ involvement in the 2008-2009 misidentification of Native American bones as belonging to Everett. Where Roberts tends to fault computer software for the error, Fradkin is generally unsparing in suggesting that the wrong people used

the wrong equipment and methods to arrive at what could only be the wrong results. “It was a classic setup for a spectacular failure,” Fradkin writes (192). He also blames “misguided and sales-driven journalism” (7). In fact, as both men narrate the same episode, the story seems largely to be one of hubris run amok.

Both authors come across as balanced, opinionated, critically minded researchers whose skepticism helps to bring us closer to the truth, though I wish Roberts were as critical as Fradkin in evaluating recent claims regarding new “evidences” of Everett’s passage through southern Utah, including the “discovery” of additional, probably faked, “Nemo” inscriptions.

Roberts’s and Fradkin’s books provide clues and hints as to what may have happened to Everett in November 1934. Roberts seems to be more persuaded that Everett may have been murdered; Fradkin seems to lean in favor of an accident, perhaps death by quicksand. Given Everett’s possibly manic-depressive mental state, suicide (either passive or aggressive) should not be discarded. Despite the speculation, however well-informed or imaginative, the mystery endures.

Thanks, in part, to the work of skilled investigators like Fradkin and Roberts, Everett Ruess survives today as one of those rare individuals forever destined to remain an enigma, a looming spectral presence whose infectious wanderlust and love of nature and beauty resonate with each new generation.

GARY JAMES BERGERA Salt Lake City

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY FELLOWS

THOMAS G. ALEXANDER JAMES B. ALLEN

LEONARD J. ARRINGTON (1917-1999) MAUREEN URSENBACH BEECHER DAVID L. BIGLER

FAWN M. BRODIE (1915-1981)

JUANITA BROOKS (1898-1989) OLIVE W. BURT (1894-1981) EUGENE E. CAMPBELL (1915-1986) EVERETT L. COOLEY (1917-2006) C. GREGORY CRAMPTON (1911-1995) S. GEORGE ELLSWORTH (1916-1997) AUSTIN E. FIFE (1909-1986) PETER L. GOSS LEROY R. HAFEN (1893-1985) B. CARMON HARDY JOEL JANETSKI

JESSE D. JENNINGS (1909-1997) A. KARL LARSON (1899-1983) GUSTIVE O. LARSON (1897-1983) WILLIAM P. MACKINNON BRIGHAM D. MADSEN (1914-2010) CAROL CORNWALL MADSEN DEAN L. MAY (1938-2003) DAVID E. MILLER (1909-1978) DALE L. MORGAN (1914-1971) WILLIAM MULDER (1915-2008) PHILIP F. NOTARIANNI FLOYD A. O’NEIL HELEN Z. PAPANIKOLAS (1917-2004) CHARLES S. PETERSON RICHARD W. SADLER GARY L. SHUMWAY MELVIN T. SMITH

WALLACE E. STEGNER (1909-1993) WILLIAM A. WILSON

HONORARY LIFE MEMBERS

DAVID BIGLER JAY M. HAYMOND FLORENCE S. JACOBSEN STANFORD J. LAYTON WILLIAM P. MACKINNON JOHN S. MCCORMICK MIRIAM B. MURPHY F. ROSS PETERSON RICHARD C. ROBERTS WILLIAM B. SMART MELVIN T. SMITH LINDA THATCHER GARY TOPPING