Wrath of Cochise by Terry Mort

Author:Terry Mort
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books

Should the readers of your Journal in the States see these communications, they will understand that notwithstanding we are serving in the most God-forsaken country in the habitable globe, yet … with Valley Tan to drink and the Valley Tan to read, we are all right.

—Camp Floyd soldier’s letter to the editor,

February 185916

I say that the nausea the Goshoots gave me, an Indian worshipper, set me to examining authorities to see if perchance I had been overestimating the Red Man while viewing him through the mellow moonshine of romance. The revelations that came were disenchanting.

—Mark Twain, Roughing It17

UNLIKE TWAIN’S “MOONSHINE OF ROMANCE,” THE MOONSHINE of choice at Camp Floyd was anything but mellow. Called Valley Tan (as in tanning fluid), it was a species of locally manufactured whiskey that was distilled under license by Mormons and sold to the unwary or the undiscriminating, and therefore had a wide market. Soldiers, teamsters, and assorted camp followers claimed Valley Tan “improved” with each glass—a compliment that loses something of its force the more you think about it. Indeed, the stuff was described as liquor that “smells like gangrene starting in a mildewed silo, it tastes like the wrath to come, and when you absorb a deep swig of it, you have all the sensation of having swallowed a lighted kerosene lamp.”18 No doubt, most of the soldiers who tried it agreed with a local bartender who said: “There ain’t nothing bad about this whiskey; the only fault is, it isn’t good.”19 During the great Reformation of 1856, one of the reforms the Mormons were required to adopt, or readopt, was abstinence from alcohol.* There was no proscription about making it, though, nor did the church hierarchy consider it wrong to sell it to the newly arrived American soldiers or to the various rough-hewn Gentile teamsters, as well as the gamblers, prostitutes, and criminals who predictably appeared as Camp Floyd grew into a sizable installation. The Mormons saw no inconsistency in this commerce; or, if they did, they were not troubled by it, perhaps agreeing with Ralph Waldo Emerson that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” And in truth, not all the Saints were as abstemious as they professed, though most probably had more sense than to drink the local product.

The other Valley Tan was a newspaper edited by Kirk Anderson, a Gentile, staunch critic of the Mormons, and tireless supporter of the army in Utah. The paper was a weekly that began publication in November 1858, after the army was installed in Camp Floyd. The Valley Tan, published in Salt Lake City, was the second newspaper in Utah Territory, the first being the Deseret News (founded 1850), which was the official organ of the Mormon Church. As an opposition editor, Anderson had strong opinions, stated them strongly and, like many frontier editors, went around well armed. He had good reason to, for, as he wrote in an open letter dated November 26, 1858, and addressed to the Salt Lake

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