Desert Between the Mountains: Mormons, Miners, Padres, Mountain Men, and the Opening of the Great Basin, 1772-1869 by Michael S. Durham

Author:Michael S. Durham [Durham, Michael S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 19th Century, State & Local, Religion, Christianity, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon)
ISBN: 9780806131863
Google: yeVUXiqmAEgC
Amazon: 0806131861
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 1999-09-14T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

THE UTAH WAR

Brigham Young arrived in the Great Basin in 1847 with one request of the world: “Give us ten years of peace, and we will ask no odds of Uncle Sam or the devil.” On Pioneer Day, July 24, 1857, the ten years were up, and the Saints, of whom there were now thirty-five thousand in one hundred communities, were about to have an opportunity to test the odds. To celebrate the tenth anniversary, Brigham Young and several thousand followers took themselves to Big Cottonwood Canyon twenty-five miles from Salt Lake City for a Mormon-style wingding lasting several days.1 There, with six brass bands for music, the Saints, in speeches and prayers, marveled at and gave thanks for their triumph over adversity. Celebrating was something the Saints were good at; the persecution and suffering that they had endured in their twenty-seven-year history had not robbed them of their ability to have a good time.

As the celebration progressed, three travel-worn Mormons rode into the camp and reported directly to Brigham Young. Among them was the long-haired Porter Rockwell, the so-called Destroying Angel of Mormondom. Earlier in the month, Rockwell had been carrying the mail east to Missouri when he met Abraham O. Smoot, the mayor of Salt Lake City, and Judson Stoddard, who were driving cattle west to Salt Lake City. The two men informed Rockwell that federal troops were on their way to Utah to suppress a “rebellion” in the territory, replace Brigham Young as governor, and perhaps arrest him and other Mormon leaders. After turning the mail and the cattle over to others, the three men hurried back to Salt Lake City, covering the 513 miles from Fort Leavenworth to Salt Lake City in just five days. When they found the city nearly empty—for the Canyon procession had begun on July 22—they remounted and headed for Big Cottonwood Canyon, arriving there shortly before noon on July 24.

Brigham Young took the news calmly; even his rhetoric on the occasion seemed subdued. Leaving the tent, he gathered the celebrants and told them of the approach of the federal army. He also reminded them of his words a decade before: He had asked for and received ten years of peace; now “God is with us, and the devil has taken me at my word.” Back in Salt Lake City, it was Heber Kimball who delivered the first rousing response to the threat of federal invasion of Utah: “Send 2,500 troops here, our brethren, to make a desolation of this people! God Almighty helping me, I will fight until there is not a drop of blood in my veins. Good God! I have wives enough to whip out the United States, for they will whip themselves.…”2

There had been talk of sending federal troops to Utah for some time, a threat that the Mormon firebrand Jedediah Grant attributed in March 1856 to a combination of Gentile “impudence and ignorance.” The victor in the presidential election that year, pro-slavery Democrat James Buchanan, was

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