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The 1857 Utah War

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77 pointsjdkee77 comments

The article is an interesting take on the time period

For one example, I think Porter Rockwell is less considered a lawman, and more of a hitman or enforcer. He's suspected of having a body count somewhere in the 150 range

edit:

It also completely leaves out the entire Mountain Meadows Massacre incident, where Mormons slaughtered around 120 men women and children in a wagon train headed to California in September of 1857

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Meadows_Massacre

For a little bonus Utah trivia, the only person actually punished for the Massacre is current Senator Mike Lee's great-great-grandfather.

Porter Rockwell was dubbed the "Destroying Angel," but he was definitely a bona fide law man. But you're right that there is some evidence that he was also kind of the frontier version of a James Bond type secret service or special forces operative with a license to kill. And his boss was Brigham Young, who was a bit drunk on power. Mountain Meadows is absolutely a disgrace and a scandal that should (and does) taint the reputations of Young and other Mormon leaders of the time, but it's more understandable once you consider the greater context of the Utah war. The Utahns were paranoid and on high alert. And Brigham Young in particular was concerned about being deposed and jailed, so he had an interest in keeping people whipped up.

It's an interesting aspect of studying history that you can watch time and peace turn a mass murder into a "disgrace" and "scandal" that "taints reputations" but is "understandable in context". Those may be fair and uncontroversial words with 150 years of remove, but would obviously not have gone over well nearer the time of massacre itself.

Just in case you were also confused, 1957 is a slight typo. The Massacre occurred in 1857.

whoops, thanks!

The Mormons are fascinating for many reasons and highly skilled at building a certain kind of American community. One of the things they are best at is spinning their clean scrubbed version of history, which as with many groups has as many despicable acts as heroic ones. They were indeed quite persecuted on their flight across the continent, but that traumatic origin story doesn't justify to me some of the less attractive aspects of modern day LDS culture. Some interesting reading:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/18/us/latter-day-saints-charity-...

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/years-sex-abuse-mo...

https://religionnews.com/2017/06/20/10-reasons-mormons-domin...

All this somewhat strained perfection does have a cost, however. Utah leads the nation in rates of anti-depressant use and several types of cosmetic surgery. [1]

1. https://www.healthresearchpolicy.org/top-3-most-requested-co...

“[Mormons] are just the worst type of people, from what I’ve experienced and what other people have also experienced.”

Can you imagine that being printed about any other minority in any serious publication? This article was published days ago and I’m still in awe at that line. (From the second link)

What I can’t imagine is your comment to be in good faith.

The quote is from the Mormon girl, specifically referring to the “Mormon church” as opposed to your “[Mormons]”, in the context of all informed officials of said church deliberately having allowed her and her infant sister to be raped for seven years, by explicit written church policy according to the article.

If your takeaway from that was that printing the quote is offensive to Mormons, mine would be that you are either trolling, reading below the article’s grade level, or morally in support of the church’s decisions.

Well said sir.

This is a very very bad description of why Buchanan sent troops to Utah. Utah really was effectively a theocracy and it really was refusing to enforce US law, especially wrt polygamy.

Quoting from https://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/artic...,

Contrary to what many have long assumed, Buchanan’s decision to intervene in Utah was not based on the despised Judge W. W. Drummond’s letter of resignation sent from New Orleans in early April 1857. That letter “recited nearly every accusation of Mormon disloyalty and perfidy that had accumulated during the prior ten years” and portrayed Utah as a “territory out of control,” with Governor Brigham Young as “the prime offender” (116). MacKinnon shows that the real catalyst for sending troops to Utah was “the substance and rhetoric in at least three other batches of material received in Washington during the third week of March 1857, weeks before the government was aware of Drummond’s resignation” (100).

The first decisive documents were the Utah legislature’s two memorials urging the appointment of only Mormons to territorial offices. As Utah delegate John M. Bernhisel reported to Young, they were seen as “a declaration of war,” breathing “a defiant spirit” and “not respectful” (106). The second document was a letter sent by Drummond probably before he left California for New Orleans and unrelated to his later letter of resignation. It detailed the impossibility of enforcing federal laws in Utah. Two more letters arrived the same week from Utah Judge John F. Kinney to Attorney General Jeremiah S. Black. Kinney gave more examples of the subversion of U.S. law in Utah and recommended that Buchanan replace Young as governor and establish an army garrison in the territory. The second Kinney letter enclosed a message from Utah’s Surveyor General David H. Burr, which included his dramatic assessment that any new governor risked assassination; Burr, too, recommended a military force.

I don’t know much about this incident but I am dubious about this retelling.

There are a lot of florid adjectives, with one side being villainous and dastardly, the other side noble (that being said, Buchanan was a disgrace).

And the level of privation described here as being inflicted on the US is not consistent with the force being able to press on. It had to have been exaggerated else they would have been forced to retreat.

Finally, the part about being “neutral” in the US a civil war, well, that is certainly nothing to be proud of for an ostensibly, moral organization, though completely consistent with their “children of Ham” doctrine that banned blacks from ordination, mixed marriages etc until the end of the 1970s.

Utah was a slave state. They might not have joined the Confederacy, but Brigham Young as governor publicly advocated in favor of slavery.

I hadn’t known that, though it doesn’t surprise me.

This is a Mormon-biased spin on the history.

This was left out of the story:

> At the height of the tensions, on September 11, 1857, at least 120 California-bound settlers from Arkansas, Missouri and other states, including unarmed men, women and children, were killed in remote southwestern Utah by a group of local Mormon militia. They first claimed that the migrants were killed by Natives but it was proven otherwise. This event was later called the Mountain Meadows Massacre and the motives behind the incident remain unclear.

> The Aiken massacre took place the following month. In October 1857, Mormons arrested six Californians traveling through Utah and charged them with being spies for the U.S. Army. They were released but were later murdered and robbed of their stock and $25,000.

> Other incidents of violence have also been linked to the Utah War, including a Native American attack on the Mormon mission of Fort Lemhi in eastern Oregon Territory, modern-day Idaho. They killed two Mormons and wounded several others. The historian Brigham Madsen notes, "[T]he responsibility for the [Fort Limhi raid] lay mainly with the Bannock." David Bigler concludes that the raid was probably caused by members of the Utah Expedition who were trying to replenish their stores of livestock that had been stolen by Mormon raiders.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_War#Overview

I just finished Mark Twain’s “Roughing It”. If you want to learn what horrible, evil people the original Mormons were, it’s a good guide. Twain holds no punches. He describes the whole story in detail. They just straight up murdered a huge group of wagoners passing through to California because they wanted their cattle, etc. Almost every man woman and child killed except the youngest who wouldn’t be able to testify. That’s just the worst of a huge list of shitty things they did.

Extremely. The Mormons headed west after trying to impose a theocratic dictatorship in Nauvoo, IL. That didn't go well, and their insurrection was put down.

https://www.flatplanet.news/post/mormon-militancy-and-the-co...

This is just the reprise of the earlier effort.

The Mormons headed west after trying to impose a theocratic dictatorship in Nauvoo, IL.

So that's where the original colony ship name came from in, The Expanse!

I find Mormons to be truly remarkable people. We visited Salt Lake City recently, and headed out to the Great Salt Lake. Brigham Young wasn’t kidding about “land nobody wants!” There’s almost nothing there, except swarms of flies. (I have no idea what they eat in the middle of the desert. As an aside, my wife’s family apparently went through Utah on the way to Oregon in the wagon train days. They noped the f—k out of there.) But these Mormons built civilization, a lovely society, in the middle of nowhere.

It doesn't hurt that the Salt Lake is sadly shrinking currently. So it's even worse than it probably was when they arrived.

The Great Salt Lake is not only shrinking/drying, but there's concern over the exposure of dangerous elements that was once underwater

> Layers of earth that were formerly underwater have swirled into dust clouds laced with calcium, sulphur and arsenic, a naturally occurring element linked to cancer and birth defects. Exposed lakebed is also contaminated with residue from copper and silver mining.

> "If you breathe that dust over an extended period of time, like decades or longer, then it can lead to increases in different types of cancer, like lung cancer, bladder cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and such," Perry, from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, told Reuters on a recent morning on Farmington Bay.

> More than just humans are endangered. Underwater reef-like structures host a micro-organism that is food for brine shrimp, in turn an important food for birds, but the structures dry out and turn gray when exposed.

source for the quote above: https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/utahs-great-sal...

other sources: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/07/climate/salt-lake-city-cl...

The GSL is also largely responsible for the famous Utah ski resorts

Without the lake effect producing all that snow, Utah's ski industry is in jeopardy. Without the ski industry, a very large portion of Northern Utah's desirability as a place to live goes away'

I live in Utah just North of SLC and I hear this every once in a while. The Wasatch Mountains here, to the East, are also pretty amazing. When I'm away I always miss these mountains. If you go West you hit the lake, which is low, muddy, stinky, and mostly dead and then there are the salt flats beyond. True, it's a desert, like much of the US, but the mountains are pretty amazing here. The best times to visit are Spring, Fall, or Winter. Hit this place in the heat of summer and you'll probably wonder why we're here (everything is dry). But it's nice in Spring and Fall and lots of people love the Winters.

I didn’t mean this in a negative way at all. After wading in that lake it’s just remarkable to me how you can create a bustling city out of that environment. Where I come from food literally grows everywhere; it jumps from the river into your nets.

I grew up in the Salt Lake Valley. The land is amazing, the people not so much. Not sure how this whitewashing of history ended up on the front page but I find it amusing that the author consistently uses quotes around "Mormons". Another commenter in this thread referred to them as a minority. Well, if you live in Utah, then they are no minority and you are living under their thumb. Especially in the author's town of Cedar City. Yikes.

They are a religious minority with a long history of being persecuted. And Muslims are a majority in Hamtramck and Black people are a majority in Baltimore—that doesn’t change that they’re properly called minorities in the US.

Wasn't this one of the primary reasons why majority of Mormons live south of Salt Lake? I swear Brigham Young ordered a scorched earth type thing on SLC and most relocated south.

Nah, there are plenty of cities with high LDS populations north of SLC. Bountiful, Centerville, Kaysville are like in the 80-90% ranges. It's when you get into Layton with Hill Air Force Base and Ogden where the population seems to dwindle. North of Ogden, you have Brigham City where the population again is very high.

Yeah no doubt about high percentages in northern utah (I'm originally from Ogden fwiw). Was mostly commenting that it would make sense if Young used this war as a means to migrate people to the true valley (Provo/Orem/etc). Those towns are easily 90%+ LDS. I vaguely remember learning about this in Utah history but it was not characterized in the same light.

It could explain places like Provo/Lindon/Orem which are most likely 99%.

There are lots of Mormons in Idaho too, as evidenced by BYU in Rexburg, Idaho.

There's a historical marker in Echo Canyon about this. It says, essentially, that the army was sent because they thought Utah was in rebellion, but Utah was not actually in rebellion, and therefore it was not right/legal to send the army, and therefore it was legitimate for Utah to resist the army. (It's in Utah, so no surprise, the historical marker is a Mormon-view spin on what happened.)

So, wait, let me make sure I've got this right. It's legitimate for you to fight the US army because you're not in rebellion? Um, hello? The moment you start fighting them, you're in armed rebellion!

Re >> It's legitimate for you to fight the US army because you're not in rebellion?

That's right. Similar to how if a cop tries to arrest you, but you did nothing deserving of arrest, it's legitimate to resist arrest. But... uh, then oic.... /s

At the time, Utah was located in Mexican territory.

At the time the Mormons arrived (1847), it was officially Mexican territory. But the US annexed it in 1848. By the time of the Utah War, it was US territory.

(BTW, the canyon by which they entered the Salt Lake Valley is Emigration Canyon. Emigration is when you leave, immigration is when you arrive. They were consciously leaving the US. They weren't really "going to Mexico", though; they were intending to form their own independent country. But a year later, the US annexed the area.)

That was great, would like to read more. Didn’t quite understand the paragraph about the gold, sounds like they stole it from the army but it is unclear.

They earned it by selling goods to the fort. Costs a lot of money to feed troops.

Between Buchanan's questionable sexuality, and the Mormons and Slavery, it is little wonder the Civil War was not far away.

Pretty much every US president from about Fillmore through Andrew Johnson (with the notable and obvious exception of Abraham Lincoln) is widely regarded as being on the short list for worst US president. Admittedly every president in the pre-Civil War period was arguably dealt a pretty bad hand but none of them seriously tried to change course--and, of course, many of them wouldn't have been elected had they tried.

True, but had Lincoln not changed the course, there would have been no office to which to be elected. It makes a pretty good point for people, as a popular democracy, not necessarily knowing what they need to have a country.

Is this really "forgotten"? Forgotten by whom?

I thought this was part of LDS mythology surrounding the settlement of the Utah territory and was fairly well known. I remember reading about the war in college, and it is definitely part of any history of Buchanan's presidency.

We've taken that word out of the title now.

Please let's discuss more interesting things than linkbait effects.

I'm 47 years old, decently educated, and can honestly say I'd never heard of this war and thought this was a great read.

Granted, it's quite possible I was taught about this in some very dry history class in high school while I was barely paying attention to the teacher. But I think it's safe to say this isn't a war that comes up often in popular discourse of US history.

I agree with you. Though, I'd also ask, are you in the Utah region or outside? It's easy for us to lose sight of just how huge the U.S. is, and what might be "common history" in one area is obscure bar-trivia somewhere else. We've all heard of the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and WWII and mostly know the broad strokes. I doubt the average person on the street could give you much info on The War of 1812, the Mexican American War, The First Barbary War, The Second Barbary War. Regarding local history, I grew up in Maine, so to me the Aroostook War might seem like common history, , and to my Filipina wife, the Philippine–American War might seem less than forgotten. I could forgive anyone on the street for knowing little or nothing about all these. Even the Korean War's nickname is "The Forgotten War".

Regional history, people don't understand how much there is. I never heard about the one bomb dropping on the continental 48 during World War 2 until I moved to Oregon, because where that happened it probably 2-3 hours away from me (bomb on a balloon). Grew up in the rural south. Like wise, my Wife who grew up in Oregon has never heard of Blair Mountain and the struggle between the the Union and the Mining company. Or she only knows of the Hatfields and McCoys from pop culture reference but doesn't actually know any of the story behind it. The US has a surprising large amount of this.

Wow, I had not heard of that - thank you for sharing. I've now gone and read up on it.

Similarly, many people "forget" (in quotes, since we're picking on that word today!) that some of the deadliest fighting in the Pacific was in Alaska*. Deadliest in terms of kill ratio, not total dead).

https://www.armytimes.com/veterans/2018/05/27/75-years-later...

They’re population is one of the few which are increasing. They very well could inherit the whole country.

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