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The 1857 Utah War
- fooey 4y agoThe 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 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- DavidAdams 4y agoPorter 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.
- swatcoder 4y agoIt'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.
- codazoda 4y agoJust in case you were also confused, 1957 is a slight typo. The Massacre occurred in 1857.
- fooey 4y agowhoops, thanks!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mixmastamyk 4y agoThat 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.
- tastyfreeze 4y agoThey earned it by selling goods to the fort. Costs a lot of money to feed troops.
- remarkEon 4y agoIs 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.
- dang 4y agoWe've taken that word out of the title now. Please let's discuss more interesting things than linkbait effects.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bitbuilder 4y agoI'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.
- daveslash 4y agoI 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".
- tcmart14 4y ago
- potta_coffee 4y agoThis is a Mormon-biased spin on the history.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kolanos 4y agoThis 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_War#Overview
- russellbeattie 4y agoI 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.
- 4y ago
- matt3210 4y agoThey’re population is one of the few which are increasing. They very well could inherit the whole country.
- TheGigaChad 4y ago
- balentio 4y agoBetween Buchanan's questionable sexuality, and the Mormons and Slavery, it is little wonder the Civil War was not far away.
- ghaff 4y agoPretty 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.
- balentio 4y agoTrue, 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.
- ramesh31 4y ago
- rwcarlsen 4y agoWhile I'm sure some of that does occur some places in the region, my experience in the Utah/Idaho region is very much the opposite. Friendly and very merit oriented work environments.
- metadat 4y ago
- InitialLastName 4y agoI don't have the moral fortitude to defend Mormonism as a religion, but based on the model of organized religion as a theocratic social insurance program (which it has been since, at least, Leviticus), your complaints don't seem entirely unreasonable: > membership costs 10% of all you earn 10% is less than I currently pay into my state's social safety net programs. > If you are in dire straights as a member and require assistance, the program is geared to get you off their assistance ASAP. Shouldn't "returning people to self-sufficiency" be the goal of any social safety net? As far as I can tell, when you build classes of people whose lives are exclusively and indefinitely supported by welfare, things don't go well (especially when the people who fund the social welfare system get a bit strapped for cash).
- metadat 4y agoThe point is, they've amassed hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars with this stingy pyramid scheme. The "social safety net" they offer is a joke. Enjoy your knitted blanket and can of baked beans. The institution is only generous with their marketing budget (e.g. BYU, which is also run on a shoestring budget) or when they're on the receiving end of generosity. The whole enterprise feeds on the exploitation of human souls for free labor. It'd be nice if they looked outside themselves a little and invested their resources into efforts to help human-beings. Does "god" really only want them helping themselves?
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoThere'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!
- daveslash 4y agoRe >> 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
- stevetodd 4y agoAt the time, Utah was located in Mexican territory.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoAt 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.)
- rayiner 4y agoI 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.
- rtkaratekid 4y agoIt doesn't hurt that the Salt Lake is sadly shrinking currently. So it's even worse than it probably was when they arrived.
- flanbiscuit 4y agoThe 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-salt-lake-is-drying-out-threatening-ecological-economic-disaster-2022-07-14/ https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/utahs-great-sal... other sources: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/07/climate/salt-lake-city-climate-disaster.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/07/climate/salt-lake-city-cl...
- fooey 4y agoThe 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'
- thenerdhead 4y agoWasn'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.
- nobleach 4y agoNah, 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.
- thenerdhead 4y agoYeah 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.
- nobleach 4y agoIt could explain places like Provo/Lindon/Orem which are most likely 99%.
- herewulf 4y agoThere are lots of Mormons in Idaho too, as evidenced by BYU in Rexburg, Idaho.
- billiam 4y agoThe 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-funds-complaint/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/18/us/latter-day-saints-charity-... https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/years-sex-abuse-mormon-officials-happen-87911176 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/years-sex-abuse-mo... https://religionnews.com/2017/06/20/10-reasons-mormons-dominate-multi-level-marketing-companies/ 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-cosmetic-procedures-in-utah/ https://www.healthresearchpolicy.org/top-3-most-requested-co...
- R0b0t1 4y ago
- metadat 4y agoThe persecution was also rooted in the cult's founder, Joseph Smith, having a thing for "seducing" young girls (14 year olds and even younger) and attempting to add them to his collection of 40 odd wives. His creepy heavenly-sanctioned pedophilic actions and vibe were not well-received by outsiders.
- anonAndOn 4y agoSomehow those blessed with being a "prophet" throughout the millennia are always instructed to have sex with young women/girls because the path to heaven is always in their pants. Funny how religion works across the ages.
- rsweeney21 4y ago
- jbellis 4y agoThis 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/articles/Dialogue_V44N02_490.pdf 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.
- gumby 4y agoI 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.
- SauciestGNU 4y agoUtah was a slave state. They might not have joined the Confederacy, but Brigham Young as governor publicly advocated in favor of slavery.
- gumby 4y agoI hadn’t known that, though it doesn’t surprise me.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]