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“Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” —Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of State, 1929
During the Utah War of 1857–1858, Brigham Young’s most influential non-Mormon advisor was Thomas L. Kane, the Philadelphia philanthropist who had come to the aid of the Latter-day Saints repeatedly during the previous ten years. Yet for a variety of reasons, there were periods before, during, and after the war, when the two men were out of touch with one another and consequently unaware of each other’s thinking. One of the strangest such gaps in communications arose in the spring and early summer of 1858 following Kane’s departure from Salt Lake City for Philadelphia on May 13 and the arrival of the army’s Utah Expedition on June 26. Young was not to hear from his chief strategist and trusted advisor for another three months, and it was even longer before Kane received any word directly from Young. This was a crucial period of high anxiety during which momentous events occurred in both Utah and Washington.1 The purpose of this article is to surface a heretofore unknown effort by Brigham Young to bridge this latter communications gap through an encrypted message he wrote to Kane on July 21, 1858, that was couriered east and delivered to Kane in Pennsylvania during late September. During the subsequent 163 years, the existence (but not the meaning) of this coded message was known only to a handful of people. Our article outlines the process by which we recently realized there was such a message, worked to access it, collaborated with a small international community of code breakers to decrypt it, and then assessed the message’s historical context and significance. Our intent in presenting this previously “lost” document is to shed new light on the Young-Kane relationship and the plans of these two friends
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Communicating in Code: Brigham Young, Thomas L. Kane, and the “Lost” Utah War Message of July 1858
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