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Uninvited, Unwelcome, and Uncomfortable
Uninvited, Unwelcome, and Uncomfortable: Utah Assignments of Colonels E. J. Steptoe and C. F. Smith
REVIEW ESSAY BY WILLIAM P. MACKINNON
In 2008 I predicted the continued discovery of documents that would illuminate Utah’s tumultuous territorial period, with much of this material unearthed by researchers in nontraditional disciplines and unlikely locations. 1 The events of 2016 were good examples of this phenomenon, as with the discovery of the July 1847 plat of Great Salt Lake City by Rick Grunder, a dealer in Mormon manuscripts based in Upstate New York. So too with the recent publication of books by Ronald E. McFarland, professor of English at the University of Idaho, and Allen H. Mesch, a chemical engineer and retired petroleum consultant writing history in Texas. With Edward J. Steptoe and the Indian Wars and Your Affectionate Father, Charles F. Smith, McFarland and Mesch have broken new ground by publishing the letters of two West Pointers posted to antebellum Utah. This material does much to reveal the reactions of these military men to the isolated, exotic society they encountered in the Great Basin of the 1850s.
Col. Charles F. Smith, photographed shortly after his promotion from lieutenant colonel in 1861. —
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
For both colonels Steptoe and Smith, duty in Utah preceded combat elsewhere that shaped the balance of their careers and reputations. In Steptoe’s case, nine months in Salt Lake City during 1854–1855 led to his surname’s brief entry into the English language as a pejorative verb, President Pierce’s nomination of him to succeed Governor Brigham Young, and his pursuit of a three-part mission to deliver hundreds of dragoon recruits and animals to the Pacific Coast, survey an improved road from Utah to California, and capture the Indians responsible for the 1853 Gunnison massacre near Fillmore, Utah. Thereafter (1858) Steptoe suffered military defeat and reputational damage in Washington Territory at the hands of an ad hoc tribal confederation armed with ammunition he believed might have been provided by “the Mormons.” 2 Charles F. Smith, who served at Camp Scott and Camp Floyd from 1857–1860, is forgotten in today’s Utah other than perhaps as the officer whose death at Shiloh, Tennessee, in 1862 unexpectedly cleared the way for Ulysses S. Grant’s meteoric rise to greatness.
Brevet Lieutenant Colonel Edward Jenner Steptoe
Prior to his defeat in the Northwest, Steptoe’s reputation was admirable, although not of star quality. Steptoe has never inspired a full biography, a reflection of his post-1858 eclipse, the paucity of available personal papers, and the fact that he spent the entire Civil War on medical leave. Ron McFarland has attempted to remedy this neglect with a study intended to correct longstanding errors while making “a case for what was gained from some of Steptoe’s un-successes, most notably in Utah and in his defeat at the Battle of To-hotsnim-me in the Washington Territory.” 3 The author does this with eight chapters and an epilogue that proceed chronologically. Through this structure the author focuses on six questions dealing with Steptoe’s competence and leadership in the West after service in Florida’s Second Seminole War and the Mexican-American War:
On balance, McFarland succeeds in providing answers to these questions while shedding light on Steptoe’s views about other issues: slavery (conflicted), Indian victimization (simpatico), and the desirability of a military career (ambivalent-to-negative). He also discusses less global matters such as whether Steptoe ever married (Mary Rosanna Claytor, 1860) and the inspiration for his given names (the famous British physician Edward Jenner). In so doing the author uses most of the important secondary sources in addition to primary materials that include military correspondence in the National Archives, the fewer than forty of Steptoe’s personal letters held by the Washington State Historical Society and descendants, and the private papers of soldiers with whom he campaigned. McFarland may be the first scholar to exploit fully some of these materials, as with the journal of William Antes, a dragoon private who served under Steptoe in Utah, and a rare photograph of the colonel taken in 1860.
How effectively has the author used this research? The results are uneven, with many of the book’s shortfalls rooted in his lack of background in military and Mormon history compounded by unsupportive editing. Consequently McFarland refers to Mormons as Latter Day rather than Latter-day Saints (5, 83), describes artillery pieces as ordinance instead of ordnance (54, 116), and renders officers as offers (81). The book’s explanation of the crucial distinction between brevet and substantive rank is inadequate (64), and there is no discussion of the extent to which promotions for Steptoe and even the talented Robert E. Lee were agonizingly slow because of the army’s static size and the absence of a retirement system to eliminate the blockages posed by aging, ailing senior officers unwilling to leave the service. 5 Because of the publisher’s shortsightedness, Edward J. Steptoe and the Indian Wars lacks the maps essential to following the author’s discussion of Steptoe’s campaigns in Florida, Mexico, Utah, and Washington.
More importantly, McFarland’s fifth chapter on Steptoe’s sojourn in Utah often falls short of providing the context needed for one to understand the complex scene Steptoe encountered there. As a result some readers will miss the implications of Steptoe’s arrival in the territory just as Brigham Young’s four-year term of office was expiring or, for that matter, the fact that Young was not only governor but served as Utah’s U.S. superintendent of Indian affairs. 6 McFarland’s explanation of the close relationship between Steptoe and Franklin Pierce is important and done well, but it appears in a chapter following the one where it is most needed to understand the president’s impromptu nomination of the colonel to succeed Young. McFarland explains Steptoe’s protracted, Hamlet-like agonizing before declining this appointment, but he misses the opportunity to analyze how such indecisiveness related to a disengaged leadership style that permitted the colonel’s troops to riot in the streets of Salt Lake City and later to engage tribal adversaries in Washington without the preparations requisite for survival, if not success.
The author breaks new ground in discussing the possibility that Steptoe suffered undiagnosed mini-strokes while campaigning in both Utah and Washington Territory, but he avoids connecting them to the quality of Steptoe’s command decisions under pressure as well as to the broader context of the pervasive physical and emotional ailments besetting the antebellum army’s most senior leaders. Also missing is a comprehensive assessment of the duplicitous behavior of Steptoe’s closest Utah ally, Chief Justice John F. Kinney, or for that matter recognition that in 1854 the judge christened a son Edward Steptoe Kinney.
Yet Ron McFarland’s study of this neglected frontier army officer is well worth reading. Unlike many biographers, McFarland has resisted the temptation to produce hagiography. He addresses his subject’s setback in Washington Territory in direct, forthright fashion. Those particularly interested in Colonel Steptoe’s Utah experience may also wish to consult David H. Miller’s aging but still-valuable master’s thesis on the subject. 7
Lieutenant Colonel Charles Ferguson Smith
On September 9, 1861, while Edward J. Steptoe convalesced at his home in Confederate Virginia, the U.S. Army promoted him from the substantive rank of major in the Ninth U.S. Infantry to the lieutenant colonelcy of the Tenth. It was an advancement made possible by Charles F. Smith’s transfer out of that regiment earlier in the day to command another unit in the broader Civil War. Smith, a Pennsylvanian, had graduated from West Point ten years earlier than Steptoe, and during 1838–1842 he returned to the academy as commandant of cadets. It was a role in which he instructed several men with whom he later served in Utah, including Barnard E. Bee Jr., Edward R. S. Canby, Lafayette McLaws, John Fulton Reynolds, and Fitz John Porter. In 1848 Smith emerged from the Mexican War with three brevets for valor. In Mexico he had seen it all. Consequently, when Congress expanded the regular army in 1855 by creating four infantry and cavalry regiments, Smith was made the new Tenth’s executive officer in the substantive grade of lieutenant colonel. In that role he oversaw recruitment of the regiment’s troops from scratch and the appointment of a talented officer cadre (some former students) that soon turned the unit into an elite military organization. After less than two years of frontier duty in Wisconsin and Minnesota Territory and sporadic combat with the Sioux, the Tenth was ordered to the Utah Expedition.
Smith’s sterling combat record, relatively senior rank, and the high regard in which he was held brought him assignments as temporary commander of the Tenth, Camp Floyd, and then the Department of Utah while his various superiors were absent, but his involvement in the active phase of the Utah War has gone unnoticed by historians. Consequently, most accounts of the conflict mention him only as commanding a small battalion composed of two of his regiment’s ten companies plus some of the civilian appointees and newspaper reporters accompanying the army during the fall 1857 march to Fort Bridger. In a few cases Mormon writers have also mentioned an incident immediately following the Utah Expedition’s triumphal march through Salt Lake City in which a visiting Nauvoo Legion officer witnessed and recorded a caloric outburst by Smith in Albert Sidney Johnston’s headquarters tent: “Several officers and gentlemen were present. Lieut. Col. Smith of the Tenth Infantry made some remarks disrespectful about the Mormons. One of the company said ‘sir, you had better be aware how you talk about the Mormons, as they might hear you.’ He said he did not care a damn who heard him, he would like to see every damned Mormon hung by the neck. This same Smith is considered one of the flowers of the army.” 8
Charles F. Smith’s near-anonymity in Utah is attributable to the absence of any published letters, diaries, or memoirs generated by him, in contrast to the plethora of such material flowing from or about the Tenth Infantry’s other officers and enlistees. 9 Now Allen H. Mesch has filled this gap with a stunning cache of letters Smith wrote from frontier posts to his young daughter, Fanny Mactier Smith, during the period of December 1855 to February 1861. Mesch discovered this material in the unexploited Charles F. Smith Family Papers at the U.S. Military Academy and figuratively rescued it from the cuttingroom floor, self-publishing it after it had fallen victim to a wrenching 90,000-word reduction to his earlier biography of Smith. 10
For Mesch’s tenacity in recycling this wonderful primary source material excised by a publisher, I am both surprised and grateful.
In writing to daughter Fanny in Annapolis, Maryland, Charles Smith revealed not only his own jaundiced views about Mormonism and its leaders but also occasional tidbits about his brother officers that permit us to piece together answers to some of the Utah Expedition’s mysteries. For example, I have long wondered why Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston selected First Lieutenant Cuvier Grover of the Tenth Infantry for the daunting assignment of Camp Scott’s provost marshal during the winter of 1858, a role in which Grover policed Johnston’s unruly garrison with “unlimited power as such. Life and death is in his hands.” 11 Johnston and Grover left no explanation of this unusual, hazardous assignment, but one likely clue lies buried in Smith’s earlier April 6, 1856, letter to twelve-year-old Fanny from Fort Crawford, Wisconsin. There the colonel casually informed his daughter that “Lt. Col. Canby and myself are going in the stage tomorrow . . . as witnesses before a civil court in Lieut. Grover’s case. You may have heard he killed a soldier last autumn, one of a party of seven deserters who were running away. I was President of a [military] Court of Inquiry by which he was exonerated & have to testify to that fact.” 12 Two years later and supported by eight of Johnston’s toughest infantry sergeants, Grover had the requisite grit and reputation to keep order in the biggest garrison in North America. He would need both qualities to control a camp swarming with gamblers and killers the likes of William C. Quantrill (soon the Civil War’s most notorious guerrilla), where Chief Justice Delana R. Eckels and his clerk were assaulted by drunken troops of the Tenth Infantry in May 1858 and where Thomas L. Kane feared assassination from soldiers, camp followers, and hostile Mormons. 13
Sometimes similar insights emerge from what Colonel Smith did not write to Fanny as well as what he did communicate. Two such subjects come to mind: the reputation of the Tenth’s regimental commander, Colonel Edmund Brooke Alexander, and Smith’s view of his frequent, duty-imposed separations from family. In Alexander’s case we are aware from other sources—the letters of Captain Gove and the journal of Captain Tracy—that some of the Tenth’s company commanders viewed him as a fussy and timid “old woman.” This was disrespect rooted in Alexander’s rigid enforcement of sometimes unpopular regulations, his unwillingness to take command of the Utah Expedition as the senior officer present before Johnston caught up with his troops at Ham’s Fork in early November, and his relatively civil correspondence with Brigham Young before Johnston’s arrival. Smith, the officer with the longest-term relationship and closest proximity to Alexander, neither expressed nor repeated any such criticism of Alexander. His was a reserve that reflects either unusual self-control or a factual situation that calls into question the fairness of traditional criticisms of his commander, especially in light of Alexander’s two brevets for valor in Mexico and his selection in 1855 to lead one of the army’s new regiments. With respect to the family separations endured by Smith, he clearly felt the sacrifice keenly, but his letters are free of the self-pity and anger that pervade the letters of Randolph B. Marcy or George B. McClellan. 14
What Smith did express was a deep-seated contempt and hostility for Mormons and Mormonism that mirrored the attitudes of virtually the entire Utah Expedition, from Albert Sidney Johnston on down, as well as the civilian correspondents who sent dispatches to New York newspapers. In this sense, Charles F. Smith was surely a man of his times.
Among Smith’s most fascinating letters was the one he wrote on April 14, 1858, to describe the controversy then roiling Fort Bridger: whether the recent departures of Alfred Cumming and Thomas L. Kane for Salt Lake City without an army escort was a courageous bid to supplant Brigham Young and assume Cumming’s new office in the face of armed Mormon opposition or part of a byzantine deal staged by Kane with Young’s cooperation to create the appearance of bravery where none existed. Suspecting manipulation by Kane, most of the Utah Expedition’s officers subscribed to the latter view. Charles F. Smith confided his own assessment of this complex political issue to his teenaged daughter:
By January 1861 Fanny Smith was of an age that prompted the colonel to share with her his smoldering rage over the stewardship of the Buchanan administration. In his penultimate letter from Camp Floyd, Charles Smith assailed not the administration’s handling of the Utah War but its posture during the unfolding secession crisis: “The Army has, thank God! Got rid of the roguish administration of Mr. [Secretary of War] Floyd; would to God the country of could only have, months ago, got rid of that miserable imbecile that rejoices in the initials J. B. If he could but hear the curses both loud & deep that are (here) showered on his head for his unreasonable course in permitting matters to go on as they have in Charleston harbor, especially in regard to [resupplying Fort Sumter and Maj. Robert] Anderson, . . . his old bones would rattle in his skin.” 16 It was a view and tone worthy of Brigham Young.
Unlike McFarland’s book, Your Affectionate Father provides several maps of Minnesota and Utah to help readers follow Colonel Smith’s western campaigning; Mesch also makes good use of the images of Camp Floyd and forts Leavenworth, Kearny, Laramie, and Bridger taken during the summer of 1858 by Samuel C. Mills and Edward Jagiello, the photographers who accompanied the Utah Expedition’s topographical engineers.
For readers intrigued by the primary sources about Utah discussed in this review essay, the discovery and publication of more such documents await us. Foremost among researchers likely to break new ground soon is the indefatigable Ephriam D. Dickson III, the deputy chief at the Field Museums Branch, U. S. Army Center of Military History. From him we can expect several studies of the unexploited letters written by the Utah Expedition’s Captain James Hervey Simpson, U.S. Topographical Engineers, and Second Lieutenant George E. Ryan, Seventh U.S. Infantry—materials retrieved by Dickson from such varied places as a Buffalo, New York, newspaper and the archives of a Catholic university. Meanwhile, Vern DeLong, a Pennsylvania businessman, is editing the letters of First Lieutenant Joseph C. Clark Jr., Fourth U.S. Artillery, a trove created at Camp Floyd in 1860–1861 and discovered by DeLong’s family in the proverbial farmhouse attic nearly ten years ago.
The beat goes on.—
Notes
1. William P. MacKinnon, Predicting the Past: The Utah War’s Twenty-First Century Future, Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture Series, no. 14 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2009).
2. In a June 12, 1858, dispatch to the New-York Tribune from Camp Scott (published July 7, 1858), reporter A. G. Browne Jr., told his readers that Buchanan’s peace commissioners Ben McCulloch and Lazarus W. Powell were gentlemen “secure from being Steptoed by any influences which [Brigham] Young can bring to bear on them.” This was a reference to the perception among the army that during the spring Governor Cumming had been suborned by Young in much the way that many people believed Young had overinfluenced Steptoe during the winter of 1855. For the colonel’s comments about Mormon “tampering” with the tribes of the Pacific Northwest, see Steptoe to Mackall, May 29, 1858, Letters Received, HQ Dept. of the Pacific, RG 393, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.
3. Ron McFarland, Edward J. Steptoe and the Indian Wars: Life on the Frontier, 1815–1865 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016), 1.
4. Ibid., 1–2.
5. Because of these promotional impediments, Lee served as a captain of engineers as late in his career as 1855. In 1857, the long-serving colonel commanding the Fourth U.S. Artillery left the army only by virtue of death in his ninety-third year. During April 1858 Buchanan and Floyd felt they had no other choice but to appoint Brevet Major General Persifor Frazer Smith to command the Department of Utah notwithstanding his incapacitation by a chronic ailment; the next month he died at Fort Leavenworth, throwing the army into another succession crisis. Persifor Smith’s successor, Brigadier Gen William S. Harney, was so emotionally unstable that the army had court-martialed him four times, and a civil court in St. Louis had tried him a fifth time. Three months after Harney’s selection for this command, the need arose for a senior officer to lead an Indian campaign in the Pacific Northwest in the wake of Steptoe’s defeat. Again the options atop the army were so narrow that Secretary of War Floyd informed the president, “On this point, I am pretty clear, in my own mind, and cannot doubt but that Genl. Harney is the proper man. I am not sure how Genl. Scott would take this proposition, but Harney is really the only general officer—[A. S.] Johnston alone excepted—who has the physical capacity to conduct such a campaign as this.” Floyd to Buchanan, August 5, 1858, James Buchanan Papers, Collection 91, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
6. For Young’s anxiety over the approaching end to his gubernatorial term and his advice to President Pierce about the need to reappoint him, see Young to Pierce, March 30, 1853, box 50, fd. 1 (reel 63), Brigham Young Collection, CR 1234/1, LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter CHL), and MacKinnon, “Sex, Subalterns, and Steptoe: Army Behavior, Mormon Rage, and Utah War Anxieties,” Utah Historical Quarterly 76, no. 3 (2008): 226–60.
7. David H. Miller, “The Impact of the Gunnison Massacre on Mormon–Federal Relations: Colonel Edward Jenner Steptoe’s Command in Utah Territory, 1854–1855” (master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1968).
8. Historical Department Office Journal, 1844–2012, entries for June 27–29, 1858, CR 100/1, CHL.
9. These individuals include captains Alfred Cumming, Jesse A. Gove, Albert Tracy, and Henry Heth; first lieutenants Lawrence A. Williams and Nathan A. M. Dudley; Second Lieutenant Clarence E. Williams; and privates Henry S. Hamilton, Theodore Boos, and James M. Uhler.
10. Allen H. Mesch, Teacher of Civil War Generals: Major General Charles Ferguson Smith, Soldier and West Point Commandant (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015).
11. Capt. Jesse A. Gove to Mrs. Gove, January 6, 1858, Otis G. Hammond, ed., The Utah Expedition, 1857–1858: Letters of Capt. Jesse A. Gove, 10th Inf., U.S.A., of Concord, N.H., to Mrs. Gove, and Special Correspondence of the New York Herald (Concord: New Hampshire Historical Society, 1928), 113.
12. Allen H. Mesch. Your Affectionate Father, Charles F. Smith (Plano, TX: N. P., 2016), 58–59.
13. John W. Phelps, Diary, June 12, 1858, Series III, S.8, John Wolcott Phelps Papers, MssCol 2399, New York Public Library, New York, New York; William P. MacKinnon, ed., At Sword’s Point, Part 2: A Documentary History of the Utah War, 1858–1859 (Norman, OK.: Arthur H. Clark, 2016), chapters 10 and 12.
14. William P. MacKinnon, ed., At Sword’s Point, Part 1: A Documentary History of the Utah War to 1858 (Norman, OK: Arthur H. Clark, 2008), 204–206 and Part 2, chapter 1. 15. Mesch, Your Affectionate Father, 153–55. 16. Ibid., 198–99.
