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Utah War

I have never willingly committed a crime. I have acted my religion, nothing more.

—John Doyle Lee

Brigham Young grew the boundaries of the Mormon empire, establishing farms, mines, and rangeland. Like the namesake of their kingdom, Deseret—the honeybee—the Mormon people assembled themselves into a hive, communally milling, milking, irrigating, harvesting, praying, and building Zion. Some of their settlements thrived; others succumbed. They fought drought, floods, and insect infestations. Travel was arduous and water was precious. It was a region that required grit to eke out enough to live on, making for a particularly trenchant and undaunted subculture of Mormonism in the desert. This is especially true of the Dixie and Iron Mission Mormons.

Beginning in 1854, Young ordered families to establish a network of small settlements and farms where the Mojave Desert abuts the Colorado Plateau and the Great Basin, today northern Nevada and Arizona and southern Utah. Several of the founding families were converts from the southern United States, earning by their efforts the “Dixie Mission” nickname. They planted cotton, though the land and soil would ultimately prove inadequate for sustainable production (the last mill closed in 1910). Instead the region became famous for tobacco, olive oil, almonds, and many varieties of fruit. McIntosh apples, Winesap apples, banana apples, quinces, peaches, plums, melons, and even grapes all ripened under the Dixie sun.

But as the desert bloomed, relations with the rest of the country withered. While the Latter-day Saints had been in Utah Territory for a decade, they’d been largely left to their own devices. Brigham Young was appointed the Utah Territorial Governor in 1851 as well as Territorial Indian Superintendent, which gave him authority over both the Mormon population and tribal affairs. He, and his people, continued to harbor huge resentments against the United States and its citizenry. Gentile administrators serving in his territory—including judges, Indian agents, and other political appointees—were harassed when they tried to do their jobs. Not surprisingly, this unwillingness to cooperate with the federal officials drew Washington’s gaze. Americans were already vexed over the issue of polygamy, which affronted a population who worried about the safety of the women and children living in such a remote corner of the country. Rumors about sexual depravities made newspaper headlines and supposed debaucheries became the fodder for bestselling novels. Metta Victor’s 1856 Mormon Wives, an early anti-polygamy novel, offered the salacious tale of sister wives and a lecherous husband. Anti-Mormon tomes appeared for decades following Victor’s work; the most famous were Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Homes adventure, the 1886 A Study in Scarlet, and Zane Grey’s 1913 Riders of the Purple Sage. Both featured Mormon polygamist villains attempting to force women into unwanted marriages, with a backdrop of murder, thievery, kidnapping, and other savageries.

Both polygamy and slavery were deeply unpopular with much of the American populace. There was a worry, among national politicians, that if Utah Territory was to become a state, the practice of polygamy would be justified with the same rationale the Southern states used to justify slavery—state sovereignty. Congress pressured President James Buchanan to stand up to Governor Young, both for his refusal to work with non-Mormon agents and for the ritual of plural marriage. Tackling the Mormon problem was seen as less incendiary than addressing slavery, so when one advisor urged the president, in 1857, to “supersede the Negro Mania with the almost universal excitements of the Anti-Mormon crusade,” Buchanan dispatched troops to march to Utah.

If the American public hated the Mormons, rest assured that the feeling was mutual. When rumors flew about the army heading to confront Mormondom, Young began to prepare for war with the United States. And he started with destabilizing Utah Territory by making travel hazardous for wagons crossing overland trails. At the time, Utah was a thoroughfare for migrants moving across the Rocky Mountains and the Great Basin. Before the friction, Young encouraged the Saints to do business with these settlers bound for the West Coast, helping them resupply on their long journeys. But as hostilities with Washington increased, Young ordered that any provisions not consumed by Mormon families were to be stored for wartime, not sold to desperate homesteaders who might be down to their last bags of beans. Those headed toward better lives in California found themselves caught between Young and the federal government. The prophet whipped up his adherents, telling them that “God has commenced to set up his kingdom on the earth, and all hell and devils are moving against it.” Thousands of Mormons had already taken oaths in Nauvoo, vowing to avenge their prophet. If President Buchanan planned to challenge Young’s authority or impede the building of Zion, he would get a fight.

In his riveting book, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows, Will Bagley, a writer and historian, explores the climate in Mormon Zion just prior to the little-known Utah War, observing that in the midnineteenth century, for “all practical purposes, in Utah, there was no law but God’s law.” Prophecy, scripture, and revelation, not the law of the land, reigned supreme. The prosperity that the Mormon people would come to enjoy was still years in the future. Many of the Saints in Utah Territory were destitute after years of being forced to move and leave possessions behind. The Mormon community had intentionally tried to isolate itself, but their territory was on the way to the California gold fields, and the American quest for westward expansion pressed directly into them. Brigham Young understood the tactical situation, and as sabers rattled, he tried to shut down traffic across his territory. He also threatened that if Washington tried to invade Utah, Gentiles would be attacked by the Native peoples that he, as the Territorial Indian Superintendent, had thus far kept in check. He told Washington that all overland travel must cease because Gentiles could no longer move across the continent safely. “The deserts of Utah [will] become a battle for freedom. It is peace and rights—or the knife and tomahawk—let Uncle Sam choose.” What he didn’t say was that it was Young himself who started to intentionally provoke attacks.

In his official role, Young had been responsible for providing support to the tribal nations. With Buchanan barring down, he began to use his position to turn Native people against non-Mormons. Jacob Hamblin, in his dealings with the tribal nations, made abundantly clear the difference between himself—a Latter-day Saint—and Gentiles. The Southern Paiute people came to distinguish Mormons, “Mormoni,” from other Americans, “Mericats.” Mormoni were friends, Hamblin told the Native peoples, and the Mericats were not. Prophet Young instructed Hamblin to tell his Native network to join the Saints in the mounting conflict, or “the United States will kill us both.”

The Utah War or, as it is also called, Buchanan’s Blunder, was not very momentous. When the troops arrived in 1858, members of the Nauvoo Legion blocked routes into the Salt Lake Valley and wouldn’t let them enter. They harassed the cavalry, stampeded their horses, and kept soldiers awake at night with loud commotion. Even though the Mormons got the better of the military contingent, they still seethed with rage over this invasion of Zion. Among the Mormon population in the 1850s, former Danites and Nauvoo Legion members, who had experienced the horrors of Missouri and been steeped in a military theology, were keen to channel their might and their ferocity against those they perceived had wronged them. Grudges burned like lye.

Isaac Haight was a constable in Nauvoo when, in 1844, he received news of Joseph Smith’s murder. By 1857, he was living in Parowan, a town in the Iron Mission district, where he served as a major in the southern Utah militia battalion. As an early church adherent, he had been devastated by the prophet’s death, and like thousands of others, he likely took the oath of vengeance before leaving Nauvoo. When Haight heard of the invasion, he vowed to fight with everything he had. “I have been driven from my home for the last time,” wrote Haight. “I’m prepared to feed the Gentiles the same bread they fed to us. God being my helper, I will give the last ounce of strength and if need be my blood in defense of Zion.”

It was the Baker-Fancher party—a group of unsuspecting Gentile emigrants from Arkansas—who were made to eat this bitter bread just for the act of crossing Utah Territory during this time of deep tension. The party, led by John Twitty Baker and Alexander Fancher, the latter an experienced wagon-train captain, included about a dozen wealthy farming and ranching families and several individuals traveling with somewhere between four hundred and eight hundred cows and horses. Being such a great procession, they were conspicuous. Throughout their journey, some families peeled off to join other trains—perhaps, according to Bagley, due to arguments over slavery—while other travelers had joined the Baker-Fancher team, seeking safety in numbers.

On May 13, 1857, mere days before the Baker-Fancher party headed west, Parley Pratt, the scout who had surveyed the Dixie region for Brigham Young, was shot and stabbed to death in Arkansas by Hector McLean. This jealous ex-husband of a woman whom Pratt had recently wed followed him for weeks, then murdered him during what happened to be the same month the US Army began its Utah campaign. Though this incident was completely unrelated to the Baker-Fancher party, the Pratt-McLean incident branded the families all the same. McLean killed Pratt in Arkansas, so the state was lumped with Missouri and Illinois as places whose residents the Mormon people most hated.

To be from Arkansas, to be Gentile, and to be wealthy were three things that earned targets on the backs of this group of travelers. Throughout their journey in the Utah Territory, the Baker-Fancher group found very few Mormons willing to sell them supplies. As they made their way south toward the Dixie and Iron Missions, things went from bad to worse. Locals began to spread lies and gossip, and these tales followed the group along the road. It was said that the Arkansans had poisoned a spring. Some Mormons accused them of pouring cyanide into the carcass of a butchered bull and giving the meat to the regional Indigenous people. And some said they had heard team members brag of killing Joseph Smith. Though these rumors were all untrue, the party did in fact commit one outrage. Their herds were very big and needed a lot of forage, a valued resource in a meager country. When a Mormon near Provo asked party members to get their animals out of his precious winter pasture, a member of the Baker-Fancher wagon train responded, “This is Uncle Sam’s grass. We are his boys.” Fighting words in Zion.

The Mormons had it in for the Arkansans. As the migrants journeyed west, Isaac Haight and John Lee gave local Paiute people weapons, with a promise that they could help themselves to the party’s goods and cows in exchange for launching an attack. With these assurances, Native men joined the Mormon assailants, who had smeared their faces with dark paint (to appear as Paiute), awaiting their chance to pounce. When the Baker-Fancher party reached the last point of respite before their final leg of the California Trail, one that took them across the pitiless Mojave Desert, team members set up camp in a place called Mountain Meadows. It’s a beautiful valley with good grass and water, in those days used by Mormons and non-Mormons alike. On September 7, 1857, after spending a peaceful night, some of the travelers woke early to tend the fires and prepare breakfast. That’s when bullets began to fly.

Following the first rounds of gunshot fire, several party members sprang into action, some circling the wagons and digging foxholes while others returned fire. The women and children took refuge in shallow pits. By the end of the first assault, seven Arkansans, including a child, slumped dead in the early autumn sun. One Native man was killed and two others badly wounded.

Details regarding the attack plan are sketchy and still argued among historians, but it’s clear that the Baker-Fancher party was targeted by Mormon militia, and maybe even Brigham Young himself. What’s also clear is that the people behind the campaign to bring down the Baker-Fancher party did not count on their incredible tenacity. Behind makeshift fortifications, the Arkansans and their traveling companions spent the next five days fighting the attackers and their increasingly reluctant Southern Paiute partners. Over the course of the week, the Mormon aggressors launched many strikes, but the wagon-train party endured. Native people, who totaled between forty to a hundred during the raid, slowly abandoned the instigators. The Mormons grew panicky as the ordeal stretched on for days. The Baker-Fancher strike was supposed to have been surgical and pinned on the Paiute people. Instead it was a slow-motion massacre.