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Communicating in Code
Communicating in Code: Brigham Young, Thomas L. Kane, and the “Lost” Utah War Message of July 1858
BY KENNETH L. ALFORD AND WILLIAM P. MACKINNON
“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 for dealing with the federal government in the immediate aftermath of the Utah War’s military phase. We also want to provide a dramatic example of the value of interdisciplinary collaboration among archivists, historians, and cryptologists to enrich the historical record.
Figures 1 (top) and 2 (bottom). Brigham Young’s encrypted July 21, 1858, message to Thomas L. Kane. Encoded in Utah, couriered east by Hugh McElrath, and decrypted in Pennsylvania during September 1858 by Elizabeth Kane and again by an international collaboration of professionals in December 2020, this two-page letter communicated the essence of Young’s agenda for postwar Utah with a frankness not possible through a plain text message sent via US mail. Courtesy of Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Library, and curator George A. Miles.
Latter-day Saints Encrypted: Context
As the historian Ardis E. Parshall has noted, the Utah War was not the first use of coded communications by Latter-day Saints. 2 As early as 1835, when the first edition of the Doctrine and Covenants was published, code names appeared throughout the book replacing the names of people, places, and properties associated with the United Firm, the church’s early financial organization. 3 As Parshall writes, “In part because [Thomas L.] Kane was so often consulted for sensitive political advice, and in part because his correspondence had to pass through many unknown and mistrusted hands, a number of codes are associated with him.” Kane is known to have used simple substitution ciphers (where one letter is consistently substituted for another), as well as more complex transposition codes (where words or letters are transformed through a series of alterations). During the Utah War, when he was in Salt Lake City and Fort Bridger, Kane often used his wife Elizabeth to decipher coded messages he intended his father and President Buchanan to read. As Parshall concludes, “The use of codes was an expression of both vigilance and ingenuity.” 4
George A. Miles, the curator of the Yale Collection of Western Americana at the Beinecke Library. His predecessor, Archibald Hanna Jr., used his talents to build an extraordinary collection of documents about the West, including important materials dealing with Thomas L. Kane. Miles has taken the collection to a new level, while acquiring primary sources about nineteenth-century Utah. Courtesy David Ottenstein Photography.
War and Peace, an Uncertain Future for Utah
Readers of this journal hardly need a rehash of the Utah War’s origins and prosecution, although a reminder of its conclusion and Young’s view of the future may be helpful.
By late March 1858 President Young was a man beleaguered, one surrounded by existential threats, with seemingly no escape routes available. It was this encirclement, intolerable pressure to do something, and perhaps divine guidance that prompted Young to change strategy. He shifted plans from a direct military conflict with the army in the Rockies and on the Great Plains to a different, more defensive strategy. Under this stunning new thrust, the Latter-day Saints abandoned Salt Lake City and northern Utah, prepared their infrastructure for incineration, and launched a flight south— first to a gathering spot at Provo and then to a more distant haven, perhaps northern Mexico. The Nauvoo Legion was to continue its defense of the mountain passes into the Salt Lake Valley while fighting a rearguard action if necessary to protect women and children. Involving 30,000 people, the “Move South” was the greatest flight of refugees in North America since the American Revolution. 5
While leading this abrupt about-face, Young focused on Utah’s future under likely military occupation and an uncertain period of federally dictated “reconstruction.” 6 Central to his thinking were the merits of yet another change in strategy. What Young began to conceive in Provo and continued after terminating the Move South in early July, was the notion of dealing with the United States government post-war through a comprehensive campaign of political manipulation, legal challenges, and public relations initiatives. If Carl von Clausewitz, the great military strategist, had postulated that “war is merely the continuation of politics by other means,” what unfolded in Utah during the last half of 1858 and beyond was the converse of this concept. After June 26, armed confrontation morphed into a continuum of nonmilitary but still contentious legal, image, and political struggles. The New York Herald’s Utah correspondent described the early stages of this transformation two weeks after the Utah Expedition marched through Salt Lake City, noting that “we do not now head our articles ‘the Mormon war’ but we may yet have to do so, for the Mormon and Gentile war is just commencing. It will at first be in accordance with the forms of law, but may not end so.” 7
The opening gambit in this campaign was already in motion by the time General Albert Sidney Johnston reached Salt Lake City and even then was playing out in James Buchanan’s Executive Mansion as well as at the editorial offices of several Manhattan newspapers. In this early stage of the strategy, facilitated by a discreet flow of church cash, Thomas L. Kane was the prime mover and the shaper of a new image for Young. Young’s anxiety to keep covert his linkage to Kane, as well as the global scope of his ambitions, shows in his operating instructions to Horace S. Eldredge, his business agent in St. Louis. As Eldredge prepared to travel east, Young told him, “let your intercourse with Col. Kane be confidential, and move from place to place without attracting more than necessary notice . . . not that we think you . . . [are] apt to make any unnecessary display, but simply as a caution to be wise and discreet, and while you with our good friend [Kane], move the whole world no one will know who has done it.” 8 It was within this context of strategic change and secrecy that Young’s message to Kane of July 21, 1858, took shape.
Odyssey of a Strange Message
The identity of the person who helped Young to formulate and then encrypt this message on July 21—three weeks after the arrival of the Utah Expedition—is unknown, but, based on knowledge of Young’s penmanship, office routine, and use of clerical-stenographic help, we are confident Young did not perform this task unaided. 9 Once the job was completed, Young apparently felt there were additional things he wanted to communicate to Kane that were less sensitive than those he felt the need to encrypt. Accordingly, the next day (July 22) he dictated a four-page letter that rambled through such subjects as his discussions with Buchanan’s peace commissioners, troop movements, termination of the Move South, Indian relations, and even his outdoor excursions. In this plain text letter, Young also felt free to ask Kane’s help with the mundane task of obtaining a wide variety of reference books, including the charter and municipal laws of New York City. Upon finishing this dictation, Young asked his correspondence clerk not to finalize the rough draft for his signature but to hold it open undated, presumably so he could add information if needed.
Young then faced the practical problem of how to transmit these two documents nearly two thousand miles to Kane in Philadelphia. Normally, absent snow in the Rockies and on the Great Plains, this would have required transit time of about thirty days by US mail. But for such documents, use of the federal infrastructure was out of the question in view of Young’s firmly held belief that postmasters and their contractors routinely monitored his mail. Accordingly, as Young prepared these two messages—one encoded and the other in plain text—he would have begun the search for an eastbound Latter-day Saint or a trusted non-Mormon to serve as a courier. He found the latter in Hugh McDowell McElrath, a visiting representative of the New York mercantile firm of Robertson, Hudson and Pulliam.
McElrath had arrived in a deserted Salt Lake City about June 26, which makes it likely he had traveled at least part of the way west under the protection of the Utah Expedition. The purpose of his trip was to collect for his employer a longstanding debt of $37,000 owed by Hooper and Williams, an over-extended Utah mercantile firm. Young had no direct business interest in this complex affair, but since 1855 he had tried to resolve it by corresponding with Robertson, Hudson and Pulliam on behalf of a hardpressed and frequently absent Captain William H. Hooper. 10 When upon arrival in Salt Lake City he did not receive immediate satisfaction from Hooper, McElrath decided to press his case directly with Young, whom he had never met. He borrowed Hooper’s carriage and drove to Provo, headquarters for the Move South, with Lemuel Fillmore, a nephew of former president Millard Fillmore who was in Utah as war correspondent for the New York Herald. As Fillmore told his readers, once in Provo:
Hugh McDowell McElrath, a courier for Brigham Young. Young entrusted this non-Mormon, southern businessman to hand carry messages to Thomas Kane several times in the 1850s. Uniformed here as a Confederate quartermaster officer before his death in 1863. Courtesy of McElrath Family Archives.
Whatever the discussions were in Provo between Hugh McElrath and Brigham Young, they produced results. When McElrath returned to Salt Lake City on July 1 with Young and most of the senior Latter-day Saint leaders, he received payment of the entire $37,000 debt in gold coin. It was a resolution of Hooper and Williams’s outstanding obligation on a basis far more favorable than that extended to the firm’s other creditors. With the New Yorker now obliged to him for this favor, Young obtained his agreement to serve as courier. As McElrath prepared to leave Salt Lake City in early August, probably aboard the eastbound Hockaday mail coach, Young instructed his correspondence clerk to finalize the letter he had dictated for Kane on July 22 by adding the date (August 6) as well as a postscript explaining to Kane that both documents were being carried by McElrath and introducing him as an agent of the Robertson firm. When McElrath arrived in Philadelphia in early September 1858, he learned that the Kanes were spending the summer in Elk County because, unknown to him and Young, Thomas had begun a new job as agent for a land development company in proximity to his family’s unexploited timber holdings in western Pennsylvania. Rather than backtrack several hundred miles to make the delivery in person, McElrath put the Young communications in the US mail to Elk County where they arrived on September 24, 1858, and continued on to New York. This would not be the last time Young called upon McElrath for such courier service. 13
Young’s plain text letter dated August 6 remained with the Kane family for nearly 140 years and was then acquired by Brigham Young University (BYU), but what became of Young’s encrypted message and the decoded version created by the Kanes in September 1858 is a mystery in terms of their provenance. There is no copy of either document in the massive accumulation of documents generated and retained by Young and the members of the Kane family and now housed largely in the research collections of the Church History Library and BYU’s Harold B. Lee Library. At some point, presumably in the late 1960s or early 1970s, the encrypted version of Young’s message gravitated to Talmadge N. “Tal” Luther, a Massachusetts native who since his graduation from Yale in 1950 had become a bibliophile and antiquarian bookseller based first in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, and then Taos, New Mexico. Luther, whose collecting and selling focused on the American West, offered this document for sale in his Catalogue 63 as item 149. Luther described the document simply as “written in code” and offered the observation, “Any expert in cryptography would find of interest.” 14 In February 1972, Archibald Hanna Jr., curator of the Yale Collection of Western Americana (YCWA) and one of Tal Luther’s frequent customers, bought the coded letter for ten dollars. It remains at Yale today.
Why Archie Hanna acquired a message he could not read is another of the mysteries associated with the document since it left the Kane family’s possession. One of us (MacKinnon) first met Hanna in 1958 and was a colleague and friend until his death in 2010. MacKinnon now speculates about two likely explanations. First is the lure of encryption, an attraction that might have appealed to Hanna’s World War II experience as a Marine Corps intelligence officer specializing in translating Japanese radio intercepts. Perhaps more compelling is the likelihood that the curator saw this document as a possible complement to his collection’s substantial holdings dealing with the Utah War. Although the message had only a single phrase in plain text (the heading “Great Salt Lake City July 21, 1858”), that might have been a clue sufficient to prompt Hanna to risk a small investment on the chance that the message was war-related and could eventually be deciphered. 15 And so encrypted and therefore unexploited, this document settled into nearly half a century of benign neglect in a file labeled “Uncatalogued Western Americana Manuscript” in Yale’s elegant Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
When Hanna retired in 1981, his successor as curator was George A. Miles. Over the next forty years, Miles continued to build the YCWA in his own way, doing so with emphasis on acquiring and preserving materials relating to the history of the Latter-day Saints and the Utah War. 16 In 2020, with the stresses and changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, Miles concluded the time was appropriate for urging Yale’s library cataloguing department to come to grips with the substantial processing backlog afflicting Beinecke. Unknown to MacKinnon, among the items Miles succeeded in having catalogued was his predecessor’s enigmatic 1972 acquisition.
Later that year, on November 17, MacKinnon telephoned Miles, as he often did, to discuss YCWA. Near the end of this conversation, there was a pause, and Miles casually commented that MacKinnon might be interested to know that the cataloguing department had recently processed one of the oddities in the YCWA long overdue for attention. He then described the coded letter in terms of what little he knew about the Luther-Hanna transaction forty-eight years earlier and the document’s brief heading in plain text.
Although neither the message’s author and recipient nor its content were then known, Curator Miles’s description was enough to immediately resonate with MacKinnon’s more than sixty years of involvement in Utah War research. When MacKinnon raised the possibility of a connection between this document and the Utah War, Miles assured him he had already shaped the new catalogue entry for what was now officially styled “WA MSS S-4203 Un21” (Undecoded cipher letter, Great Salt Lake City, Utah, 1858 July 21) so that it read, in part, “The letter may relate to the Utah Expedition.” MacKinnon asked Miles if it would be possible to scan and send this document to him electronically, which Miles did. 17
As a noncryptologist, MacKinnon began the search for someone who could decode it. Later on November 17, he called genealogist, historian, and friend, Ardis E. Parshall of Salt Lake City, who he knew had a longstanding interest in the use of codes by the Latter-day Saints during the nineteenth century. Upon seeing the message, Parshall’s reaction was that it had been encrypted using a code unfamiliar to her, but she agreed to help MacKinnon think through what type of code had been used. There followed several days of exchanged emails during which Parshall became increasingly convinced that what was at hand was not an example of a simple “substitution code” but rather one that used a prearranged grid, overlay, or shared key.
On December 4, MacKinnon exchanged emails with Parshall, observing: “This letter has to have been encrypted by someone in a key role in the church, army, or among the merchants, newspaper reporters, or federal appointees, yet I can’t think of a single instance of any such person using such a cipher during the Utah War in all the documents I’ve seen over the decades. All of the ‘usual suspects’ have transmitted documents/ messages that were very sensitive, but to my knowledge they were all in plain text, with security concerns being met by use of trusted couriers rather than the mails or use of cut-outs at the Salt Lake City end of the communications chain. The person only remotely in this ballpark was Thomas L. Kane, who did use a cipher system during his sojourn in Utah to transmit dispatches to his family using a matching Bible on both ends of the message flow.”
At this juncture, MacKinnon’s mind turned to a BYU church history professor, Kenneth L. Alford, with whom he was already collaborating on a monograph about a quite different Utah War subject. 18 Alford’s earlier professional career involved service as a US Army colonel, and MacKinnon’s thought was that, although not a cryptologist himself, he might have contacts familiar with that world. On December 4, 2020, MacKinnon briefed Alford on Yale’s intriguing document, asking “do you have any military friends knowledgeable about cryptology who might be willing to take a look at this document just for the fun of it?” And it turns out he did.
Professor Alford contacted Robert Simpson, Librarian of the National Cryptologic Museum, an affiliate of the National Security Agency at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, on December 7. Simpson, in turn, put Alford in touch with a German cryptologist, Klaus Schmeh, who is an international expert on the history of encryption, a prolific author, and the proprietor of Cipherbrain, a leading Internet blog focusing on this subject. 19
Schmeh informed Alford that he and Elonka Dunin, an American video game developer and cryptologist, would be giving an online presentation on December 12 during the International Conference on Cryptologic History. Fortuitously, the Schmeh-Dunin presentation was to focus on unsolved cryptographic mysteries, and they agreed to include the 1858 Salt Lake City document in their discussion. Schmeh and Dunin graciously allowed Alford to answer questions from online attendees after their conference presentation. The previous day, Schmeh had posted images of the July 1858 letter on his website and challenged his readers to decrypt it. 20
Schmeh’s invitation was accepted by Adam Sampson—an associate professor of computer science at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. After several days of guess work and experimentation, Sampson pieced together the original transpositional encryption scheme and decoded the first page. His solution was posted on Schmeh’s blog on December 28, 2020. The second page was decoded through the collaborative efforts of Matthew Brown, an amateur cryptologist living in England, and Sampson. 21
Through this unpredictable chain of events, the challenge of this document moved through a variety of conventional and electronic means from Brigham Young’s office in Salt Lake City on July 21, 1858, to “stops” in Pennsylvania, Kansas, Connecticut, California, Utah, Maryland, Germany, and then, near the end of 2020, to the Internet and the arcane international community of cryptologists and computer scientists. In terms of provenance alone, it is a story replete with examples of the power of technological change, serendipity, and collaboration. At any step along the way during the course of this 162-year odyssey an interruption to these forces and events would have consigned this enigmatic message to an even longer period of obscurity. That this did not happen is a lesson worth considering within the context of the research processes used by historians and other scholars.
Encrypting and Decoding Brigham Young’s Message: 1858 and 2020
The solution to determining the code’s origins and use by Young in July 1858 lies in an understanding of the coded messages Kane sent to his family from Salt Lake City and Fort Bridger earlier that year that were decrypted in Philadelphia and then couriered to President Buchanan. As those letters have survived only in plain text (decrypted) form, we were dependent for an understanding of their origins on a description of them contained in an unpublished manuscript, “Mother of the Regiment,” Elizabeth Kane wrote in the late nineteenth century to describe the role she and her husband played in the Civil War. In that document Elizabeth devoted a chapter to husband Thomas’s 1858 Utah mission and made clear that the code they used during the Utah War was one devised in the early 1800s by Dr. Robert Patterson, a prominent Philadelphia mathematician-cryptographer and relative by marriage of Judge John K. Kane, Thomas’s father. The judge was to name his fourth son Robert Patterson Kane in honor of the mathematician.
Based on this understanding, we believe Young used a cipher devised by Patterson, shared by him with Judge Kane, and carried to Utah by Thomas L. Kane during the winter of 1857– 1858. Before departing Utah for Pennsylvania in mid-May 1858, Thomas instructed Young or one of his confidants in the code’s use and left its key in Salt Lake City to encrypt future confidential communications. 22
Here is one plausible way that the July 21 message may have been encoded. First, all spaces and punctuation were removed from Young’s plain text message. Second, guided by the key, a specific number of meaningless, nonmessage letters (“key values”) were written on each line. For example, there are 23 nonmessage letters on row 1 (“abcdlmnmopstvwxyqrsmnoj”); 10 nonmessage letters on row 2 (“lmnopqrstg”), repeated down the page. Third, the message text begins immediately after the leading nonmessage (“junk”) letters—at the 24th letter on the first line, the 11th letter on the second line, and so forth. The plain text message was then written, one letter per row, down the page (e.g., writing d on line 1, e on line 2, a on line 3). At the bottom of the page,
the scribe returned to the top line and continued the process until each line “hid” 24 letters of the original message. The first two words in the message, for example, are “Dear Colonel.” 23 The resulting message text “hidden” on the first line of page 1 is “delnthdediesenritfhilpfa.” (See figures 1 and 2.) Finally, a varying number of nonmessage letters were added at the end of lines that were too short, such as “vvwymnopghijk” added on the second line of page 1. 24
The encoding process was the same on page 2, with three exceptions. First, the second page used different key values to determine how many meaningless characters begin each line. Second, there are only 8 message characters per line, instead of 24. And third, there are 25 lines on the page instead of 23. The decryption key Young and Kane possessed included two essential elements: the number of meaningful message characters on each line (24 on page 1 and 8 on page 2) and the varying character position where the message text begins on each line. Therefore, we infer that the decryption key may have looked something like this. 25
Page 1 Decryption Key
24 “hidden” message characters per line.
Character positions where the message text begins on lines 1–23:
24, 11, 3, 23, 9, 4, 7, 21, 22, 19, 7, 7, 20, 5, 14, 21, 7, 2, 14, 24, 21, 10, 17
Page 2 Decryption Key 8 “hidden” message characters per line.
Character positions where the message text begins on lines 1–25:
14, 21, 21, 5, 5, 21, 17, 13, 17, 20, 21, 4, 4, 16, 3, 2, 9, 4, 8, 24, 21, 7, 16, 21, 9
It may be worth noting that as none of the key values exceed twenty-six, the decryption key may have originally been based on a shared book or document, such as the first letters of verses in a specified chapter in the Bible, for example.
Figures 3 and 4. Transcriptions of page 1 (top) and page 2 (bottom) of Young’s letter, highlighting the hidden message text.
Figure 5. The reassembled text of the original message. The letters in column 1 (“delnthdediesenritfhilpfa”) are the same as the hidden message text on line 1 from page 1. Column 2 is the same as line 2 and so forth.
Elizabeth Kane recorded in her journal the arrival of the coded communication from Brigham Young: “On Friday,” September 24, 1858, “came a letter and cipher from B.Y. wh[ich] I spent the evening in making out.” 26 Even though she was surely in possession of the key, it would have taken her several hours to reassemble the intended message from the coded letter. The first page has pencil marks on most lines that were presumably made by Elizabeth Kane as she labored to decipher the letter. Most pencil marks are correctly placed, but curiously some are not (such as lines 2 and 4). Elizabeth also crossed out characters on several lines (3, 6, 13, 15, and 16) to correctly identify the beginning of the encoded text on those lines. Interestingly, there are no pencil marks on the second page. Perhaps she was sufficiently comfortable with the decoding process by that point to make their use unnecessary.
Without the benefit of the original key, cryptologists faced a more daunting challenge to decipher the letter in 2020 than Elizabeth Kane did in 1858. After several false starts, Kane’s pencil marks provided an essential insight into how the code might have been constructed. As Professor Sampson, who cracked the code, observed, “On both pages, the runs of alphabetic sequences and repeated characters do not continue across line breaks, which suggested that the line structure was important, and the runs were probably filler. There are also some pencil marks that look like they are dividing the lines into sections. This turned out to be right . . . each line has a variable amount of junk at the start and the end, and on the first page there are 24 meaningful characters on each [line].” 27
Deciphering the second page proved more difficult because Elizabeth Kane left no pencil marks to serve as breadcrumbs in pursuing the encryption trail that started in Salt Lake City. Encoding shortcuts taken in the summer of 1858, though, provided significant clues to solving the puzzle in 2020 because the scribe who created the letter was apparently lazy or bored or both. The much shorter width of the message text on page 2 (only 8 letters versus 24) meant the scribe had to add more nonmessage characters on each line. The last twelve lines on page two contain increasingly long sequences of the same consecutive letter (i, g, h, j, y, a, m, w, r), which enabled Sampson and Brown to identify where the coded message text ended on each line. Through a process of trial and error, they determined the width of the message text on the second page and were able to reconstruct the original message in its entirety.
Meanings
With this background we now turn to the plain text of Brigham Young’s relatively brief message and our analysis of its significance and meaning.
Given the fact that one day later Young wrote a much longer letter in plain text to Thomas Kane and that both communications were couriered east by Hugh McElrath in early August, historians may be tempted to discount the value of the encrypted message as somehow superseded by the second message. To do so would, in our view, be a mistake. The substance of the two documents is complementary rather than duplicative, and to marginalize the shorter, encoded message is to miss its importance at a critical juncture in Utah’s history as a distillation of Young’s priorities for the territory’s future. Here is a focus that provides historians (as it did Thomas L. Kane) with a summary glimpse into Young’s thinking free of the distractions of the rambling style that often shaped his prolix office dictations (such as that of July 22, 1858) as well as his sometimes hours-long Sunday discourses.
Great Salt Lake City July 21st 1858
Dear Colonel,
The stock driven from the command last fall were offered to, received, and receipted for by the quartermaster, a sad mistake by the General. 28 Gov. Cummin[g] is bold for law and the rights of the people, and Sec. Hartnett and Suprtdnt. Forney stand by him. 29 The pageboys commissioners talked much and handed us the pardon, which we accepted as far as burning wagons and driving stock were concerned. 30 The rest you know. There is some contention between the law-abiding and the camp followers. Can you aid us in the removal of the troops? Officers, soldiers, and camp followers feel themselves completely whipped. 31 A petition for the appointment of certain men has been forwarded [y] to President Buchanan with the approval of Gov. Cumming and Doctor Forney. A duplicate is enclosed to you. 32 Can you induce a favorable action thereon? We shall change our delegate. Who shall we send? Give us a name. Yours would look splendid. [lymdgwrs] 33
Stripped of Utah’s governorship, beset by apprehensions of assassination and accountability for the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and embarrassed by the unfulfilled bravado of his quixotic pursuit of a “Sebastopol strategy,” creation of the Army of Israel, and execution of the Move South, by the time the Utah Expedition marched through Salt Lake City Young had withdrawn to the safety and isolation of his walled, heavily guarded compound. He cancelled worship services and other public appearances. 34
Yet by the third week in July, Young’s resilience had returned. Although still sequestered and subdued, he resumed his ongoing efforts to shape the Latter-day Saints’ future. By July 19, his old combativeness flared to the point of a near clash in his office with army guide Ben Ficklin when Ficklin took umbrage over a casual reference Young made about Secretary of War John B. Floyd, a fellow Virginian. 35 Only two days later, his encrypted message of July 21 set forth for Kane’s use Young’s agenda for a new life—one in uncomfortable proximity to the US Army while beset by the continued burden of unwanted federal political appointees.
Aside from its value as a colorful example of Latter-day Saint use of codes, the primary significance of this document rests with the way in which it signaled two of Young’s most important priorities: the removal or significant reduction in the new federal military presence in Utah, and a wholesale purge of the federal officials President Buchanan had appointed not much more than a year earlier.
The matter of troops in the territory was especially sensitive because of the longstanding perception by Latter-day Saints that the federal government had earlier failed to provide military protection in the face of persecution in Missouri and Illinois. Equally if not more important was the fact that when Buchanan ordered the Utah Expedition to garrison the territory in the spring of 1857, there was no permanent federal military presence in Utah. In this sense, the place was quite unlike every other state and territory that surrounded it. The result was that Governor Brigham Young soon grew accustomed to operating 2,000 miles from Washington without the restraining influence that often came with proximity to army posts and military commanders with an independent reporting relationship to the government’s Executive Branch.
Thus, by the commencement of the Utah War, the stage was set for a determined effort by Young to bar federal troops from entering the territory. On September 15, 1857, he took formal action on this intent by issuing an unprecedented gubernatorial proclamation of martial law. This decree described the approaching Utah Expedition and its thousands of camp followers as “a hostile force . . . an armed mercenary mob” and prohibited “All armed forces of every description from coming into this Territory under any pretence whatever.” As weather conditions and harassment by the Nauvoo Legion forced Johnston’s troops into winter quarters two months later at Fort Bridger, just inside Utah’s northeastern border, a beleaguered Young worried about their likely move on the Salt Lake Valley in the spring. As that time came, he also experienced recurring nightmares of armed assaults on his person by Johnston and other army officers. In early May, Young made his priority explicit by instructing his covert agent on the staff of New York’s Herald that “the objects to be first moved for are the prevention of any re-enforcement to the troops now in our borders and the withdrawal of those troops at the earliest date upon which it can [be accomplished].” 36
How Thomas L. Kane reacted in September 1858 upon decoding Young’s July plea for aid “in the removal of the troops” is unclear, but action indeed took place to bring partial, if not complete, relief. This result came from two forces in play during the summer of 1858 in addition to lobbying by Kane and others: the staggering, unsustainable cost of the Utah Expedition in the midst of the nation’s worst economic downturn in twenty years, and the impact of Indian outbreaks in both the Pacific Northwest and in the Southwest. 37
Consequently, even as McElrath carried Young’s messages east, the war department diverted regiments already in Utah and others on the march from Kansas Territory to meet these unexpected needs. Much of the enormous force of infantry and artillery units westbound on the Oregon Trail under General William Harney was halted in Nebraska Territory and ordered back to Fort Leavenworth.
Unknown to Young, the day before he encrypted his priorities to send east, Kane rose from his sick bed and dictated a memorandum to be couriered west in which he too touched on troop levels. Kane treated the matter as an important one, but he ranked it behind the achievement of statehood in his priorities for Utah. Not gripped with apprehension of summary execution as Young was, Kane was almost relaxed about ridding Utah of a federal military presence: “As for the late War—it will end for good with the withdrawal of the present forces from the [Great] Basin.—Get them, out quietly— let me have a few sound facts and arguments [to] spread before the nation, and, my word for it, you have seen your last soldier marched across the plains—have heard your last forever of all such wickedness and folly.” 38 Notwithstanding Kane’s optimism, it took nearly three more years and the advent of the Civil War for Young to free Utah entirely of US troops. Once accomplished, this respite lasted only slightly more than a year.
If ridding Utah of US troops headed Young’s priorities in the immediate aftermath of the Utah War, what rivaled it was the need to replace or marginalize the most objectionable civilians holding federal office in the territory. As Young saw it, both thrusts were essential to freeing Utah from its quasi-colonial status as a ward of Congress during its uncertain political passage toward statehood. Young’s critics perceived such priorities as simply his way of shaking loose from the inhibitions of federal oversight and supervision.
Thomas L. Kane, confidant of Brigham Young. Photo, reflecting his continuing ill health, taken by Elizabeth Kane ca. 1859. Courtesy of HBLL, BYU.
Elizabeth D. W. Kane. Judge Kane taught Elizabeth to use the code created by a relative, Robert Patterson. She decrypted messages sent east first by her husband and then by Brigham Young. Photo taken May 12, 1858, her twenty-second birthday. Courtesy of HBLL, BYU.
In his encrypted message to Kane, former governor Young mentioned several among the incumbents whom he considered reasonably friendly to the Latter-day Saints and also referred to the development of a petition urging removal of other office holders. Neither comment was a casual one; both signaled to Kane the importance in Young’s thinking of an integrated, two-pronged strategy he had launched to defend Utah during her long post-war period of political and societal reconstruction.
The first of these thrusts, conceived nearly two months before the Utah Expedition marched through Salt Lake City, was one of divide and conquer. This was not Young’s terminology, but it aptly describes his effort, with Kane’s help, to befriend and then dominate his successor, Alfred Cumming. Tactics used by both men were a combination of flattery, intimidation, and possible blackmail. 39 At the same time, Young worked to draw into his orbit as many as possible of the other federal appointees. Those officials unwilling to accept such an alignment assumed the status of so-called antis, perhaps with their safety in jeopardy.
Brigham Young, his church’s president, circa 1855–1865. Although no longer Utah’s governor or superintendent of Indian affairs, he was still the territory’s acknowledged ruler, shaping its relationship with the US government during Utah’s long period of “reconstruction.” Courtesy of Library of Congress, LC- BH82-4714.
A comprehensive description of the means by which Young accomplished such a split is available elsewhere and need not be rehashed here. 40 Suffice it to say that by the time he encrypted his message to Kane, the former governor was well on the way to dividing Utah’s federal establishment, with more polarization to come as the rest of the new officials arrived in Salt Lake City.
The related matter of the petition to which Young referred on July 21 likewise took shape before the army’s arrival but did not become an important part of Young’s maneuvering until slightly later than his efforts to create factionalism. By way of context, we note that Latter-day Saint petitions to the US government seeking removal of obnoxious federal appointees had a long and unhappy history. In public at least, prior to the spring of 1858 Brigham Young tended to rail against Utah’s federal appointees as a corrupt, ineffective class rather than to name worthless officials individually. Usually such criticism was accompanied by a pointed explanation that Utah’s culture and society were so isolated, expensive, and peculiar that only Latter-day Saints or perhaps those office seekers sympathetic to them could or should be induced to accept appointment in the Great Basin. 41 With the army poised to resume its march on the Salt Lake Valley in the spring of 1858, the gloves came off, and obnoxious officials were identified. Perhaps alarmed by Young’s extraordinary letter to him of May 8 hinting at possible violence awaiting such appointees, Governor Cumming, with Kane’s help, drafted a long memo reciting Latter-day Saint grievances and urging the removal of chief justice Eckels, US attorney John M. Hockaday, secretary John Hartnett, and perhaps others such as Hiram F. Morrell, Salt Lake City’s postmaster, and Indian agent Garland Hurt. Cumming addressed this document to congressman James L. Orr, speaker of the US House, who, in turn, sent it to Buchanan. Kane served as the courier between Salt Lake City and Washington, then carrying it from Capitol Hill to the Executive Mansion. 42
As June unfolded in Utah, Young concluded that the best way to bring about a change in the appointees who afflicted Utah was through a petition to Washington, although he understood the need for care, given the backlash produced by earlier such memorials. He would have to resolve several tactical issues to shape such a document: to whom should it be addressed; the petition’s length and tone; who should sign it; which appointees should be targeted for removal and why; who should be the presumed Latter-day Saints to replace them; and what part in this gambit should Cumming and Kane play? This was the petition Young would later copy and send to Kane via the coded message of July 21.
With Kane’s unavailability in Pennsylvania, Young turned for a draftsman and strategist to Brigadier General James Ferguson, the Nauvoo Legion’s Belfast-born adjutant general. Because Young was in Provo leading the Move South, it fell to Ferguson to deal with Alfred Cumming in Salt Lake City once the church president determined that the governor was to be key in facilitating a favorable reception in Washington for such a petition. 43
By the last week in June 1858, with the Utah Expedition marching through the Wasatch mountains, Ferguson’s drafting had progressed to the point that in a letter to Cumming on an unrelated subject, Young added a postscript noting, “Any assistance you can render Genl. Ferguson in obtaining signatures from your friends to the petition which he bears with him as well as your own signature would be esteemed a favor.”
Not surprisingly, word that such a petition was taking shape found its way to the cadre of newspaper reporters camped in a near-empty Salt Lake City to await the army’s arrival. Early on the morning of June 26, several hours before the Utah Expedition marched into town, James W. Simonton, correspondent for New York’s Times, put his latest dispatch aboard the eastbound mail coach. After listing the officials believed to be targeted for removal and the reasons as well as their rumored successors, Simonton wrote, “We shall see now whether justice or the Mormons are strongest in their influence over the Administration of James Buchanan.” He then added a long paragraph criticizing Cumming’s role in creating and forwarding such a document, urged his recall, and described the governor as “naturally excitable, and notoriously gets steam up to an alarming point over the whisky-jug. . . . He is, withal, vain as a boy of 13, and offensively imagines himself the embodiment of all that is great and grand.” Simonton concluded, “I suggest that Mr. Buchanan send his nomination[s] here for confirmation [by Brigham Young], rather than to the Senate of the United States.” 44
The petition, transmitted to Buchanan via Cumming’s organizational superior, secretary of state Lewis Cass, was close to what Cumming had urged Ferguson to finalize and what reporter Simonton had ferreted out of legion major Seth M. Blair, Young’s nominee to replace Judge Eckels. Here was a result Young had hoped for during the closing weeks of the Utah War and for which he, with Kane’s help, would advocate during the period of reconstruction that followed. As a matter of strategy, Cumming did not sign this document, although sixty prominent church, Nauvoo Legion, and business leaders did sign, including Young. No action was taken on these recommendations, and there is no trace of this petition in federal records. The copy that Young transmitted to Kane via his encrypted message of July 21 ultimately gravitated to Yale’s Beinecke Library but for some reason did so separately from the coded transmittal message. 45
After he returned to Washington in August 1858, peace commissioner Ben McCulloch wrote Blair, his old comrade-in-arms from the Texas Rangers, “One word as to [federal] government officials in Utah; I don’t think this administration will remove any of its appointees, until they have given them a fair chance to show whether they are honest and competent. This is the opinion of your friend.” 46 He was right.
Although neither Young’s coded message nor the copy of the accompanying petition to the Buchanan administration that it transmitted to Kane on an informational basis mentioned the need to keep Governor Cumming in office, that thought went without saying. His retention was indeed essential to the effectiveness of Young’s and Kane’s strategy for transforming the period of reconstruction that followed the Utah War into a nonmilitary campaign to benefit the Latter-day Saints. Increasingly, as 1858 and 1859 unfolded, such retention grew precarious as non-Mormon criticism of Cumming’s role in shepherding the petition of June 25 to Washington and perceptions that Young had, in effect, co-opted the new governor’s independence grew exponentially. To Kane fell the major responsibility for shoring up Cumming’s political viability with the Buchanan administration. How and when Kane went about doing this falls beyond the scope of this article, but it is the primary focus of the article immediately following in this journal. 47
Afterword
When Thomas L. Kane departed Philadelphia to attend Brigham Young’s funeral in August 1877, he did so under an alias, much as he had as assumed the identity of “Dr. Osborne” for his 1858 mission to Utah. Twenty years later, the use of an alias may have again comforted Kane, but it failed to mislead the alert Mormon bodyguards who in 1877 swung aboard his train in search of their protectee a thousand miles east of Salt Lake City. After the funeral, Kane beheld the splendors of northeastern Utah for the last time as his eastbound Union Pacific train rocked and swayed through Echo Canyon. As the red sandstone cliffs passed, he reached for his diary to record thoughts of Young’s role in the Utah War. The meaning of Kane’s written musings remains as cryptic and enigmatic as the day he wrote them. 48
We choose to believe that in September 1877 Tom Kane, a “special friend” of the Latter-day Saints heading home to Pennsylvania, would have smiled had he known of apostle John Taylor’s earlier lamentation to Brigham Young from New York: “I felt & said that I would give $500 for five minutes conversation with you. You must here excuse me Br. Young. I may be obtuse and so may those who were with me; but however plain your words might be to yourself on this matter, neither I nor my associates could understand them.” 49
Notes
The authors wish to express their appreciation to George A. Miles (in Connecticut), Robert Simpson (Maryland), Klaus Schmeh (Germany), Adam Sampson (Scotland), and Matthew Brown (England) for the role they each played in surfacing and successfully decoding this little-known and heretofore wholly unreadable letter from the Utah War. We are also grateful to Ardis E. Parshall of Salt Lake City for surfacing the link between Dr. Robert Patterson’s long interest in cryptology and the Kane family’s decision to safeguard its communications with Brigham Young through use of codes. Finally, posthumous thanks to Archibald Hanna Jr. (1916–2010), founding curator of the Yale Collection of Western Americana, who a half-century ago had the intuition to acquire this document when Tal Luther offered it for sale.
1. During this period, on July 5, Kane drafted a letter to Young that began, “You cannot be more anxious to hear from me, than I am to write to you,” but for logistical reasons this message was never sent. Kane to Young, July 5, 1858, fd. 18, box 14, Kane Family Papers, Vault MSS 792, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah (HBLL).
2. Ms. Parshall gave a presentation on this subject at the 2006 annual conference of the Mormon History Association in Casper, Wyoming. Based on that presentation, on December 9–11, 2008, she published a three-part essay entitled “The Qmlbwpnygax Eujugec Have Not the Power to Ktgjie the Wzznlhmpygtg: Codes and Ciphers in Mormon History” on her blog Keepapitchinin, accessed April 14, 2021, keepapitchinin.org/2008/12/09/.
3. Robin Scott Jensen, Richard E. Turley Jr., and Riley M. Lorimer, eds., “Substitute Words in the 1835 and 1844 Editions of the Doctrine and Covenants,” The Joseph Smith Papers: Revelations and Translations—Volume 2: Published Revelations (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2011), 708–711; David J. Whittaker, “Substituted Names in the Published Revelations of Joseph Smith,” BYU Studies 23 (Winter 1983): 103–111.
4. Parshall, December 9–11, 2008, Keepapitchinin.org. Latter-day Saint leaders continued to use codes and encrypted communications after the end of the Utah War and during the American Civil War. See Kenneth L. Alford, ed., Utah and the American Civil War: The Written Record (Norman: Arthur H. Clark, University of Oklahoma Press, 2017), 119–21, 131.
5. Alford, “‘We have now the Territory on wheels’: Direct and Collateral Costs of the 1858 Move South,” Journal of Mormon History 45 (April 2019): 92–114; MacKinnon, “Exodus and the Utah War: Tales from the Mormon Move South,” Overland Journal, Quarterly of the Oregon-California Trails Association 34 (Fall 2016): 89–100; Richard D. Poll, “The Move South,” BYU Studies 29 (Fall 1989): 65–88.
6. We use the term reconstruction to describe the decades-long period of postwar turmoil in Utah Territory because of its parallels to certain aspects of the experience of the eleven states of the Confederacy during 1865–1876. The most recent discussion of this concept is W. Paul Reeve, “Reconstruction, Religion, and the West: The Great Impeacher Meets the Mormons,” Journal of Mormon History 46 (April 2020): 5–45. Earlier uses of this descriptor are Richard D. Poll, “The Political Reconstruction of Utah Territory, 1866–1890,” Pacific Historical Review 27 (May 1958): 111–26; and Clyde A. Milner II and Brian Q. Cannon, eds., Reconstruction and Mormon America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019).
7. [Lemuel Fillmore], “Utah Affairs,” Dispatch, July 10, 1858, New York Herald, August 9, 1858, 8/1.
8. Young to Eldredge, October 20, 1858, General Correspondence, Outgoing, 1843–1876, Brigham Young Office Files, CR 1234/1, Church History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City (CHL). See also Young to George Q. Cannon, September 7, 1858, Brigham Young Office Files, for instructions on influencing the press and interfacing with Kane. Both available online at catalog.churchofjesuschrist.org.
9. One possibility for the person acting as code clerk is Samuel W. Richards, who shared with Young an interest in coded communications.
10. Young’s correspondence with both firms during 1855 and 1856 may be found in the CHL.
11. A reference to a fort-like quadrangle of frame cabins fabricated in Provo from lumber shipped south by wagon from the Salt Lake Valley to shelter Brigham Young’s families.
12. [Lemuel Fillmore], Dispatches from Provo and Salt Lake City, June 28 and July 2, 1858, New York Herald, July 30, 1858.
13. In the late winter of 1859, for example, McElrath traveled to Philadelphia to hand Kane a sensitive letter dated January 14, 1859, that Young had probably sent him via the all-weather Utah-California-Panama-New York mail route. In this case, McElrath would have acted as what today’s intelligence operatives call a “cutout” as well as a courier. On the same day, apostle George A. Smith had also written Kane to describe the chronic drunkenness of one of Utah’s federal judges, a letter that probably traveled with Young’s. Matthew J. Grow and Ronald W. Walker, The Prophet and the Reformer: The Letters of Brigham Young and Thomas L. Kane (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 282 and 317n17. For an understanding of McElrath’s southern roots and his subsequent Civil War career as a Confederate quartermaster officer, we are indebted to his great-great grandson, Robert “Rob” W. Melton Jr. of Portland, Oregon.
14. Our thanks to antiquarian book seller Michael Heaston for locating this rare catalog and Yale curator George Miles for relaying this information. Miles to MacKinnon, email message, April 15, 2021.
15. William P. MacKinnon, “The Curator Retires from the Old Corral: Where the East Studies the West,” Yale Alumni Magazine 45 (October 1981): 33–37.
16. George Miles, “Mormon Stories: A Librarian’s Perspective,” Journal of Mormon History 38 (Spring 2012): 47–65, and “Mormon Americana at Yale University,” in Mormon Americana: A Guide to Sources and Collections in the United States, ed. David Whittaker (Provo, UT: BYU Studies, 1995), 296–304.
17. Descriptions of MacKinnon’s telephone conversations and email messages involving George A. Miles, Ardis E. Parshall, and Kenneth L. Alford are based on his retained phone logs and archived email messages.
18. William P. MacKinnon and Kenneth L. Alford, Fact, Fiction, and Polygamy—A Tale of Utah War Intrigue, 1857–1858: A. G. Browne’s “The Ward of the Three Guardians” (Salt Lake City: Tanner Trust Fund, University of Utah Library, forthcoming).
19. Email, Simpson to Alford, December 7, 2020.
20. Klaus Schmeh, “Can You Decipher an Encrypted Letter from the Utah War?,” Cipherbrain, December 11, 2020, accessed April 14, 2021, scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto -kolumne/2020/12/11/can-you-decipher-an-encrypted -letter-from-the-utah-war/; emails between Schmeh and Alford, December 7, 2020, through January 2, 2021.
21. Klaus Schmeh, “Die erste Seite des Utah-Krieg-Kryptogramms ist gelöst, wer löst die zweite?,” Cipherbrain, December 28, 2020, accessed April 14, 2021, scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/the-first -page-of-the-utah-war-cryptogram-is-solved-can-a -reader-break-the-second/; emails between Sampson, Brown, and Alford, December 2020 and January 2021.
22. Elizabeth W. Kane, “The Story of the Mother of the Regiment,” vol. 2, ch, 3, fd. 1, box 31, reel 22, Kane Family Papers, HBLL.
23. Several transcriptions of the July 21 letter were created during the 2020 decryption process. The text in figure one is based primarily on Adam Sampson’s initial December 2020 transcription with some changes from a later transcription provided by Alford.
24. Young’s unknown scribe made a few mistakes during the encoding process. An extra letter was added on lines 5 and 21 of page 1—the scribe wrote “coeec” instead of “coec” on line 1, for example. The scribe also omitted a g at the end of Governor Cumming’s name on line 19, which may explain the extraneous letter y that was added to the last line on page 1. Those mistakes have been corrected in figure 1.
25. Email, Brown to Alford, December 31, 2020.
26. Elizabeth Wood Kane Journal, vol. 3, 40, Kane Family Papers, HBLL.
27. Adam Sampson, quoted by Klaus Schmeh, “The first page of the Utah war cryptogram is solved, can a reader break the second?,” December 28, 2020, Cipherbrain, accessed May 13, 2021, scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto -kolumne/the-first-page-of-the-utah-war-cryptogram -is-solved-can-a-reader-break-the-second/.
28. A reference to the army’s beef cattle driven off by the Nauvoo Legion in what is now southwestern Wyoming during the fall of 1857. Although hundreds of animals were stolen, Young returned only a small herd in July 1858. This was the only offense of which he was accused during the war for which Young admitted responsibility, so it is understandable that here he went out of his way to assert that he had made it right. The “General” was Albert Sidney Johnston. The meaning of “a sad mistake” is unclear.
29. Alfred Cumming of Georgia was Young’s gubernatorial successor; Jacob Forney was his successor as US superintendent of Indian affairs in Utah. John Hartnett of St. Louis was Utah’s territorial secretary. All three men were non-Mormons but considered by Young to be reasonably sympathetic to the Mormon cause, at least in comparison to other federal appointees.
30. This was a sarcastic reference to President Buchanan’s two peace commissioners, Lazarus W. Powell and Ben McCulloch, who infuriated Young by following their instructions to avoid negotiating and debating with him, instead presenting him with the presidential pardon on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.
31. To a twenty-first-century reader the term “whipped” might seem counterintuitive, but this kind of hyperbole was frequently used by Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, and other Latter-day Saint leaders for moralebuilding and public relations purposes.
32. Although this copy of the petition was carried east with the coded message of July 21 by McElrath, decades later it became separated from its transmittal message. Ironically, both documents ultimately gravitated to the YCWA at different times and through purchases from different antiquarian book dealers operating in widely separated regions of the United States.
33. Adam Sampson notes that the final word of the message could also be read as “splendidly” (as the first two letters in the filler text that completes the message table are “ly”). Sampson to Alford, email, January 2, 2021. This was not the first time Young broached to Kane the matter of becoming Utah’s delegate in Congress. In 1855 Kane politely deflected Young’s offer to arrange his election to this position, arguing that he could be of more help to the Latter-day Saints outside of Congress through action behind the scenes. Young to Kane and Kane to Young, October 30, 1854, and January 5, 1855, in Grow and Walker, eds., The Prophet and the Reformer, 171–83.
34. William P. MacKinnon, ed., At Sword’s Point: A Documentary History of the Utah War to 1858, Part 1 (Norman, OK: Arthur H. Clark, 2008), 62–65.
35. Two differing accounts of this incident survive: a short yet remarkable one recorded by President Young’s office clerk in the format of a stenographic record of the repartee between Ficklin and Young; and a highly colorful narrative description that found its way onto the front page of the New York Times through a dispatch filed by the newspaper’s principal correspondent in Salt Lake City. Both accounts agree on the basics of the clash but with understandably different approaches to presenting the context and dialogue involved. Ficklin may have been spoiling for a fight when he entered Young’s office. Minutes: Brigham Young and Benjamin F. Ficklin, Office, July 19, 1858, box 48, fd. 11, reel 62, CR 1234/1, CHL; “A. B. C.” [David A. Burr], Dispatch, “Condition of Mormon Affairs,” July 24, 1858, New York Times, August 24, 1858, 1/6.
36. Young to T. B. H. Stenhouse, May 8, 1858, Brigham Young Office Files (qtn); Church Historian’s Office Journal, April 16, 1858, vol. 20, and May 30, 1858, vol. 21, CR 100 1, CHL.
37. When Kane visited President Buchanan, secretary of war Floyd, and other cabinet secretaries during the third week in June he carried briefing notes indicating he was prepared to advise “the withdrawal of them all, of every soldier, without exception, within a reasonable time.” Kane, “Brief for the President,” undated draft memo, [ca. June 1858], fd. 14, Research Files on Thomas L. Kane, MS 1251, CHL.
38. Kane to Young, July 18, 1858, Research Files on Thomas Kane, ibid.
39. By the time Kane left Fort Bridger on April 5, 1858, with Alfred Cumming in tow, he had intimidated the new governor to the point of subordination. See Thomas L. Kane to Robert Patterson Kane, undated ms., “In Re Mormons” File, Series IV. Thomas Leiper Kane, Kane Family Papers, Mss.Ms.Coll.115, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia; George A. Smith, Church Historian’s Office Journal, April 13, 1858, vol. 20, CHL. For a description of behavior by Cumming that made him vulnerable to the possibility of blackmail, see “Acting Egregiously: The Staines Mansion as Honey Trap,” in 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), 465–66.
40. See MacKinnon, ed., At Sword’s Point, Part 2, 455–58, 576, 635–42.
41. Young to Franklin Pierce, March 30, 1853, box 50, fd. 1, Brigham Young Office Files.
42. Cumming to Orr, May 12, 1858, and Orr to Buchanan, June 21, 1858, both in James Buchanan Papers, Collection 0091, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
43. Young to Cumming, June 19, 1858, and Young to Ferguson, June 27, 1858, in 1858 June 18–August, General Correspondence Outgoing, 1843–1876; Ferguson to Young, June 21, 1858, Ev–F, 1858, General Letters, 1840–1877, General Correspondence, Incoming, 1840– 1877; all in Brigham Young Office Files.
44. “S” [Simonton], “View of Mormon Affairs,” June 26, 1858, New York Times, August 1, 1858, 1/4–6, 2/1–3.
45. Cumming to Cass, June 26, 1858, Alfred Cumming Papers, RL.00273, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; Petition: Citizens of Utah to James Buchanan, June 25, 1858, Thomas Leiper Kane Papers, WA MSS 279, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Yale’s records indicate the petition accompanying Young’s coded message to Kane was donated to YCWA by collector William Robertson Coe in the 1940s and that he, in turn, had acquired it from dealers Walter and Mary Benjamin of New York, whose source is unknown. Miles to Alford and MacKinnon, email message, April 25, 2021.
46. McCulloch to Blair, August 27, 1858, transcribed in Church Historian’s Office Journal, October 2, 1858, vol. 21, CHL.
47. See MacKinnon, “Saving the Governor’s Bacon: Thomas L. Kane’s Political Defense of Alfred Cumming, 1859,” Utah Historical Quarterly 89, no. 4 (2021): 322–44.
48. “Thomas L. Kane’s Account of His Journey to Salt Lake City, August 30, 1877–September 17, 1877,” Kane Family Papers, HBLL.
49. Taylor to Young, February 24, 1857, John Taylor, 1857, Letters from Church Leaders and Others, 1840–1877, General Correspondence, Incoming, 1840–1877, Brigham Young Office Files. Here the subject was not the imminent Utah War but the future of handcart operations.
