Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 80, Number 4, 2012

294 IN THIS ISSUE

296

Utah’s Civil War(s): Linkages and Connections

By William P. MacKinnon

314 A Terror to Evil-Doers: Camp Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and Utah’s Civil War By Will Bagley

334 “A Perfect Hell”: Utah Doughboys in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, 1918

By Brandon Johnson

354 Departure of the Late Nineteenth-Century Cattle Companies from Southeastern Utah: A Reappraisal

By Clyde L. Denis

374 BOOK REVIEWS

Robert S. McPherson. As if the Land Owned Us: An Ethnohistory of the White Mesa Utes

Reviewed by Edward A. Geary

Richard V. Francaviglia. Go East Young Man: Imagining the American West as the Orient

Reviewed by Ethan Yorgason

William M. Adler. The Man Who Never Died: The Life, Times and Legacy of Joe Hill, American Labor Icon

Reviewed by John Sillito

Richard E. Lingenfelter. Bonanzas& Borrascas: Gold Lust and Silver Sharks, 1848-1884

Reviewed by Richard V. Francaviglia

Susan J. Matt. Homesickness: An American History

Reviewed by Philip F. Notarianni

Gregory K. Armstrong, Matthew J. Grow, and Dennis J. Siler, eds. Parley P. Pratt and the Making of Mormonism

Reviewed by Richard W. Sadler

John Phillip Reid. Forging a Fur Empire: Expeditions in the Snake River Country, 1809-1824

Reviewed by Jay H. Buckley

Kelly J. Dixon, Julie M. Schablitsky, and Shannon A. Novak, eds. An Archaeology of Desperation: Exploring the Donner Party’s Alder Creek Camp

Reviewed by Derinna Kopp 390 2012 Index

In late October 1862, some eight hundred soldiers of the Third Regiment of California Volunteers under the command of Colonel Patrick Edward Connor broke camp on the west side of the Jordan River and marched through Salt Lake City enroute to a site on the east bench of the valley where they established Camp Douglas named for the late Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas. In time, the camp became Fort Douglas and for the last one hundred and fifty years has played a key role in the history of Utah, the American West, and the nation. Connor and his men were disappointed that they were not sent to battle the armies of the Confederacy. Instead they were in Utah to keep open the newly completed transcontinental telegraph, the overland mail and transportation route connecting California with the rest of the nation, and to keep watch on Brigham Young and the Utah Mormons. A little more than four years earlier, another force of United States soldiers made their way through an abandoned Salt Lake City to establish Camp Floyd forty miles southwest of the City as part of a negotiated compromise to end the Utah War. Our first article for this issue considers the 1857-1858 clash as Utah’s first civil war and describes the linkages and connections between that conflict and the

COVER: Soldiers at Fort Douglas—May 24, 1917. SHIPLER COLLECTION, UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY.

IN THIS ISSUE: An aerial view of Fort Douglas taken in the early 1950s. UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY.

American Civil War. One of the connections is that many of those men who arrived in 1858 as part of Johnston’s army became prominent participants during the Civil War and their experience in Utah helped shape their attitudes and conduct during the four-year war between the states.

Our second article examines the caldron of issues that made Utah’s experience during the American Civil War unique, in many aspects, from that of the rest of the nation. It considers such questions as the relationship between Abraham Lincoln and Brigham Young, the interaction of Connor’s men with local citizens, the mistrust and animosity between Brigham Young and Patrick Connor, and the reasons for the bloody battle or massacre in January 1863 at Bear River that left twenty-three casualties among the soldiers and several hundred Northwestern Shoshone men, women, and children dead.

Fort Douglas is Utah’s most prominent reminder of the Civil War even though when the war ended in 1865, the fort was still in its infancy. In subsequent years, stone then brick buildings were constructed. The fort reflected the United States military presence in Utah. Soldiers left from the fort to participate in the nation’s armed conflicts including the Spanish American War, the Philippine Insurrection, the conflict along the United States Mexican border, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam Conflict. Our third article in this issue reports the involvement of Utahns in the concluding battle of World War I, the Meuse-Argonne Offensive near Verdun in northeastern France.

Our final article for 2012 takes an insightful look at the nature of large cattle ranches in southeastern Utah and the reasons for their departure from the state during the last decade of the nineteenth century.

As we commemorate with this issue two important sesquicentennials—the establishment of Fort Douglas and the American Civil War, it is interesting to reflect on what the area included in the original Camp Douglas has become. A military presence remains at the fort with active Army Reserve units, but much of the original fort has been absorbed during various phases of expansion by the University of Utah. During the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, the Fort became the Athletes Village with the fort’s bandstand the center for celebrations by the athletics. Subsequently the Olympic village became housing for University of Utah students. Historic buildings have been preserved throughout the fort and the fort has been recognized by the National Park Service as a National Historic Landmark. The historic Officer’s Club has become the location for the annual Utah State History Conference. Surrounding the parade ground, on the south, the Fort Douglas Military Museum, housed in two barracks buildings, preserves the history of the fort and Utah’s military tradition. To the east, the houses that were accommodations for officers now serve a variety of University connected functions. On the north side of the parade ground, the former commander’s house and other buildings are also used by the University with the American West Center and the Center for American Indian Languages housed side by side.

Utah’s Civil War(s): Linkages and Connections

BY WILLIAM P. MACKINNON

“Could my voice be as effectually heard in the strife now surrounding you, as was yours in the troubles that seemed to overshadow us in 1857-8.” — Brigham Young to Thomas L. Kane, September 21, 1861

“You need not expect anything [from Utah] for the present. Things are not right.” — Utah Gov. Stephen S. Harding to Brig. Gen. James Craig, August 25, 1862

As the nation commemorates the American Civil War’s onehundred-fiftieth anniversary, there is a need to remember Utah’s uniquely limited role in that conflict, especially the highly unusual linkages and connections that shaped it, and the reasons why the territory’s involvement unfolded as it did. It is a rich, exotic context that needs to be understood rather than a background to be overshadowed by our understandable, national fascination with the more dramatic stories of slavery and

Copyright 2012 by William P. MacKinnon. This article is derived from the author’s keynote address of same title for the 59th Annual Utah State History Conference, September 10, 2011.

William P.

first article in the Utah Historical Quarterly in 1965.

Mackinnon is an independent historian residing in Montecito, Santa Barbara County, California. He is a fellow and honorary life member of the Utah State Historical Society who published his

General Irwin McDowell.

CIVIL WAR ACADEMY

large-scale battles fought east of the Mississippi. This article’s intent is to shed light on Utah’s unusual Civil War role through a better understanding of a territorial-federal conflict that immediately preceded and shaped it, the Utah War of 1857-1858. It is not an easy connection to describe, for, as historian Michael Beschloss has observed, it is challenging “to dramatize a nonevent. Telling a tale that unfolds [invisibly] in conflicts behind Washington’s closed doors is more difficult than recounting the boom and bang of battlefields.”1

To what extent and how did Utah Territory participate in the American Civil War? 2 Our story begins with the “what” of the matter and then proceeds to the “why” question.

If one skips from the April 1861 start of the Civil War to the third week of October, it is apparent that the six-month-old conflict was going badly for the Union side. On October 21, for example, President Lincoln learned of the Union Army’s disastrous defeat at Ball’s Bluff,Virginia. That same day the president’s bodyguard, Ward H. Lamon, and Illinois congressman Elihu B. Washburne, wrote privately from St. Louis to describe in apocalyptical tones the leadership shortcomings of the army’s department commander in Missouri, General John C. Frémont, the flamboyant, erratic adventurer who had run for the presidency in 1856 on a Republican Party platform that linked and urged the eradication of polygamy and slavery as “the twin relics of barbarism.” Also on October 21, 1861, former president James Buchanan a prime mover in the Utah War—wrote from his Pennsylvania retirement mansion a shockingly inane note asking a beleaguered Lincoln to forward a borrowed book that he had inadvertently left behind in the White House library seven months earlier. Almost as an afterthought, Buchanan closed his only known note to Lincoln during the Civil War with the breezy comment: “Sincerely desiring that your administration may prove successful in restoring the union & that you may be more happy in your exalted Station than was your immediate predecessor.”

On October 22, 1861, the next day, the flow of mail to the White House with strange LDS linkages continued apace, especially from New York. James Gordon Bennett, editor-publisher of the New York Herald and a former brigadier general in the Mormon Nauvoo Legion, wrote to support Lincoln and the Union in language as vigorous as President Buchanan’s

1 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.

2 For the most significant narrative studies of Utah’s Civil War involvement, see E.B. Long, The Saints and the Union: Utah Territory during the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981 rptd. 2001); James F. Varley, Brigham and the Brigadier: General Patrick Connor and His California Volunteers in Utah and Along the Overland Trail (Tucson: Westernlore Press, 1989); Fred B. Rogers, Soldiers of the Overland, Being an Account of the Services of General Patrick Edward Connor and His Volunteers in the Old West (San Francisco: Grabhorn Press, 1938); and Margaret May Merrill Fisher, Utah and the Civil War: Being the Part Played by the People of Utah in that Great Conflict, with Special Reference to the Lot Smith Expedition and the Robert T. Burton Expedition (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1929).

comments were insipid. The same day, James Arlington Bennet, a Brooklyn cemetery developer whom Joseph Smith, Jr. had earlier designated a Nauvoo Legion major general as well as his 1844 presidential running-mate, also wrote to Lincoln. His was a stunning, unsolicited proposition: “Will your Excellency accept from one to ten thousand Mormons to be mustered into the service of the U. States, to fight for our glorious Union & Constitution?” This Bennet, not to be confused with his brother-officer the Manhattan newspaperman, signed the letter with his former Nauvoo Legion rank and the self-description, “full of life fun & fight.”3

James Arlington Bennett’s unsolicited profferof thousands of Mormon troops for the Union Army would, on the surface, seem to have been a god-send for Abraham Lincoln—the prospect of the Mexican War’s Mormon Battalion but on a grander scale. The president’s initial call for the states to provide seventy-five thousand men had been met during the summer, but their three-month enlistments were expiring, and, after dramatic Union defeats at Bull Run and Ball’s Bluff, governors were challenged to provide fresh, longer-serving regiments for the duration of the war. The president was in need of, if not desperate for, troops. What did Lincoln do with James Arlington Bennet’s offer? Nothing. He filed it without response, much as the army’s adjutant general had literally pigeon-holed former captain U.S. Grant’s unsolicited offer to re-enter the army a few months earlier.

The reason for Lincoln’s decision to ignore this proposition is murky. Perhaps from his highly-developed political instincts, the president realized that James Arlington Bennet’s vision of brigades of Latter-day Saints was a non-credible pipe dream spawned in the isolation of Brooklyn from the rich fantasy life of an erratic, aging former Mormon insider-outsider. Then there was the matter of background. Bennet was not only the author of

3 Letters to Lincoln discussed above are all from Abraham Lincoln Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. The first known discussion of James Arlington Bennet’s quirky offer of Mormon troops was MacKinnon, “Stephen A. Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and ‘The Mormon Problem’: The 1857 Springfield Debate,” unpublished plenary talk at Mormon History Association annual conference, Springfield, Ill., May 23, 2009. Subsequent published discussion of this document appeared in Mary Jane Woodger and Wendy Vardeman White, “The Sangamo Journal’s ‘Rebecca’ and the ‘Democratic Pets’: Abraham Lincoln’s Interaction with Mormonism,” Journal of Mormon History 36 (Fall 2010), 96-128 and Woodger, “Abraham Lincoln and the Mormons,” chapter in Kenneth L. Alford, ed., Civil War Saints (Provo and Salt Lake City: BYU Religious Studies Center and Deseret Book, 2012) as well as in Ted Widmer, “Lincoln and the Mormons,” opinion essay of November 17, 2011, in New York Times “Opinionator,” accessed November 17, 2011 at http://opinionator.blogs. nytimes.com/2011/11/17/lincoln-and-themormons/?emc=e.

T.B.H. Stenhouse.

UTAH

accounting and mathematics texts but a small-time confidence man who had spent part of the 1850s imprisoned in Manhattan’s notorious Tombs. Although Brigham Young had baptized James Arlington Bennet in the surf of Long Island Sound in the early 1840s, Bennet had written to Lincoln in 1861 without consulting Young or anyone else in Utah Territory, home of the thousands of troops he envisioned to fight for the Union. As a cemetery promoter, Bennet might have been able to provide the free burial plot and 300-foot obelisk that he had quirkily tendered to President Buchanan as the Utah War started in the spring of 1857, but four years later he was wholly incapable of delivering the large religiously-based military force that he held out to Lincoln.4

If President Lincoln chose to distance himself from James Arlington Bennet’s byzantine recruiting scheme, he was equally wary of seeking largescale troop commitments directly from Utah Territory’s official and informal leaders. So also were they. A month before Bennet wrote to Lincoln, Brigham Young had written to his oldest non-Mormon friend, Thomas L. Kane of Philadelphia, who had just entered the Union Army as a lieutenant colonel after recruiting a regiment of Pennsylvania lumberjacks: “A word to you, my Friend, your present position and calling will bring no credit to you, nor to any other man. They are afraid of you, and will not give you your just dues. They will find out in time that the strife they are engaged in will bring no desirable celebrity. This is for your own eye and benefit [only].” 5

4 There is no full-length biography of Bennet, although some of his interactions with Joseph Smith and Brigham Young are discussed in Lyndon W. Cook, “James Arlington Bennet and the Mormons,” BYU Studies 19 (Winter 1979): 247-49. Bennet’s legal problems appear in fragmentary fashion in a variety of newspaper accounts, including those in Boston Courier, January 14, 1850, and Savannah, Georgia, Daily Morning News, January 16, 1850. The matter of presidential burial arrangements is discussed in Bennet to Buchanan, June 24, 1857, and Buchanan to Bennet, July 1, 1857, James Buchanan Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

UTAH’S CIVIL WAR(S)

Thomas L. Kane

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Accordingly, although there was a significant amount of military activity in and around Utah during 1861-1865, the territory, its civil-religious leaders, and its military-age men played virtually no part in the action.6

There was, of course, a notable exception to this generalization—the now-famous ninety-day service of Captain Lot Smith’s one hundred-man federal cavalry company raised in Utah with Brigham Young’s help during the spring of 1862. But that was it. When during August 1862 Brigadier General James Craig, the Union Army’s short-handed commander at Fort Laramie, sought to re-enlist Lot Smith’s troops and recruit even more extensively in the territory, Utah governor Stephen S. Harding waved him off. Harding, a Lincoln appointee, had just met with former governor Brigham Young, with the result his cryptic telegraphic report to General Craig: “You need not expect anything [from Utah] for the present. Things are not right.”7 Consequently, Craig and the Lincoln administration backed off for the balance of the war and recruited troops elsewhere – three hundred thousand of them in the next few months alone. In the fall of 1864 the army’s commander in San Francisco made one more attempt to explore the possibility of raising a regiment of volunteers in Utah, but the effort proved ineffective. Hence T.B.H. Stenhouse’s now-famous 1863 report to former governor Young that the president had described to him a Lincolnesque Mormon policy by which “if the people let him alone, he would let them alone.”8

This is not to say that individual Latter-day Saints living in the Middle West or South, rather than Utah, did not join the Union and Confederate armies. In fact, they did so. But their numbers were very small—only a handful have been identified by name—and their enlistment decisions were influenced by personal inclinations or local pressures rather than by any call

5 Brigham Young to Thomas L. Kane, September 21, 1861, LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City.

6For context, see Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., The Civil War in the American West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).

7 Harding to Craig, August 25, 1862 quoted in Craig to Major General Henry Halleck, same date, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, series 3, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1899), 596. Unfortunately there is no record of Harding’s meeting with Young. The author’s conjecture is that Brigham Young was offended by his awareness that the Lincoln administration was then in the process of sending a regiment of California volunteer troops to garrison Utah without notifying either him or Governor Harding.

8 Stenhouse to Young, June 7, 1863, LDS Church History Library. Stenhouse, an English-born convert, was then a Mormon newspaperman and emigration agent in Manhattan, who kept the Mormon hierarchy current on eastern affairs. Years later, folklore transformed the phrasing of the most famous part of the Lincoln-Stenhouse interview into a more personalized version by which the president supposedly said, “You go back and tell Brigham Young that if he will let me alone, I will let him alone.” The slight difference in phrasing is subtle but telling. See, for example, Preston Nibley, Brigham Young, The Man and His Work (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1936), 369. Interestingly, when Young received Stenhouse’s letter, he used its phrasing in describing the White House interview to George Q. Cannon rather than that later attributed to Lincoln by folklore.Young to Cannon, June 25, 1863, LDS Church History Library. One of the few accounts to grasp the distinction between folklore and what Stenhouse actually reported to Young as Lincoln’s words is Chad M. Orton, “‘We Will Admit You As a State’: William H. Hooper, Utah and the Secession Crisis,” Utah Historical Quarterly 80 (Summer 2012): 225 n 73.

to arms by Utah Territory’s distant official or informal leaders.9

And so from August of 1862 the responsibility for protecting Utahns as well as the transcontinental emigration trails and telegraph line through their territory fell to volunteer regiments raised not in Salt Lake City but in California and elsewhere. As Brigham Young so frequently phrased it in other contexts, “the job was let out.”

Compared to the participation, if not carnage, experienced by virtually every other state and territory, Utah’s absence from the fray was unparalleled and had long-lasting negative impact on attitudes about her patriotism throughout the United States. 10 If Utah’s men were not battlefield casualties, their territory’s reputation surely was, especially among Union and even Confederate veterans unaware of service by Lot Smith’s company and Abraham Lincoln’s ambivalence about a subsequent call on Utah Territory for military manpower.

Put most starkly, Union men from each of the eleven states of the Confederacy formed and provided more companies, battalions, and regiments to the United States Army than did Utah. Perhaps even more dramatic was the fact that at the end of the war Camp Douglas was garrisoned by at least one federal regiment recruited from Confederate prisoners of war who had been paroled with the condition that they enlist in the Union Army to fight Indians as “Galvanized Yankees.”11

So why would President Lincoln have to rely more on federal units with names like the First Alabama Cavalry and the First Georgia Infantry—

9

For a discussion of the few known LDS troops who served other than in Lot Smith’s company, see Robert C. Freeman, “LDS Civil War Stories: Union and Confederate Soldiers,” chapter in Alford, ed., Civil War Saints

10 John Gary Maxwell, Gettysburg to Great Salt Lake: George R. Maxwell, Civil War Hero and Federal Marshal among the Mormons (Norman: The Arthur H. Clark Co., 2010). As for other western territories during the war, Nevada contributed 1,180 men, most of whom served in or around Utah. Arizona Territory was not carved out of New Mexico Territory until 1863, but the latter as well as California supplied multiple regiments of volunteer troops to defend Arizona against raids by Apaches, Navajos, and Confederates. Montana did not become a territory until May 1864, when it was created from eastern Idaho Territory. Montana contributed no Civil War units, wracked as it was by its own sectional partisanship. See Josephy, The Civil War in the American West. Even though much emphasis is given to the Civil War recruitment and service rendered by Captain Lot Smith’s lone cavalry company, it is important to understand its contribution in the context of military service rendered by other western territories during the war.

11 For a listing of such units see Frederick H. Dyer, A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion, 3 vols. (Des Moines: F.H. Dyer, 1908; rptd. Dayton, Ohio: Morningside Book Shop, 1978), vol. 3; Dee Brown, The Galvanized Yankees (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963).

General James Craig. PUBLIC DOMAIN

regiments that joined General Sherman in his brutal march from Atlanta to the sea—rather than on, say, a Second Regiment of Utah Cavalry that was never recruited? The short answer is that because Utah Territory, under Brigham Young’s unofficial leadership, had, in effect, opted out of the Civil War with Lincoln’s acquiescence. Beyond his key, early role in raising Lot Smith’s single company of three-months men, President Young was unwilling for Utah to contribute further to the war effort. He had two main reasons for this decision—the first religiously oriented and the other emotional.

With respect to religion, Young felt that the American Civil War was simply not a Mormon conflict. When the war started Utah was technically a slave territory, but there were so few people living in bondage within its borders that defense of the Confederacy and its peculiar institution held no appeal for Mormons. By the same token, anti-black attitudes (President Young’s among them) muted any abolitionist fervor in Utah of the sort that had developed in many of the northern states to bring on the war itself while fueling the fires of strong pro-Union sentiments. Consequently Brigham Young saw the war in millennial or religious terms rather than through the lens of political or sectional allegiances. As one of Young’s senior apostles, John Taylor, put it on Independence Day of 1861, “Shall we join the North to fight against the South? No! … Why? They have both, as before shown, brought it upon themselves, and we have had no hand in the matter … we know no North, no South, no East, no West; we abide strictly and positively by the Constitution.”12

Since Joseph Smith’s 1832 prophecy that there would be a great American civil conflict and that it would begin in South Carolina, Mormons and their supreme leader had not only anticipated such a turn of events but viewed it as God-given retribution or punishment for Mormon persecution.13 They saw the Mormon role as one to be played out only at the war’s end. By this view, Mormons, with Lamanite allies at their side, were destined to save an exhausted country and its imperiled constitution by intervening to establish the Kingdom of God in anticipation of the end days and imminent Second Coming of Christ. Perhaps this is what Brigham Young meant in writing to Thomas L. Kane in September 1861 to comment on “disastrous results” and to say cryptically, “all this is but the beginning of still greater events, events which it may not be wise to too freely express one’s views upon.”14

In some respects Young’s religious views of the war closely resembled those of many other American religious leaders. In still other ways his

12 John Taylor, Discourse of July 4, 1861, quoted in B.H. Roberts, A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Century I, 6 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1930), 5:11.

13 Doctrine and Covenants 87:1-8. At the time Joseph Smith made this prophecy, President Andrew Jackson was dealing with the Nullification crisis in South Carolina.

14 Young to Kane, September 21, 1861, LDS Church History Library.

UTAH’S CIVIL WAR(S)

interpretation of the Civil War was uniquely Mormon, leading President Young to counsel as he did a complete withdrawal from involvement in the conflict.

The similarities among Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, and Jews ran to their religious leaders’ view of what historian George C. Rable has called a “providential” (divinely involved) interpretation of the Civil War—one with millennial overtones:

The providential view led most observers to see individual battles [as well as the war] as sign posts in a mysterious and evolving providential story. Thus Confederate preachers trumpeted the battle of Manassas at the beginning of the war as God’s judgment on Yankees; the latter’s soul searching concluded the almighty used the defeat in the battle to punish the sins of Northerners. Thereafter, each victory or defeat brought similar interpretations on both sides, nurturing overconfidence or despair. The Civil War god was one carefully calibrating individual and national sins … and doling out battlefield victories and defeats accordingly.15

In Brigham Young’s view, the national sin for which the Civil War was divinely engineered and deservedly calamitous, was godlessness aggravated by persecution of the Latter-day Saints and assassination of their founding prophet, abandoned to his fate by a feckless U.S. government. If before the Civil War Abraham Lincoln had worried about what he termed a House Divided, Brigham Young was more than willing, once the fighting began, to proclaim a plague on both its conflicted wings while awaiting societal collapse on a continental scale. From this ruin Mormonism was expected to arise triumphant. Given this interpretation of the war’s origins and meaning by the most influential religious leader in the territory, it is not surprising that Utahns abstained from rushing into such a scene.16

Aside from matters of religion, the second major factor driving Brigham Young’s antipathy toward Utah’s participation in the Civil War was an emotional one—anger and resentment toward the U.S. government, especially with respect to its involvement in the recently concluded Utah War of 1857-1858 and the federal military “occupation” of the territory that followed until the outbreak of the Civil War itself.

Take the matter of gunpowder, for example. All during the Utah War Young had tried without significant success to stimulate the local manufacture of this military necessity. As the Utah Expedition closed down Camp Floyd in 1861, to Young’s rage it blew up its ammunition magazines, prompting him to storm: “Was this course conciliatory and wise? Such destruction appears the more singular … when contrasted with the possibility that the

15 Charles Reagan Wilson in review of George C. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010) in Journal of American History 98 (December 2011): 801.

16 For a review of LDS Church leaders’ perspective on the war see David F. Boone, “The Church and the Civil War” in Robert C. Freeman, ed., Nineteenth-Century Saints at War (Provo: BYU Religious Studies Center, 2006), 113-39; Richard E. Bennett, “‘We Know No North, No South, No East, No West’: Mormon Interpretations of the Civil War, 1861-1865,” Mormon Historical Studies 10 (Spring 2009): v-xvii.

Government may wish our armed assistance in some shape, at some time, for which those arms and munitions would be very requisite, and the destruction of which has placed a call for aid in such an awkward position to be made, should they at any time desire to make it. Where is the counsel of the prudent?”17

In 1861 Brigham Young had wistfully written to Kane: “Could my voice be as effectually heard in the strife now surrounding you, as was yours in the troubles that seemed to overshadow us in 1857-8, I would most cheerfully endeavor to reciprocate the noble deeds of yourself. But the roar of cannon and the clash of arms drown the still small voice of prudent counsel.” 18 By 1862 it was too late; anti-federal attitudes rooted in the devastating Utah War experience and aggravated by both Congress’s rejection of another statehood petition for “Deseret” as well as Lincoln’s signature on the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, the first federal anti-polygamy statute, had solidified Brigham Young’s negative view of the Civil War. That year Young said: Had we not been persecuted, we would now be in the midst of the wars and bloodshed that are desolating the nation, instead of where we are, comfortable located in our peaceful dwellings in these silent, far off mountains and valleys. Instead of seeing my brethren comfortably seated around me to-day, many of them would be found in the front ranks on the battle field. I realize the blessings of God in our present safety. We are greatly blessed, greatly favored and greatly exalted, while our enemies who sought to destroy us, are being humbled.19

Reinforcing Brigham Young’s hostility to the war effort was Lincoln’s unannounced insertion into Utah of Colonel Patrick Edward Connor’s regiment of California volunteers. Through his own intelligence sources, Young knew that Connor’s troops were coming weeks ahead of their arrival in Salt Lake City on October 26, 1862. As with the westward movement of the Utah Expedition five years earlier, Young had received no formal notification from the United States Government. As early as August 25, 1862, the day that Utah’s Governor Harding met unsuccessfully with Young to discuss General Craig’s desire to re-enlist Lot Smith’s cavalry company, President Young had sent the army’s adjutant general in Washington a telegram freighted with both ambivalence and sarcasm: “Please inform me whether the government wishes the militia of the Territory of Utah to go beyond her borders while troops are here from other States who have been sent to protect the mail and telegraphy

17 William P. MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point , Part 1, A Documentary History of the Utah War to 1858 (Norman: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 2008).

18 Young to Kane, September 21, 1861, LDS Church History Library.

19 Brigham Young, “Constitutional Powers of the Congress of the United States.—Growth of the Kingdom of God,” Discourse of March 9, 1862, Journal of Discourses. 26 vols. (Liverpool: Latter-day Saints Book Depot) 10:38-39.

property.”20 With this message Young signaled not only his annoyance over the unannounced troop movements then under way but his unwillingness to again use his influence to send Mormon troops into action outside Utah’s borders.

A view of Fort Douglas in 1868 looking from the northeast to the southwest.

Compounding the indignity of having Utah “occupied” by “foreign” troops while the U.S. government exerted pressure to recruit Mormon lads for service elsewhere, was Connor’s decision to name his bivouac on the bench overlooking Salt Lake City “Camp Douglas.” Connor’s selection of the late Senator Stephen A. Douglas as namesake for his new post was a deliberate thumb in Young’s eye. Given the well-known Mormon hostility to Douglas since his controversial, anti-Mormon speech given in Springfield, Illinois at the beginning of the Utah War, it is difficult to view Connor’s motives otherwise.21

Chaffing under the presence of Connor’s troops in Utah, in March 1863 Brigham Young’s anger boiled over. He publicly lashed out in a Sunday discourse to say, “[I]f the Government of the United States should now ask for a battalion of men to fight in the present battle-fields of the nation, while there is a camp of soldiers from abroad located within the corporate limits of this city, I would not ask one man to go; I would see them in hell

20 Young to Brig. Gen. Lorenzo Thomas, August 25, 1862, LDS Church History Library. The author thanks Prof. John Turner of the University of Southern Alabama, Mobile for bringing this telegram to his attention.

21 Kenneth L. Alford and William P. MacKinnon, “What’s in a Name?: Establishing Camp Douglas,” chapter in Alford, ed., Civil War Saints. Although not documented, it is also reasonable to assume that the California and mining background of Connor’s command did nothing to endear it to Brigham Young. As former residents of the Mormon colony in San Bernardino understood, President Young had long been ambivalent about California as a proper place for Latter-day Saints to gather. Young’s view of mining as an inappropriate Mormon occupation was well known.

UTAH’S CIVIL WAR(S)

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

first.”22 Connor’s Californians were in Utah, rather than battlefields in the East, because of President Young’s unwillingness to countenance local recruitment after the spring of 1862 and his opposition to raising regiments in Utah because of the war department’s decision to send Connor’s troops to Salt Lake City. Compounding this complexity was President Lincoln’s apparent unwillingness to call on Utah’s federally-appointed governor for a levy of troops as he had done throughout the rest of the country.

Nonetheless, in October 1864 Brigadier General Irvin McDowell, commander of the army’s Department of the Pacific, doggedly queried Utah governor James Duane Doty, a non-Mormon on good terms with Brigham Young, about the possibility of raising a four-company regiment of Utah infantry for the Union Army. Doty never quite said “no” in response to this overture, but he pointed out that Utahns already had the opportunity to join the Union Army by enlisting in Connor’s existing regiment. Doty also noted the inferiority of military pay versus wages for mining and agricultural work in Utah, the absence of an attractive enlistment bounty for Utahns of the sort available elsewhere, and the ineffectivenessof using infantry rather than cavalry in the region. McDowell, exiled to San Francisco following his disastrous 1861 defeat at First Bull Run, was in no mood to quibble with a clearly unenthusiastic territorial governor. After informing Governor Duty, “I do not propose to make requisition for cavalry instead of infantry,” General McDowell let the matter drop.23

Adding to this antipathy were Brigham Young’s strong reservations about, if not contempt for, President Lincoln, a man whom he had never met notwithstanding their common residence in Illinois. After Lincoln’s assassination and near-canonization, public criticism of the martyred president was carefully muted in Utah as elsewhere, but before that catastrophe, local comments about Lincoln were frequently caustic. Even before Lincoln’s first inauguration, Brigham Young referred to him publicly as a weakling “King Abraham” much as he continued to dub Lincoln’s predecessor, James Buchanan, “King James.” Throughout the war Brigham Young was often scathing in his private comments about Lincoln as were some of the president’s own cabinet officers. 24 On August 23, 1863, a month after the fall of Vicksburg and the great battle at Gettysburg, Young referred to the president during a small council meeting at apostle Ezra T. Benson’s home as “old Abe Lincoln” and added, “Now you may excuse me

22

Brigham Young, “The Persecution of the Saints.—Their Loyalty to the Constitution.—The Mormon Battalion.—The Law of God Relative to the African Race,” Discourse of March 8, 1863, Journal of Discourses, 10:107.

23 McDowell to Doty, October 3, 1864; Doty to McDowell, October 21, 1864; McDowell to Doty, October 22, 1864; photocopies in author’s possession courtesy of Ephriam D. Dickson III, curator, Fort Douglas Museum.

24 Some writers have concluded that as the war progressed,Young mellowed on the subject of Lincoln and grew to respect him. For a study subscribing to this more benign “mellowing” view, see George U. Hubbard, “Abraham Lincoln as Seen by the Mormons,” Utah Historical Quarterly 31 (Spring 1963): 91-108.

UTAH’S CIVIL WAR(S)

or not, but he is a damned old scamp and villain, and I don’t believe that Phoraoh [sic] of old was any worse or wickeder.” 25 Unlike Brigham Young’s comments about General Connor, which were deeply personal, his negative remarks about Abraham Lincoln, as with those about James Buchanan before him, seem institutional more than personal.

With this background as to the “what” of Utah’s limited role in the Civil War, it is now appropriate to return to the “why” question and the linkage between that conflict and the Utah War that immediately preceded it. The 1857-1858 conflict was the single biggest factor in shaping Utah’s unique reaction to the Civil War when it began three years later.26

In brief, the Utah War was a struggle for power and authority in Utah— ten years in the making—between the territory’s civil-religious leadership headed by Governor Brigham Young and the federal administration of President James Buchanan. At stake were competing philosophies of

25 Minutes of Council Meeting at Logan, Utah, August 23, 1863, Church Historian’s Office, General Church minutes, 1839-1877, Box 3, Fd 34, LDS Church History Library.

26The most recent, comprehensive documentary and narrative accounts of the Utah War of 1857-1858, and the service of Utah War veterans in the Civil War and thereafter, are: MacKinnon, “Buchanan’s Thrust from the Pacific: The Utah War’s Ill-Fated Second Front,” California Territorial Quarterly 82 (Summer 2010): 4-27, “Epilogue to the Utah War: Impact and Legacy,” Journal of Mormon History 29 (Fall 2003): 186-248, and At Sword’s Point; David L. Bigler and Will Bagley, The Mormon Rebellion: America’s First Civil War, 18571858 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011); Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict, 1850-1859 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960). A concise account of the conflict is MacKinnon, “Utah War of 1857-58,” essay in W. Paul Reeve and Ardis E. Parshall, eds., Mormonism: A Historical Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2010), 120-22.

Lodging for non-commissioned soldiers and laundress quarters at Fort Douglas.

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governance for Utah—its continuation as a de facto religious theocracy under Young’s authoritarian leadership or a territory ruled by republican principles under congressional supervision. This armed confrontation was the nation’s most extensive and expensive military undertaking during the period between the Mexican and Civil wars—one that eventually pitted Utah’s large, experienced territorial militia (Nauvoo Legion) against almost one-third of the United States Army.

During the war atrocities were committed by both sides on a scale that rivaled the carnage that had earned Utah’s eastern neighbor the enduring label “Bleeding Kansas.” Among the casualties was Brigham Young’s own reputation, damaged by federal grand jury indictments for treason and murder and stained, along with that of the church he led, by controversy over responsibility for the appalling Mountain Meadows Massacre of September 11, 1857. What followed during the three-year period between the U.S. Army’s entrance into the Salt Lake Valley in June 1858 and its 1861 departure for the battlefields of New Mexico and Virginia, was an ordeal that Mormons later likened to Reconstruction in the South during 1865-1876.

Upon the army’s arrival in Utah, private citizen Young went into seclusion, fearing for his life and curtailing church services in the Salt Lake City Tabernacle throughout the summer of 1858. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Mormon families from northern Utah trekked home and struggled to reestablish themselves after their epic, disruptive Move South to Provo during the spring of 1858. Theirs had been the largest mass movement of refugees since the expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia and the British Loyalists from the United States following the French and Indian War and American Revolution, respectively. With the subsequent influx of troops, camp followers, merchants, miners, and opportunists the ratio of Utah’s Mormon to non-Mormon population changed forever. Destroyed with this change was the cultural, family, and religious isolation that had enabled Utah to become what it was when the Utah Expedition first arrived. Adding insult to injury, in March 1861 a departing president Buchanan reduced Utah’s borders drastically by signing legislation to take three “bites” from her western and eastern flanks to form Nevada and Colorado territories and to enlarge Nebraska. It was a loss to be replicated a few years later with reductions at Utah’s expense to form and then enlarge the State of Nevada while creating Dakota and Wyoming territor ies.As President Lincoln prepared to take office in March 1861 as president of a divided nation, the army’s largest garrison was in the desert forty miles southwest of Salt Lake City.

In terms of its immediate impact the Utah War had enormous negative consequences that were economic, geographic, personal, and reputational in character. Some of these consequences—especially the legacy of Mountain Meadows—are still evident today. The Utah War spawned not only ambivalence in Brigham Young but an exotic legacy comprised of rich, colorful, and fascinating personal experiences for thousands of other people that helped to shape the subsequent history of the

Civil War, Utah, Mormonism, and the American West.

For many of these participants, the Utah War was a foundational experience in their formative years from which they subsequently sprang into a panoply of even more colorful adventures of both heroic and tragic stripe.27 The stories are legion of how their Utah War experiences shaped the post-1858 world of senior civilian leaders on both sides like James Buchanan, his cabinet officers, Brigham Young, and Alfred Cumming, Young’s gubernatorial successor. And then there are fascinating, well known vignettes involving the Utah War’s most senior military leaders like the U.S. Army’s Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, Brigadier General William S. Harney, and the Utah Expedition’s principal commander, Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston, as well as the Nauvoo Legion’s senior leader, Lieutenant General Daniel H. Wells. What should be noted at least briefly, though, is that among the junior officers, enlisted men, and even civilians who served under Colonel Johnston during the Utah War, scores of them would become Union or Confederate generals soon thereafter. Several among Johnston’s troops—enlistees as well as officers and even a few civilian employees—were destined to receive the Medal of Honor during the Civil War or the Indian campaigns that soon followed.

One graphic way to illustrate the vastness of the Utah Expedition’s experiential contribution to the Civil War’s talent pool is through the Union and Confederate command structure at a single 1863 battle— Gettysburg. It is a list that reads like a Who’s Who of Utah War veterans. It was a Confederate brigadier, Henry Heth, formerly a captain in the Utah Expedition’s Tenth Infantry, whom folklore credits with touching off the battle. Soon arrayed against Heth and his Confederate comrades—some of them Utah War veterans like General J.E.B. Stuart—were Union generals with similar backgrounds such as John F. Reynolds, late of the Third Artillery, and John Cleveland Robinson, a former Fifth Infantry captain. General Reynolds died famously at Gettysburg; General Robinson survived, later lost a leg, received the Medal of Honor, and went on to command the Grand Army of the Republic and serve as New York State’s lieutenant governor. Also rendering extraordinary service to the Union at Gettysburg were General Stephen H. Weed, a former first lieutenant in Phelps’ battery who died while defending Little Round Top, as well as Generals John Buford and Alfred Pleasonton, both formerly of the Utah Expedition’s Second Dragoons.

Among the most tragic deaths at Gettysburg was that of Confederate brigadier Lewis A. Armistead, killed while fighting his friend and brother officer from the Utah Expedition’s Sixth U.S. Infantry, Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, a subsequent candidate for president of the

27Much of the following discussion of personal stories about Utah War participants is based on MacKinnon, “Epilogue to the Utah War” and “Prelude to Civil War: The Utah War’s Impact and Legacy,” chapter in Alford, ed., Civil War Saints.

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United States. One of the battle’s most dramatic deaths was that of Brigadier General Elon John Farnsworth, a cavalry officer killed only four days after being promoted from captain while leading a gallop against entrenched Alabama troops likened to the Crimean War’s Charge of the Light Brigade. During the Utah War Farnsworth had worked at Camp Floyd as a civilian foragemaster after being expelled from the University of Michigan for his role in a fatal drinking bout. He was the sole Union Army general officer to die behind enemy lines during the entire war.

Lower in the Union Army’s leadership cadre at Gettysburg, one finds First Lieutenant James (“Jock”) Stewart, Scottish-born commander of the battle’s most decimated unit—Light Battery “B” of the Fourth U.S. Artillery, the unit in which Stewart served as first sergeant throughout the Utah War. Like Albert Sidney Johnston, Jock Stewart campaigned in the Civil War astride the horse that he had ridden into the Utah War. While Stewart led Light Battery “B” at Gettysburg, his Utah War comrade in the Fourth, Frederick Fuger, commanded the regiment’s Battery “A” as its first sergeant in helping to repulse Pickett’s Charge, a performance that brought Fuger both a lieutenant’s commission and a Medal of Honor.

On the Mormon side of the Utah War, the military talent was as colorful as that of the federals but not as well known because of the Nauvoo Legion’s almost total absence from the Civil War. Among the most dashing of the Legion’s veterans were a handful of men who during the Utah War carried relatively modest military and church rank but were among the West’s most accomplished horsemen. Best known of these, of course, was Major Lot Smith, a veteran of the Mormon Battalion, from whom came the Utah War’s most famous utterance during his spectacular, fiery raid on the army’s supply trains near Green River during the night of October 4-5, 1857. When an excited federal wagonmaster reportedly shouted, “For God’s sake, don’t burn the trains,” Smith’s reaction was, “it was for His sake that I was going to burn them.” It fell to Smith to command the single mounted company constituting Utah Territory’s contribution to the Union Army, a role that he carried out efficiently as a federal captain although he had earlier served as a militia major.

In 1892, living in self-imposed exile in the slick rock canyons of northern Arizona and somewhat estranged from his church, Lot Smith died of wounds sustained in a close-range exchange of gunfire with a Navajo shepherdin a grazing dispute. A decade later Smith’s body was exhumed and transported north to his former home at Farmington, Utah for an extraordinary recommital service attended by virtually the entire hierarchy of the LDS Church. This was a direct reflection of his standing as the Utah War’s best-known veteran on either side. For years thereafter Lot Smith’s comrades-in-arms from the Utah and Civil wars met for annual reunions at his grave. Even during the twenty-first century uniformed re-enactments of these gatherings continue periodically in Farmington as a gesture of respect for Lot Smith and pride in Mormon military service.

Space does not permit discussion of all the other Utah War soldiers— federal troops as well as Nauvoo Legionnaires—who entered the history books because of their colorful post-war adventures but did so largely unrecognized for their connection to the Utah War in which they earlier served. And so for now it is necessary to pass by the stories of men like Private William Gentles of the Tenth U.S. Infantry, a veteran of Captain Randolph B. Marcy’s epic winter march from Fort Bridger to New Mexico for remounts. It was Gentles whom folklore has delivering the mortal bayonet thrust to Chief Crazy Horse at the Fort Robinson, Nebraska guardhouse in 1877. Then there are Private Robert Foote of the Second Dragoons, a prominent civilian player in Wyoming’s Johnson County War of 1892; Corporal Myles Moylan of the same regiment, who during the Civil War was commissioned and then cashiered, reenlisted as a private under an alias, commissioned again in the Seventh U.S. Cavalry, and retired as a major in 1893 after surviving the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876 and receiving the Medal of Honor; Lieutenant Colonel Barnard E. Bee, commander of the Utah Expedition’s Volunteer Battalion, who died heroically as a Confederate brigadier at First Bull Run after giving General Thomas L. Jackson the nickname “Stonewall”; Bee’s Volunteer Battalion subordinate, Private Benjamin Harrison Clark, who fought in the Civil War, later became extraordinarily proficient in Cheyenne, and served as chief scout-interpreter for Generals Custer, Sheridan, Sherman, and Miles during the post-Civil War plains campaigns; Second Lieutenant Samuel Wragg Ferguson of the Second U.S. Dragoons, the Confederate brigadier who at the opening of the war accepted the surrender of Fort Sumter and who atthe end escorted Jefferson Davis in his last futile dash south from Richmond; and Captain Jesse Lee Reno,

This 1864 photograph of the Fort Douglas Guardhouse which was constructed in 1862.

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commander of the Utah Expedition’s siege battery, who died a federal major general at South Mountain, Maryland.

Also worthy of mention is William H.F. (“Rooney”) Lee, Robert E. Lee’s second son, who dropped out of Harvard in May 1857 to wangle a lieutenant’s commission in the Utah Expedition’s Sixth Infantry against his father’s wishes. Rooney Lee was to become the Confederacy’s youngest major general, a role in which he was captured on a Virginia battlefield by Samuel P. Spear, a lieutenant colonel of Pennsylvania cavalry whom Lee had earlier met in Utah when Spear was sergeant-major of the tough Second U.S. Dragoons. Spear ultimately became a brevet brigadier general in the Union Army; after the war he led the quixotic Fenian (Irish) invasion of Canada from Vermont.

Of all the later exploits of the Utah War’s veterans, it would be most intriguing to probe further the experiences of Private Charles H. Wilcken, a Prussian Army veteran with an iron cross to his credit, who deserted the U.S. Army’s Fourth Artillery during the fall of 1857, crossed into the Nauvoo Legion’s lines, and converted to Mormonism. Wilcken was probably unique in having served both the federal side and the Latter-day Saints. After the Utah War he took part in many of late nineteenth-century Mormonism’s seminal events. As a coachman, bodyguard, nurse, and eventually pallbearer for Presidents John Taylor and Wilford Woodruff, Wilcken was everywhere and saw everything.28

If Private Wilcken had a rival for most intriguing post-1858 life, it might well be his comrade-in-arms in the Fourth U.S. Artillery, Thomas Moonlight. After the Utah War former Sergeant Moonlight served in the Civil War, rising to brevet brigadier general. His political connections then brought him appointment as Kansas’s adjutant general, following which he became governor of Wyoming Territory and U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia before dying in 1899. It was as Wyoming’s governor that former sergeant Moonlight granted a pardon to that famous Utahn, the Sundance Kid, who also ended his career in Bolivia in spectacular fashion.

All of this is not to say that the Utah War experiences of these veterans were solely responsible for shaping their experiences during the Civil War and thereafter. Obviously there were other influences involved. But there was an impact, and it is important to recognize the connection as a significant contributing factor to the destinies these people met after such a remarkable experience during their formative years. For some of the older Civil War participants, the lessons learned in Mexico during 1846-1848 were, of course, important. Yet what they and their younger comrades later experienced for the first time during the Utah campaign—armed conflict between Americans—was as fresh and vivid as it was unique. It was why in

28 Charles H. Wilcken is Mitt Romney’s great-grandfather and the namesake of Michigan governor George Wilcken Romney, Mitt’s late father.

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1858 former Mexican War officers William Tecumseh Sherman, George B. McClellan, and Simon Bolivar Buckner sought so anxiously (albeit unsuccessfully) to reenter the army for the action in Utah.

Would William C. Quantrill have become the Confederacy’s most notorious guerrilla if he had not at age twenty been a civilian teamster, card sharp, and camp cook in the sordid bivouacs of the Utah Expedition? Would John Jerome Healy have become sheriff of Fort Benton, Montana, creator of Alberta’s “Fort Whoop-Up,” and the Alaskan hero of Jack London’s first novel without first campaigning as a teenaged private in Albert Sidney Johnston’s Second U.S. Dragoons? Was the character that Charles R. Morehead displayed as mayor of first Leavenworth, Kansas, and then El Paso, Texas, forged in his boyhood home of Lexington, Missouri, or along the trail to Fort Bridger with Russell, Majors and Waddell?

When the Civil War broke out in 1861 and descended into unimaginable carnage, Brigham Young wrote to Thomas L. Kane of divine retribution and Utah’s contented disengagement. Having shaken off the depression that beset him with the Utah Expedition’s 1858 march through Salt Lake City, President Young was once again the roaring Lion of the Lord. In April 1864, with unintended insensitivity to the cause for which “the Little Colonel” had put his life on the line at Gettysburg and elsewhere, he wrote again to a war-wounded, convalescing Kane:

While you were with us in our mountain home [during the Utah War], little did many imagine the signal reversion that has taken place in so brief a period. The thirty millions of people, who would in their blindness, with comparatively few exceptions, have labored for and rejoiced in our obliteration as a religious society, are destroying each other and the nation in a fierce and gigantic war; while Utah, thanks to a very merciful Providence, continues blest with the rich boon of peace. The threatened war of 1857-8 has thickly canopied its lurid clouds over those who would have destroyed us, while the serene light of Heaven smiles upon our valleys and mountains, and crowns their peaks with its halos.29

Self-confident, brooding over past conflicts, and preoccupied with his own millennial thoughts, Brigham Young failed to hear, let alone ponder, the patriotic, hymn-like song drifting westward from the blood-drenched Atlantic Coast. It was music with post-war implications for him and Mormon Utah as well as the Confederacy:

We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more, From Mississippi’s winding stream and from New England’s shore. We leave our plows and workshops, our wives and children dear, With hearts too full for utterance, with but a silent tear. We dare not look behind us but steadfastly before. We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more!30

29 Young to Kane, April 29, 1864, LDS Church History Library.

30 James Sloan Gibbons (words) and L.D. Emerson (music), “We Are Coming, Father Abraham,” accessed September 3, 2011 at http://www. civilwarpoetry. org/union/songs/coming.html.

A Terror to Evil-Doers: Camp Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and Utah’s Civil War

By WILL BAGLEY

In September 1863, Captain George Price’s Company M, Second California Volunteer Cavalry, stopped Mormon overland companies hauling freight and emigrants to Utah Territory to search for contraband. The confrontation between the troopers and three overloaded “church trains” illustrates the tensions between representatives of the federal government and Latter-day Saints during the Civil War. Twenty-five “U.S. Soldiers made their appearance and requested both aliens and citizens to take an oath of allegiance to the Constitution of the United States, which we did,” wrote William McLachlan. The officers “caused our Captain J. W. Woolley to take an oath that he had no Powder or Ammunition in his possession only that necessary for his own protection and those under his charge.” 1 Farther west, a “compy of Armed Mounted Men Calling themselves, U.S. Soldiers” rode in between wagon trains under

A map of Camp Douglas in June 1864.

Will Bagley is an independent historian. With David Bigler, he is the author of The Mormon Rebellion: America’s First Civil War, which won best book awards from the John Whitmer Historical Society and Western Writers of America, Salt Lake City Weekly’s Reader’s Award for Best Non-Fiction Book of 2011, and Utah State History’s Best Militar y History Award.

1 William McLachlan, Reminiscences, September 25. 1863, LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1:115–39.

TERROR TO EVIL-DOERS

Isaac Canfield and Daniel McArthur. Both wagon trains had taken a detour to the Muddy River “to save the Cattles Feet,” a dangerously dry detour around Fort Bridger. McArthur said his “Oxen had had no water for two days & but verry little feed & he was afraid on account of the Roughness of the Road they would give out & die” if they were compelled to return to Fort Bridger. He “had broken no Law & had the right to travel which Road he Knew to be the best for his Cattle & also for the Passengers.”2

Given the route’s aridity when compared to the traditionalMormon Trail, it was an odd claim.

The officer said “his orders were to convey us to the Fort, and to the Fort we must go,” reported journalist Edward Sloan. The soldiers gave vent to “their strong desire to pitch into the damned Mormons, one fellow saying, ‘Why the hell dont he give us the order and let us end the matter, without all this damned palavering’?” At a campground near the fort, the soldiers indulged “in a abundance of jeers, coarse jokes and abuse at our expense.” The post commander “affected to look upon us as Secessionists,” but took McArthur’s “word for the contents of the wagons, and postponed the ceremony of swearing.” The next morning, the soldiers mustered the persecuted “citizens of the Republic” inside the wagon corral “and had the oath of allegiance administered to them, after which the aliens were sworn to neutrality between the belligerent North and South. This concluded the entire business for which we were dragged across the country, like prisoners taken in arms,” Sloan wrote. The Mormons composed a protest and demanded five hundred dollars compensation for their trouble, but the officer in charge “declared his inability to do anything in the matter.”3

This incident, in which suspicious federal officials confronted Latter-day Saints who vehemently protested the violation of their rights, is familiar to students of Mormonism’s frontier history. Brigham Young decried the infringement of his followers’ Second Amendment rights: “Who have said that ‘Mormons’ should not be permitted to hold in their possession fire-arms and ammunition? Did a Government officer say this, one who was sent here to watch over and protect the interest of the community, without meddling or interfering with the domestic affairs of the people?” Young claimed, “I know what passes in their secret councils. Blood and murder are in their hearts, and they wish to extend the work of destruction over the whole face of the land.”4 For its part, the army acted under the authority of the Second Confiscation Act, which Congress passed on July 17, 1862, to give federal authorities broad powers “to suppress Insurrection, to punish Treason and Rebellion, to seize and confiscate the Property of

2 Elijah Larkin, Diary, September 25, 1863. L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, MSS 175.

3 E. L. Sloan, Journal History, September 25, 1863, LDS Church History Library, 2–3.

4 Richard Van Wagoner, ed., Complete Discourses of Brigham Young 5 volumes, (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2009), October 9, 1863, 4:2162.

Rebels.”5 The army had good reason to suspect LDS church trains were smuggling gunpowder into Utah Territory. “A company of Brethren [who] were Sent out by President Young to Green river to meet the trains that had powder, as a Company of U. S. Soldiers were Stationed near Hams Fork to Search the trains as they Passed,” wrote William McLachlan. At the Green River, “18 of the Boys with mules” greeted the Woolley party. The next morning “they left Green River with their mules loaded with Powder from Hector Haights train, on their mountain trail.”6 Teamster William Richardson recalled the trouble. The army suspected the train was carrying “two or three wagon loads of powder. They were afraid that if the powder got into Salt Lake City the Mormons would kill all the Gentiles in Camp Douglas.” An officer took Captain Haight to his tent and interrogated him for several hours, as the Mormons took “the Wagon with the pooder” across Green River and into the mountains, unloaded “the pooder into sacks & came back the nixt day.” That night, when troopers “sarched all the train,” they “did not find the lood of pooder then thay told us to go,” Richardson wrote.7

The confrontation on Hams Fork took place ten weeks after the battle of Gettysburg and two months before Abraham Lincoln visited the battlefield. The president went “to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.” Lincoln asked Americans engaged in a great civil war whether “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” or “any nation so conceived and so dedicated, could long endure.”8 Meanwhile, 2,019 miles to the west, a similar question was being asked in Great Salt Lake City.

Between 1862 and 1865, an American Moses and the Gaelic founder of Camp Douglas personified the conflict in Utah Territory. Ex-governor Brigham Young, one of the most famous men of his time and place, clashed with Patrick Edward Connor, a fiery Irish immigrant born in County Kerry on St. Patrick’s Day in 1820. Connor was a former First Dragoon, Texas Foot Rifleman, captain in the War with Mexico, and the contractor who laid the foundation for California’s state capitol. As commander at Camp Douglas, for three years the pugnacious Connor served as the military representative of federal power in Utah Territory, while the equally pugnacious President Young led the LDS church and a theocratic “ghost government” known as the “State of Deseret.” Both men held the other in sheer contempt and spewed inflammatory rhetoric as the debate between two of Utah’s most histrionic characters produced some of the Civil

5 See U.S. Supreme Court, Miller v. U. S., 78 U.S. 268 (1870), which upheld the government’s “right to confiscate the property of public enemies wherever found.”

6 McLachlan, Journal, September 23, 24 1863, LDS Church History Library.

7 William Richardson, Autobiography, 18-20, LDS Church History Library.

8 Abraham Lincoln, “The Gettysburg Address,” November 19, 1863.

War’s most colorful language, posturing, and bombastic exchanges.

Utah’s history, to use Elliott West’s phrase, is contested ground. The story of the founding of Camp Douglas on Salt Lake City’s east bench 150 years ago illuminates why Utah’s history is so problematic—and why perceptions of the outpost’s early years are so partisan. Today revisionist and nuanced schools of Utah history debate whether the Latter-day Saints were loyal to a democratic republic as their prophets happily predicted the demise of the Union, or whether the religious leaders of Deseret, who had seen their beloved prophet murdered and had suffered mighty indignities during the Utah War, owed anything to agents of American imperialism who trampled their rights. The Civil War sesquicentennial, the opening of previously unavailable or obscure sources, and revolutionary research technology allow a revisionist to ask hard questions. Why was Mormon support for the Union so equivocal, and how did Abraham Lincoln manage his relations with Brigham Young? How much of Colonel Connor’s indictment of Mormon tyranny, treachery, and treason was the petrified truth? Were Mormons and Indians persecuted victims of American imperialism or active participants in a conflict in which both sides gave as good as they got? Finally, how much of Utah’s beloved Civil War mythology is not merely nuanced but fabricated?

The argument about Utah’s loyalty to the nation began soon after the territory’s creation. It already had a contentious history when two Sacramento Union correspondents renewed the debate December 1862. T. B. H. Stenhouse described how a “good many blue overcoats” in “the great Tabernacle” listened to loyal Latter-day Saints sing the “Star Spangled Banner,” “Yankee Doodle,” and “The Flag of Our Union” to deafening applause. Stenhouse is best remembered for his exposé of the Rocky Mountain Saints, but until his excommunication in 1869 he was Mormonism’s foremost intellectual defender. “Enfield,” the unidentified but high-caliber army correspondent, dismissed Mormon protestations of loyalty as “merely of the lips, nothing more,” and described how “sundry incendiary, ranting speeches” of John Taylor and Brigham Young worked the Saints up to “a fever heat of rebellion against the constituted authorities.”9

9 Liberal, “Letter From Salt Lake,” Sacramento Union, December 23, 1862; Enfield, “Letter From Salt Lake,” Sacramento Daily Union, March 27, 1863. “Reflections,” Union Vedette, August 10, 1864, identified Stenhouse as “Liberal.”

Patrick Edward Connor.

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Mormon loyalty was complicated. An 1832 Joseph Smith prophecy said civil war would begin with “the rebellion of South Carolina” and the South would “call on other nations, even the nation of Great Britain.” The revelation predicted war would “be poured out upon all nations,” and told of a slave revolt, the uprising of “the remnants [of Israel] who are left of the land” (a reference to American Indians), famine, plagues, earthquakes, and vivid lightning “until the consumption decreed hath made a full end of all nations” and the blood of the Saints was “avenged of their enemies.”10

Such apocalyptic beliefs suggested “a bond of sympathy between the Confederates and the people of Utah,” observed Utah Agricultural College professor Franklin Daines. Mormon leaders believed the Union was doing as much to destroy the Constitution as the Secessionists, so the “despised Mormons were hence the only loyalists,” but this “was loyalty to an ideal Government, not then in existence.” Utah’s professions of loyalty did not seem to convince Lincoln, who kept the army there “to make sure of having there a loyal force.”11 Brigham D. Madsen explained the Mormon perspective: despite statements by “second president” Heber C. Kimball that “the Government of the United States is dead, thank God it’s dead,” LDS church leaders believed the Constitution was a divine document and “continued to sustain the nation throughout the Civil War.” Yet this unique brand of loyalty was dedicated to the belief that all earthly kingdoms would be destroyed and the Kingdom of God would triumph, regardless of who won the Civil War. “No wonder Connor and others interpreted Mormon rhetoric and actions as signs of disloyalty,” Madsen noted.12

10 Doctrine and Covenants, Section 87:1–8.

11 Franklin D. Daines, “Separatism in Utah,” Annual Report , 1917 (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association), 341–43.

12 Brigham D. Madsen, Glory Hunter: A Biography of Patrick Edward Connor (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1990), 66–67.

Johanna Connor, wife of Patrick Edward Connor. UTAH

Some writers—including this one—have concluded Brigham Young remained carefully neutral during the conflict. But as E. B. Long observed, the Mormons condemned both sides, which ardent Unionists interpreted as proof of the Mormons’ basic disloyalty. “At such a moment of passion, any group which did not support either side wholeheartedly was suspect by both sides.” The Saints “were suspicious of Lincoln and critical, particularly in the early days of his presidency.” They might have held him in even greater disfavor than the documents he had seen indicated, Long noted.13 Recent evidence confirms Mormon leaders were more sympathetic to the Confederacy and critical of Lincoln than skilled historians concluded. Before hostilities began, Young claimed American officers “hate the Mormons because they feel they will rule the world.” He predicted a slave revolt in which both slaves and their masters “will be slaughtered by thousands.” Young regretted how many innocents would be killed, but he was “like the woman who saw her husband fighting with a Bear”: when he asked for help, she said, “I have no interest in who whips [whom].”14

In August 1861, President Young’s office journal reported, “the Brethren are gratified by hearing of the continued success which attends the Southern Confederacy.” Latter-day Saint leaders saw the conflict as God’s vengeance on the nation for countenancing the murder of their founding prophet. “Every move that has been made by the Government has been made to fulfil the sayings of Joseph,” Young said. It would now “be death upon death, and blood upon blood until the land is cleansed,” he preached.15 “The nation, as a people, objected to the Lord’s calling upon his servant Joseph, and sending him as a teacher to this generation,” he said. Americans had a right to reject the prophet’s revelations and God’s servants, but “the Lord has the right to come out from his hiding place and vex the nation. He too has rights. They had a right to kill Joseph, and the Lord has the right to destroy the nation.”16 Brigham Young conceded Lincoln might be sagacious, but he was no friend to Christ and “as wicked a man as ever lived.”17 He called “Abe Lincoln and his minions” cursed scoundrels “who have sought our destruction from the beginning.”18 The prophet considered

13 E. B. Long, The Saints and the Union: Utah Territory during the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 18, 271. University of Wyoming professor Everette Beach Long died at age sixty-one the year his masterfulvolume on Utah and the Civil War appeared.

14 Brigham Young Office Journal, December 28, 1860, March 15, 18, August 24, 1861, in Van Wagoner, ed., The Complete Discourses of Brigham Young, 3:1720

15 Young, “Remarks,” August 31, 1862 and November 6, 1863, Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (London: Latter-Day Saints Book Depot, 1854-1886), 10:367, 10:287-88.

16 “Synopsis of Instructions,” June 22–29, 1864, Journal of Discourses, 10:333.

17 “Completion of the Telegraph,” Deseret News, October 23, 1861, 5/3; Van Wagoner, ed., The Complete Discourses of Brigham Young, December 28, 1860, March 15, 18, August 24, 1861, 3:1720, 1741; 4:1982, 1906.

18 Journal History, December 10, 1861, LDS Church History Library, cited in Long, The Saints and the Union, 50. Long thought this “was perhaps Brigham Young’s strongest known anti-Lincoln statement during the presidency.”

the president “a damned old scamp and villain,” and did not believe “that Phoraoh [sic] of old was any worse, or any wickeder” than “old Abe Lincoln.”19

To grasp the significance of Camp Douglas requires understanding Utah in 1862. The arrival of the U.S. Army in 1858 had dramatically shifted the balance of power in the territory. The Utah War taught Brigham Young the perils of open defiance of the federal government, while the repeated failure of his apocalyptic prophecies increased the level of dissent. The last soldiers left the Wasatch Front in July 1861, and for fifteen months there would be virtually no military presence in Utah, or the security the army offered to disillusioned Latter-day Saints. The events that took take place during that time would, as historian David Bigler observed, “make this period among the most significant and revealing in the history of Utah Territory.”20

The interval saw the completion of the Pacific Telegraph line at Great Salt Lake City in October 1861. The Pony Express had reduced the time it took a letter to get from Missouri to Sacramento to ten days, but now the news of Abraham Lincoln’s election reached California in seven days and seventeen hours.21 Wherever the talking wire spoke, the telegraph changed everything. “Utah has not seceded but is firm for the Constitution and laws of our once happy country, and is warmly interested in such useful enterprises as the one so far completed,” President Brigham Young telegraphed in the first eastbound message.22 “Young was careful with his language,” historian John Turner concluded. “He was ‘firm’ for the Constitution, not for the Union or its present government. In short, Young and most of his coreligionistswere simply pro-Mormon during the crisis.” The Mormon president “did not wish Utah mixed up with the secession movement,” but Young “would be glad to hear that [Confederate] General Beauregard had taken the President & Cabinet and confined them in the South.”23

In April 1862, Indian raiders shut down the Overland Stage Line and a militia escort left Great Salt Lake City, “to guard the mail stage and passengers across the Indian-infested plains.” Brigham Young’s business agents, William Hooper and Chauncey West, and politicians in his favor “concluded not to wait any longer for the mail, but will start in the morning with an escort under the command of Col. Robert Burton.”24 A “company of cavalry for service of ninety days to protect the overland mail and telegraph against

19 Anonymous, Minutes of the Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1835-1893 (Salt Lake City: Privately Published, 2010), August 23, 1863, 318.

20 David L. Bigler, Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon Theocracy in the American West (Spokane: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1998), 199.

21 Riders carried the election results to the telegraph at Fort Churchill in today’s Nevada. Papers in Sacramento and San Francisco published them on November 14, 1860.

22 Orson Whitney, History of Utah 4 vols. (Salt Lake City: Cannon and Sons Co., 1893), 2:30.

23 John G. Turner, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 318

24 Whitney, History of Utah, 2:43; Young to Bernhisel, April 25, 1862, Brigham Young Collection, LDS Church History Library.

Indian attack” followed Burton on May 1, under Lot Smith, best remembered for burning U.S. Army supply wagons in 1857. 25 Colonel Burton commanded a more dramatic military action on June 15, 1862, when five Utah militia companies brutally suppressed the followers of Joseph Morris. 26 Brigham Young (and a host of historians) used his contribution of a militia company to protect overland communications and standing “firm for the Constitution” as examples of his loyalty, but the murders of the Morrisite leaders provided a more revealing example of Mormon power.Young’s refusal to extend the enlistment of Lot Smith’s company—the sole military support Utah provided to the Union during the Civil War—compelled Lincoln to secure that force elsewhere.27

President Lincoln kept abreast of affairs in the West and exhibited a distinct talent for managing Utah Territory, an accomplishment that few politicians could claim. “There is a batch of governors, and judges, and other officials here, shipped from Washington, and they maintain the semblance of a republican form of government,” James Street told Sam Clemens in 1861, “but the petrified truth is that Utah is an absolute monarchy and Brigham Young is king!” 28 It took only three weeks for John Dawson, the Indiana newspaper editor Lincoln appointed as Utah’s

25 Deseret News, April 30, 1862. Acting on Brigham Young’s suggestion, acting governor Frank Fuller called up Burton’s company. A few days later, the Secretary of War asked Young to provide Smith’s company.

26 The classic study is C. LeRoy Anderson, Joseph Morris and the Saga of the Morrisites (Logan: Utah State University Press, enlarged edition, 2010). For an insightful perspective, see Val Holley, “Slouching Towards Slaterville: Joseph Morris’s Wide Swath in Weber County,” Utah Historical Quarterly 76 (Summer 2008), 247–64.

27 Long, The Saints and the Union, 87–88.

28 Mark Twain, Roughing It (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1872), 105.

Monument in the Fort Douglas Cemetery to commemorate the Union dead at the Bear River massacre.

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territorial governor, to learn that lesson in December 1861. On his arrival, Dawson called on the legislature to raise $26,982 as a federal war tax. Brigham Young complained the government would first want the taxes and then “they will want us to send 1,000 men to the war.” He would “see them in Hell before I will raise an army for them.” Take a man like Dawson who had been “an Editor for 15 years and you will find him to be a Jackass,” the Mormon prophet said.29 After Dawson vetoed a plan to win statehood for Deseret, someone took five shots at a federal judge in front of the governor’s rooms. Local authorities laughed it off and produced a widow’s affidavit charging the governor with making an indecent proposal. He got the message. On December 31, Dawson boarded an eastbound stagecoach, saying his health “imperatively demanded” he return home.30

Nobody ever had a worse New Year’s Eve than Governor Dawson. He told Lincoln “a band of Danites,” a rough set of young Mormon toughs, followed him from Salt Lake City. That night the crowd at Ephraim Hanks’s Mountain Dell stage station got drunk. Stage driver Wood Reynolds, a relative of the insulted widow, knocked the governor down and he was “viciously assaulted & beaten.” Lot Huntington and his hoodlums wounded “my head badly in many places, kicking me in the loins and right breast until I was exhausted” and then carried “on their orgies for many hours in the night,” Dawson said. On New Year’s Day the Deseret News reported Dawson had hired the gang that beat him up to “guard him faithfully and prevent his being killed or becoming qualified for the office of chamberlain in a kings palace.”31 Dawson’s congressman later “laughingly” informed George Q. Cannon that he “had been half emasculated.” Cannon insisted “the story in our country was that he was only whipped,” but Dawson’s doctor had informed the congressman “that an operation had been performed.”32

The ruffians claimed the chief of police had ordered the assault, but within a month most of them were dead at the hands of either Deputy Sheriff Orrin Porter Rockwell or the Salt Lake City police. In June 1863, Indians killed and scalped Wood Reynolds and another stage driver. They “brought the scalps of the poor men they killed” to Nephi and proudly displayed them. Mormon convert Phebe Westwood, an 1853 emigrant and wife of the Fort Crittenden overland agent, informed her husband she saw the scalps and “got dreadfully excited” when the bishop “treated the Indians with tobacco and ordered the people to feed them.” The incident

29

Brigham Young Office Journal, December 25, 1861, in Turner, Brigham Young, 312.

30

Bigler, Forgotten Kingdom, 201–02; Scott Kenney, ed., Wilford Woodruff’s Journal, December 23, 1861, 10 vols. (Midvale: Signature Books, 1983), 5:609. Dawson was “a victim of misplaced confidence, and fell into a snare laid for his feet by some of his own brother-officials.” Stenhouse, The Rocky Mountain Saints (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1873), 592.

31 “Departure of the Governor,” January 1, 1862, “Governor Dawson’s Statement,” January 22, 1862, both Deseret News

32 Cannon to Young, January 29, 1874, Brigham Young Collection.

angered her so much she “pitched into them and told them what I thought of them, and then I felt better.”33

There was little love lost between Utah’s religious leaders and the governor sent to replace Dawson. Stephen Harding arrived at Great Salt Lake City on July 7, 1862. “And that thing that is here that calls himself Governor,” Brigham Young said in October, “If you were to fill a sack with cow shit, it would be the best thing you could do for an imitation.”34 Abraham Lincoln had more pressing concerns than affairs in Utah or the Mormon petitions asking him to replace officials their prophet despised, but he listened to their complaints. After the South’s Army of Northern Virginia vanished on June 7, 1863, Lincoln met with Mormon journalist T. B. H. Stenhouse. He made typically “free jocular remarks about Hardin or Harding, or some such name that somebody had got him to appoint Governor of Utah.” Stenhouse explained the difference between the Mormon “position with the Indians, to that of the soldiers & the Indians.” Lincoln “sustained the settlers in keeping out of hostilities with the Indians.” The president hoped “his representatives there would behave themselves, & if the people let him alone, he would let them alone.” That was the substance of Stenhouse’s description of the encounter in a

33 Kenney, Wilford Woodruff’s Journal, June 12, 1863, 6:115; War of the Rebellion, Series 1, Vol. 50, Part II, Serial 3584, 500. On January 12, 1864, a firing squad shot Jason Luce, the last known participant in Dawson’s assault, for the murder Samuel Burton. See Bigler, Forgotten Kingdom, 204n11

34 Van Wagoner, ed., The Complete Discourses of Brigham Young, October 30, 1862, 4:1945.

Printing office of the Union Vedette at Fort Douglas. Photo taken in 1868.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The November 20, 1863 issue of the Union Vedette published by the officers and soldiers at Fort Douglas.

letter to Brigham Young two days later.35 His 1873 exposé of the Rocky Mountain Saints barely mentioned Lincoln and said nothing about the conversation.

Over time, writers adorned Stenhouse’s brief report with a story first told in 1886 to invent one of the most charming and oft-cited anecdotes in Mormon history. General James B. Fry, the son of an old friend of the president, knew Lincoln well. Among Fry’s “vexatious duties” as ProvostMarshal was fielding complaints about the draft from belligerent governors who took their ultimatums to the highest authority. One governor, probably Horatio Seymour, returned entirely satisfied. Fry assumed it required large concessions to deflect the governor’s “towering rage,” but Lincoln assured him, “Oh, no, I did not concede anything. You know how that Illinois farmer managed the big log that lay in the middle of his field!” The log “was too big to haul out, too knotty to split, and too wet and soggy to burn,” so the farmer ploughed around it. Lincoln said that was how he got rid of the governor—“I ploughed around him.” It took three hours to do it, and Lincoln “was afraid every minute he’d see what I was at.” The president, Fry observed, “was a good judge of men, and quickly learned the peculiar traits of character in those he had to deal with.”36

35 Stenhouse to Young, June 7, 1863, Brigham Young Collection. Similarly, Lincoln told John Bernhisel he remembered less about Dawson “than any important appointment that I have made.” Long, The Saints and the Union, 60.

36 Allen Rice, Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln ( New York: North American Publishing Company, 1886), 399–400.

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Apostle Orson Whitney claimed Lincoln illustrated his “let them alone” policy “by comparing the Mormon question to a knotty, green hemlock log on a newly cleared frontier farm. The log being too heavy to remove, too knotty to split, and too wet to burn, he proposed, like a wise farmer, to ‘plow around it.’”37 In a biography of President Young noted for its silence about the prophet’s many marriages, Preston Nibley, embellished the story, claiming Lincoln said:

Stenhouse, when I was a boy on the farm in Illinois there was a great deal of timber on the farms which we had to clear away. Occasionally we would come to a log which had fallen down. It was too hard to split, too wet to burn, and too heavy too move, so we plowed around it. That’s what I intend to do with the Mormons. You go back and tell Brigham Young that if he will let me alone I will let him alone.”38

Lincoln did not move to Illinois until after his twenty-second birthday, so Nibley clearly manufactured the quote. Leaving the Mormons alone won Lincoln the grudging respect of LDS leaders and the Great Emancipator’s obvious integrity won the deep affection of the people of Utah. Of all the presidents who had to contend with Brigham Young, Lincoln proved far and away the most able. He wanted to avoid yet another rebellion in the West, and he stationed a substantial military force in Salt Lake City to made sure the Mormons left him and the Union alone.39

The Second California Volunteers marched out of Stockton, California, on July 12, 1862, with orders to protect the overland mail route. After a September visit, Connor denounced Utah as “a community of traitors, murderers, fanatics and whores,” whose people “publicly rejoice at reverses to our arms, and thank God that the American Government is gone, as they term it, while their prophet and bishops preach treason from the pulpit.” Federal officers were “entirely powerless, and talk in whispers for fear of being overheard by Brigham’s spies.” Young ruled “with despotic sway, and death by assassination is the penalty of disobedience to his commands.” Colonel Connor declined to re-occupy the remote ruins of Fort Crittenden, now in the hands of speculators, and resolved to locate his headquarters on a bench overlooking Great Salt Lake City, where he could “say to the Saints of Utah, enough of your treason.”40

Chaplain John A. Anderson described the army’s entry into Great Salt Lake City. The “Chief of the Danites” allegedly offered to bet five hundred dollars that the California Volunteers would never cross the Jordan and rumor said the Mormons “would forcibly resist an attempt to cross that stream.” Colonel Connor was not easily bluffed; he reportedly swore he

37 Orson Whitney, History of Utah (Salt Lake City: George Q. Cannon & Sons Co., Publishers, 1893), 2:24–25.

38 Preston Nibley, Brigham Young (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1937), 369.

39 Long, The Saints and the Union, 26, 36, 168, 271.

40 War of the Rebellion, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880-1900) Vol. 50, Part 2, 119-20, cited in Long, The Saints and the Union, 101.

would “cross the river Jordan if hell yawned below him.”Yet his men, “from the highest to the lowest” intended “to treat the Mormons with courtesy and the strictest justice, so long as they remain friendly to the Government.” The soldiers crossed the river without incident but received a chilling reception as they marched to their new post overlooking the city. “Every crossing was occupied by spectators, and windows, doors and roofs had their gazers,” Anderson wrote. “Not a cheer or jeer greeted us.” 41 Brigham Young immediately beefed up the city’s police force, instructing them to watch suspicious persons “night and day until they learned what they were doing and who frequented their houses.” If any Mormon women visited the army’s camp, “no matter under what pretense, they should cast them forth from the Church forthwith.”42 Connor, a longtime supporter of the late Senator Stephen Douglas, named the army’s new post Camp Douglas after the Mormon ally-turned-foe.

Colonel Connor, Stenhouse reported, was “determined that the highway between the Atlantic and Pacific shall be kept open and free from murder while he is here in command, and he will stop at no considerations of opinion in attaining this end.”43 The soldiers and the Saints settled into a mutually suspicious but muted hostility, broken only by the odd collaboration that led to the virtual destruction of the Northern Shoshones early in 1863. Before dawn on a bitterly cold January 29, 1863, the California Volunteers attacked Boa Ogoi, the tribe’s winter camp on Bear River, near today’s Preston, Idaho. Shoshones had allegedly attacked and kidnapped travelers on the Oregon-California Trail, but the bands at Bear River had little to do with these raids. They had, however, resisted the settlers who began moving into Cache Valley in 1860 and appropriated their land and water during the next three years. “They rejected the way of life and salvation,” Bishop Peter Maughn told Brigham Young. The settlers wanted the tribe out of the way. Porter Rockwell led the soldiers north to the Shoshone camp. Before leaving Salt Lake, Connor announced he would take no prisoners. Frostbite crippled almost a third of the soldiers before they reached Brigham City, and the approach of the army was no secret to the Shoshones. Three of Bear Hunter’s men visited his father’s farm before the attack, William Hull recalled. Having seen the Toquashes, or soldiers, Hull warned them, “Maybe you will all be killed.” A warrior replied, “Maybe Touquasho be killed too.”44

The Shoshones had fortified the ten-foot bank of Beaver Creek, and when the freezing soldiers arrived, the warriors were ready for a fight. Oddly enough, Indian missionary Sylvanus Collett claimed he watched the

41 Long, The Saints and the Union, 111-12.

42 Journal History, October 26, 1862, cited in Long, The Saints and the Union, 112.

43 Liberal, Sacramento Daily Union, February 7, 1863.

44 William Hull, “Identifying the Indians of Cache Valley, Utah and Franklin County, Idaho,” Franklin County Citizen, January 25, 1928, cited in Madsen, The Shoshone Frontier, 182.

fight “from a nearby eminence,” and an old pioneer, Hans Jesperson recalled visiting the battlefield with Lot Smith. The Deseret News reported the Shoshones sang out, “Fours right, fours left; come on you California sons of b—hs!” William Hull credited Bear Hunter with the taunt, adding, “We’re ready for you!” Connor reported the warriors “with fiendish malignity waved the scalps of white women and challenged the troops to battle.” The outraged volunteers launched a disastrous frontal assault before flanking the Shoshone position and cutting off their retreat. By 8:00 o’clock the warriors were out of ammunition and the soldiers shot down the survivors with their revolvers. What began as a battle degenerated into a massacre of women and children.45

Local Mormons hailed the atrocity “as an intervention of the Almighty,” but U.S. Army surgeon John Lauderdale thought otherwise. This “hardest fought battle was instigated without a doubt by the Mormons. The latter being unfriendly to our army thought they would betray us into the hands of the Indians. They thought by so doing they would make a little speculation out of it themselves. They made the Indians believe they could capture us most easily & agreed to reward them finely if successful.” The sequel of the story, Lauderdale wrote, “proved the destruction of the Indians.” 46 Lauderdale was right about the sequel, but he did not arrive in Utah until

45 Deseret News, February 11, 1863. Rod Miller, Massacre at Bear River: First, Worst, Forgotten (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Press, 2008), 100-101 and 155-56.

46 Lauderdale to Dear Frank, June 15, 1864, Lauderdale Papers, Beinecke Library,Yale University.

The January 27, 1864 issue of the Daily Union Vedette.

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April 1864, so his conclusion was based on hearsay. His claim of collusion lacks corroboration, even though Connor did not hesitate to charge the Mormons with aiding and abetting Indian attacks on emigrants and soldiers.

Army reports of an upsurge in Indian violence during the spring of 1863 support Connor’s charge that Mormons “encouraged and instigated” repeated attacks on army patrols at Cedar Fork, Pleasant Grove, and Spanish Fork Canyon. The assault on Lieutenant Francis Honeyman’s advance party in the middle of Pleasant Grove was especially revealing,for as an officer’s report noted, it took place in front of “several hundred people calling themselves civilized and American citizens—God save the mark!” More than a hundred townspeople, “apparently well pleased at the prospect of six Gentiles (soldiers) being murdered,” helped some fifty Ute raiders steal government mules. Honeyman was convinced the attack “was a contrived and partnership arrangement between some of the Mormons to murder his little party, take the property, and divide the spoils.”47 According to E.B. Long, Connor’s officers “to a man, felt that the Mormons, instead of cooperating in punishing the Indians, encouraged them.”48

Federal Civil War Indian policy was nasty, brutish, and short—the army brutally suppressed Native resistance, concluded treaties with tribes that sued for peace, and quickly stopped violence on the overland road. If Ute leaders such as Antero, Tabby, Kanosh, and Black Hawk desired peace he “was there to grant it on proper terms,” Colonel Connor told them. The government “would protect all good Indians, and was equally determined and able to severely punish all bad ones.” 49 Connor’s toughness, Long concluded, “combined with a degree of flexibility when pragmatism dictated it, his willingness to work for peace with both the Indians and the Mormons, in the long run worked. Connor had a job to do, was

47 War of the Rebellion,Vol. 50, Part 2, 205-206, cited in Long, The Saints and the Union, 176.

48 Long, The Saints and the Union, 177.

49 Connor to Drum, July 18, 1863, War of the Rebellion,Vol. 50, Part 2, 528.

Mrs. Selden Irwin performed at the Fort Douglas Theater in 1864.

determined to do it as he saw it, and in the main he was a credit to the leadership of the United States in the crisis years of the Civil War.”50

Camp Douglas expanded the contest for the hearts and minds of Utah, and it made significant contributions to territorial culture. Its soldiers created the Union Vedette in November 1863, which became Utah’s first daily newspaper in January 1864. As its name indicated, the paper proposed to act as a mounted sentinel to expose those “bold, bad men” who sought to mislead the mass of Utah’s people, “who we know to be honest and sincere, though mistaken.” These devoted Unionists expressed their intense loyalty to “the freest, greatest, and most paternal Government on earth” and proclaimed it had “no enemies to punish; no prejudices to indulge; no private griefs to ventilate.” The editors promised to expose “the appeals of ambitious, crafty, designing men, to wean the people from the Government, that their own ends may be subserved—who constantly vilify and abuse the officers of the best Government with which this or any other people were ever blessed.” The soldiers wanted peace with the Mormons, but “toleration for disloyal sneers is no part of the duty of a true citizen.” Its first issue promoted opening “the rich veins of gold, silver, copper, and other minerals” to attract “a new, hardy and industrious population” to the only place in the West where a prospector could find himself “cast forth.”51

The first editor, Captain Charles H. Hempstead, tried to maintain a moderate tone until “pressing duties” led him to resign in December 1864, but “the continued and persistent disloyal utterances in Tabaernacle [sic] sermons” outraged his successors.52 A constant complaint was the contempt Mormon leaders displayed for President Lincoln and the federal government. “To aid the right, oppose the wrong,” The Vedette was unapologetically “bold, sarcastic, and obviously partisan, but no more so than most papers of its day.”53 The newspaper gave voice to the eloquent dissent of disillusioned Latter-Day Saints, reprinting a Scot convert’s description of life in Zion from a March 1864 Dundee Advertiser and publishing forty-five installments of a report by a “Resident of Utah” between March and October 1865.54 The Vedette’s alternate voice and the army’s presence provided a counterweight to Mormon power in Utah Territory.

Meanwhile, Utah’s war economy boomed and Brigham Young’s attempt to control prices floundered. After years of grinding poverty, mining discoveries in Idaho and Montana, a resulting surge in overland freighting,

50

Long, The Saints and the Union, 270–71.

51 “Salutatory” and “Ourselves,” Union Vedette, November 20, 1863. For more, see Lyman C. Pedersen, Jr., “The Daily Union Vedette: A Military Voice on the Mormon Frontier,” Utah Historical Quarterly 42, (Winter 1974), 39–48.

52 “Plainer Than Usual,” Union Vedette, January 7, 1865.

53 Long, The Saints and the Union, 208–09.

54 “Mormonism as Seen by a Scotchman,” Union Vedette, May 5, 1864; “An Address to the People, by a Resident of Utah,” March 16, 1865 to October 10, 1865, all Daily Union Vedette.

and the demands of Camp Douglas for grain, groceries, produce, beef, lumber, firewood, and entertainment introduced Latter-day Saints to the blessings of a free market. “More than one merchant of this city boasts of having made from $160,000 to $300,000 the past season, clear profit,” the New York Times reported in 1865. “A merchant that can’t make a fortune in a twelvemonth is ‘nowhere.’”55

President Young moderated his public rhetoric about the evils of Republican government as the Civil War wound down, but he never ceased to complain about “the strong arm of military power” Connor commanded in Utah. He denounced the army post as “an uncalled for, utterly useless, extravagant, and non-sensical operation.”56 As 1865 began, he said, “If Gen Connor crosses my path I will kill him so help me God. He must keep out of my path. He may say what he pleases about me and I will what I please about him.” Young threatened Connor with Governor Dawson’s fate, saying the Lord would be pleased if the Saints “cut him” and sent his soldiers back to California. Connor wanted “to kill the Saints, take our grain and destroy our Daughters and this I will not permit him to do,” Young told the State of Deseret’s legislators.57

Despite such prophetic fulminations, Union support grew in Utah as the Civil War came to its bloody end. Even Mormonism’s highest leaders seemed to join in a spirit of reconciliation on March 4. Wilford Woodruff described the “great Celebration in the City on this day of all the Military & Civil authorities on the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln to the presidential Chair & the late victories.” A very imposing mile-long procession marched through the “streets, broad and straight, of the Mormon Capital,” whose sidewalks, windows, house-tops were “thronged by eager, and in some instances, enthusiastic lookers-on.” Thousands of “Citizens Joined them in the Celebration,” along with the faith’s apostles, generals, and politicians, until the “vast concourse dispersed amid rousing cheers and salvos of artillery.” Apostle George A. Smith “waved the US Flag & said ‘One Country, A united Country An undivid[ed] Country & the old Flag Forever.’” The “citizen cavalry of Great Salt Lake City” escorted the soldiers back to Camp Douglas, and then the officers “were invited to partake of an elegant repast, provided by the City Council at the City Hall.” A new “era of toasts, speeches and good things generally seemed to have arrived. Mayor Smoot opened the ball by proposing the health of President Lincoln and success to the armies of the Union.” Mormon officials, businessmen, and four apostles joined in a “free, easy, hospitable and a most kindly interchange of loyal sentiment among gentlemen not wont often to meet

55

“Affairs in Utah,” New York Times, April 23, 1865.

56

Brigham Young Letter Books, LDS Church History Library, cited in Long, The Saints and the Union, 113–14.

57 Van Wagoner, Complete Discourses, January 23, 1865, 4:2261; Turner, Brigham Young, 329.

TERROR TO EVIL-DOERS

over the convivial board.”58 Woodruff cast the celebration in a darker light: “Speeches weremade & tosts were drank. All this was for policy.”59

Woodruff’s “policy” comment raises questions about the sincerity of Mormon leaders, their interest in reconciliation with the diverse elements of Utah’s increasingly complex polity, and their proclamations of loyalty to the Constitution while happily predicting the demise of any government but their own. President Lincoln’s wise Utah policy and the economic benefits Camp Douglas brought to the territory began to win the hearts of the people. A repentant Thomas Stenhouse characterized General Connor and the California Volunteers as “a terror to evil-doers” and acknowledged that “neither the commander nor his officers had any feeling but sympathy” for the Mormon people, who were loyal to the Republic; leaders were only the disloyal. Brigham Young’s persistent claims of government persecution and abuse did “incalculable mischief to the Saints,” Stenhouse concluded. “It has robbed them of the natural loyalty of good citizens, and led them to curse the Government which protects them, and to pray for the overthrow and destruction of the nation.” The conflict between church and state, Stenhouse observed, revealed that “Theocracy and Republicanism were naturally antagonistic” and neither would yield to the other. Faithful

58

“The Inaugural Celebration” and “Reunion at the City Hall,” Union Vedette, March 6, 1865.

59 Kenney, ed., Wilford Woodruff’s Journal, 6:215–16.

The Fort Douglas Military Band taken about 1865.

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Mormons were “enlisted on the side of ‘the Kingdom,’” but to the territory’s federal officers, “the Republic is everything, Brigham and his ‘kingdom’ are but an ‘ism.’”60

The tradesmen and working-people parading through the streets, cheering “the patriotic, loyal sentiments” expressed in the speeches, moved General Connor. “He wanted differences to be forgotten,” and he extended his hand to Thomas Stenhouse, editor of the Ogden Telegraph . Connor “expressed the joy he experienced in witnessing the loyalty of the masses of the people” and his hope for peace. The newspapers “had waged a fierce warfare, but as an evidence of good faith,” Connor proposed to stop publication of the Vedette immediately.61

As late as 1865 Mormon leaders believed the Civil War was only in its initial stages. On March 6, Daniel H. Wells of the First Presidency said Lincoln “would be in the presidential Chair untill He had destroyed the Nation. The North will never have power to Crush the South No never. The Lord will give the South power to fight the North untill they will destroy Each other.” 62 About the time Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse, Brigham Young uttered his least celebrated prophecy to the semi-annual conference on April 9, 1865. “On the very day that the telegraph announces the downfall of rebellion in the destruction of the last army it could boast,” the Union Vedette reported, “this infallible seer raised the curtain of the future and to have ‘the war continue four years longer.’” The Deseret News limited its coverage of the sermon to “a few remarks upon sending missionaries to preach the gospel,” and comments on local grog shops, gambling dens, and “the present lamentable and mournful condition of our country.” The Vedette wondered if “the public has been made the victim of a grave hoax—that Lee has not surrendered, after all.”63

At the end of his service in Utah, General Connor concluded the secret power of Mormonism’s leaders “lies in this one word—isolation.”64 Word of President Lincoln’s assassination arrived in Utah on the morning he died and Salt Lake City businesses closed immediately. Many decorated their homes with emblems of mourning, and black borders framed the front pages of both the Union Vedette and Deseret News. The Salt Lake Theatre closed. “The citizens have done themselves lasting honor on this sad occasion, and we acknowledge the display of deep feeling on their part with the gratitude it deserves,” the Vedette acknowledged. The flags on Brigham Young’s residence and other houses flew at half-staff, and “the

60 Stenhouse, The Rocky Mountain Saints, 248, 606, 683.

61 Ibid., 611–12.

62 Kenney, ed., Wilford Woodruff’s Journal, March 6, 1865, 6:216.

63 “Minutes,” Deseret Weekly News, April 12, 1865; “The Doctors Disagree,” Union Vedette, April 12, 1865.

64 Connor to Dodge, April 6, 1865, The War of the Rebellion, Series 1,Vol. 50, Part II, Serial 3584, 1185.

Mormon president’s carriage went through the town covered with crepe.” It was good policy, but Young declined to join the public events that celebrated Lincoln’s victory and all-too-soon mourned the martyred hero. The sorrow of the Mormon people contradicted the prophet’s long expressed contempt, ridiculing the president as “Abel Lincoln” and suspecting that Old Abe had plotted “to pitch into us when he has got though with the South.”65

On Sunday, April 19, the pulpit of the Tabernacle was draped in black. “This is the day Set apart by the Nation for the funeral Seremonies of Abram Lincoln in all the States & Territories,” wrote Wilford Woodruff, who delivered the benediction. “A Large Assembly met at the Tabernacle at 12 oclock of all Classes Civil & Military Jew & Gentile.” An immense concourse filled the building “to its utmost capacity, religious differences for the time ignored, and soldiers and civilians all uniting as fellow citizens in common observance of the solemn occasion,” the Vedette reported, praising the tone and sentiment of Amasa Lyman’s eulogy, which was “marked by much ability, feeling and fitness for the occasion.”66 Utah’s heartfelt reaction to a national tragedy was a quiet rebuke to Brigham Young’s contempt for the government and a landmark in the transformation of the territory from a religious theocracy to an American state.

The beloved president’s death and the end of the war that had torn a nation apart marked a sea change in American history. The Civil War saw the “triumph of nationalism over states’ rights,” as the war “created a national currency, a national banking system, a national army and new national taxes. The jealous restrictions against the power of the central government were broken in a score of ways,” wrote Mark Cannon.67 Congress exercised full sovereignty over the territories, granted homesteads, endowed agricultural colleges, and underwrote a Pacific railroad with massive land grants and bonds. With the abolition of slavery and the creation of a strong central government, the reunited United States resolved to make citizens of every faith obey American laws, including Justin Morrill’s 1862 “Act to punish and prevent the Practice of Polygamy in the Territories of the United States.” The long struggle to quell Mormon theocracy and “the second relic of barbarism,” Mormon polygamy, and the Latter-day Saints’ long campaign of religious and civil disobedience, now began.

65

Brigham Young Office Journal, quoted in Long, The Saints and the Union , 36. See also 26 and 261–62

.

66

Kenney, ed., Wilford Woodruff’s Journal, April 19, 1861, 221; “Funeral Ceremonies at the Tabernacle,” Union Vedette, April 21, 1865.

67 Mark W. Cannon, “The Crusades Against the Masons, Catholics and Mormons: Waves of a Common Current,” BYU Studies 3 (Winter 1961), 39.

“A Perfect Hell”: Utah Doughboys in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, 1918

By BRANDON JOHNSON

The letter, dated January 14, 1919, brought unwelcome tidings from France. Mail was the tenuous thread that kept the Robert and Lucy Moyes family of Ogden, Utah, tied to their son and brother Leroy since they sent him off to war in 1918. For Leroy, regular correspondence undoubtedly served as a happy reminder that he was not alone: he had a loving family back home that hoped one day soon he would return safe and sound from the battle-scarred fields of Europe. On the other side of the world, Leroy’s family relied on his letters to track his (and his fellow soldiers’) progress against the German army which, back in 1914, had invaded Belgium and northern France, and then had dug in to wage a protracted war (now variously known as the First World War, the Great War, and World War I) against the French and their allies. But this newest letter from France was not from Leroy; it came from his commanding officer, Lieutenant Joseph P. Toole. “My Dear Mr. Moyes,” the letter began. “Your son, Private Leroy Moyes, No. 2781852, company D, 364th Infantry, has been reported missing in action since Oct. 3rd, 1918, in the Meuse-Argonne operation, France. I have endeavored to obtain further information concerning his whereabouts but have not met with success. I sincerely hope nothing serious has happened to him and I

Brandon Johnson lives in Virginia and works in Washington, D.C. He wishes to thank his father, Hal Johnson, for his research assistance and Bob McPherson for commenting on an early draft of this article.

United States soldiers marching to the front.

PHOTOS OF THE GREAT WAR

will notify you if any news of him comes to the company.”1

When Leroy Moyes left home at the age of thirty-one, he was far from the youngest draftee in the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) then being cobbled together to fight in France, but evidence suggests that he was still single, making him an ideal candidate for the job of waging war: if killed, he would not leave a widow or fatherless children behind. Following his physical examination and formal induction into the U. S. Army, the Utah “doughboy” (the era’s popular nickname for American soldiers) eventually found himself attached to the 364th Infantry Regiment in the 91st “Wild West” Division, which saw heavy fighting near Gesnes and Eclisfontaine, German-occupied hamlets located near the eastern margins of the Argonne Forest. At some point late in the drawn-out battle now known as the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, Leroy was injured and admitted to a rear-area military hospital, where he wrote a single letter home, the last one his parents would get from him. In the long months that followed, the only word the Moyeses had received from France was the letter from Lt. Toole.2

Perhaps Leroy’s family gained some solace from the fact that he had not been killed on the battlefield, but making it to a base hospital certainly was no guarantee of survival in the Great War; large numbers of wounded men regrettably succumbed to injuries or disease while tucked snugly into hospital beds far behind the front lines. No doubt Robert and Lucy Moyes fretted over the possibility that their boy had cheated death in battle only to die, anxious and lonely, in some rear-area medical ward. Even Lt. Toole appears to have given up on the idea that the young soldier was still alive; in closing his note to the Moyeses, he referred ominously to Leroy in the past tense: the Utah doughboy, he wrote. “was a good soldier and always took a particular interest in his work. He always tried to do his very best and never complained no matter how hard the work.”3

Imagine the Moyes family’s surprise, then, when Leroy miraculously turned up in a New York hospital, alive and well, four months after Toole’s missive arrived from France. Once the fighting men began trickling home to Ogden from the war zone back in 1918, the unfortunate Moyeses may have felt compelled to veil their deep sadness so as not to diminish the joy their neighbors felt at being reunited with their loved ones. But now the family surely felt only relief. According to the Ogden Standard, Leroy’s father was eager to celebrate the “homecoming of his son who for months he mourned as lost.”4

1 Ogden Standard, April 30, 1919; “United States Census, 1910.” index and images, FamilySearch.org: accessed March 29, 2012, entry for Leroy Moyes; citing Census Records, Ogden, Weber, Utah, family number 124, page number 6; United States Bureau of the Census, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

2 1910 Census entry (cited above); “Veterans with Federal Service Buried in Utah, Territorial to 1966.” index and images, FamilySearch.org: accessed March 29, 2012. Entry for Leroy Moyes, died September 2, 1954; citing Veterans Records, FHL microfilm; Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City, Utah. On the 91st Division, see The Story of the 91st Division (San Mateo, CA: 91st Division Publication Committee, 1919).

3 Ogden Standard, April 30, 1919.

4 Ibid.

The story of Leroy Moyes is truly extraordinary; precious few similar tales ended so happily. The Meuse-Argonne Offensive, in which the young Ogdenite was wounded, had been a bloody affair: the forty-seven-day-long battle, which lasted from September 26 to the last day of the war— November 11, 1918—ended with 26,277 American men killed and another 95,786 wounded, making it the deadliest battle in American history. (By comparison, in the costliest battle the U. S. Army fought in northwest Europe in the Second World War—what we now call the Battle of the Bulge—far fewer Americans were killed and wounded than were killed and wounded in the Meuse-Argonne in 1918, despite the fact that both battles were of more or less equal length. In the 44 days of the Battle of the Bulge, 10,276 Americans were killed and 47,493 were wounded.)5 For being the nation’s most lethal battle, however, the fight for the Meuse River highlands and the Argonne Forest has attracted scant attention from historians, and even less notice from scholars of Utah history.6 The story of Utahns’ experiences in the Great War—especially in the Meuse-Argonne—remains effectively untold. Even the aging standard reference on World War I-era Utah, published in 1924, devotes only a handful of pages to the campaign.7 The purpose of this article is to begin rectifying this historiographical lapse by recovering some of the stories of Utah men who fought or otherwise participated in the Meuse-Argonne campaign. This is not a comprehensive account of the offensive; rather, it is a collection of narrative snapshots that provide a soldier’s-eye-view of what it was like to undergo the process historian Peter S. Kindsvatter has dubbed “immersion in the environment of war”—a process that commences with being shipped to the war zone and culminates in actual combat experience and the frightening realization that tomorrow one’s “number might be up.” Firsthand accounts and other reports credited to Utah doughboys highlight the alienating and disorienting nature of the fighting in the Meuse-Argonne sector. Men witnessed nearly boundless destruction—both human and environmental—in the offensive, and endured terrifying brushes with death, physical wounds (sometimes severe ones), psychological distress, the loss of friends, and paralyzing fear. Even troops attached to rear-echelon support units were sometimes forced

5 Robert H. Ferrell, America’s Deadliest Battle: Meuse-Argonne, 1918 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2007), xi. Ferrell also claims that the Meuse-Argonne battle was the largest in American history, with 1.2 million men actively involved at the front. For casualty figures in the Battle of the Bulge, see Max Hastings, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-45 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 235.

6 Immediately following the war, a handful of studies on the Meuse-Argonne Offensive were rushed into print. These included Frederick Palmer, Our Greatest Battle (The Meuse-Argonne) (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1919); and Arthur D. Hartzell, Meuse-Argonne Battle(Sept. 26-Nov. 11, 1918) (Chaumont, France: General Headquarters; American Expeditionary Forces, 1919). Recent studies of the Meuse-Argonne, however, have been few and far between. See Paul F. Braim, The Test of Battle: The American Expeditionary Forces in the Meuse-Argonne Campaign (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987); Ferrell, Deadliest Battle; and Edward G. Lengel, To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2008).

7 Nobel Warrum, Utah in the World War: The Men Behind the Guns and the Men and Women Behind the Men Behind the Guns (Salt Lake City: Utah State Council of Defense, 1924), 39-55.

to witness and internalize the terrible consequences of war, while combat soldiers on the front lines saw and did things on the battlefield they ordinarily would not have seen or done. It does not take much imagination to deduce the impact wartime trauma had on them. And on top of such terrible individual consequences, Utah families also paid a heavy price, with more than a few losing fathers, sons, and brothers in the bloodshed that swept the Meuse-Argonne in 1918.8

The United States was a latecomer to World War I, only entering the fight on April 6, 1917, after nearly three years of increasingly tested neutrality. Not even the sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania by a German U-boat in 1915, with more than a hundred Americans aboard, was enough to get President Woodrow Wilson to break his resolve to stay out of the war. (He eventually won a second presidential term in 1916 on a peace platform.) Only a German offer to join forces with Mexico in a war against the United States and the resumption in 1917 of unrestricted submarine warfare finally brought America into the conflict. (The German high command had reauthorized the nation’s U-boats to attack and sink any ship approaching the British and French coastlines, regardless of the flag under which it sailed).9

8 Peter S. Kindsvatter, American Soldiers: Ground Combat in the World Wars, Korea and Vietnam (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), xx, 67-92.

9 David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War in American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Thomas Fleming, The Illusion of Victory: America In World War I (New York: Basic Books, 2003); and Justus D. Doenecke, Nothing Less Than War: A New History of America’s Entry into World War I (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011).

World War I recruits at the Price train station.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The United States, though, was woefully unprepared to fight a world war, even after watching the forces of rampant militarism and total war consume the European continent over the space of almost three years. America’s peacetime army was unrealistically small, and its equipment and weapons were outdated and sparse.10 But the United States did have the potential to supply enormous numbers of men to the cause of war through conscription. Indeed, by the end of 1918, the U.S. Army had marshaled over three million men for the war effort thanks to a draft set in motion by the passage of the Selective Service Act on May 18, 1917. The first draft lottery occurred on July 20, 1917, when Secretary of War Newton D. Baker drew the first number, thus calling up the men holding the same number in each local draft board’s area. Of course, some of the men who found themselves in the AEF had joined the fight of their own volition as volunteers or had been nationalized as members of state national guards, but the great majority (around two-thirds of the three million) were draftees.11

Men from across Utah found their way into the AEF through all three channels: volunteer enlistment, federalization of the national guard, and conscription. One volunteer enlistee, Oscar Evans of Sunnyside in Carbon County, joined the army with a buddy hoping to avoid infantry service in the muddy, pest-infested trenches of France. Formal induction came on December 11, 1917, at Fort Douglas in Salt Lake City, where doctors pushed and prodded Evans and his fellow inductees to the point of causing some of the young soldiers to faint. Without skipping a beat, the medical personnel used the time to inoculate the men. “They [the inductees] would fall,” recalled Evans, “and the doctors would punch the needle in them and give them their shot.” From Utah, Evans first went to Florida’s Camp Johnson, where he was assigned to a transportation unit, then to Norfolk, Virginia, and finally Brest, France, aboard a steamer manned by a green crew. For the duration of the war, Evans drove trucks.12

Like most new volunteers and draftees, Evans was mostly ignorant of army protocol. Shortly after he was issued his uniform, the young Utahn passed a lieutenant without saluting him, a military faux pas for which he received a strong dressing-down. “I told him [the lieutenant] that I had just got in,” the innocent Evans remembered, “and I didn’t know that I had to salute.”13

Unlike many new volunteers, federalized national guardsmen were familiar with the military way of life. Guardsmen like Private Lamar H. Deming of Salt Lake City were prime candidates for deployment to the

10

Byron Farwell, Over There: The United States in the Great War, 1917-1918 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 56-57.

11 Ibid., 50-51.

12 Oral History Interview with Oscar W. Evans, 10 July 1992, MSS A-5088, 5-6, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City, Utah. Hereafter cited as Evans History. As a member of a support unit, Evans’ ability to transport much needed supplies to men on the front lines quickly and efficiently was essential for victory.

13 Ibid., 6.

war zone. Not all nationalized guard units, however, were destined to see action in France. Deming, for example, had been part of the 145th Artillery Regiment created from a federal order to reorganize the Utah National Guard. Originally called the First Artillery Regiment of the Utah National Guard, the unit was redesignated the 145th Artillery Regiment and given to the 40th “Sunshine” Division after shipping out to Camp Kearney, California. In the end, though, despite its evident preparedness for action in France, the 40th Division and its regiments became stateside “depot” units, providing replacement troops, including Deming, to front-linedivisions in France. (Before the war was over, the Sunshine Division had sent 27,000 replacements to AEF combat units.) Deming was detached from the 145th and left the United States in June 1918 bound first for the British port of Liverpool, and then for France, one of six thousand doughboys on a crowded ship. He arrived on the line just in time to join the 2nd “Indianhead” Division in stopping a march on Paris by the German army.14

14 “United States Census, 1920.” index and images, FamilySearch.org: accessed March 29, 2012, entry for Lamar Deming; citing Census Records, Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, Utah, family number 277, page number 13A; United States Bureau of the Census, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; Deseret News , December 27, 1918; Richard Roberts, Legacy: The History of the Utah National Guard: From the Nauvoo Legion Era to Enduring Freedom (Salt Lake City: National Guard Association of Utah, 2003), 102-25.

Salt Lake City soldiers at Fort Lewis, Washington, prior to being shipped overseas.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

(The regiment Deming left behind at Camp Kearney, the 145th Artillery, with its division, the 40th, eventually made it to Europe, but never saw combat duty.)15

For every volunteer enlistee and national guardsman like Lamar Deming there were many, many conscripts from Utah who ended up on the front lines. In the case of Kanarraville, a small Iron County town, of the sixteen townsmen who fought in the war, only one, Emery Pollock, volunteered. The rest, including young Leland Stapley, were draftees.16 On the day of the draft lottery, Stapley’s serial number—461—was the hundred and tenth number drawn; given that the War Department’s quota for the entire county was only 46, he appeared safe from conscription. But authorities exempted too many of the men at the top of the list—men whose numbers had been drawn earlier in the lottery—or judged them to be physically or mentally unfit for military service, meaning that those further down the list would have to take their places; only twenty of the first 125 draft registrants were conscripted into the army in the initial round of examinations, and Leland Stapley was one of them. (The county draft board eventually ruled that “all fathers, married before the passage of the law calling the draft, should be exempted,” meaning that married men without children and unmarried men would be forced to fill the county’s quota.)17

Despite the apparent unfairness of the situation, Stapley took his licks and allowed himself to be inducted. The townspeople fêted him and his brothers-in-arms at a “rousing meeting” the afternoon before they were set to leave for basic training. Out came the “old martial band,” and the food. “Fruit and melons were served to all present, followed by a dance,” wrote the Kanarraville correspondent to the Iron County Record. The next day, the boys were on their way to Salt Lake City and then Camp Lewis, near Tacoma, Washington, where they were attached to the 346th Machine Gun Battalion of the 91st Division, the same division in which Leroy Moyes served.18

Many of the divisions that went into the Meuse-Argonne sector were initially organized regionally. As men were inducted, the army grouped them into units with men from the same area or section of the country. This, of course, was especially the case with federalized national guard divisions, such as the 28th “Keystone” Division (Pennsylvania) and the 37th “Buckeye” Division (Ohio). But even some draftee divisions were organized along regional lines: men from West Virginia and the mountainous western counties of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina filled the 80th “Blue Ridge” Division’s ranks, while the 77th “Statue of Liberty” or “Melting Pot” Division originally contained a large number of recent

15 Roberts, Legacy, 117-119; Deseret News, December 3,1918.

16 Kerry William Bate, “Kanarraville Fights World War I,” Utah Historical Quarterly 63 (Winter 1995), 27.

17 Iron County Record, July 6, 1917; July 27, 1917; August 17, 1917; August 24, 1917.

18 Ibid,September 28, 1917.

European immigrants from New York, with names like Knifsund, Cepeglia, Karpinsky, Ziegenbalg, and Bejnarowicz. The shipping of replacement troops from stateside depot divisions to fill vacancies left by casualties, however, undercut the regional character of individual AEF divisions, and men from across America ultimately were thrown together in mixed units. While evidence shows that Utahns filled vacancies in a number of AEF divisions, the majority of the state’s draftees ended up in the 91st Division, as its “Wild West” moniker suggests.19

Stapley estimated he and his companions spent a whole nine months in training, first at Camp Lewis, and then at New Jersey’s Camp Merritt (Stapley incorrectly assumed the cantonment was in New York). He and the rest of his battalion boarded the ship Dano at Hoboken on July 7, 1918, bound for France. Life on the Dano was “one continual jam,” Stapley wrote in his diary (which was eventually excerpted in the Record ). “We had daily inspectionswhich are the curse of a soldier’s life.” The “main excitement” of the trip was a whale sighting, though the opening stampede for the canteen each day ran a close second. Upon reaching France, the young Utahn, like so many others before and after him, climbed aboard a freight car with “8 Horses or 40 Men” stenciled in French on its sides, bound for the country’s interior and advanced training.20

Leland Stapley was only one of hundreds of young Utah men being swept up into America’s burgeoning war machine, and perhaps not unremarkably the experiences of those hundreds did not depart radically

19 L. Wardlaw Miles, History of the 308th Infantry, 1917-1919 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927), 270-78; Lengel, To Conquer Hell, 35, 92-93, 121-22; Warrum, Utah in the World War, 47. According to Warrum, “all Utah men inducted into the service through selective enrollment [the draft] were sent” to Camp Lewis, the 91st Division’s home base. Warum also points out that more Utah men were assigned to the division’s 362nd Infantry Regiment “than to any of the others, so it came to be regarded as a Utah regiment.”

20 Iron County Record, April 18, 1919.

American troops on the march in Europe.

PHOTOS OF THE GREAT WAR

from his. Russell C. Wheeler of Slaterville registered for the draft in June 1917 and was in the first group of 120 men to appear before the Weber County draft board. If Wheeler hoped to escape the clutches of military conscription, draft authorities disappointed him. As a single man without dependent children, he, like Stapley, was a prime candidate for the draft; married men with dependents were being exempted left and right. (Responding to the appeal of a married Ogden man with a dependent child whose local draft board had turned down his request for an exemption, the district draft board in Salt Lake City seemed to set a precedent in August 1917 that such men, as a matter of course, should be free from conscription.) The fact that Wheeler had received previous military training (at least if we choose to believe an Ogden Standard report to that effect), only made the Slatervillian even more attractive as a draftee.21

Like Stapley, Wheeler and his fellow Weber County draftees were assigned to basic training at Camp Lewis. Before they left for camp, citizens and dignitaries invited the newly-minted soldiers to a party at a local café where politicians were given the standard privilege of delivering long-winded speeches on the selflessness and patriotism of the departing men. The party’s planners, however, also saved a little time for the soldiers themselves to speak to the café crowd; according to the Standard , they “express[ed] pride at being able to get out and fight for the cause of world liberty.” Perhaps the oddest event of the night was an impromptu comedy show that “got everyone into a light-hearted spirit,” and allegedly “did much to impress the boys with the fact that going to war is not so hard after all.” One wonders how many of the draftees actually came to the same conclusion.22

Wheeler’s judgments about training at Camp Lewis were highly positive. “You would probably like to hear how we are fairing [sic] in the army training camp,” he wrote in a letter published in the Standard. “Well, to sum it all up, we are getting along first class.” Military planners had assigned the Weber County men to the 91st Division’s 362nd Infantry Regiment, Company M, where the officers, at least according to Wheeler, were quite solicitous. “These officers will do anything to add to our comfort,” he declared. He also pointed out that Camp Lewis was “situated on one of the most picturesque spots in the west” and the “grub” the army served in camp was excellent, “although there is nothing fancy about it, and with not much of a variety.” The meat, potatoes, unbuttered bread, and fruit went down “all right after a hard day’s work.” Wheeler’s final verdict regarding training at Lewis can be found in his advice to other draftees who might follow him into the 91st Division: “Tell all who are coming up here that they are coming to a fine place and will receive good treatment if they will

21 Ogden Standard, June 14, August 1, August 31, 1917. The appellant in the Ogden draft case, George Lowe Abbott, later enlisted in the army as a regular. See Ogden Standard, September 8, 1917.

22 Ibid., September 10, 1917.

do their part.” As much as he liked Camp Lewis, however, Wheeler could not stay forever. Eventually he too had to bid the training depot goodbye and ship off to France.23

Men in the American Expeditionary Force— including doughboys from Utah—began and completed advanced training in France and entered combat or support units on a staggered schedule, though some like Lamar Deming went immediately into combat. America’s full commitment to the cause of the First World War would not be made, however, until General John J. Pershing, the American commander-in-chief, launched his grand offensive between the Meuse River and the Argonne Forest in September 1918.24

Prior to the Americans’ “big push,” the Meuse-Argonne had been a French sector, one they had fought tooth and nail to keep. In 1916, in an effort to put France out of the war once and for all, the Germans had launched an assault on the forts that ringed the ancient city of Verdun, one of the sector’s key strong points; not surprisingly, the French army pushed back. The seesaw battle lasted for months until both sides were exhausted. When the U. S. Army finally arrived on the scene, the tired French soldiers left to make room. Pershing put nine divisions on the line: the 77th, 28th, and 35th on the left, the 91st, 37th, and 79th in the middle, and the 4th, 80th, and 33rd on the right. A regiment from the 92nd Division made up of African American draftees and white officers, and put under the command of the French, served on the extreme left as a liaison between the American units and French troops to the west, while Pershing held the 1st, 3rd, 29th, 32nd, 82nd, and 92nd divisions in reserve. Most of the troops that jumped off on September 26, 1918, were green; only the 4th, 28th, and 77th had seen previous action. Across no-man’s-land waited a hardened enemy dug into three very strong defensive lines.25

23 Ibid.

24 Deseret News, December 3, 1918.

25 Lengel, To Conquer Hell, 58-62, 122.

American soldiers advancing through a French battlefield.

PHOTOS OF THE GREAT WAR

The American offensive began with a thunderous artillery barrage followed by the advance of the divisions General Pershing had chosen to lead the attack. AEF planners assigned the 91st Division, with its not inconsiderable number of Utahns, the task of driving up the middle of the American line. The “Wild West” men met only moderate resistance as they pushed over Chambronne Creek and past Véry toward Eclisfontaine near the Argonne Forest. On the battle’s second day, however, elements of the 91st found themselves on the outskirts of the village of Epinonville, under heavy German artillery fire. Among the division’s scattered units was Utahn Glenn Stewart. Stewart, a Millard County man, crouched patiently in a dug-out keeping his eyes peeled for enemy movement. (A real-life crack shot, he had made sergeant based on his expert rifleman classification and his ability to cut a pasteboard target in two with a machine gun at 1700 yards.) Like so many other soldiers, Stewart witnessed some of the worst examples of war’s bloody nature firsthand. In one case, while hunkered down in a hole, weapon in hand (probably a French-made Chauchat light automatic rifle), the Utah sergeant watched helplessly as a German plane dove on a forward aid station full of injured men and “deliberately drop[ped] two bombs.” Placing the warheads with “fiendish cruelty,” the aviator killed twelve “already maimed” men and injured forty more. Stewart also witnessed an enemy flyer down three Allied observation balloons with outlawed incendiary bullets designed to set the gas-filled balloons ablaze. According to an account published in the Millard County Chronicle, when the observer and his assistant saw the enemy plane, they jumped from the balloon trusting in their parachutes to save them. The assistant’s parachute “met with a little wind and drifted off” to safety, but the observer was not so fortunate. His parachute was slow to deploy, giving the fiery balloon time to settle on top of him. The entire apparatus “enveloped him in flames.” Stewart could only watch from his hole in the ground as the man burned to death above him.26

The fighting around Epinonville and other towns in the sector took a heavy toll on the 91st Division. On the battle’s second day, Glenn Stewart saw “Hun artillery” nearly annihilate a retreating infantry unit, with an American soldier falling “at every shot.” Stewart counted thirty-five men just around him that the Germans’ effective fire had cut down (the thirtyfive included three men in his own squad). The barrage gutted the unit’s leadership cadre, leaving some squads without any non-commissioned officers. It was, in the words of the Millard Chronicle, a “perfect hell.”27 The 362nd Infantry Regiment, made up mostly of Utahns, lost half of its men on a single afternoon of combat in the Meuse-Argonne campaign.28

On the battle’s third day, while elements of the “Wild West” Division

26 Millard County Chronicle, June 26, 1919.

27 Ibid.

28 Lengel, To Conquer Hell, 172.

were still fighting around Epinonville, George Augustus “Gus” Faust of Fillmore found himself near the French village, looking across what in normal times must have been a lush, picturesque valley. Faust, a corporal in the division’s 348th Machine Gun Battalion, wrote that the valley was now “checkered with machine gun nests, camouflaged, and in every possible way, cunningly concealed; there were trenches in welldefined rows; barbed wire entanglements aplenty.” On the hill, the German artillery itched “to pour down on any part of our advance.” The odds were stacked heavily against Faust and his comrades, but the machine gunners did not shirk the coming action. Forging across the bunker-studded dale, the Americans pushed the Germans out of their first line of defense, but the doughboys simply could not crack the second line, reinforced as it was by the first-line German evacuees. The defenders “certainly did pour it onto us,” Faust recalled. “Not one of us had even time to eat a bit of hardtack or bully beef [a tinned meat product], nor was there time for any other thought than the work at hand.”29

Unfortunately for us, Faust left no narrative clues concerning his emotional response to the violence he beheld at Epinonville, but he did offer us a brief glimpse of the distress and even anger many soldiers, from Utah and elsewhere, must have felt at losing their friends in the intense bloodletting that marked the Meuse-Argonne battle. As Faust’s machine gunners and their accompanying infantry slowly worked their way forward

29 Millard County Chronicle, June 26, 1919. Gus Faust was the father of James E. Faust, Second Counselor in the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. See Lynn Arave, “President James E. Faust dies at age 87,” Deseret Morning News, August 10, 2007.

American troops passing through a ruined French town.

PHOTOS OF THE GREAT WAR

along the valley floor, they encountered a German machine gun emplacement. (The Germans’ perfection of the art and science of defensive combat over the course of the war ultimately helped them build the world-class defensive frontier the Allies dubbed the Hindenburg Line, an amazing convergence of reinforced concrete, camouflage, and highly effective defense-in-depth tactics.) Faust watched in horror as a “squad of Huns” in the bunker “mow[ed] down our men until that nest was surrounded, and then to a man, after all that damage, when the game was up with them, up went their arms, with the full expectation of a peaceful walk back.” The doughboys were livid, having just seen the Germans—now begging for mercy—coldly gun down their friends. No prisoners were taken that day, Faust declared tellingly.30

Clyde Bunker of Delta also personally witnessed the human violence and environmental devastation of the offensive’s initial push. Before going “over the top” into no-man’s land, Bunker stripped to his olive drab uniform, a rain slicker, his cartridge belt, and his steel helmet, leaving behind his blankets and other equipment. He also carried his Chauchat automatic rifle and a light pack filled with a quarter loaf of bread, two cans of bully beef, and four hundred rounds of ammunition. Bunker had married his fiancée shortly before he landed in the army, so his desire to survive the war and return home, while no greater than anyone else’s, surely ran high. Shortly before daylight on the first day of the offensive, he and his comrades filed into the American trenches—located about a hundred yards from the Germans—and when “zero hour” came, following a preparatory artillery barrage, they rushed over the parapet into the killing zone. The land resembled a moonscape. The Americans’ heavy guns had mercilessly pounded the first and second lines of the enemy trenches, leaving overlapping craters and tangled masses of barbed wire strewn across no-man’s-land. The once lushly forested terrain now lay denuded save for a few scattered, barkless stumps. All around the area lay the lifeless bodies of German and American soldiers, and neither side showed signs of wanting to curb the climbing corpse count. “One man put his head in a [German] dug out,” Bunker reported, “and called to the enemy to surrender. He was almost completely severed in two by a burst of machine gun fire.”31

Leland Stapley of Kanarraville witnessed much the same thing. “No farmer ever turned over the soil more thoroughly than the artillery had plowed up” the forest, Stapley wrote home. “There was not one tree but that was full of shrapnel.” The doughboy only hinted at the human carnage he witnessed, perhaps because he was writing to his mother and did not want to upset her. “Some of the sights along the road would make a strong man weak,” he wrote cryptically.32

30 Millard County Chronicle June 26, 1919.

31 Ibid., April 25, 1918, and June 26, 1919.

32 Iron County Record, April 18, 1919.

Even support troops not directly assigned to combat roles could not avoid the startlingly gruesome sights and alienating terror of the Meuse-Argonne battlefield. Truck driver Oscar Evans recalled driving along the far eastern edge of the sector and seeing wild pigs rooting up buried corpses.33

S. Clay Mills of Salt Lake City, on the other hand, experienced the terrors of combat on the Western Front in a far more immediate way. A clerk and occasional courier in an observation balloon company charged with spotting enemy targets for American artillery, Mills had crossed the Atlantic on an Italian ship, the S. S. America , and after less than a month in a French training camp, made his way to the front. In the MeuseArgonne sector, German aviators and artillery regularly targeted the company’s balloon, whether it was airborne or on the ground. But it was not just the balloon that found itself in the Germans’ crosshairs. Near Mort Homme, a prominent hill just north of Verdun, where the German and French armies nearly bled each other dry in 1916, the enemy incessantly shelled the area around Mills’ makeshift clerk’s office, which at the time was little more than a “tarpaulin thrown over a couple of sticks.” The shelling finally forced him to move his workplace to a more secure dug-out. (Mills discovered one of the grisly realities of war at Mort Homme: the physical remains of the dead rarely stay buried when their graves come under artillery fire. Following a bout of heavy German shelling, the Salt Laker noticed that “human bones & skeletons and skulls” now covered the hill.)34

In a letter to his father, written only a few days after the Armistice was signed, Mills admitted that even he, a lowly company clerk, had come very close to, in his words, “getting it where the chicken got the AXE.” On November 10, the day before the war ended, Mills and his company

33 Evans History, 11. Evans appears to have been so affected by what he saw in the war, that he instructed his interviewer years later, “Now, I don’t want to go into a lot of things I saw in France, the wicked things.”

34 S. C. Mills, Diary, December 16, 1917-November 26, 1918, MSS A-2032, Utah State Historical Society.

A United States soldier at St. Nazaire, France, ready to board a ship for the return home.

PHOTOS OF THE GREAT WAR

commander set out from Consenvoye, a town perched on the eastern bank of the Meuse River, to pick up the company’s pay from the quartermaster. They crossed the Meuse and eventually caught up with the quartermaster in Romagne near the center of the sector, secured the money to pay their unit, and then turned back toward their bivouac at dusk. Deciding to take a shortcut back to Consenvoye, Mills and his commander crossed the Meuse on a bridge only recently built by AEF engineers. When they were only halfway across the bridge, a German artillery shell, seemingly out of nowhere, dropped out of the sky and detonated directly in front of their car. Before the “chauffeur could stop,” Mills wrote home, “he ran into the big hole with his left front and hind wheel causing [the] car to tip to the left almost going over. It just did cling on to [the] edge by the other two wheels.” If Mills saw his life flash before him in that second he did not let on in his letter, but he seems to have taken some time to reflect on his mortality following the experience as evidenced by his next sentence: “If the driver had hit that hole square with both front wheels we would have plunged into the Meuse River, with about a 50 ft. fall.”35

It turns out that even men of the cloth who provided for the spiritual needs of men on the front line, occasionally experienced moments of pure dread in the war zone. Though they may have felt more prepared than most to deal with the twin realities of death and violence in war, military chaplains sometimes had “come-to-Jesus” moments when they were forced to ruminate on their own mortality. On one occasion, army chaplain Herbert Maw, destined to become the State of Utah’s eighth governor in 1941, visited a friend attached to an observation balloon unit. Maw’s associate invited him to accompany him in the balloon; the chaplain agreed and soon he found himself in the air above the battlefield. “The balloon ascended to an altitude of around 2,000 feet,” Maw later wrote in his memoir Adventures With Life, when “suddenly the anti-aircraft guns on the ground began blasting and the balloon began descending and we were ordered to jump. We were being attacked by a lone German airplane.” The army equipped each balloon with parachutes, and as a balloonist could do very little to protect himself while in the air, he usually opted to bail out when attacked. Maw watched as his friend leaped over the edge of the observation platform that dangled below the sausage-shaped balloon, leaving him alone. “I was horrified,” Maw recalled, “but finally climbed over the side of [the platform] and hung there for a moment before letting go. I felt the jerk of my parachute leaving the bag, but it seemed an eternity before I felt the tug of the chute opening.” In what Maw may have counted as a small miracle, he and his companion floated to the ground unhurt.36

The slow progress of the green divisions he had sent into the Meuse-

35 S. C. Mills to his father, November 24,1918, MSS A-2032, Utah State Historical Society. 36 Herbert B. Maw, Adventures With Life (Salt Lake City: self published, 1978), 87-88.

World War I veterans marching in Ogden in 1919.

Argonne finally convinced General Pershing to take the worst performing units—including the 91st Division—off the front lines and to replace them with seasoned ones such as the 1st and 2nd Divisions. For Lamar Deming of the 2nd, this meant another stint on the line. His division went forward on November 1, and by the end of the first day, under effective covering fire by the divisional artillery (of which Deming was a part), the unit gained a full nine kilometers of ground and had opened up a sixteen kilometer gap in the German defenses (though the enemy soon filled the hole). 37 The unfortunate product of the 2nd Division’s success was a hefty number of casualties, which Deming described in a letter home, later published in the Deseret News. On the first day of the unit’s push, wrote the young soldier, he and his comrades in the artillery moved forward “about 12 kilometers through the ground where the doughboys [in the infantry] had passed two hours before. The fields were covered with dead. They [the dead infantrymen] were still warm and still dripping blood.” Later, when Deming and the other artillerymen stopped for the night, they dug holes for shelter and bedded down, only to be shelled heavily by the Germans. One projectile fell a scant twelve feet from Deming’s dug-out, leaving a six-foot-deep crater. “The next night was worse than that,” Deming recalled. “The shells came over four at a time but fell short. I had traveled half the night in the cold with mud to [my] shoetops, but once I hit my blankets I forgot all about it.” The German artillery fire had killed a good part of the 2nd Division’s draft horses, forcing Deming and his fellow soldiers to move their guns “one at a time.” When the 2nd finally penetrated to the outskirts of Beaumont, an

37 Ferrell, Deadliest Battle, 112-29, 131-34, Lengel, To Conquer Hell, 387-99.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

impressive distance up the sector, the Germans again shelled them “night and day.” Calling the experience “a nightmare,” Deming wrote that he and his buddies “were shelled several times with gas there and the battery had sveral [sic] escapes.”38

The ceasefire of November 11, 1918, produced spontaneous celebrations at the front as well as back home, and set in motion the negotiations that would ultimately lead to a peace treaty between the Allies and Germany. With the fighting at an end, Utah doughboys began to filter home. But of course, not all the men who left in 1917 and 1918 came back. According to a state government report, a total of 535 Utah men died in the war, and a good number of those surely met their end in the highly lethal MeuseArgonne campaign. One was Sheldon Axelson, a native of the small Emery County town of Cleveland. According to a report in the Manti Messenger, Axelson, who served in the 4th “Ivy” Division’s 59th Infantry Regiment, had cheated death in earlier battles, but in the Meuse-Argonne a shell fragment finally ended his lucky streak. Wilford P. Ashton, a buddy of Axelson’s from Blanding, wrote to his dead friend’s family in 1921, perhaps hoping to provide them with some closure. “I did see him the night before they left for the front,” wrote Ashton. The Emery man’s unit left its “position in reserve about 5:30 in the evening with full trust that most of them would stay with the organization.” Ashton had heard through the grapevine that his friend had joined some of his comrades for a quick meal when “a large shell” exploded nearby snuffing out his life. The Blanding man assured Sheldon’s family that he mourned with them. “His life was nothing but exemplary,” declared Ashton, “and I appreciate the happy days we have spent together.” How the Axelson family mourned we do not know, but we can be sure the loss of young Sheldon hit them hard.39

Two other Utahns, close friends in civilian life, also left mourning families behind. Arthur Cahoon of Deseret and Orin Allen of Logan, along with Cahoon’s wife, Vernell (or Vernal), and Allen’s longtime fiancée, had taken a final camping trip into Utah’s backcountry before the men had to report for induction. One can visualize the two civilians-turned-doughboys fixing this trip in their memories as a happy mental bulwark against the carnage and possible privation they were bound to experience in the war zone. But if they hoped to repeat that trip into Utah’s mountainous wilderness,they were out of luck. Cahoon, a corporal, was leading a squad in the 363rd Infantry Regiment’s Company M, when a shell from one of the heavy guns exploded near him, killing him instantly. (The battalion major, who was standing only fifteen feet from the blast, remained unhurt.)

Ironically, a fragment from the shell that killed Cahoon injured Allen. The burning metal mangled the young Utahn’s legs and one of his shoulders,

38 Deseret News, December 27, 1918.

39 Manti Messenger, April 18, 1919; November 12, 1920; May 17, and October 7, 1921.

necessitating his removal to a rear area dressing station, where he lay out in the open all day. (This was likely due to the heavy casualties the division took around Epinonville.) That night, around 11 o’clock, an errant artillery shell fell on the aid station, killing thirteen men including Allen.40

Of course there were other Utah men who left the battlefields of Europe with their lives intact, but with their bodies broken. Men lost arms, legs, and other appendages to artillery blasts and suppurating wounds. Others suffered disfiguring damage to their faces. More than a few returned home with limps and other handicaps. Such was the case with Hugh Kelley, another Millard County man, who suffered from a gas attack in the MeuseArgonne fighting. Weaponized poisonous gas—mustard, chlorine, and phosgene—killed or debilitated thousands of soldiers in the First World War, and belligerents on both sides used it freely. Despite the real danger the aerosolized poison posed, however, soldiers sometimes shrugged off putting on their protective masks when gas shells detonated nearby, as Kelley had chosen to do on one unfortunate occasion. In an instant, the gas leaking from the shell overtook him, and he began to cough violently. His ears and nose bled, and for two days, as he fought on, he wiped the trickles of blood away. At last, he gave up and went to an aid station, He retur ned home, partly deaf and probably permanently injured from inhaling the gas.41

Kelley’s brother, Jim, fared no better in the Meuse-Argonne. The Utah doughboy and his comrades had just routed a German strongpoint on a hill, when a shrapnel shell exploded over his head, knocking him out cold and killing six men in his group. When he came to, reported the Millard County Chronicle, he noticed that the explosion had torn his gas mask to shreds. He foggily looked himself over and discovered “a forefinger loose and wobbling, hanging on by only a strip of flesh.” Amazingly, the wounded hand caused Jim no pain, but another injury, this one in his leg, did. In the hospital, doctors removed the finger and patched up his leg. Jim Kelley

40 Millard County Chronicle, November 14, 1918; June 26, 1919.

41 Ibid., June 26, 1919.

Returning soldiers on board a World War I tank during a 1919 Ogden parade.

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went home fingerless and no doubt limping, perhaps for the rest of his life.42

Then there were those who possessed invisible wounds—mental and psychological damage that even experts would have been hard pressed to spot. These injuries could fester for years undetected, while they slowly ravaged their victim’s psyche. 43 This apparently was the case with Levi Taylor of Moab who, according to the local newspaper, the Moab Times Independent , had been “on the line in France.” The paper reported that Taylor suffered from shell shock, after surviving a near miss in a German artillery barrage near the Argonne Forest, but he refused to let his parents apply for federal medical aid. According to his buddies, a dramatic change in his demeanor accompanied his brush with death.44 Taylor’s condition, reported the Times Independent, remained “pitiful,” as he struggled with the effects of the war on his psyche. The paper maintained that Taylor suffered from “delusions resulting from his experiences on the battle front”— presumably flashbacks and other symptoms of what we would now label post-traumatic stress disorder. A suicide attempt finally spurred Taylor’s parents’ to action, and they took him to Salt Lake City where Veterans Bureau physicians could examine him. The doctors approved a claim for disability benefits, but Taylor did not want to stay at the hospital, so his

42 Ibid.

43 For more on the physical and psychological dimensions of combat in the First World War, see Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 211-67.

44 Moab Times Independent, August 11 and 21, 1924.

War veterans at Bingham Canyon.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

physicians sent him home to recuperate under his parents’ care.45 Things seemed to go back to normal after Taylor returned to Moab, though his family noticed his physical condition beginning to slip. Then one Friday in 1925, while talking to two of his sisters at his parents’ home, Taylor calmly dismissed himself, went into a nearby room, and put a bullet in his head. What a tragic shift from the hopeful tenor of a letter young Levi wrote to his married sister, Ada Harris of Monticello, immediately following the war’s end, talking about his eagerness to return to the United States and the anticipation he and his pals felt about marching in a big military parade down the boulevards of Paris!46

And what of those uninjured Utah doughboys who seemed to adjust more readily to post-war life, despite having experienced directly the tremendous destructive power of modern warfare? How did they handle what they had seen and heard? Few shared their feelings publicly, in spoken or written form. Some may have looked back fondly on their days in France as some of the best of their lives. Still, many former soldiers would have echoed the sentiment of one of their own: Sergeant Jack Francis of Salt Lake City. The Utahn had fought in the ranks of the much vaunted 1st Division, otherwise known as the “Big Red One” (so named for the red “1” the unit’s men wore on their sleeves). According to the Salt Lake Telegram, Francis “saw about as much service as happened to fall to the lot of any Utahn who went over.” His declaration about what he wanted to do now that the fighting was over was short and unambiguous: “I don’t even want to talk war again.” It appears that even those who seemed most prepared to reenter civilian life, knew they were dealing with powerful demons. Once immersed in war, they would never be the same.47

45 Ibid., June 18 and August 21, 1924. On the causes and consequences of shell shock and psychological trauma in combat, see Denis Winter, Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War (New York: Penguin, 1978), 129-40.

46 Moab Times Independent, January 3, 1919.

47 Salt Lake Telegram, September 9, 1919.

Departure of the Late Nineteenth Century Cattle Companies from Southeastern Utah: A Reassessment

By CLYDE L. DENIS

Aflamboyant and unique period of southeastern Utah history involved the sudden arrival of large cattle companies in the early 1880s to reap the financial benefits proffered by free, open, and productive range land. Estimates have been made that well over a hundred thousand cattle used the areas around the Blue (Abajo) and La Sal Mountains, most owned by the large companies. It was a time replete with inevitable range conflicts, cattle fiefdoms against intrepid Mormon settlers, Indian depredations, and drunken cowboy rampages. And, then, just as suddenly, by the mid-1890s the large cattle companies were gone. While other local companies changed hands, departed, and even prospered over the next decades, the apparent rise and fall of these gargantuan cattle companies created an enduring legend of great interest.

Several historians and writers over the recent decades have suggested at least ten Cowboys herding cattle.

Clyde L. Denis is Professor of Biochemistry at the University of New Hampshire.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

causes for the departure from southeast Utah of three large cattle companies: drought, overgrazing and decimation of the range, a severe decline in cattle prices, San Juan County taxes, cattle rustling, Mormon resistance to cattle company expansion, hostile Indians, sheep competition, the Panic of 1893, and the European depression of 1890.1

However, it has been at least a quarter century since the last serious analysis of these issues was conducted. Because accurate information is now available indicating when the cattle companies departed, the timing and duration of the late nineteenth-century drought, and the dates when the Mormon conflicts with the cattle companies were resolved it is time to reassess the principal causes for the cattle company departures. This new information is critical in that a careful analysis of what caused the large cattle companies to depart must be constrained by the actual timeline of their departures. Such an analysis indicates that the two primary causes for the large reduction in cattle numbers across all of southeast Utah at the turn of the century were a severe and longstanding decline in cattle prices nationally, and the excessive overstocking and overgrazing of the range.

This article will introduce the three major cattle companies and smaller livestock operators in southeastern Utah during the late nineteenth century and then analyze the merits of each of the reasons offered for the departure of the large cattle companies. In addition, the cattle company departures will be viewed within the larger trends of the western range. The flourishing of the cattle industry in southeast Utah was a late event in the livestock history of the West, coming at the end of a spectacular boom in the western cattle industry. The industry bust after 1885 contributed to and presaged its similar end in southeast Utah. A re-evaluation of this critical historic period introducing new information as to exactly when the cattle companies departed will clarify these issues and determine whether the large cattle companies really “fell,” as in some type of failure that was unique to them.

The three largest cattle companies of southeastern Utah after 1880 were the Kansas and New Mexico Land and Cattle Company, commonly referred to as the Carlisle Cattle Company, the Lacy-Coleman (LC) Cattle Company, and the Pittsburgh Land and Cattle Company. Other smaller outfits existed at the same time, such as the Mormon Bluff Pool with

1 The first eight reasons were extracted from the following historians and writers: Frank Silvey, “History and Settlement of Northern San Juan County: from the writing of Frank Silvey,” Pam 5736, Utah State Historical Society,A. J. Redd, “The Early Cattle Industry of San Juan County,” November 3, 1952), 15; Utah State Historical Society; Franklin D. Day, “The Cattle Industry of San Juan County, Utah, 1875-1900” (M.S. thesis, Brigham Young University, 1958), 37-95; Cornelia A. Perkins, Marian G. Nielson, and Lenora B. Jones, Saga of San Juan, 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City: Mercury Publishing Company and San Juan County Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1968), 181; Charles S. Peterson, Look to the Mountains: Southeastern Utah and the La Sal National Forest (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1975), 84-95; Charles S. Peterson, “Grazing in Utah: A Historical Perspective,” Utah Historical Quarterly 57 (Fall 1989): 300-19; Daniel K. Muhlestein, “The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Companies in San Juan, 1880-1900,”11-45, Mss. A-4191, Utah State Historical Society.

Utah Territory 1890 map of Cattle Companies in Southeastern Utah.

several thousand head, the Elk Mountain Cattle Company which had around two thousand head, and Turner and Holman with about thirty-four hundred head. 2 However, these smaller cattle outfits did not succeed to the size and power the big three enjoyed. The LC Cattle Company had its main headquarters near the Dolores River in Lewis, Colorado; the Carlisle Cattle Company was in Carlisle, located six miles north of Monticello, and the Pittsburgh Cattle Company was located at La Sal.

The large number of cattle that were run by the big three cattle companies was impressive. Carlisle Cattle Company at its departure sold thirty thousand cattle, LC Cattle Company sold approximately twenty-two thousand cows, and the Pittsburgh Cattle Company released ten to fifteen thousand. The number of cattle in San Juan County at that time was estimated as at least a hundred thousand cattle.3 These numbers are staggering considering that the famous Scorup-Sommerville Cattle Company of the early to middle twentieth century typically only ran seven to twelve thousand cattle.4 These numbers indicate that the cattle industry of the last twenty years of the nineteenth century was much more extensive than in subsequent years, as the total number of cattle run by large and small ranchers diminished significantly at the end of the nineteenth century.

After 1885, the range cattle industry suffered a glut of cattle and overstocking, resulting in decreased prices and huge declines in cattle numbers.5 For example, from 1885 to 1895 Colorado and Wyoming saw the number

2 Howard E. Greager, The Hell That Was Paradox, (Norwood, CO: privately published, 1992), 54.

3 Harold G. Muhlestein and Fay L. Muhlestein, Monticello Journal: A History of Monticello until 1937 (H. G. & F. L. Muhlestein, 1988), 40.

4 John F. Vallentine, Lonesome Trails of San Juan: The Ranching Legacy of J. A. (Al) Scorup (Provo: privately published, 2002), 92. Copy available at the Utah State Historical Society.

5 Edward E. Dale, The Range Cattle Industry Ranching of the Great Plains from 1865 to 1925 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960), 62-101; Maurice Frink, “When Grass Was King,” in When Grass Was King: Contributions to the Western Range Cattle Industry Study (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1956), 26-93.

Cattle Numbers and Prices in dollars.

of cattle reduced by 25 percent. From 1890 to 1895, southeast Utah ranchers similarly reduced their cattle numbers. The reason the decline in the number of cattle in San Juan County began at a later date is that cattle operations were delayed entering into southeast Utah until after the Native American population was subdued in the early1880s.

The beginning point in any analysis is establishing when the large cattle companies exited the region. The Pittsburgh Cattle Company, which bought out several small herds in the La Sal Mountains in 1886, was the last of the three companies to actually dissolve. This company was most typical of the absentee landlordism that was synonymous with cattle barons buying into the western range. Individuals from Pittsburgh held the $210,000 in shares in the company. In 1888, the Pittsburgh Cattle Company, unable to achieve its expected profits, replaced their manager and foreman with John Mendell Cunningham and Thomas B. Carpenter. Carpenter was the nephew of one of the Pittsburgh Cattle Company investors and may have worked for the company in South Dakota and Wyoming. He was a tall reserved man who like to operate by a time table, rewarding efficiency in both his men and horses. Cunningham was from De Soto, Missouri. Although locally renowned as “the milk man of De Soto,” he was recommended to the company by his uncle from Blairsville, Pennsylvania, where a number of Pittsburgh Cattle Company investors lived.7 Cunningham, in

6 Richard Goff and Robert H. McCaffree, Century in the Saddle (Boulder, CO: Johnson Publishing Company, 1967), 309.

7 James L. Cunningham, Our Family History Subsequent to 1870 (Pittsburgh: privately published, 1943), 65-73; Pittsburgh [PA] Dispatch, May 12, 1891; B. W. Allred, interviewed by Charles Peterson and Gregory Maynard, June 2, 1973, Charles Redd Oral History Project. Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, Brigham Young University, pp. 24 and 95-96.

the early 1900s, was described as a man with “the inevitable cigar sticking out from his stubby gray mustache.” He was “stocky, kindly, slow of speech, he was square and just and beloved by all who came in contact with him.”8

In the 1890s when four thousand calves were branded, the Pittsburgh Cattle Company herd was estimated at ten to twelve thousand cattle—a conservative figure based on documentation that for cattle on the public domain in Utah, the ratio of total herd size to calves branded was four to one.9

While the owners of the Pittsburgh Cattle Company were far removed from southeast Utah, they were keen to resist threats to their investment. One such threat came from the citizens of Colorado who wanted the federal government to remove the Ute Indians from southwestern Colorado to an Indian reservation in southeastern Utah. Individual investors in the Pittsburgh Cattle Company used its presence in the East to advantage to lobby the federal government to maintain free and open lands in southeast Utah for the livestock industry. In contrast, in 1888 Monticello community leader Francis A. Hammond commented that the Mormons would only be to “some extent” affected by the move of the Indians and that “None of us, however, have any title to these lands.”10 Two years later, Hammond said, “the residents of San Juan County are by no means disheartened at the prospect of having their lands set apart by the government as an Indian Reservation.”11

8 John Riis, Ranger Trails, (Richmond,VA: The Dietz Press, 1937), 8.

9 Frank Silvey Collection, “Folklore Subjects,” MSS A 1006-3, p. 1, Utah State Historical Society; William Petersen, et. al., “Cattle Ranching in Utah” Utah Agricultural Experimental Station Bulletin 203 (Logan: Utah State Agricultural College, 1927).

10 Salt Lake Herald, October 30, 1888. For a fuller discussion of Indian removal to southeastern Utah, see Gregory C. Thompson, “The Unwanted Indians: The Southern Utes in Southeastern Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 49 (Spring 1987): 189-203.

11 Deseret News, August 15, 1889.

John M. Cunningham.

PHOTO COURTESY OF BILL AND JOYCE CUNNINGHAM

The agent of the Indian Tribal Authority, a group of well-connected Protestant Indian reformers in Washington, D.C., opposed to the Ute relocation, was criticized by Senator E.O. Wolcott of Colorado as being in cahoots with the Pittsburgh Cattle Company, “lobbying in an unholy cause,” is how he phrased it.12 Another Indian Tribal Authority agent also opposed the relocation for several reasons, foremost because “it would remove them [the Utes] from civilized surroundings,” interesting comments about the then-current state of San Juan County.13 In 1889, Pittsburgh Congressman John Dalzell supposedly persuaded one of the committee members reviewing the bill to delay its passage “by [putting] it in his pocket.”14 As summed up in 1893, “the Pittsburgh Cattle company have [sic] been the chief opponent of the proposed removal, which perhaps is correct, they having been able to do more than people of less means.”15 A year later, in the winter of 1894-95, the Pittsburgh Cattle Company sent Cunningham to Salt Lake City to persuade Governor James West that San Juan County should not be abandoned to the Utes.

The Pittsburgh Cattle Company departure from southeast Utah probably occurred in the late fall of 1896.16 In 1915, C.A. Robertson, a prominent Moab lawyer and newspaper editor, in an article on Monticello and Moab, also gave 1896 or 1897 as the year that the Pittsburgh Cattle Company sold out to Cunningham, Carpenter, and Fred N. Prewer.17 Moreover, it was reported in June of 1896 that “Fred Prewer for the Pittsburgh Cattle Co….is working to secure a postoffice at Coyote,” near their La Sal headquarters and in October of that year that Prewer of the Pittsburgh Cattle Company was granted the right for the post office. 18 Since the company changed its name after the sale to the La Sal Cattle Company, the end of the Pittsburgh Cattle Company must have occurred soon after October 1896.

Importantly, when the owners of the Pittsburgh Cattle Company sold out, the new owners, Cunningham and Carpenter, diversified their operation to include sheep and reduced the number of cattle grazing on the same open range land. When Cunningham left the area at age fifty-nine, the J.M. Cunningham Company was renowned for its success and was used as the exemplar of the local stock industry: “And some wonderful successes have been made in this line. Eighteen years ago two men bought on credit for

12 Pittsburgh Dispatch, March 21, 1892.

13 Ibid.

14 Salt Lake Herald, March 28, 1889.

15 Deseret News, November 18, 1893.

16 Silvey, “Folklore Subjects,” 1. In previous writings, other dates of 1890, 1895, and 1900 have been given for this event, but no evidence supports these dates. They are also suspect because of their ending in “0” or “5” a common ending when the real date is not known. For more on the confusion over the years see Cornelia A. Perkins, et. al, Saga of San Juan, 181, and Cunningham, Our Family History, 65-73.

17 C. A. Robertson, “Southeastern Utah, the Mecca of the Homesteader,” in Facts and Figures Pertaining to Utah (Salt Lake City: The Arrow Press, 1915), 115.

18 Grand Valley Times, June 19, October 15, 1896.

$75,000 what was thereafter known as the J.M. Cunningham & Company ranch and live stock property and ranch at La Sal. The value of the property today, and the money that has been taken out of it, amounts to something over a half milliondollars.”19 Cunningham and Carpenter, in addition to having the premier ranch in the area, were also recognized for their exceptional integrity. Years later in 1910, a young man reported, “Many times we got word of our cattle that were a long way from home but we never got very many of them back….When Cunningham and Carpenter owned the Cross H cattle, they helped us by gathering our cattle with their own. After the cattle were gathered they would ship and sell them for us.”20 Investors from around the country came to discuss terms with Cunningham and Carpenter when they put their Utah investments up for sale.21 After selling out to local interests in Utah, Cunningham retired near Denver, Carpenter to Fort Collins.22

The LC Cattle Company displayed a typical pattern for the decline of a large cattle company in San Juan County. Formed by the merging of herds and interests of Isaac W. Lacy with L. G. Coleman in Texas in 1870, the LC Cattle Company entered the Montezuma County area of southwestern

19 Robertson, “Southeastern Utah,” 115.

20 Henry McCabe, Cowboys, Indians and Homesteaders (Salt Lake City: Deseret Press, 1975), 309.

21 (Moab) Grand Valley Times, October 30, 1913.

22 Cunningham, Our Family History, 65-73, and Grand Valley Times, June 1, 1927.

Colorado in 1879 with about five thousand head of cattle.23 In the next year they spread westward, establishing their Utah ranch headquarters at the junction of Johnson and Recapture Creeks north of the San Juan River and Bluff. Of the three major cattle companies under discussion, the LC Cattle Company was the only cattle outfit owned by cattlemen from the southwest.

The LC Cattle Company over the next decade became very productive, but by the years of 1892 and 1893 it sold its twenty-two thousand cattle at eleven dollars a head at Dolores, Colorado. At the same time, the company closed its line camp at Verdure and sold its Recapture headquarters and the LC brand to Dr. W. I. South. It was also about this time that Scott and Campbell obtained the LC Cattle Company’s range rights southeast of Monticello and Montezuma Canyon to Monument Creek.24

The founders of the LC Cattle Company did not disappear completely, however. Sarah Lacy, the widow of Isaac Lacy who had been murdered in 1881, was aided in running the cattle company by her two brothers, William and John Brumley. The two brothers continued to operate their own spread in southwest Colorado; having started at Brumley Draw near Lewis, they eventually migrated down to Big Bend near present day Dolores. The Brumleys were involved in the political life of the community and broadened their business interests by opening a fine saloon in Dolores in 1896 that later became a nationally recognized hotel. They maintained their cattle outfits in the area after the demise of the LC Cattle Company and left several generations of Brumleys in their wake.25

The final large cattle company, the Kansas and New Mexico Land and Cattle Company, was run by two English brothers, Edmund and Harold Carlisle, born in the early 1850s. Unlike the Pittsburgh Cattle Company

23 Jay W. Palmer, “The LC Cattle Company: A Cow Outfit Plagued with Disasters,” Canyon Legacy 45 (2002): 11-14; Ira S. Freeman, A History of Montezuma County Colorado (Boulder: Johnson Publishing Company, 1958), 55-62. For a colorful description of the notoriety and violence associated with the LC Cattle Company, see the Palmer article.

24 “Historical Information: La Sal National Forest, 1940,” manuscript, La Sal-Manti National Forest Service, Price, UT, 54-55; Vallentine, Lonesome Trails, 34; Perkins, Saga of San Juan,90; McCabe, Cowboys, Indians, 113-16.

25 Palmer, “The LC Cattle Company,”11-15,Freeman, A History of Montezuma County Colorado (Boulder: Johnson Publishing Co., 1958), 55-62; Richard H. Dalrymple interview, June 11, 2011; Daily Journal (Telluride), April 13, 1896; Molly R. Walrip, Montezuma’s Trails of Time (Cortez: Privately Published, 1993), 128.

William Brumley.

PHOTO COURTESY OF RICHARD H. DALRYMPLE

absentee owners, the Carlisle brothers were intimately involved in their company and lived in southern Utah. Harold Carlisle following the sale of their cattle in the early 1890s for a time stayed in the livestock business in Utah. Eventually, Harold Carlisle left Utah for good in 1911, selling out to Mormon interests.

While a photograph of Harold Carlisle has yet to be found, a contemporary of Harold described him as:

…a short, stocky built man of five foot five. He was a great walker with swinging hands and really moved. He had a reddish, ruddy complexion (sic) which was from exposure to the sun. His hair was shoulder length, light brown and straight. He had a low forehead with a full head of hair…. His thin, smooth face was clean shaven with a long chin. He had deep blue eyes which looked at a person with a searching expression. He had a very pleasant smile. He was a man of few words due to being a ramrod and wore cowboy clothing.26

The brothers also owned a thousand acres in Kansas and operated a large spread in Gallegos Canyon in New Mexico. But it was in San Juan County where their main livestock operation of twenty- to twenty-five thousand head was located with a smaller cattle operation of only three to four thousand in New Mexico. Beginning in 1883, the Carlisles bought up several local herds and had about seven thousand head. The following year they had at least ten thousand head of livestock.27

From their ranch headquarters at Carlisle, north of Monticello, the Carlisles in their heyday ran an enormous enterprise with at least eightyfive riders.28 The size of the Carlisle herds in the mid-1880s can be fairly well estimated, based on a report that fifty-three hundred calves were branded in 1885, indicating an approximate total of twenty-one thousand cattle.29 After selling most of his cattle, Harold Carlisle remained in the livestock business expanding to raising sheep. By about 1898, he had some six thousand head of sheep, and from 1893 to 1898 he used his ranch at Carlisle in partnership with his son-in-law W.E. (Latigo) Gordon, the infamous foreman of the Carlisle Cattle Company and known for his wildness, abundance of bullet wounds, drunken escapades and brushes with the law, to raise hay for young cows that were then shipped to Kansas. Harold Carlisle meanwhile opened a gents furnishing store in Kansas City.30

The Carlisle Cattle Company, like the LC Cattle Company, ceased cattle

26 Muhlestein and Muhlestein, Monticello Journal, 27-28.

27 Salt Lake Herald, October 30, 1888; Frank McNitt, The Indian Traders (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), 296-311, Don D., Walker, “The Carlisles’ Cattle Barons of the Upper Basin,” 271; Nathan W. Adamson, Jr., Francis Asbuiry Hammond: Pioneer and Missionary (Salt Lake City: privately published, 1993), 92; Silvey, “Folklore Subjects,” 13.

28 Grand Valley Times, December 10, 1896.

29 Silvey,“History and Settlement,” 35; Petersen, et. al., “Cattle Ranching in Utah,” 47.

30 Silvey, “History and Settlement,”27-53; Muhlestein and Muhlestein, Monticello Journal, 5-40; John Riis, Ranger Trails (Richmond,VA: The Dietz Press, 1937), 83-84; Times Pub. Co. v Carlisle (May 8, 1899) 94 Federal Reporter 762-65 (8th Cir. 1899), in http://openjurist.org (accessed 3/7/11); MancosTimes, August 3, 1894.

operations in southeastern Utah in 1893. While Frank Silvey, an early settler and record keeper in southeastern Utah, remembers that the Carlisles sold their cattle over a period of four years beginning in 1891 or 1892, they abandoned their New Mexico ranch and headquarters in 1893, shipping 3,300 head of cattle to Kansas in late November of 1893.31 In 1894, the Mancos Times reported that “Harold Carlisle has sold the remnant of the once immense Carlisle herd of cattle….to Jud. Pierce of Disappointment.” 32 In an 1898 Federal Court of Appeals decision in a libel case involving Harold Carlisle, the court records confirmed 1893 when the Kansas and New Mexico Land and Cattle Company sold its livestock.33

What is salient in the above descriptions of the big three cattle companies is the decline in the immense numbers of cattle owned by these outfits in southeast Utah in the early to middle 1890s. Yet, the three companies did not uniformly decline. The Pittsburgh Cattle Company changed hands, added sheep and became very successful. The Carlisle Cattle Company changed emphasis, first to fattening young cows, then successfully raising sheep. The LC Cattle Company retreated to its headquarters in Colorado where it continued to raise cattle there, albeit on a much reduced scale.

Similar changes occurred during this period for other smaller companies. The Mormon Bluff Pool Cattle Company disbanded in 1898, selling its herds to various small owners. The Bluff Pool would have failed much earlier if it had not been for J.A. Scorup’s tenacity and skill. The Elk Mountain Cattle Company, which moved into the area south and west of the Elk Ridge in late 1887, tried to compete with the Bluff Pool but

31 Silvey, “History and Settlement,” 27-53; McNitt, The Indian Trader, 296-311; Adamson, Francis Asbuiry Hammond, 92; Santa FeDaily Mexican, November 8, 1893.

32 Mancos Times, August 3, 1894.

33 United States Circuit Court of Appeals, 94, p. 693.

Cattle moving along a Utah mountain trail.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

failed completely, and sold out to the Bluff Pool five years later.34 But what were the causes of the large cattle company departures? Unfortunately, just at the opening of the range in southeast Utah, the western cattle industry underwent a dramatic bubble of speculation and increase. Following the depression of the early 1870s and a febrile economic climate, a huge section of the western range had become available. Factors that contributed to this were the expansion of railroads (the railroad reached Durango, Colorado, in 1881) and the removal of the Indian threat to vast tracts of land in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah. Texas was unable to supply the burgeoning demand for cattle, driving up meat prices across the United States. The availability of apparently unrestricted free grasslands in these states seemed to augur unlimited profits for cattle companies. By 1883, cattle companies from Texas to Montana were described as reeling in 25 to 40 percent profits per annum. The price of beef sold in the Chicago Stock Yards correspondingly increased, enhancing the boom.35 During the decade following the 1870s depression, the states of New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana experienced a five-fold increase in cattle from five hundred thousand.36 With glowing reports of profits in newspapers and books, British and Scottish investors, as well as those from the eastern United States, jumped into the cattle business. Historian Dale described it as, The desire to engage in ranching became almost a craze. Prominent lawyers, bankers and other business men throughout the East began the formation of cattle companies in order to take advantage of the wonderful opportunities pointed out to them…. Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington, together with many lesser cities, all had a number of prominent men who invested money in ranching enterprises.37

But by 1884 the peak of this western cattle boom had occurred. A recessionfrom 1884 to 1886 caused a dip in prices and less meat was consumed as wages declined. British importation of cattle also dropped in these years, as fears rose over importing diseased cattle. Texas cattlemen, unable to sell their cattle in England because of a pleuro-pneumonia outbreak, began to dump more on the United States market. This was coupled with a severe winter in 1884-85 on the southern Great Plains that caused the release of more cattle onto the market as cattle companies folded. The removal of two hundred thousand cattle from the Arapahoe-Cheyenne reservations into Colorado and the Great Plains by President Cleveland’s proclamation in late 1885 exacerbated this glut of livestock and decline in prices.38 As one

34 Vallentine, Lonesome Trails, 24-28; Historical Information, 54-55.

35 E. S. Osgood, The Day of the Cattleman (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1929), 7295.

36 Marion Clawson, The Western Range Livestock Industry (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950), 383.

37 Dale, The Range Cattle Industry,”81

38 Dale, The Range Cattle Industry, 62-101; Frink, When Grass Was King, 26-93; Goff and McCaffree, Century in the Saddle, 121-22; W. Turrentine Jackson, “British Interests in the Range Cattle Industry,” in When Grass was King, 172-260.

writer commented at the time: “But profit and loss can no longer control it. The cattle are there; they are increasing by thousands daily; the pasture they have taken possession of is no longer able to carry them all, and for selfpreservation the overgrown herds must be depleted.” Or as summed up by another more recent commentator, “Even if it proved desirable, enterprising ranchers could not create more land or produce more grass.”39

The most dramatic precipitating event that drove down the price of cattle was the severe blizzards of 1886-87 decimating herds throughout the Great Plains, Wyoming, Montana, and Colorado. According to one observer “… it was possible to walk from Greeley to Julesburg [Colorado] on the north bank of the Platte and never set foot on the ground, simply by stepping from one animal carcass to another.”40 Montana and Wyoming suffered a 30 to 40 percent decline in the number of cattle in 1887, which resulted in the failure of many cattle companies. Consequently, Texas livestock men were unable to sell their excess cattle to ranches in the northern states, resulting in a significant drop in the price of cattle in other markets. A typical comment on one sale of cattle in Colorado in 1893 was: “Like all the cattle on sale last week Mr. Jewell’s shipment brought just about enough to make it questionable whether it would not have paid better to have skinned the animals and shipped the hides.”41

39 Jackson, “British Interests,” 234.

40 Goff and McCaffree, Century in the Saddle, 121-22.

41 Ora Brooks Peake, The Colorado Range Cattle Industry (Glendale: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1937), 277.

Cattle at a watering hole.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Because beef price declines have led directly to the cattle reductions across the United States, the number of cattle in southeast Utah would have declined after 1890 based solely on the decline of prices, irrespective of all other factors. The economic impact on the big three cattle companies in southeastern Utah was noted in the case of the Pittsburgh Cattle Company in which it gave up “because of extremely low prices received for cattle.”42

In addition to these events that faced western livestock men, was the implacable economic decline of the Panic of 1893 which depressed cattle prices further, closed businesses across the country, and resulted in 20 percent unemployment. However, the timing of this severe business downturn occurred after both the LC and Carlisle Cattle Companies had sold most of their cattle. Similarly, the 1890 depression in Great Britain apparently affected neither the LC nor the Pittsburgh Cattle Company.

Other causes have been suggested for the reduction in cattle numbers by large cattle companies in San Juan County. These include an increase in the number of sheep competing for open ranges, San Juan County tax rates, Indian problems, and cattle rustling. However, sheep competition and tax rates had little impact. It has been reported that only eighteen to twentyfive thousand sheep were in southeast Utah in the early 1890s.43 Since the range can sustain about five sheep for every cow, these numbers would have had little effect on the sixty-five thousand or so cattle being run by the three large cattle companies. The role of taxes also appears minimal, since cattle were generally only assessed at one quarter the number being grazed in the county. Scorup recalled that at the time the big stock companies didn’t pay any taxes.44 Indian problems and cattle rustling were endemic to the cattle business in San Juan County, but there is no historical evidence to suggest these problems drove the big cattle companies out of San Juan County in the early 1890s. The cattle companies probably viewed them as irritants that must be endured.

It has also been suggested that San Juan County Mormons were successful both in controlling land use and in obtaining water rights thereby restricting the Carlisle Cattle Company access to range lands and much needed water. Several facts, however, make this a less than compelling argument for the Carlisle Company to withdraw from the county. The major fight between the Mormons of Monticello and the Carlisle Cattle Company over water rights to North Fork of the North Montezuma Creek commenced in 1888, and was later settled in the courts. North Fork was an important source of culinary and irrigation water for the community of Monticello as well as for the Carlisle Cattle Company. The cattle company retained water rights to the North Brook until 1897, long after the cattle were sold.45 During the1890s, when the water remained under the control of the

42 Cunningham, Our Family History, 68.

43 “Historical Information,” 61-64, 125-28.

44 Ibid., 61-64, 125-28.

Carlisle Cattle Company, Monticello residents continually sought some type of agreement as they complained constantly and bitterly about their horrible water situation: “The water got so low that they could hardly get a drink. The little that did come was almost green;” and “In the late summer the creek water became so foul and green that all household water had to be hauled from Soldier Spring in kegs and barrels.”46 Water rights and water use were not issues between the Pittsburgh Cattle Company and the Mormon community as Pittsburgh’s cattle range did not overlap that of the Mormons. In addition, the Mormon controlled Bluff Pool owned limited numbers of cattle that were grazed on Elk Ridge, an area not part of the Carlisle Cattle Company’s grazing grounds. This difference in grazing grounds and the low numbers of cattle owned by the Bluff Pool would not have caused the Carlisle Cattle Company to sell its thirty-thousand head of cattle. There is no historical evidence that the Carlisle outfit and the Mormon use of land were factors which may have caused the cattle company to leave the county. Further, a large number of settlers did not take up significant areas of the land until the 1910s.47

Two other causes for the big cattle companies to withdraw from southeastern Utah are the environmental factors of drought and overgrazing. Several writers have indicated that the beginning of the drought that was experienced in southeastern Utah in the last quarter of the nineteenth century ranged from 1886 to 1893. In contrast, according to a meteorological study of drought in the American Southwest, the eleven years from 1893 to 1904 were defined as severe drought years.48 Additional studies confirm that several years immediately prior to those eleven years southeastern Utah received normal precipitation levels and that the 1893 to 1904 drought was followed by very wet years up to the early 1930s.49 In support

45 Muhlestein and Muhlestein, Monticello Journal, 63.

46 Ibid., 16, 27; and Perkins, Saga of San Juan, 100.

47 “Historical Information,” 61-64, 125-28.

48 H. E. Thomas, “The Meteorologic Phenomenon of Drought in the Southwest,” U. S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 372- A (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1964), A1-A43. This study defines drought as a “meteorological phenomenon” that “occurs during a period when precipitation is less than the long-term average.”

49 Ibid., Charles W. Stockton and Gordon C. Jacoby Jr, “Long-Term Surface-Water Supply and Stream flow Trends in the Upper Colorado River Basin Based on Tree-Ring Analyses,” Lake Powell Research Project Bulletin No. 18 (1976): 33; J. S. Gatewood, et. al., “General Effects of Drought on Water Resources of the Southwest, 1942-1956,” U. S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 372-B (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1964), B1-B55.

John Brumley.

PHOTO COURTESY OF RICHARD H. DALRYMPLE

of these studies Scorup indicated that 1891 and 1892 were very good for the cattle industry but the next seven years were bad.50 Rains and snows were reported for the winter of 1888/1889 and the year of 1889 in Monticello and nearby Bluff. Also, a study of inscription writing in Canyonlands National Park in relation to winter grazing of cattle has concluded that the winters of 1886-87, 1888-89, and 1891-92 had significant snows in that region.51

Yet, the timing of the 1893 to 1904 drought does not coincide with the movement of cattle out of the region by either the Carlisle or LC Cattle Company, which began about 1891 and was complete by 1893. Only the Pittsburgh Cattle Company, which sold out later, would have been affected by drought.

In contrast to drought, the depletion of the range by overgrazing contributed to the reduction of cattle on the San Juan County range. Later studies of range lands in the 1930s suggest that overgrazing of the salt-desert shrub lands of southeast Utah led to “vast areas of the palatable and nutritious winterfat …. [being] replaced by shadscale and little rabbitbrush.” Shadscale and rabbitbrush were considered worthless. Heavily grazed lands had three- to six-fold more of the worthless species than remnants of the virgin range. Southeast Utah grazing range on average was considered greater than 75 percent depleted for forage by the 1930s compared to 20 to 50 percent in the Great Plains as well as much of Wyoming and Colorado. 52 Seventy percent depletion of the range corresponds to more than a three-fold increase in acreage to support a similar number of grazing animals as compared to the virgin grasslands. The extreme depletion of the southeast Utah range described in the 1936 Western Range Letter was observed at a time immediately following thirty years of what were the highest levels of precipitation that southeast Utah received since the early 1600s.53 Therefore, degradation of the rangeland could not be attributed to drought. Extensive overgrazing of these lands would have resulted in at least a three-fold reduction in the number of grazing animals following depletion of the range in the 1880s. But how much of this overgrazing occurred prior to the early 1890s? The range land of southeast Utah was initially impressive when the first settlers and cattlemen arrived. For example, at Dodge Point just south of Monticello, it was stated that the grass grew “high enough to hide a saddle horse if his head was down feeding.”54 At Elk Mountain, Kumen Jones, the

50 “Historical Information,” 61-64, 125-28.

51 Clyde L. Denis, “The Origins of Chesler Park: Determining Late 19th Century Snowfall Records and Occupations of Inscription Writers in Canyonlands N. P.,” Canyon Legacy, 69 (2010): 2-9.

52 The Western range: letter from the Secretary of Agriculture transmitting in response to Senate resolution No. 289: A Report on the Western Range, a great but neglected national resource (Washington, D. C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1936), 56; Clawson, The Western Range Livestock Industry, 56.

53 Stockton and Jacoby Jr., “Long-Term Surface-water Supply, “33; J. S. Gatewood, et. al., “General Effects of Drought,” B1-B55.

54 Muhlestein, “Rise and Fall,”10.

local school superintendent and road supervisor, reported, “There was lots of feed on the mountain in those days [mid-1880s]. The top of the ridge was all grass. There was no sagebrush.” Silvey concurs that when he first came in the mid-1880s to La Sal “the country was a wave of grass.” Early settler A.N. Ray remembered at Coyote (later renamed La Sal), “The cattle we brought with us from …. [Wayne County] were very thin when we got to La Sal, by the first of March they were fat…. The grass in many places in the spring looked like a meadow.” 55 Years later, J.W. Humphrey commented about the range in 1913 when he was the La Sal Forest Supervisor, “For the South Division [i.e., Monticello Forest reserve] there was a little good country [near Indian Creek] to the north and west of Monticello” and “aside from that I do not remember any range on the south division where you could turn out a horse to graze other than in the ranger station pasture or enclosures maintained by the cattlemen for their horses.” In regard to the North Division, Humphrey indicated it “was all

55 “Historical Information,” 61, 66, 128.

Cattle being loaded into railroad boxcars.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

overgrazed” with “ranges” that “did not appear to have any forage on them other than the browse that was closely cropped.” Later in the same report it was summarized that pioneer “Stockmen … found here some of the best grazing they had ever seen. The sad part of it is that the ranges were seriously over-stocked from the very first that even as early as 1900….the ranges had deteriorated and erosion was becoming common.” 56 Silvey remembered that before 1894 the ranges were already overstocked. 57 Willard Butts, county sheriff, said in 1894 that the range was “not sufficient for the stock of the [Monticello] settlers.”58 Even by 1888, it was reported that “the San Juan River country….is getting so many cattle that serious fears are expressed of short picking for them.”59 As summarized in 1927, “Between 1885 and 1890 all the Utah ranges were fully occupied.”60

Within a decade following the settlement of Great Salt Lake City and for the next two decades the Mormon dominated territorial legislature passed laws restricting the use of land as well as controlling livestock grazing. This body of land laws restricting livestock grazing was repealed with the passage of the Animals-at-Large Act of 1874. For the next dozen or more years, Utah territorial governors complained to federal officials about the lack of control of public grazing lands. In 1890 Utah Territorial Governor Arthur L. Thomas, for example, called the grazing conditions in the territory “unsatisfactory” and said that “the result is that the man who to-day may find a place where he can feed and water his animals, may tomorrow find himself surrounded by other men with their animals, and in a short time the forage plants sufficient to maintain a limited number of animals are eaten out, or completely destroyed.”61 The results from this lack of control of open range in southeastern Utah and elsewhere in the territory was overgrazed lands. The problem of overgrazing is that usually within ten to fifteen years the loss of plant cover results in severe land erosion when the intense rains of summer hit the now barren land. In fact, devastating floods became common in southeast Utah by the 1890s.62 Local rancher Scorup recalled the rapidity by which overgrazing had led to erosion in Dark Canyon within ten short years after the outfit of Cooper and Martin first came into the area in 1894.63

The overstocking of the range is illustrated in the Elk Ridge area, the last virgin region to be grazed in southeast Utah. The Elk Mountain Cattle

56 “Historical Information,” 25, 125

57 Silvey, “History and Settlement,” 7.

58 Muhlestein, “Rise and Fall,” 44.

59 Salt Lake Tribune, April 25, 1888.

60 Quoted in Don D. Walker, “The Cattle Industry of Utah, 1850-1900: An Historical Profile,” Utah Historical Quarterly 32 (Summer 1964): 190.

61 Quoted in Levi S. Petersen, “The Development of Utah Livestock Law, 1848-1896,” Utah Historical Quarterly 32 (Summer 1964): 202.

62 Western Range Letter, 308, 311; Silvey, “History and Settlement,” 54.

63 “Historical Information,” 54.

Company entered the area in 1887 even though the Bluff Pool had established cow custom grazing rights to Elk Ridge a year earlier. Yet in 1893, after the Elk Mountain Cattle Company failed to make a go of it, another Texas outfit moved thirteen hundred more cattle into the area. Typical of the state of grazing conditions was that of Bluff Mormon Platte D. Lyman who described his range as “the abomination of desolation…of moving cattle…a time of passing through hades, demanding heavy [toll] of starving live stock [sic] and famishing worn out humanity.”64

This pattern of overgrazing was endemic to the whole west. Referring to the overgrazing conditions in Texas but equally appropriate for the grazing conditions of southeastern Utah was the report that “no small part of the cattlemen’s trouble was due to the reckless policy of overstocking the range.”65 Put yet another way, “A barren pasture will not produce beef any more than the ancient Hebrew could produce bricks without straw. The cattle men became their own most dangerous enemy by their practice of over stocking.”66

If the three large cattle companies left because of overgrazing and low prices, why did they not return to San Juan County when cattle prices later climbed to mid-1880s levels? Drought ended in 1904, followed by nearly

64 C. S. M. Jones, The Hole-in-the-Rock Foundation Preserving the Ancestry and Sharing the Legacy (2008) at http://www.hirf.org/history-bio-Lyman-D.asp (accessed May 2011).

65 Western Range Letter, 161.

66 Clara M. Love, “History of the Cattle Industry in the Southwest,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 20 (1916): 13.

thirty years of above average rains. The answer is that the once abundant free grasslands of southeast Utah were no longer there, and what remained would never again sustain the unreasonable stratospheric levels of cattle of the 1880s. The Forest Service, beginning in the early 1900s, made concerted efforts to restrict cattle and sheep permits so that the lands of the La Sal Mountains and Abajos would heal. Over time the livestock industry improved its methods, switching from the open range to raising hay for winter needs and by diversifying into sheep. Sheep provided two cash products, wool and meat, that could sustain the business in uncertain economic times.

The departure of the three large cattle companies from southeast Utah cannot therefore be construed as some type of failure particular to them. Failure would be if they had wanted to stay in southeast Utah forever, which apparently they did not. In later years both Cunningham and Carpenter expressed fondness for southeast Utah. However, Cunningham when he raised livestock in Utah established his primary residence in Montrose, Colorado, where he believed he could obtain better schooling for his children.67 Harold Carlisle kept his residence in Kansas City and the Brumleys stayed in the Dolores area. As pointed out by Hardy Redd, the

67 Grand Valley Times, October 9, 1930; Cunningham, “Our Family History,” 69.

A cattle ranch located between Bluff and Mexican Hat in San Juan County.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

fact that the twentieth century cattle companies of southeast Utah were Mormon had nothing to do with failure of companies owned by Carlisle or Cunningham and Carpenter, but that the Mormons stayed, and the others did not.68

Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation

The Utah Historical Quarterly (ISSN 0042-143X) is published quarterly by the Utah State Historical Society, 300 Rio Grande, Salt Lake City, Utah 84101-1182. The managing editor is Allan Kent Powell with offices at the same address as the publisher. The magazine is owned by the Utah State Historical Society, and no individual or company owns or holds any bonds, mortgages, or other securities of the Society or its magazine.

The following figures are the average number of copies of each issue during the preceding twelve months: 2,743 copies printed; 8 dealer and counter sales, 2,345 mail subscriptions; 0 other classes mailed; 2,353 total paid circulation; 78 free distribution (including samples) by mail, carrier, or other means; 2,431 total distribution; 312 inventory for office use, leftover, unaccounted, spoiled after printing; total, 2,743.

The following figures are the actual number of copies of the single issue published nearest to filing date: 2,576 copies printed; 3 dealer and counter sales; 2,183 mail subscriptions; 0 other classes mailed; 2,186 total paid circulation; 69 free distribution (including samples) by mail, carrier, or other means; total distribution; 2,255 inventory for office use, leftover, unaccounted, spoiled after printing; 321 total 2,576.

68 Hardy Redd, “Comments on San Juan: A Hundred Years of Cattle, Sheep, and Dry Farms,” in Allan Kent Powell, ed. San Juan County: People, Resources and History (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1983), 208.

BOOK REVIEWS

Utes.

By Robert S. McPherson. (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2011.

xii + 432 pp. Paper, $29.95.)

OVER THE LAST THREE DECADES, Robert S. McPherson has made the peoples and landscapes of Utah’s San Juan County and adjacent areas his special intellectual province, taking possession of the region through seven books and numerous articles. As If the Land Owned Us , written at the invitation of the White Mesa Ute Council, reflects the author’s deep immersion in his subject matter. This is a big book about a small group of people. Historically, the White Mesa or Allen Canyon Utes have been associated with the Weenuche band of Southern Utes. However, unlike the main body of Weenuche now headquartered at the Ute Mountain Reservation in Colorado, the White Mesa Utes for many years resisted assignment to a reservation, choosing instead to follow their traditional nomadic lifestyle amid the mountains and canyons of southeastern Utah. This independence, combined with the intermingling of Utes with local Paiutes and Navajos, led to the development of a distinct community. McPherson provides a comprehensive and insightful account of the persistence of this small but hardy band over a century and a half of adversity, resistance, and eventual accommodation.

The first three chapters, dealing with Ute origin myths, relation to the land, and daily life in a traditional hunting-gathering existence, are primarily ethnographic in character. Much of the information is drawn from the work of other scholars on Ute cultural practices, but McPherson effectively connects these broader traditions to the White Mesa people through insights derived from numerous interviews with local elders.

Chapters Four and Five sketch the history of the Southern Utes from the first contact with the Spanish in the seventeenth century to the beginning of permanent white occupation of Southern Ute lands in the 1870s. The acquisition of horses, development of trade with the Spanish in the Rio Grande Valley, and shifting alliances with neighboring peoples including the Navajo, Comanche, and Apache led to a transformation from small, scattered groups to larger social units culminating in the formation of the main Southern Ute bands, the Capote, Muache, and Weenuche. There is little information from early in this transformative period to distinguish the forebears of the White Mesa Utes from the larger body of Ute people, but McPherson notes that Escalante in 1776 wrote of a distinct population east of the Colorado River that he termed “Yutas Payuchis,” distinguishing them from the Southern Paiutes he had earlier encountered in southwestern Utah, whom he labeled as “Yutas Cabardes,” or “Timid Utes” (75).

As if the Land Owned Us: An Ethnohistory of the White Mesa

Beginning in the mid-1850s, the U. S. Government employed Southern Utes to assist in rounding up the Navajos and relocating them to Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Some Navajos evaded relocation by retreating to the canyons around Navajo Mountain and Elk Ridge, where they spent several years of hiding in contact with local Utes and Paiutes. McPherson cites Navajo oral histories suggesting “that there were fairly peaceful relations between some Utes and Navajos living in southeastern Utah, and that it was the Utes living farther east who actually hunted for those in hiding”(99). Another component in the formation of the White Mesa Utes, according to McPherson, was the band known as the Sheberetch, or Elk Mountain Utes, mobile horsemen who ranged widely from their home base in the vicinity of the La Sal Mountains. The Sheberetch reportedly made up a large portion of Wakara’s band of raiders in the 1840s and 1850s. They repelled the first attempt by Mormons to establish a settlement in southeastern Utah in 1855, the Elk Mountain Mission, and many of their warriors joined Black Hawk a decade later in his campaign against the Mormon settlements in central and southern Utah. The Sheberetch lost their identity as a distinct band following a decimating disease in the early 1870s. Part of the remnant subsequently joined the Northern Utes on the Uintah Reservation. McPherson suggests that others joined with the mingled local Weenuche Utes, Paiutes, and Navajos to become the ancestors of today’s White Mesa Utes: “Their independence, band composition, knowledge of the terrain, and effectiveness . . . established a pattern for the future. Anxious to assert their independence, this band of people, as they coalesced into today’s White Mesa Utes, were able to avoid moving to a reservation for another fifty-five years” (102).

The most valuable part of McPherson’s book is the middle chapters that provide a detailed account of the White Mesa people from the first incursions of white ranchers and settlers in the 1870s until the final armed conflict in the so-called “Posey War” in 1923. The public image of the White Mesa Utes as hostile to white intrusion began to take form with an attack on members of the Hayden Survey in Dry Valley, south of the La Sal Mountains, in August 1875.Even though the attackers had identified themselves to the surveyors as Yampa Utes from the White River Agency, blame fell on the local Utes. The influential Uncompahgre chief Ouray, who seems to have borne a prejudice against the Southern Utes in general, had warned the surveyors that “the Indians in the Sierra LaSal Mountains . . . were likely to steal stock if they get a good chance”(116). In the aftermath of the attack, Colorado newspapers further characterized “the Ute/ Paiute/Navajo faction living in southeastern Utah . . . as a group of ‘outlaws,’ ‘renegades,’ and a ‘robber band,’ epithets used for the next fifty years” (124).

Even if the White Mesa people were not involved in the attack on the

surveyors, they clearly took a leading role in conflicts with the whites in the following years. In 1879, two prospectors were killed in Monument Valley. In 1881, the Utes defeated a large posse of Colorado cowboys at Pinhook Draw in the La Sal Mountains. Three years later, they repelled a force of United States cavalry in White Canyon. The Utes prevailed in these encounters chiefly because of their superior knowledge of the country. In addition, they were well armed and had capable leaders including Mancos Jim and Narraguinip. But if the Utes were winning the battles, they were losing the war. In 1880, the Mormons established a settlement at Bluff, a favorite wintering-ground for the Utes. In subsequent years, Mormon settlers would expand to Monticello and Grayson (Blanding), which were also sites important to the Utes. During the 1880s, several large livestock operations moved into San Juan County, taking possession of the range that had supported the Utes’ small flocks of sheep and goats as well as the deer that served as a staple of the Ute economy.

McPherson treats all of these events in great detail, including maps and photographs that enable the reader to follow the course of the battles. He also provides a good account of the various proposals put forward during the early 1890s, mostly by Colorado interests, to remove the white settlers and ranchers and convert San Juan County into a reservation for all of the Southern Utes. McPherson gives an especially close analysis of the tension between the Utes and the white residents of San Juan County in the early decades of the twentieth century, which broke out in violent conflicts in 1914-15 and 1923. The “Posey War” in the latter year, usually referred to as the last Ute or Paiute uprising, is reinterpreted by McPherson as “the Last White Uprising”(226). In its aftermath, the Utes were settled, more or less, on individual allotments in the Allen Canyon area, and a long process began to have their children educated in white schools.

The last third of the book is devoted to a sympathetic account of the Utes’ life at Allen Canyon and eventual relocation to a new community at White Mesa where they would achieve their own balance between integration into the larger society and preservation of traditional values, a process that McPherson labels as “adoption, adaptation, and abandonment” (323). Taken all-in-all, As if the Land Owned Us is a worthwhile addition to the library of Utah history.

EDWARD A. GEARY Huntington

Go East Young Man: Imagining the American West as the Orient By

Richard V.

Francaviglia. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2011. x + 350 pp. Cloth, $36.95.)

THE FRONTISPIECE to Go East Young Man quotes N. Scott Momaday: “The landscape of the West has to be seen to be believed. And, perhaps conversely, it has to be believed in order to be seen.” Richard V. Francaviglia showcases in this fascinating book the close and historically important relationship between landscape and cultural belief/meaning. The American West has both been blessed and burdened by an overload of discourses and meanings. But while some scholars have noted instances of Orientalist discourses operative at particular times and places within the West, Francaviglia shows just how widespread and important they have been.

Francaviglia’s books tend to be a bit eclectic. He keeps one foot in history and one in geography. He does not seem overly bound to fashionable topics or modes of analysis. The result is a wonderful passion for his topics. He mixes and matches a variety of themes, theoretical stances/critiques, and vantage points in order to best transfer his excitement to the reader.

As engaging and optimistic as Francaviglia’s own personality, Go East Young Man begins with a personal story from not many years ago of how Francaviglia, while touring Israel’s Jordan River Valley, felt an overwhelming sense of familiarity because of his experiences in California’s Imperial Valley. The remainder of the book follows with a wide variety stories of how (mostly) Anglo-Americans and Europeans from the early nineteenth century onward likewise found compelling similarities between the Orient and the American West. Most importantly, they used understandings of the Orient to make sense of the new landscapes and peoples they encountered in the West.

The introduction highlights academic discussions of Orientalist discourses, where Edward Said’s influence remains powerful. But unlike Said and many of his critics, Francaviglia does not regard Orientalist discourses primarily as moral problems. Instead, he argues that these discourses, when used to understand the American West, express positive wonder as often as they denigrate. Seven chapters (Part I) explore these tendencies prior to 1920. Americans imagined the Great Plains as the Sahara, for example, while a period of fascination with Egyptian civilization saw Americans finding pyramids, sand dunes, and even sphinxes and camels in the West’s landscape. Many observers viewed Native Americans as Moors, Americans thought California “a land that imported and embraced the best of the exotic,” and people understood California’s and the Pacific Northwest’s potential via their links to the Far East (194).

Part II (the final three chapters) shows how these imaginations, both of Far and Middle Easts continued to inform understandings of the West in

the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as how representations of the American West (the frontier West, for example) find their way into explanations of twenty-first century Asia (China’s Wild West economy, for instance).

Most significant for Utah is a chapter from Part I arguing that representations of the Orient (again both positive and negative) helped to both make and understand the state. Here Francaviglia highlights much well-known material—for example, the Promised Land, Great Salt Lake as the Dead Sea, the Jordan River, Mormon leaders as desert patriarchs, Native Americans as Israelites, Corinne as Sodom and Gomorrah, Saltair’s architecture—as well as a few more obscure representations—Point of the Mountain as the Tower of Babel. But here, as elsewhere, the book’s signal contribution (though well researched) is less than its original findings its demonstration of the flexibility, malleability, ubiquity, and power of these Orientalist imaginations in helping Americans understand the West and its landscapes.

YORGASON

The Man Who Never Died: The Life, Times and Legacy of Joe Hill, American Labor Icon. By William M. Adler. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011. 435 pp. Cloth, $30.00.)

FOR NEARLY A CENTURY,scholars have been intrigued by the case of Joe Hill. The basic facts are well known. Hill turned up with a bullet wound the same January 1914 night that Salt Lake City grocer, John G. Morrison, and his seventeen year old son, Arling, were murdered. After a controversial trial, Hill was executed for the killing. Some think he was not guilty, but framed and murdered by Utah authorities because of his radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) unionism. Others believe Hill received the appropriate punishment for the crime—one which marked the Morrison family forever. Many simply know him as a romantic, iconic figure, who urged those enraged by his death not to mourn, but organize. Over the years, historians, novelists, and playwrights have sought to separate the mythical Hill from the real person. That may be impossible, but William Adler’s excellent study, building on past scholarship, provides the most important re-examination in a generation.

Not content to simply revisit what was previously known, Adler has tracked down important new information, both in archives and private hands, addressing crucial questions. Why did police identify a likely suspect, who, as it turns out, had a long criminal record, then drop him quickly

ETHAN

Kyungpook National University Daegu, Korea

once Hill was arrested? Why wouldn’t Hill provide authorities with an alibi to explain his actions that fateful evening? And finally, in Adler’s words, “the essential question of Hill’s life: why he chose to die rather than try to save himself” (23).

Initially, based on two key points, police believed they were dealing with a revenge killing not a botched robbery. First, Morrison’s son Merlin, who survived the incident, reported that the gunmen had said “We’ve got you now,” before opening fire. Second, there were prior attacks on Morrison, most recently in September 1913. Their prime suspect was Frank Z. Wilson, paroled from the Utah State Penitentiary in December 1912, after serving sixteen months for burglary. While they had no definite connection, Wilson had been in the vicinity of the Morrison store, and fit the description of Morrison’s attackers provided by several eyewitnesses; even been picked out of a police line up. Yet, detectives released him, convinced that he was not involved. In the past, the story has stopped there. Adler, however, discovered that Wilson, born Magnus Olson and known by a score of aliases, was a career criminal who had been in and out of jail in Utah, Nevada, and elsewhere for committing violent crimes, which often included threats of retribution. Indeed, after Hill was arrested, one policeman told the press that despite what he claimed, their prisoner wasn’t Hill but Wilson. This isn’t surprising considering their similarity in age, height, weight, hair and eye color, etc. Why didn’t the police look closer at Wilson? He was never interrogated about his whereabouts at the time of the September 1913 attack on Morrison, nor were his movements immediately prior to the killings seriously examined. Perhaps, Adler asserts, once they had arrested this radical IWW, authorities were “satisfied that Hill was a serviceable culprit” (86).

Hill always maintained that he had been shot in a dispute over a woman. Here again, Adler sheds important light on this claim, noting there were two people who could have given him an alibi: “the man who had shot him and the woman over whom he had been shot”(291). While neither stepped forward at the time, that changed thirty-five years later. During the trial, and after his death when she served as a pall bearer, Hilda Erickson had been close to Hill. Was she the woman involved? In June 1949, Erickson sent a lengthy letter to Aubrey Haan, a novelist writing about Hill, outlining what she knew, and providing an alibi. She told Haan that she had once been engaged to Hill’s friend Otto Applequist, had changed her mind, but denied to him being attracted to Hill. Erickson reported that Hill told her the night of the Morrison shooting that Applequist had “shot him in a fit of anger” (296). In a second letter, Erickson said that she had seen Hill at a play in Salt Lake City earlier that same evening. These letters raise as many questions as they answer. Why did she wait and not come forth at the trial? Did Hill wish to protect her? Was he so convinced in

the presumption of his innocence that he refused to involve Erickson unnecessarily? Adler admits he doesn’t have answers to these questions, but perhaps they shed light on something else—Hill’s decision to die rather than try to save his life.

Adler concludes that Hill was “innocent of murder,” and could have avoided execution by “revealing the circumstances of his shooting.” But, he writes, “like many Wobblies, Joe Hill was principled to the point of recklessness and no less stubborn than he was principled. Time and time again ... [d]espite persistent appeals from his lawyers and friends that he break his silence ... Hill kept mum.” Hill likely “came to believe, consciously or unconsciously, that he could better serve the union by dying.” In that sense, Hill’s death “imbued his life with meaning,” transforming him from just another “anonymous working stiff tramping around the West with a bindle on his shoulder and a red card in his pocket,” to someone whose “place in history was secure ” (23-24). Thus, metaphorically speaking, he never died.

Adler’s impressive book combines solid research with well-crafted prose, and he places this event into a broader context. Regardless of how one feels about Joe Hill or the IWW, The Man Who Never Died helps us better understand conflicting forces and factors in early twentieth century Utah, and the American West.

JOHN SILLITO Weber State University

Bonanzas & Borrascas: Gold Lust and Silver Sharks, 1848-1884, vol. 1; and Copper Kings and Stock Frenzies, 1885-1918, vol. 2. By Richard E. Lingenfelter. (Norman: Arthur H. Clark Company, 2012. 461 pp and 586 pp. Cloth, two-volume set $72.00, single volume $40.00.)

THIS HANDSOME TWO-VOLUME SET by historian and astrophysicist Richard Lingenfelter is an exposé of how western American mining properties were financed over the seventy-year period from the California Gold Rush to the First World War. To shed light on the otherwise shady process of how mines large, small, and non-existent were financed, Lingenfelter consulted varied resources such as financial records, stock reports, court cases, and sensational news stories. As he demonstrates, successful mining requires capitalization, but obtaining that capital often involved considerable fleecing of the public. Lingenfelter’s duo arrives on the heels of the financial meltdown of 2008, and it has much to say about how greed and corruption operated—and still operate—in the American economy. As those familiar with mining investment have long joked, when

promoters develop a mine, someone—usually the investor—gets the shaft. With good reason, it takes Lingenfelter more than a thousand pages to tell this often sordid story. The West is a huge area with a long history of financing both sound and dubious enterprises. The exploitation of mineral resources here required capital from not only the East, but also Europe. Although Lingenfelter covers the entire West, this review will focus on how the Territory and state of Utah are treated, and, by extension, how Mormons were involved in some of that activity.

Volume 1 begins with early Spanish and Mexican mining operations in New Mexico, and then quickly moves to the discovery of gold in California (1848). Utah is introduced in the later 1860s in the context of the transcontinental railroad that enabled full scale commercial metals mining to flourish, but little is said about U.S. military explorers here who were ever on the lookout for mineral wealth from the late 1840s into the 1850s, nor about the Mormons who began to actively develop strategic mineral resources for the building of Zion during that period. However, these seeming oversights are rectified when Col. Patrick Edward Connor emerges as the father of Utah mining in the 1860s. From here on, Utah is frequently featured, sometimes center stage. The financing of the Emma Mine at Alta and the burgeoning mines in the vicinity of Eureka are cited as prototypes for outside investment in Utah mining properties. By the 1870s, smelters began springing up in the Salt Lake Valley, and the City of the Saints developed a dual personality that is still evident today. Silver and gold were the metals that outsiders mined first, and this activity brought schools of “silver sharks” trolling for investors, a vivid metaphor that Lingenfelter often employs. Then, too, the mines at Frisco had boomed in the 1870s, and in another metaphor, an eager flock of new pigeons invested in that opportunity. As Lingenfelter astutely notes, most of this investment money never reached Utah, much less the mines there, and even less still ever came back to the investors in the form of profits. Rather, it wound up in the hands of the promoters—in other words “fed the sharks.” Volume one concludes in the mid-1880s, with a drop in metals prices, a nationwide financial depression underway, and the grueling winter of 1886-1887 about to grip much of the region.

Volume 2 documents the renewed activity of the later 1880s as Park City’s mines and thousands of others throughout the West were promoted. Lingenfelter here discusses the “silver barons” of Utah, including David Keith and Thomas Kearns, as well as Utah’s “Silver Queen” Susie Emery. In the Tintic mining district, Lingenfelter discusses in some detail the Mormon involvement with commercial mining, highlighting the roles of George Q. Cannon, John Beck, and Jesse Knight—the latter of whom, Lingenfelter irreverently if humorously notes, “had run out of revelations....” (vol. 2, pp. 111-12). In the 1890s, Mercur was noteworthy for

several reasons. Although a German miner had hoped to mine quicksilver here, precious metals were found and the pioneering use of the new cyanide process here ironically signaled the end of mercury as amalgam. Mercur, too, was a rare exception to the rule of mine financing and payback because tenderfeet here actually made (and kept) money. The year 1900 marked an economic watershed as inflation increased and speculation schemes flourished. Between 1904 and 1912, Lingenfelter estimates that the amount of money provided nationally by “armchair Argonauts” (about three billion dollars) surpassed the entire amount squandered on mining speculation up until that time! Incredibly, more than one hundred billion dollars—fully half the entire worth of the nation—had been offered in mining stocks. In other words, more opportunities were offered than could ever realistically materialize. Utah was in the thick of this mining scam mania. This period also marked the aggressive development of Utah’s porphyry ore bodies as huge open pit mines. This Lingenfelter calls the “copper crescendo,” and it also characterized much of the West, especially places such as Morenci and Bisbee, Arizona, Butte, Montana, and Ely, Nevada. But Utah’s Bingham Canyon was the original leader of these low-grade porphyry copper mines and ultimately developed into what proved to be the largest. The names of extremely powerful individuals such as Dan Guggenheim, Samuel Newhouse, and Daniel Jackling, and the names of incredibly powerful companies such as Utah Copper, Kennecott, and ASARCO became household words at this time. However, as Lingenfelter demonstrates, these properties were not really profitable until Europe went to war with itself in 1914–1918, at which time Bingham Canyon yielded what he calls “obscene wartime profits” (vol. 2, p. 425). Despite these profits, though, shareholders typically came out on the short end. Ultimately, thirtysix billion dollars in copper, and nine billion dollars in gold and silver, were produced from Bingham Canyon, keeping Utah on the map as a major metals producing state throughout much of the twentiethcentury.

Like most western history, this epic set is ultimately about politics, and it is noteworthy that Lingenfelter elects to conclude it with some lessons from the 1930s to the present. Here he again turns to “that old mining shark and beleaguered Republican president” Herbert Hoover, who once cold-heartedly opined that money lost by hapless investors was not really lost after all because it would be reinvested by others who had profited (vol. 2, p. 442). Noting that Hoover had left the nation in a depression, Lingenfelter here introduces visionary Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose Democratic administration rescues the nation’s economy through greater government involvement. Lingenfelter ends with the current (2012) ongoing financial crisis, citing Alan Greenspan, and calling for greater government oversight of the economy, concluding that “the marks and the sharks will always be with us and that where there’s a lot of money involved things are

seldom as they seem” (vol. 2, p. 444). Readers should recall that both political parties are no strangers to the crony capitalism that enables some mighty big sharks to chew right though the best of nets.

RICHARD V. FRANCAVIGLIA Salem, Oregon

Homesickness: An American History. By Susan J. Matt. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. xii + 343 pp. Cloth, $29.95.)

ITALIAN IMMIGRANT RAFFAELE

SCALZOcommented thusly on his new-found home in Carbon County, Utah: “if someone speaks badly of Italy I get mad, but if they speak badly of the United States or Carbon County, I get god-damned mad.” Such a statement helps to address the issue of “connectedness” between Mr. Scalzo’s native Calabria, Italy, and his adopted home in Helper, Carbon County. The element of “emotion” looms as most significant. Susan J. Matt’s, Homesickness: An American History delves convincingly into the history of the emotion of homesickness. While lacking specific examples drawn from Utah history, the work nevertheless can be most useful in providing a broad framework for understanding the Utah experience as alluded to in the Scalzo quote, and including the Mormon pioneers. Matt, Presidential Distinguished Professor of History at Weber State University, stated succinctly that “Americans have not always been able to leave home with ease. This book explains how they learned to do so . . .” (4).

The author’s main thesis centers upon her statement that “The history of homesickness recovers the story of how Americans learned to manage their feelings, but beyond that, it reveals how Americans learned habits of individualism that supported capitalist activity” (7). The author distinguishes between homesickness, the separation “from home by a gulf of geography”; and nostalgia, a separation by “a greater gulf – the gulf of time” (130). Immigrants and migrants can return “home” only to find that “home” no longer remains the romanticized original place of departure. This, in part, perhaps explains Scalzo’s view of place and time.

The way capitalism formed (and forms) our emotional patterns in a society in motion serves as another emphasis of the study. According to Matt, homesickness “is a problem not just because it seems to be a sign of immaturity, but perhaps more crucially because it threatens individual and social progress, for it carries with it the temptation to return home. If acted upon it can disrupt market relations and render individuals less interchangeable, less fungible. It interferes with profits and contradicts the idea

of fluidity that is at the base of the capitalist economy” (252). Perhaps Raffaele Scalzo ran counter to this notion. Nevertheless, Scalzo also discussed the “return,” which Mann insightfully described as “. . . the dream of returning home rich—a tangible payoff for the homesickness that so many had endured” (148).

This reviewer would have appreciated more on the American Indian and African American experiences, especially in the context of the American West. The author somewhat casually states that “Much of the discontent that Indians manifested on reservations grew out of simple homesickness” (111). Perhaps they had much more at stake. One point well made in discussing the role of emotions in the post-Civil War world of the African American experience, author Matt observed that “In reality, it was often whites who wanted to remain lodged in the ways of the past and blacks who wanted to move on, but discussions of emotions were more than idle explorations of social psychology—they were a way of defining and justifying power relations in the racially divided South” (110).

This careful analysis of an “emotion” provides a balanced approach in studying people in motion, either voluntary or involuntary. “What the history of homesickness, and the history of the emotions more generally, brings to the American narrative is a record of intention, motivation, and feeling” (9). This summation truly argues for the importance of oral history in the methodology of writing about the past. In this context, Homesickness: An American History is a must read for historians and those desiring to understand a basic “emotion” in the American past and present.

PHILIP F. NOTARIANNI Magna

Parley P. Pratt and the Making of Mormonism. Edited with contributions by Gregory K. Armstrong, Matthew J. Grow, and Dennis J. Siler. (Norman: Arthur H. Clark Company, 2011. 351 pp. Cloth, $45.00.)

PARLEY P. PRATT (1807-1857) ONE OF Mormonism’s original Quorum of the Twelve Apostles has been the subject of much recent attention including this volume of edited essays and the 2011 biography Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul of Mormonism by Terryl L. Givens and Matthew J. Grow. As an early Mormon missionary, Pratt was the earliest link to Sidney Rigdon in Mentor, Ohio. Pratt wrote poems and hymns, was an indefatigable proselyting missionary, spent nine months in jail in Richmond and Columbia, Missouri, before he escaped to Illinois, and explored much of the Utah Great Basin for future Mormon colonization. Pratt was the creator and first editor of the Latter-day Saints Millennial Star,

as well as The Prophet an eastern states Mormon newspaper. He authored The Voice of Warning (1837) a groundbreaking Mormon missionary tract. Pratt had twelve plural wives, and was murdered near Fort Smith, Arkansas, in the spring of 1857 by Hector McLean the estranged husband of his last wife, Eleanor McComb McLean.

Many of the eleven essays in this volume began as papers in an academic conference held in 2007 at Fort Smith, Arkansas. The editors of this volume suggest that “Pratt remains among the least understood of early Latter-day Saint leaders” and that Pratt “arguably influenced the direction of early Mormonism more than anyone besides Joseph Smith and Brigham Young” (14). Seven of the eleven essays focus on the life and contributions of Pratt, while the remaining four essays focus on his controversial death. In her essay, Jan Shipps places Pratt in historical context and notes the twenty (or more) biographical accounts of his life. In discussing early Mormonism and Pratt, Shipps notes, “…sects grow up to be churches while cults grow up to become new religious traditions” (35). R. Steven Pratt’s essay deals with the complex and involved family life of his great-great-grandfather. Pratt’s essay is a significant case study of early Mormon plural marriage including incidents examining conflicts over who held ultimate authority to authorize and perform plural marriages. David Whittaker’s essay is a close examination of Pratt and the early Mormon Print Culture in which Whittaker notes that Pratt may be called “the literary pathfinder of early Mormonism or the father of Mormon pamphleteering” (135).

In the middle essays of the volume, Alex Baugh examines Pratt’s Missouri imprisonment, David Grua looks at him in terms of martyrology and persecution, and Jordan Watkins focuses on the ideas of Pratt and his Key to the Science of Theology in which he states “Gods, angels and men are all of one species” (201). David Clark Knowlton explores Pratt’s missionary efforts in Latin America.

The last essays probe the death of Parley P. Pratt. Patrick Q. Mason scrutinizes ante- bellum culture in the United States and places the murder in context with both honor and extralegal violence. Richard Turley asserts that the death of Pratt played little or no role in bringing about the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Robert J. Grow relates recent family unsuccessful efforts to remove Pratt’s remains from Arkansas after locating the gravesite only to find that the body had disintegrated. Matthew Grow’s essay notes that to Mormons Parley P. Pratt was a martyr to the cause of truth, while to the nation at large the story of Pratt illustrated religious fanaticism, sexual deviance, polygamy, and justly delivered violence. This volume is well edited and the essays are both thoughtful and provocative.

RICHARD W. SADLER Weber State University

Forging a Fur Empire: Expeditions in the Snake River Country, 1809-1824.

By John Phillip Reid. (Norman: Arthur H. Clark Company, 2011. 229 pp. $29.95).

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAWprofessor John Phillip Reid is no stranger to writing about the fur trade of the Pacific Northwest. His Patterns of Vengeance (1999) chronicled cross-cultural homicide in the fur trade. Reid’s Contested Empire (2002) focused on Peter Skene Ogden and the Snake River Expeditions of the mid to late 1820s. Now, a decade since that publication, Reid offers the prequel to the Peter Skene Ogden expeditions. In this book, number 36 in Arthur H. Clark’s “Western Frontiersmen Series,” Reid focuses his lens on the attempts by the American Fur Company, the North West Company, and the Hudson’s Bay Company to forge a fur empire by constructing posts to encourage trade with the Indians and then sending out trapping brigades into the Northwest to harvest the furs themselves.

Reid, a legal historian, examines the different notions of justice shared by American and British fur traders in the Snake River country of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and British Columbia during the fifteen years between 1809 and 1824. He begins his narrative with the arrival of the Astorians on the Columbia River in the wake of Lewis and Clark. These members of John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company (a subsidiary of his larger American Fur Company) erected Fort Astoria on the Oregon side of the Columbia River not too far from Lewis and Clark’s Fort Clatsop. The War of 1812 dashed Astor’s hopes when Fort Astoria was occupied by (and eventually sold to) the British. The North West Company continued fur trading operations along the Columbia and its tributaries but increasingly found it needed to build posts further inland nearer to the source of beaver and to do more of the trapping since many Indians refused to hunt beaver for commercial sale.

Enterprising men, first from the North West Company, and then from the Hudson’s Bay Company, continued exploiting the fur resources of the region. Donald McKenzie, Michel Bourdon, Finan McDonald, and Alexander Ross all led British efforts to capitalize on the fur market. Unfortunately, the first three men did not leave much in the way of journal keeping or letter writing. Hence, three quarters of this book dwells upon the 1823-24 expedition of Alexander Ross, who left extensive journals, wrote numerous letters, and penned an autobiography. The author uses the Ross expedition as the lens to reveal the economic, political, tribal, and international concepts of law in the fur trade.

Reid is at his best when discussing the intersection of geopolitical, social, institutional, economic, and legal culture in this trans-boundary region. He does an admirable job of portraying how individuals, tribes, and companies

often judged events by the standards of their own cultural perspective. His evaluation of class separation, ethnic contempt, and different world views in the trade is a welcome contribution, as is his presentation on the hierarchy of social preference, cultural perceptions, and institutional values in the trade. He is especially good at discussing the Hudson’s Bay Company rationale to “denude” the Snake River Country by trapping out all of the beaver, not as an economic ploy but rather as a geopolitical strategy to keep American trappers from penetrating into the Oregon Country–a policy that met with partial success.

One wishes the author had provided even more analysis of the complicated legal arrangements surrounding the proprietary rights of horses, traps, guns, ammunition, and equipment loaned by the company on credit and whether the borrowers had possessory interest or simply custodial interests. There is also some repetition of arguments (such as discussion of the problems of the Hudson’s Bay Company had with Iroquois trappers) that could have been pared down. Moreover, there is one map that contains some of the forts and rivers, but none of the Snake River Expeditions are charted. Nor are there any other illustrations. As for Utah, Reid scarcely mentions the Snake River Expeditions’ significance in northernUtah, although he does briefly mention occasional forays into Bear Lake country and Cache Valley. Nevertheless, this work makes a fine contribution to understanding the motives and operations of the Snake River Expeditions in the 1820s.

JAY H. BUCKLEY Brigham Young University

An Archaeology of Desperation: Exploring the Donner Party’s Alder Creek Camp.

Edited by Kelly J. Dixon, Julie M. Schablitsky, and Shannon A. Novak. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011. xiv + 390 pp. Cloth, $34.95.)

WHILE THE STORY OF THE DONNER PARTYhas been told and re-told in nearly three hundred accounts, what is known of the Donner Party and their daily lives during their entrapment in the Sierra Nevada is based on a sparse narrative heavily focused on cannibalism. As set forth in the Introduction of An Archaeology of Desperation: Exploring the Donner Party’s Alder Creek Camp, the editorshope to “slow down the narrative, elaborate on the details, and reexamine the questions through an interdisciplinary lens” (2). By utilizing historical, archaeological, bio-archaeological, enthohistorical, and social anthropological resources an interdisciplinary team of researchers examined and expounded upon the results of two filed

seasons of archaeological investigations at Alder Creek, the camp site of the George and Jacob Donner families. The researchers sought to “unequivocally” link the site to the Donner family, then consider the “various contexts within which the entrapment took place” and “examine how kinship, class, and gender were negotiated in Jacksonian America” to understand the responses of the Donner Party members to their unfortunate situation (3).

The book is divided into four parts Locating (Ch. 1- 2), Lingering (Ch. 3-5), Consuming (Ch 6-8), and Narrating (Ch 9-11), with each part containing chapters of similar subject matter or sources of analysis. Part I, Locating, presents a well researched and written historical overview of the Donner Party and the Alder Creek Camp. Part II, Lingering, presents archaeological work conducted both by previous explorations and the current research to confirm the Alder Creek archaeological site was indeed the remnants of the Donner Alder Creek camp. Based on the types, amounts, and distribution of features and artifacts recovered from the Alder Creek site and historical records the researchers conclude that the most viable explanation for the Alder Creek site is that it was indeed the Donner camp. Part III, Consuming, presents the scientific analyses of the skeletal material recovered from the Alder Creek site and a review of cannibalism. The necessarily somewhat technical chapters 6 and 7 discuss that while no human bone was identified among the heavily butchered and processed tens of thousands of bone fragments from Alder Creek, horse, cattle, dog, and deer were identified. The extensive processing exhibited by the bone fragments reveals the lengths to which the Donner Party went to extract every last bit of fat and nutrients out of the bones in their desperate fight to stay alive and avoid cannibalism. Part IV, Narrating, presents Native American narratives from the Washoe people, a review of how the media and other groups presented the fate of the Donner Party, and the summary chapter.

A few chapters seem superfluous in the book. The evolutionary and historical review of cannibalism presented in chapter 8, while a must read for any student writing a paper on cannibalism, seems unnecessary as the pertinent information on cannibalism had already been discussed in several preceding chapters. Similarly, chapter 9 presents an interesting history and narratives of the Washoe people and their interactions, or lack thereof, with the Donner Party; however, the chapter does not adequately discuss or connect those narratives within the overall argument of the book set forth in the Introduction.

An Archaeology of Desperation: Exploring the Donner Party’s Alder Creek Camp presents valuable historical and archaeological evidence for a portion of the Donner Party story not too well known. The Alder Creek camp site

reveals a tale of struggle, desperation, perseverance, and unfortunate death. The editors attempt to place the data from the Alder Creek site within the historical and cultural constructs of the Donner Party experience to elucidate “life and death during the winter entrapment, as well as the human condition in desperate situations” to understand the responses of the Donner Party members to their desperate situation. The book could have benefited from a summary chapter wholly devoted to the synthesis and discussion of the information presented by each chapter within the theoretical theses presented in the Introduction; unfortunately, the brief final chapter does not sufficiently accomplish this.

DERINNA KOPP Antiquities Section Utah Division of State History

A

Aguinaldo, Emilio, Philippine nationalist, 153

Alaska, possible exodus of Mormons to, 138

Albright, Horace M., assistant director of the National Park Service, 247; impression of Zion National Park, 248

Allen, Orin, World War I soldier, 350-51

Alter, J. Cecil, and visit of Warren Harding to Zion National Park, 252

Armistead, Lewis A., Utah War veteran, killed at Gettysburg, 309-10

Arrowhead Hotel, 25-26, 30-31, 25, 49

Arrowhead Trail, 24-30

Ashton, Wilford P., World War I soldier, 350

Atkin, Sid, owner of Sugar Loaf Café, 35, 37 Axelson, Sheldon, World War I soldier, 350

B

Badger Creek, naming of, 16-17

Battle of the Bulge, compared with Meuse Argonne Offensive, 336 Bear River, Massacre, 326-28

Beardsley, B.F., lecturer on Mountain Meadows Massacre, 269

Bee, Barnard E., commander of the Utah Expedition Volunteer Battalion, 311

Bennett, Bill, auto court owner, 33

Bennett, James Arlington, former Navuoo Legion Major General and proposal to Abraham Lincoln, 299-300

Bennett, James Gordon, editor-publisher of New York Herald, 297-98

Bernhisel, John M., Utah Congressional Delegate, 118-19, 138

Big Hand Café, 50

Bigelow, Charles H., California road promoter, 24, 28, 31, 48

Bingham, World War I veterans at, 352 Blood, Henry H., Governor of Utah, 188, 185 Borders, Utah’s reduced during the Civil War, 308

Branch Agriculture College (Cedar City), opposition to Dixie College becoming a state institution, 181, 186, 188

Brumley, John, cattleman, 361, 373, 367

Brumley, William, cattleman, 361, 373, 361 Bryant, William Cullen, author of poem, Our Country’s Call, 80

Buchanan, James, United States President, 109, 211, policies toward Utah, Mexico, and Cuba,132-51, letter to Lincoln on preservation of the Union, 297, 138

Bunker, Clyde, World War I soldier, 346 Burr, David H., Utah Surveyor General, 108, 112-120, 123-24, 130-31 Burr, Eugene, Frederick H., and David A., sons of David H. Burr and deputy surveyors, 112 Burt, Andrew Sheridan, author of Mountain Meadows Massacre melodrama, 261, 264 Burton, Robert, and Morrisite Affair, 320-21 Butte, Montana, and Mountain Meadows Massacre reenactment, 269 Butts, Willard, San Juan County Sheriff, 370

C

Cahoon, Arthur, World War I soldier, 350 Camp Douglas, See Fort Douglas Camp Lewis, Utah soldiers at, 342-43 Camp, Williams, slave owner in Utah, 72-73 Canfield, Isaac, encounter with federal soldiers, 315 Cannon, Abraham H., LDS apostle, 175 Cannon, George Q., 84, 92 Cannon, Walter, St. George motel owner, 36 Carlisle Cattle Company, 355-56, 361-63, 366 Carlisle, Edmund, cattleman, 361 Carlisle, Harold, cattleman, 361-62, 372-73 Carpenter, Thomas, B., cattleman, 357, 359-60, 372 Catholic Church, in Utah--St Mary’s Academy, 226-41 Cattle Companies in Utah, 354-73 Civil War, Utah and, 75-92, 297-314, 317-19, and religion, 302-03; response in Utah to end of the war, 332 Clark, John A., Utah Surveyor General, 123-25 Clements, Courtland C., Utah Surveyor General, 125 Cody, Agnes, actress, 265 Cody, “Buffalo Bill,” as promoter of Mountain Meadows Massacre melodrama, 258-64, 261 Cody, May, sister of Buffalo Bill Cody, and namesake for Mountain Meadows Massacre melodrama, 258-64 Coleman, L.G., cattleman, 360-61 Colfax, Schuyler, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, visit to Utah 87-88, 89

College of Saint Mary of the Wasatch, 241 Confederate States of America, and Utah statehood, 214-15, 220-22

Connor, Johanna, wife of Patrick Connor, 318

Connor, Patrick Edward, and California Volunteers, 81-82, 316-17; Utahns respond to, 308, 317

Cooper, James E., Wild West show promoter, 266

Covington, Bert, owner of Conoco Auto Court, 33

Cox, J.H., surveyor, 126 Cox, Warren, owner of Arrowhead Hotel, 25-26, 49

Craig, Columbus L., deputy surveyor, 112, 114-15

Craig, James, United States General and commander at Fort Laramie, 300-301, 304

Crawford, J.L., and Zion National Park, 252 Crawford, John Wallace, playwright, 264 Critchlow, John F., Battery B officer, 160 Crossing of the Fathers, during 1858 expedition to the Hopis, 9-10, 11

Cumming, Alfred, resigns as Utah territorial governor, 223 Cunningham, Johon Mendell, cattleman, 457-60, 372, 358

D

Daily Union Vedette, See The Union Vedette Dalzell, John, Colorado congressman, 359 Dan, slave of Williams Camp, 72-73 Davis, James George “Dariris,” member of 1858 expedition to the Hopi Villages, 6-9 Davis, Orlando, member of Mississippi legislature encourages Utah to join the Confederacy, 220-22

Dawson, John W., territorial governor in Utah, 84, 224, 321-22 Day, Wilford, state senator from Parowan, 188 Deming, Lamar H., World War I soldier, 338-40, 343, 349

Dern, George, Utah Governor, 29 Desert Land Act of 1877, 109

Dick’s Café, 50

Dixie Auto Garage, 48

Dixie College, transfer of ownership to the State of Utah, 173-191, founding of college 173, Dixie Hotel, 32

Dixie Sun Bowl, 36

Dixie Theater, 51 Dodge, Augustus Caesar, United States Minister to Spain, 136

Dominguez-Escalante Expedition, trail followed by 1858 expedition to the Hopi Villages, 9-11 Doty, Jameas Duane, Utah territorial governor 306 Drake, Thomas, J., federal judge in Utah territory, 84 Drought, and the Utah cattle industry, 367-68 Drummond, Willis, General Land Office Commissioner, 126

E

Eckels, Delana, Utah Territorial Justice, 118 Eggleston, Orson Hyde, Mormon missionary, 260

El Escalante Hotel, 255 El Pace ‘O Lodge, 34 Elk Mountain Cattle Company, 363-64, 370-71

Evans, Oscar, World War I soldier, 338, 347

F

Fallon, Christopher, Minister to Spain and efforts by the United States to purchase Cuba, 136-37 Farnsworth, Elon John, Utah War veteran killed at Gettysburg, 310 Faust, Augustus “Gus”, World War I soldier, 345-46 Ferguson, Samuel Wragg, Utah War veteran, 311-12 Ferron, Augustus D., land surveyor in Utah, 125-26 Flake, Green, 54 Foote, Robert, Utah War veteran, 311 Force, Clarence, St. George motel owner, 36 Forepaugh, Adam, Wild West show promoter, 266

Forney, Jacob, Utah Indian Agent, 5 Forsyth, John, United States Minister to Mexico, 134 Fort Douglas, 82, 159, 305, 294-95, 314-33 Fox, Jesse, Utah Territorial Surveyor General, 121

Fox, Samuel R., Surveyor General, 122 Francis, Jack, World War I soldier, 353 Free Schools Act of 1890, 175-76 Fuller, Lucius “Luke” Hubbard, member of 1858 expedition to the Hopi Villages, 6, 18

G

Gable, Clark, visit to Kanab, 257

Gale, Mrs. Clarence R., Lecturer on Mountain Meadows Massacre 269 Galvanized Yankees, former Confederate soldiers, at Fort Douglas, 302 Gentles, William, soldier in Utah War, killed Chief Crazy Horse, 311 Gibbons, Andrew S., member of 1858 expedition to the Hopi Villages, 6, 15, 19-21, 18

Gibbs, George W., Battery A officer, 160 Grant, Frank A., Battery B Captain, 160 Grant, Heber J., LDS Church President, on education, 178; with Warren Harding in Zion National Park, 252 Gray, Carl, president of Union Pacific and tourism in Southern Utah, 251 Goodman, Wilhelm, Utah soldier wounded in the Philippines, 166 Gordon, W.E. (Latigo), foreman of Carlisle Cattle Company, 362 Grow, Orrin R., Battery B officer, 160

H

Hail, Brown, owner of Hail’s Motel, 36 Hail, G.W. “Jockey,” owner of Liberty Hotel, 30

Hamblin, Frederick, member of 1858 expedition to the Hopi Villages, 6 Hamblin, Jacob, leader of 1858 expedition to the Hopi Villages, 4-21 Hamblin, William, member of 1858 expedition to the Hopi Villages, 6-9, 15 Hammond, Francis A., Monticello community leader, 348 Harding, Stephen, Utah Territorial Governor, 82, 323

Harding, Warren G., visits Zion National Park, 28-29, 251-52

Harrison, J. William, Dixie College faculty member, 179-80

Haskell, Thales, member of 1858 expedition to the Hopi Villages, 6, 19

Hatch, Ira, member of 1858 expedition to the Hopi Villages, 6, 21

Heffernan, Louise (Sister M. Rita), teacher at Saint Mary’s Academy, 240, 226 Hempstead, Charles H., U.S. army captain and editor of The Union Vedette, 329 Hendricks, Thomas A., General Land Office Commissioner, 114

Heth, Henry, United States army officer and the Battle of Gettysburg, 309 Higgins, Edwin, acting governor of Utah

Territory, 125 Hirschi, Claudius, Hurricane LDS Stake President and supporter of Dixie College, 182

Hirschi, David, Utah State Representative, 183 Homestead Act of 1862, 109 Honeyman, Francis, army lieutenant, attacked by Indians in Pleasant Grove, 328 Hooper, William, H., Utah territorial delegate to Congress, 84, 110, 114, 125, quest for Utah statehood, 208-25, 122, 208 Hoover, Herbert, at Zion National Park, 252 Hopi Indians, supposed descendants of the Welsh, 6; Mormon mission to, 1858, 4-21, 13, 15 Howell, Martha J. Perkins, daughter of Green Flake, 69 Humphrey, J.W., Utah forest ranger on overgrazing, 369-70 Hurst, Philip, Mormon missionary 260 Hyde, Orson, on slavery, 62-63

I

Independence Day, (Fourth of July), celebrated in Utah, 1861, 79-80 Indian Slavery, in Utah, 64 Interstate 15, controversy over location of St. George exits, 40 Irvin, Mrs. Selden, actress at Fort Douglas Theater, 328 Ivins, Anthony W., LDS general authority and supporter of Dixie College, 182-83, 190

J

J.M. Cunningham Company, 359-60 Jackson, Thomas L., “Stonewall”, veteran of Utah War, 311 Jesperson, Hans, visits Bear River Battle Site, 327

Johnson, Aaron, and Parrish murders, 118 Jones, Kumen, Southeastern Utah settler, 368-69, Jones, Randall, tourism promoter 245 Judd, James, tourism promoter, 30 Judd, Samuel, owner of the Dixie Hotel, 25

K

Kane, Thomas L., and Utah War, 147, 313, 299 Kansas and New Mexico Land and Cattle Company, see Carlisle Cattle Company Kellogg, William, Representative from Illinois,

216

Kelly, Edward, Catholic Father in Utah, 227 Kelly, Hugh, World War I soldier, 351 Kelly, Jim, World War I soldier, 351-52

Kennedy Brothers Wild West Show, 267 Kimball, Heber C., on the nation and Civil War, 318

Kimball, Nathan, Surveyor General, 127 Knell, Benjamin, member of 1858 expedition to the Hopi Villages, 6 Knight, Samuel, member of 1858 expedition to the Hopi Villages, 6, 15

L

Lacy-Coleman (LC) Cattle Company, 355-56, 360-61, 363, 366

Lacy, Isaac W., cattleman, 360-61 Lacy, Sarah, wife of Isaac Lacy, 361 Land Office, in Utah, 110

Lauderdale, John, U.S. Army surgeon on Bear River Massacre, 327-28

LDS Institute Program, 178 LDS Seminary Program, 176 Leavitt, Dudley, member of 1858 expedition to the Hopi Villages, 6, 18 Leavitt, Thomas, member of 1858 expedition to the Hopi Villages, 6, 15 Lee, J. Bracken, Governor of Utah, 187 Lee, John D., trial and execution, 259 Lee, William H.F., (“Rooney”) son of Robert E. Lee and veteran of the Utah War, 312 Lee’s Ferry, 9 Liberty Hotel, 30-32 Lillie, Gordon W., see Pawnee Bill Lincoln, Abraham, 1864 election, 82, 86; William Hooper’s efforts to meet with, 224; Gettysburg Address, 316; Brigham Young’s attitude toward him, 319-20; inauguration celebrated in Utah, 330-31; response to assassination in Utah, 332-33, 85, 216

Lone Ranger, radio show on Mountain Meadows Massacre, 270 Lyman, Platte D., comments on overgrazing, 371 M

Mabey, Charles, Governor of Utah, 29; soldier in the Philippines, 159, 168; with Warren Harding in Zion National Park, 252; 155,

163

Macfarlane, M. J., supporter of Branch Agricultural College in Cedar City, 186 McArthur, Daniel, encounter with federal soldiers, 315 McDowell, James, United States General, 306, 296 McKay, David O., education issues, 178, 189 McLachlan, William, encounter with federal soldiers during Civil War, 314, 316 Manfield, J. Carroll, comic strip illustrator, 270

Martin, Henry, Utah Territory Superintendent of Indian Affairs, 80 Martineau, James H., Cache County Surveyor, 126, 127 Marysville, California, Mountain Meadows Massacre reenactment, 268-69 Mather, Steven, Director of the National Park Service, 247, 251 Maw, Herbert, World War I soldier, 348 Merrill, Joseph F., LDS Apostle and Commissioner of Church Education, 177, 184-85 Meuse-Argonne Offensive, and Utahns, 334-53

Middleton, George, tourism promoter, 245 Mills, S. Clay, World War I soldier, 347 Milne Motor Court, 32, 36, 41, 22 Milne, Bert and Edith, motel owners, 32, 36 Mix, Tom, movie star visits Kanab, 254 Mogo, Charles, deputy surveyor, 112, 117-21, 126

Moran, Benjamin, secretary of American legation to Great Britain, 147 Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, July 1862, 86, 224 Morrill, Justin,Vermont Congressman, 212, 224-25, 224 Morris, Joseph, settlement attacked, 321 Mormons, and slavery, 61-65; and Civil War 75-92; possible settlement of Alaska and Mexico, 138, 143

Mormon Bluff Pool (Cattle Company), 355-56, 363-64

Motels, in St. George, 22-43

Mountain Meadows Massacre, search for surviving children 5-6; as entertainment topic, 258-71

Movies, in southern Utah, 253-57 Moylan, Miles, Utah War veteran, 311 Moyes, Leroy, World War I soldier, 324-26 Mukuntuweap National Monument, see Zion

National Park

N

Naraguats, Piute Indian Chief and 1858 expedition to the Hopis, 8-9, 12

National Park Transportation and Camping Company, 246-47, 250

Naylor, Ray C., Battery B Executive Officer, 160

Nelson, William, owner of the Dixie Camp, 27

Nevada, creation of territory, 223 New Mexico, statehood proposed, 222 Newspapers, and the Civil War, 75-92 Nichols, Joseph K., Dixie College President, 178-83, 186

O

Ogden, World War I veterans in, 349, 351

Oglesby, Bell, granddaughter of Green Flake, 69

Oklahoma Ranch Wild West Show, 268 Ostend Manifesto, 135, 147

Ouseley, William Gore, British diplomat, 138-151, 136, 141 Overgrazing, and the Utah cattle industry, 367-72

P

Pace, Andrew, tourism promoter, 33-34, 41 Pace, John W., owner of Pace Camp and Inn, 27, 30, 33

Pack, Frederick, Utah geology professor, 244 Paiute Indians, and 1858 Jacob Hamblin expedition, 5, 8, 21

Paolosso, Julio, owner of the Shady Acres Motel, 36 Parrish, William and Beeson, murdered in Springville, 116 Parry, Chauncey and Gronway, promoters of Southern Utah tourism and movie industries, 242-57; childhood and youth, 242-43; education, 243-44; and National Park Transportation and Camping Company, 246-47; service in World War I, 249; host President Warren G. Harding, 251-52; and the Utah-Grand Canyon Transportation Company, 252-53; promote movie industry, 254-57; relations with community, 257; historic wagon collection, 257; death, 257, 243, 244, 245, 251, 252, 255

Parry, Dale, son of Gronway, 253, 257

Parry, Whitney, brother of Chauncey and Gronway Parry, operates Parry Lodge, 256

Parry Lodge, 255-56, 253 Pathe Freres Film Company, producer of 1911 motion picture on the Mountain Meadows Massacre, 269 Pawnee Bill, 266-67, 270 Pedro, Don, and Indian slavery in Utah, 64 Philippines, Utah soldiers there 1898-1899, 152-72

Pike, Ralph, murdered by Howard Spencer, 128-29 Pipe Spring, naming of 7-8, 18 Pittsburgh Land and Cattle Company, 35558, 363. 366 Pleasant Grove, site of Indian attack on federal soldiers, 328 Pollock, Emery, World War I soldier, 340 Polygamy, national attention of, 86-87 Pony Express, 320 Prewer, Fred N., cattleman, 359 Price, World War I recruits at train station, 337

Price, George, Captain in California Volunteer Calvary, 314 Prince, Bill, St. George motel owner, 30 Public Land Surveys in Utah, 108-31

R

Ray, A.N., early LaSal settler, 369 Reynolds, John F., army captain, Utah War veteran killed at Gettysburg, 309 Robertson, C.A., Moab newspaper editor, 359 Robinson, J. King, murdered in Salt Lake City in 1866, 128-29 Robinson, John Cleveland, Utah War veteran, looses leg at Gettysburg, 309 Russell, Isaac “Ike,” Battery A soldier,161-62, 166-67, wounded, 168-69

S

Saint Angela’s Literary Society, 238 Saint George, early motels and motor courts, 22-43

Saint George Stake Academy, see Dixie College

Saint Mary’s Academy, 226-41, establishment of, 228-29; damaged by explosion, 228-29; students, 231; Mormon attitudes toward, 231-32; faculty, 232, 240; curriculum, 233-36; tuition, 236-37;

commencement, 238; May Procession, 238; sports, 239; closing of, 241; 228, 230, 239

Sanders, John F., surveyor, 126

Scanlan, Lawrence, Catholic Bishop in Utah, 227

Schulz, Fred and Edna, owners of Dixie Camp motor court, 27

Scorup-Sommerville Cattle Company, 356, 370

Secession, and Utah Statehood, 214-22

Seegmiller, Daniel, tourism promoter, 244-45

September Dawn, 2007 movie about Mountain Meadows Massacre, 270

Sherman, John, Representative from Ohio, 216

Slavery, in Utah—An Act in Relation to Service, 54-74

Sloan, Edward, journalist, 315

Smith, Joseph, on slavery, 61; coming Civil War 302, 318

Smith, Lott, military leader during Civil War, 81, 300, 310-11, 320-21

Smith, Sam, playwright, 264

Smoot, Reed, with Warren Harding in Zion National Park, 252

Snow College, becomes a state sponsored institution, 182-83, 187-88

Snow, Edward H., President of Dixie College Board of Trustees, 179

Snow, Eliza R., Mormon poet, 80-81

Snow, Joseph, southern Utah legislator promotes roads, 26 Soap Creek, naming of, 16-17

Southern Utah University, see (Branch Agricultural College Cedar City)

Spencer, Howard, tried for murder of Ralph Pike, 128

Staines, William, Mormon missionary at House of Representatives, 213

Stambaugh, Samuel C., Surveyor General, 120-21

Stapley, Leland, World War I soldier, 340-41, 346

Statehood, Utah’s quest for, 83-86, 208-25 Stenhouse, T.B.H., and Abraham Lincoln, 300, 317, 323-24; on Patrick Connor, 331-32, 298

Stevens, Lucinda Flake, daughter of Green Flake, 69 Stewart, Glenn, World War I soldier, 344 Stewart, James (“Jock”) Utah War veteran,

310

Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916, 28 Stout, Hosea, Acting U.S. Attorney, 114 Sugar Loaf Café, 35 Swenson, John C., Dixie College Board Member, 186

TTaylor, John, on Civil War, 302 Taylor, Levi, World War I soldier and suicide victim, 352-53 Telegraph, completion and significance, 320 Tenney, Ammon, member of 1858 Jacob Hamblin Expedition, 5-18, 7 Thomas, Arthur L., Utah Territorial Governor, 370 Thomas, John and Louise Parry, son-in-law and daughter of Chauncey Parry, 255, 257

Toquerville, and visit of Warren Harding, 252 Tourism, in southern Utah 22-43, 44-53 Tracy, Spencer, visits Kanab, 257 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 109 Troskolawski, Joseph, deputy surveyor, 113, 117

Truman, Alma and Ruth, owners of the Sands Motel, 37-38

U

Union Pacific Railroad, and tourism in Southern Utah, 250-51 Union Vedette, 329, 324, 327 United States Capitol, under construction, 219, 221 Usher, John P., Secretary of the Interior, 121 Utah Batteries, in Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, 152-72 Utah Grand Canyon Transportation Company, 250-53

Utah Parks Company, 251, 253 Utah War, prelude to the Civil War, 76,78-80, 297 308-09, 320; as a factor in efforts by United States to acquire Cuba, 132-51, and statehood for Utah, 211; impact on men and officers who fought in Civil War, 209-213 Ute Ford, see Crossing of the Fathers V

Varian, Charles, Utah Batteries corporal, 164 Villiers, William Frederick, (Fourth Earl of Clarendon), British secretary of state for foreign affairs, 140-44

Visscher, William, L., play promoter, 264

W

Waite, Charles B., federal judge in territorial Utah, 84 Wallace, Henry C., Secretary of Commerce, 252

Warm Springs, dispute over land 129-30 Wathen, Robert, comic strip illustrator, 270 Webb, William C., Utah Battery officer, 160, 165-66

Weber State College, becomes a state funded institution, 182-83, 187-88

Wedgewood, Edgar A., Battery B officer, 160, 166, 168

Wells, Daniel H., commander of Nauvoo Legion, 82, on Abraham Lincoln, 332 Wells, Heber, Governor of Utah, 157 West, James, Utah Territorial Governor, 359 Westwood, Phebe, and Indian atrocity, 322-23

Wheeler, Russell C., World War I soldier, 342 Wilcken, Charles H., Utah War veteran, converts to Mormonism, 312 Wilson, Joseph, General Land Office Commissioners, 121-22, 124

Wittwer, Lester, St. George motel owner, 43 Woodruff, Wilford, on Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration, 330-31

Woody, Reynolds, killed by Indians, 322 Woolley, Edwin D., files anti-slavery complaint, 72 Woolley, Edwin D. (Dee), Southern Utah tourism promoter, 244 Work, Herbert, Secretary of Agriculture, 252 World War I, Utahns involvement in, 334-53 Wylie, William W., and tourism in Zion National Park, 246-47, 249, 250, 247, 248 Wyoming Bill’s Wild West Show, 268

Y

Young, Brigham, on slavery and abolition, 60, 64-66, 71; on Utah Statehood, 85, 215-16; newspaper reports about, 88-91; description of, 90; reappointment as Utah territorial governor, 223; on impact of Mountain Meadows Massacre on missionary work, 259-60; attitude toward Civil War and Abraham Lincoln, 302-307, 313, 319-20; comments on Territorial Governor Stephen Harding, 323; comments on Patrick Connor, 330,

87, 212

Young, Harry, Utah soldier and doctor killed in the Philippines, 168-69 Young, John, Utah soldier wounded in the Philippines, 166 Young, John W., tourism promoter, 244 Young, Richard W., commander of Utah soldiers in the Philippines, 158-60

Z

Zion National Park, 242, 245-49; visited by President Warren G. Harding, 251-52