In This Issue

From traffic violations to weightier questions of domestic life and land use, laws and regulations fill the lives of everyday, contemporary Utahns. So too did laws circumscribe and inform the world of nineteenth-century Utah. In that historical setting, things ecclesiastical often became entangled with things civil. For many years after the settlement of the Salt Lake Valley in 1847 by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, distinctive Mormon practices, institutions, and laws played a critical part in the governance of Utah. People outside the LDS church soon chafed at this arrangement. Much of the fall 2014 issue of Utah Historical Quarterly explores the place of law in society and illuminates Utah’s church and state conundrum.

Volumes of legal material exist regarding the relationship between governmental entities and Native Americans. In the words of Francis Paul Prucha, from the origins of the United States to the present, “Indians as tribes or as individuals have been persistently in the consciousness of officials of all three branches of the federal government.” 1 In 1850s Utah, another player—the LDS church— complicated the already difficult relationship between the government and the tribes. The LDS church and the federal government had separate, at times competing, policies regarding Great Basin Indians. Those policies could have very real effects on the ground. In our first article, Brent Rogers explores how federal officials perceived Mormons to be dangerously at odds with “Americans” in their dealings with indigenous peoples. Critically, the president had the legal backing to enforce federal law in relation to Native Americans; as Rogers writes, “Indian policy emerged as a crucial factor in the federal government’s effort to assert national power and authority in Utah Territory in the 1850s.”

The second article in this issue moves from the world of presidents and governors to provide an entirely different look at Utah in the 1850s and how behavior at home affects the most vulnerable of people: children. It presents the story of Isaac Whitehouse, a boy with disabilities who suffered terrible abuse—and, on one fall evening in 1855, a violent death—at the hands of his caretakers. Noel Carmack documents the injustices of the case: following his conviction for the boy’s murder, Samuel G. Baker served only two months in the territorial penitentiary before being pardoned by Brigham Young—a move Judge William Drummond found to be an affront to the rule of law in Utah. But Carmack reveals complex forces at work in the case and raises interesting, and surprising, questions about the intersection of religion, community, and domestic responsibility in early Utah.

As the third article attests, toward the end of the nineteenth century the loosening of LDS ecclesiastical control in Utah—in this case, over the distribution and management of water—contributed to bitter conflict in some Mormon villages. The angst over water is understandable: even in a state endowed with heavy snowpack and healthy runoff, then—and now—water scarcity was an issue of central concern. Slow to adopt the system of prior appropriation (“first in time, first in right”), Mormons had operated under a communitarian system of water management since their arrival in the Salt Lake Valley. Some second-generation Mormons, faced with state regulation and private ownership of water, desperately attempted to retain control of the resource. John Bennion documents one conflict in Utah’s Rush Valley that pitted men, otherwise bound together by ecclesiastical responsibilities and familial ties, against one another.

By 1881, conflict and anti-Indian furor had led to the relocation of certain Ute bands from Colorado to Utah. Many photographs document the Utes of the era, especially the principal players in these episodes. Unfortunately, the people in such photographs are often misidentified. Our fourth article shows how technology can assist in the study of history. In it, Beth Simmons uses a newly (and freely) available tool—face recognition software— to pin down the identities of Utes whose images were captured in an 1870s stereograph. Simmons’s article provides a fitting coda for the state historical society’s sixty-second annual meeting, which was held this September and focused on the place of technology in Utah’s past.

1 Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians, abridged ed. (1984; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), ix.