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Brigham Young’s Deseret

We ought to have the building up of Zion as our greatest object.

—Joseph Smith

In the wake of his death, confusion befell his grieving community, as Joseph Smith left behind no appointed or clear successor. So, while mourning the death of their prophet, the Latter-day Saints had to face the utter disarray and dissent within their community and a population of seething Gentiles, and do it without a leader. The beginnings of a church infrastructure were in place, including the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the group of church leaders among Joseph Smith’s closest advisors, but there was no leader.

Nephi Johnson and his family were living in Carthage at the time of Joseph’s assassination; his father, Joel, was employed in the construction of the town’s jail, whose walls were left splattered in blood. Porter Rockwell had been in Nauvoo during the murders and John Lee on a mission in Kentucky. Though absent at the crucial moment, these men, over the next decades, came to avenge the blood of their prophet in various and brutal ways.

According to History of the Church, an official collection of Joseph Smith’s edited writings and observations published twelve years after his death, he had prophesied that “the Saints would continue to suffer much affliction and would be driven to the Rocky Mountains.” Those who made the journey would go on to “assist in making settlements and build cities and see the Saints become a mighty people in the midst of the Rocky Mountains.” Like the White Horse Prophecy, this revelation is probably apocryphal, written after his death and slipped into church annals in order to bolster Smith’s reputation as a prophet and provide the “proof” that indeed the Great Basin had been designated as Zion. It offered reassurance that the prophet had foreseen their troubles in Nauvoo and had known all along that a safe haven awaited them in the West.

When he heard about Joseph’s death, Brigham Young made his way back to Nauvoo from the East Coast, where he’d been campaigning on behalf of the prophet’s presidential bid. Smith’s running mate Sidney Rigdon also returned to Nauvoo, from Pennsylvania, where he’d moved after agreeing to be the vice presidential candidate on Smith’s ticket. These men, and a man named James Strang who claimed to hold a letter from Joseph granting him authority over the church, all vied for the role that Joseph had left vacant. In a sermon delivered on August 8, 1844, in the same grove where the King Follett Discourse had been given, Brigham Young made his case to assume leadership. He so moved the gathered crowd that many felt he channeled Joseph himself. With this passionate outpouring on why he felt called to steward the Mormon people, Young became a clear front-runner for doing just that. At the same event, Sidney Rigdon, known for his fiery Salt Sermon, also made his appeal to lead, but lost audience attention with rambling non sequiturs on end-times and Queen Victoria. After the men finished their elocutions, Young demanded that the crowd choose the next leader. “Do you want the church properly organized?” he asked. “Or do you want a spokesperson”—referring to Rigdon—“to be chief cook and bottle washer?” The crowd voted unanimously for Young to serve as president of the Quorum of the Twelve, apparently understanding their grave need for management over speechifying if the church was going to survive.

Young was convinced that Joseph Smith died due to Mormon disloyalty. He resolved that he would not abide disobedience or perfidiousness. He harbored grudges, did not admit to his own wrongdoings, and allowed no criticism of his directives. Redheaded, broader, and less sure of his prophetic skills than Smith, he secured Zion and under his authority the church grew from 26,000 members to 115,000, spread out through Utah and parts of Nevada, Idaho, and Arizona. He became church president in 1847 and served as prophet for thirty years, until his death in 1877. Young is the one to thank for the prosperity that his people would find in the West. He is the reason the church remains fixed to the Great Basin today. Honored with nicknames such as “Lion of the Lord” and “American Moses,” Young believed utterly in the Mormon doctrine, and was resolute in his knowledge that he led God’s chosen people. Cliven Bundy may be guided by the doctrine of Joseph Smith, but he wouldn’t be battling over the land he is today without the resolve of Brigham Young.

Most thought Strang’s letter from Joseph Smith had been forged, so he was excommunicated. He went on to build another Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a sect that grew to 12,000 members, called the Strangites. Among those who followed him to Beaver Island, Michigan, were Hiram Page, the man who had long ago proffered a rival seer stone that Joseph ordered destroyed, and Lucy Mack Smith, Joseph’s mother. Though Strang initially opposed the practice of polygamy, he ended up married to five women. Like Joseph Smith, he also declared himself King of the Earth before he was murdered in 1856 by two disgruntled ex-Strangites.

After losing the coveted position to Brigham Young, Sidney Rigdon returned to Pennsylvania and also began his own sect, the Church of Christ. He continued to believe that the Book of Mormon was God’s truth and that he was the rightful successor to the Mormon faith. Emma Smith and her children remained in Nauvoo and, in 1860, her son Joseph Smith III became the leader of a third splinter sect, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a branch of the Mormon Church that did not condone plural marriage, an idea Emma so despised. Freed from polygamy by widowhood, Emma went on to remarry. Still, throughout her life she never doubted that Joseph had dug up the sacred golden plates chronicling America’s sacred early history and providing a restored gospel for modern America.

Immediately after Joseph Smith’s death, the Gentile outrage seemed to abate, but only for a short time. By 1846, the Illinois House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution demanding that Mormons leave the state. These religious adherents were no longer as defenseless as they had been in Missouri, nor were they without culpability in the violence perpetrated against them. They had weapons, martial capabilities, and a ferocious spiritual mandate for getting even. With acquittal of the five men charged in Joseph’s murder (among them a commanding officer in the Illinois militia, a state senator, and the publisher of the anti-Mormon newspaper, the Warsaw Signal), the prophet’s murder had infuriatingly gone unpunished. But as the Saints prepared to leave Illinois, some church members took retribution into their own hands.

Porter Rockwell shot and killed a reported leader of the militia effort called “the Carthage Greys,” a young lieutenant named Frank Worrell. Rockwell was later acquitted of the murder because Worrell, fiercely anti-Mormon, had been threatening the life of a Mormon sympathizer, Sherriff Jacob Backenstos. To save his own hide, Backenstos ordered Porter to defend him from Worrell’s advance. So Rockwell, the Destroying Angel, shot Worrell—to defend Backenstos and avenge the blood of the prophet.

For some time, the Latter-day Saints had felt very unlike other Americans, whom many regarded as both vicious and godless. This invidious distinction encouraged the Saints to believe they were governed by different laws, higher laws, both religious and jurisdictive, than the rules laid out by Gentiles. Joseph Smith had given his people the freedom to ask for private revelations directly from God, and left his followers with confidence that they possessed the raw materials and moral compasses of gods themselves. And if men were gods in the making, then all of their revelations, convictions, entitlements, and transgressions must also be infused with the divine. The Mormons were certain in the Lord’s guidance—Gentiles and their laws were nothing compared to God’s bidding.

By the time the Nauvoo Temple was dedicated in April of 1846, Brigham Young had already begun to prepare for the journey across the Oregon Trail. The doctrine of plural marriage continued during Young’s reign, most steadfastly practiced by Young himself. Before walking west, he married twenty-one women in 1846 alone. He took fifty-five wives during the course of his lifetime. In the last months before leaving Nauvoo, the Saints kept the temple hopping with ceremony. It wasn’t only marriages being performed. Families were sealed together for eternity and younger males were spiritually adopted by older men. Brigham Young embraced these bonds as well, adopting John Lee, among others. This was a time of endowments, washings, anointings, and sealings performed furiously before they departed Nauvoo—the rituals offered the idea of lasting spiritual bonds that would persist in spite of what might befall them on the journey ahead.

Before he departed west in 1846, Young wrote a letter to President Polk telling him of his plan for the Mormon people as well as sharing his sentiments. “We would esteem a territorial government of our own as one of the richest boons of earth, and while we appreciate the Constitution of the United States as the most precious among the nations, we feel that we had rather retreat to the deserts, islands or mountain caves than consent to be ruled by governors and judges whose hands are drenched in the blood of innocence and virtue, who delight in injustice and oppression.” Young was not one to mince words.

On the first passage west during the winter of 1846–1847, Young bore the enormous burden of ushering 1,200 families—people who had laid their lives and their destinies at his feet—across a dangerous stretch of country on the 1,300-mile journey. The first families wintered along the trail 266 miles west of Nauvoo in what was called Winter Quarters, in Nebraska. There, hundreds died of illness, malnourishment, and exposure, their remains buried in a graveyard built for those lost.

In the only prophecy he ever made, shared with the first families to cross to Zion, Young spoke of a dream in which God likened the Saints’ experience to that of the ancient Israelites. He told his followers, “I am he who led the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt; and my arm is stretched out in the last days, to save my people Israel.” With that, their journey was given a religious justification, sacralizing their enormous efforts and trials in following this fledgling faith. They were walking in the footsteps of the children of Israel, across the lands of the Nephites and Lamanites, led by their own Moses.

Porter Rockwell served as scout and runner in the advance party as they made their way from Winter Quarters to the Great Salt Lake Valley. An excellent marksman, taunting death with his long and magical hair, he kept team members supplied with game and functioned as lookout to help thwart raids from justifiably outraged Native peoples in Nebraska, who were experiencing the crush of whites and the pains of Manifest Destiny. When his party reached Wyoming, a wet, cold spring left snow resistant to melt, creating a prime environment for ticks. Many in the first team suffered from what was called mountain fever or tick fever, including Brigham Young.

On the last leg of their journey, the forty-six-year-old Brigham Young convalesced, packed into a “sick” wagon as the team made its way down the western slope of the Wasatch Range. His wagon bumped along the same steep gulches and rocky terrain crossed by the ill-fated Donner Party one year before. According to legend, when Brigham Young first spied the Great Salt Lake Valley, he announced, “This is the place!” A year later John Lee and the Johnson family, who brought with them the first domesticated sheep in the territory, joined Young and the others.

At first, they were on Mexican soil. But in 1848, millions of acres, including the fledgling Mormon settlement, were transferred from the Mexican government to the United States with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which marked the end of the Mexican-American War. This act covered lands that today lie within the states of Utah, California, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Arizona. But signing the treaty put his people back in the United States, the place they’d been so desperate to escape, so Young made plans straightaway to isolate the Saints from further violence and tyranny and create their own religious realm on earth. He dreamed of a Mormon empire, a kingdom called Deseret, a word in the Book of Mormon, possibly derived from a Hebrew root, that in Mormon tradition means “honeybee.” To build it, he planned settlements that stretched across the map, from the Sierra Nevada to the Southern Rockies, from Oregon to Mexico.

A couple of years after his arrival, Nephi’s father, Joel, wrote a poem titled “Deseret.” Joel, like his children and others, had seen the horrors of the Mormon experience firsthand. He’d lived in Kirtland and trailed the Saints through Missouri and Illinois. He’d helped build the blessed Kirtland Temple as well as the cursed Carthage jail. Joel Johnson’s verses became a beloved Mormon hymn, “High on the Mountain,” encouraging its listeners never to forget their history:

For God remembers still,

His promise made of old.

That He on Zion’s hill,

Truth’s standard would unfold!

Her light should there attract the gaze

Of all the world in latter days.

Then hail to Deseret! A refuge for the good,

And safety for the great, if they but understood.

That God with plagues will shake the world,

Till all its thrones shall down be hurled.

His song was sung in warning to Gentiles—if you mess with the Mormons, you mess with God, and that has serious consequences.

This homeland, finally found, felt providential and glorious. One church official wrote in 1849 that, after the Mormon people had “received nothing but one continued series of persecutions since the rise of the church,” they had finally found their home in the Great Basin, free of Gentiles, those “inhuman, bloodthirsty savages who dwelt in the United States under the pious name of Christians.” It was a wild and romantic country, this official noted, its landscape of mountains, saline lakes, desert, and extraordinary geological formations allowing for easy comparisons to the Holy Lands of the Middle East. Here they were, modern Israelites as Young’s prophecy had foretold, making their home next to the Great Salt Lake Valley’s most defining feature, the eponymous lake, which became the Mormon Dead Sea. The river emptying into this large saline body became the Jordan River. Mormon pioneers named their settlements accordingly—Eden, Moab, and Hebron. The tallest mountain in the Wasatch Range became Mount Nebo, after the one from which Moses first glimpsed the promised land. The Great Basin was not the verdant grassland of Missouri, and it was far from their swampy bend of the Mississippi River in Nauvoo. In this land, Yankee and European farmers continued to cultivate, yes, but they also began to run wide-ranging sheep and cattle in a vast and parched desert. This Zion made them ranchers.

But there was a reason the Great Basin was not occupied by other white settlers. It was not an easy place to plant stakes, in this country better suited to mobile communities that moved with the seasons, finding forage here and there, or following the prey depending on the time of year. People of such habits already lived here before the Saints arrived. This landscape may have been passed over by other Europeans before the arrival of the Mormons, but it was far from empty.

The Mormon people were colonizers who claimed Zion by homesteading. Before long, it became clear that the Salt Lake Valley was not big enough to sustain the tens of thousands of Mormons who arrived over the next two decades. Though Deseret never manifested in full (it was originally plotted for over one-sixth of the United States), a smaller version emerged in Young’s plan to become economically independent from, and competitive with, other American states.

In 1849, Young sent teams to reconnoiter arable territory. One scout, Parley Pratt, who had been an early adherent of Joseph Smith, led his party down to what is now the site of Cedar City, Utah, and continued along the Virgin River. He later gave Young a detailed report of iron deposits and farmland, but also noted that “a wide expanse of chaotic material presented itself, huge hills, sandy deserts, cheerless grassless plains, perpendicular rocks, loose barren clay, dissolving beds of sandstone.” Pratt’s report was dreary, but it informed Young’s scheme for settlement campaigns along lands that today make up some of the most celebrated scenic destinations in the world.

As Young considered how to establish Zion, he faced a people already living there. Though the Indigenous population presented a conundrum for the Saints, there was also opportunity. Bringing Native people into the church had been a priority from the beginning—one of Joseph Smith’s aspirations had been a Native missionary campaign in Missouri: reversing the curse of Ham with the gift of a new faith that promised a renewed virtue and thereby took the world one step closer to the Second Coming. All the same, the Native people didn’t act like God’s chosen people. They didn’t farm. Nor did they live in developed communities. And they did not like, as one could easily imagine, white people poaching their resources. At times they expressed this resentment by helping themselves, in their turn, to Mormon property.

There were early conflicts with the Timpanogos band of Utes, as Mormons settled along Utah Lake and the Provo River. Horse and cattle rustling became offered recourse against the pressures the Saints put on limited water and food. Jacob Hamblin was living near Tooele, Utah, south of the Salt Lake, when he watched Porter Rockwell shoot and kill five Utes who were wrongly accused of stealing horses. The last few years had made Rockwell a ruthless man, cynical and resolute, who would not question commands or overthink orders from church leadership. Brigham Young and others were exasperated with the Indian raiding, and for a time the new prophet adopted a position that justified killing any Native people found stealing from the Mormons. And when Young ordered the killing of horse thieves, that’s what Rockwell did, whether they were culpable or only suspected.

A resourceful frontiersman, Jacob Hamblin was solemnlooking, his face defined by a heavy brow and elongated by a stiff, brushy beard. He had become a Latter-day Saint in 1842 and was serving as a lieutenant in the Nauvoo Legion when Joseph Smith was murdered. After the emergency decampment from Nauvoo, he had initially planned to join the Mormon wagon train, and even started heading west with his family. But in Council Bluffs, Iowa, just three hundred miles along, his wife, Lucinda, looked at the trail ahead with trepidation. After all that the congregants had been through, she just didn’t have the heart to go forward into the unknown and refused to proceed. The already unhappy Hamblin marriage dissolved in 1849, leaving Jacob with their four children: Lyman, Martha Adaline, Duane, and Maryette Magdaline. And yet this lonely chapter for Hamblin was brief. The Lord Almighty evidently favored him, and soon another woman was in the picture. By the time he walked into the Great Salt Lake Valley a year later, he was accompanied by seven children—his own plus three stepchildren—and the new Mrs. Hamblin, Rachel.

Shortly after Rockwell killed the Ute men, a Goshute group, a Western Shoshone tribe, came under suspicion of taking cows. Hamblin gave chase and found himself face-to-face with one of the raiders. But when he aimed his gun at the Goshute man and fired, the shot went wild. Again, he took aim and this time his gun misfired. The man retaliated, shooting arrows that pierced the Mormon’s hat and tore his coat, but not his flesh. Eventually both men fled the confrontation, in a close call that Hamblin came to believe was a result of divine intervention. After the encounter, Hamblin claimed that God had spoken, assuring him that if he never killed an Indian, neither would an Indian ever kill him.

To create Zion in the hills, deserts, and grassless plains of Utah Territory (designated in 1851) that Pratt’s report described, relations with Native peoples became a priority. Recognizing the need for diplomacy and alliance in further settling homeland, Young arranged to send a crew who could earn the trust of the Indigenous peoples. Though he had spent a few years already as emissary to the southern tribes, in 1854, Jacob Hamblin moved his family, including his brother, William “Gunlock” Hamblin, to the lands along the Santa Clara River, a tributary of the Virgin. They built their homesteads among the yucca and sagebrush growing out of deep red soil. This was Southern Paiute territory, home to one of the region’s most vulnerable cultures. These bands possessed no horses and slept in simple brushwood shelters suited to their mobile culture. Slave traders from other tribes preyed on Paiute people, and their bands hoped an alliance with the Mormon people might offer them protection.

With a knack for languages, Hamblin became known as “the Indian Apostle,” admired for his ability to understand Native people and broker relationships. But he showed little charity toward the Paiute people in his early encounters, writing in his journal, “there is not a day passes over my head, but that I consider it so great a privilege to have an hour to myself, where the Piutes [sic] cannot see me.… They are in a very low, degraded condition indeed; loathsome and filthy beyond description.”

Mormons did establish relations, of varying degrees of closeness, with Native peoples. The church today includes many Indigenous members of the Southern Paiute and Navajo Tribes, converts to Mormonism—but this path was full of the heartbreak of assimilation, land grabs, white supremacy, and political maneuvering. Young mostly wanted partnerships with Native people so that together they could unite in case of attack on Mormon territory. He wasn’t convinced, as Joseph Smith had been, that Native people would turn white with any religious conversion. And after a few years in the Great Basin, Young decided the tribal leaders would never be won over to Mormonism. Instead, he focused on children and intermarriage between his Saints and the Indigenous population. The biracial children born into such marriages could be brought up as Mormons—another piece of a cynical campaign.

The Virgin River watershed proved insufficient homeland for two such distinct cultures. Mormons were farmers and the Paiute people, for the most part, were not. Though Paiute communities did plant and harvest in lean years, they mainly lived off natural bounty. But in homesteading, the settlers took the choicest places, near springs and lands best suited for livestock forage. A region that had once amply supported the many bands of the Southern Paiute people disappeared as Mormons shaped the land for their own lifestyle.

The Southern Paiute people were left devastated in what they considered sacred homeland as well. These were a people who came as descendants of Tabuts, a wolf god. In one story, Tabuts carved people from sticks, in all shapes and sizes, placing them inside a sack, with a plan to “scatter them evenly around the earth so that everyone would have a good place to live.” Tabuts had a younger brother, a trickster known as Shinangwav, the coyote. “Shinangwav cut open the sack,” according to legend, “and people fell out in bunches all over the world.” Somehow, according to their beliefs, the Southern Paiute people managed to stay in the sack. And as a result, “Tabuts blessed them and put them in the very best place.” But with the arrival of the Mormons, the land became Zion: a place promised by Joseph Smith and conquered by Brigham Young.

After Mormon presence in the West was well established and the Native people had been run off or killed by disease and starvation, Young finally admitted his mistreatment of the Indigenous population and announced during a talk in 1866, in Springville, Utah, “This is the land that they and their fathers have walked over.” It was “their home, and we have taken possession of it.” After the Saints had been in the West for seventeen years, the prophet decreed that “it is our duty to feed these poor ignorant Indians; we are living on their possessions and at their homes.” Young’s condescension was shared by his followers, people who felt superior to the region’s inhabitants and entitled to their lands—though the church continued its efforts to convert and control Native people well into the twentieth century.