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The Whites Want Every Thing: Indian-Mormon Relations, 1847– 1877. Vol. 16, Kingdom in the West: The Mormons and the American Frontier
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Edited by Will Bagley, with foreword by Floyd A. O’Neil Norman: Arthur H. Clark Company, 2019. 559 pp. Cloth, $55.00
The Whites Want Every Thing: Indian-Mormon Relations, 1847–1877 assembles primary sources on Mormon pioneers’ early relations with Utah’s Native American peoples, with particular emphasis on documents that report Native peoples’ own words. Despite the volume’s somewhat misleading title, most of the documents relate to the years 1847–1858. Summary treatment is given the years 1830–1847 and 1859–1877. Well organized and beautifully illustrated, this sixteenth volume of Arthur H. Clark’s Kingdom in the West series is somewhat marred by frequent typos and a cover that smears the reader’s fingers with green ink. The editor Will Bagley has created no mere documentary sourcebook here. He weaves primary sources together with narrative framing. Although Bagley’s ambition is to allow Native voices to speak, he knows that the sources collected in the volume are “white records of what whites said Indians said” and that to “recover” Native voices from these sources requires an interpretive act. Throughout the volume, his editorializing provides a counterweight to the editorializing of the sources’ authors. Yet he also acknowledges that in “presuming to speak for a people not my own,” he commits “an act of pious fraud” and pens a work of “colonial literature” (20, 25). Many of the sources collected here will be familiar to Utah historians, but others may be new. A western historian of long experience, Bagley draws not only on Mormon pioneer documents, but also on anthropological studies,
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Spanish chronicles, federal government reports, and travel diaries from emigrants who passed through Utah on their way to Oregon and California. These often prove more fruitful than Mormon accounts, for where Mormons wrote as partisans for their settlement project, outsiders took a more critical view. Where Mormon sources almost completely silenced dissident Native people’s voices, for example, federal Indian agents ruefully catalogued the dissidents’ grievances against Mormon settlers. “American good! Mormon no good!” the Ute leader Sowiet told Henry Day. In a perfect inversion of how Mormons portrayed Natives’ perceptions of the two white groups, Sowiet told Day that Americans were “friends,” but that Mormons “kill, steal” (191–92). In characteristic fashion, Bagley engages in at least a little muckraking. For instance, citing evidence that Mormons poisoned Natives, he asserts that the “facts defy denial.” Said facts, however, show conclusively that Mormons contemplated the use of poison and that Natives believed it had been used, but not that any specific act of poisoning occurred (526). Yet Bagley, always a sharp critic of Mormon leaders, also gives them some credit here. There was at least one “profound difference” between the way Latter-day Saint theology imagined Indians and the way the American literary canon did: the novelist James Fenimore Cooper’s “Indians were the last of a doomed race,” while Joseph Smith’s “Lamanites were a chosen people,” destined for survival (41–42). Smith’s successor Brigham Young may have talked of controlling and exterminating Native groups, but he also advised mercy and defensive strategies more often than his followers liked. “Historians who shift accountability for the brutality shown to Native peoples from leaders to followers have a point,” Bagley writes (524). For all its aspiration to recover Native voices, Whites Want Every Thing is first and foremost a collection of documents about Mormon
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