What Hath God Wrought (107 page)

Mormon reaction to the assassination was well expressed by Eliza Snow, secretly a plural wife of Joseph’s, later and publicly a plural wife of his successor, Brigham Young. Called a “prophetess,” she contributed to Mormon theology the doctrine of a Heavenly Mother. A leader of women’s organizations within the LDS Church, in later years she espoused women’s suffrage for Utah Territory, achieved in 1870. Four days after the martyrdom of her prophet husband, she published her righteous anger in imagery of divine judgment:

Among several claimants to the prophet’s mantle, Brigham Young, the senior member of the Twelve Apostles, established his right to succeed Joseph as leader of the church. Where Joseph had been an imaginative, charismatic seer, Brigham was practical, decisive, and gruff. He had a better head for business. He received only one divine revelation, which set out the command structure for crossing the plains. The successful leader of the best organized large migration in American history, he has appropriately been called “the Moses of an American Exodus.” A dissenting minority argued that the presidency should pass to the prophet’s young son Joseph Smith III; they eventually established the Reorganized LDS Church, whose members (sometimes called Josephites, as distinguished from the Brighamites) have remained a separate denomination.
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They did not join in the westward migration and did not practice polygamy.

Disillusioned with Illinois and the United States, Brigham set about planning the escape of his people to someplace else, where they could implement their theocratic vision of society and prepare for the millennium undisturbed. During Joseph’s lifetime, Texas, Oregon, California, and Vancouver Island had already been considered. But the first priority remained completion of the Nauvoo temple, which was achieved by August 1845. Even before they finished construction, the Saints had begun to perform new rites there, based in part on Joseph’s revision of Masonic rituals (restoring them to their ancient originals, he claimed).
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When anti-Mormon violence resumed in September, Young promised state authorities his community would depart by the following spring. It was little enough time to ready and equip such an undertaking. To ensure Mormon departure, the state legislature voted (by wide bipartisan margins) to revoke Nauvoo’s charter of self-government. By now, most gentiles saw Mormonism the way the nativists saw Roman Catholicism: as a denial of and a threat to American liberal pluralism. That opponents had to resort to illiberal measures themselves seemed to them regrettable but necessary.
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The exodus actually got under way early, in February 1846. With typical resourcefulness, Mormon families turned unusually cold weather to advantage, crossing the frozen Mississippi on foot. But when almost everyone in town tried to sell home and possessions at the same time, prices hit rock bottom; as in Missouri earlier, the departing Saints took a terrible financial beating. The Mormons did not cross the plains in a single group. During 1846, Brigham stretched out sixteen thousand people in camps all across Iowa. The circumstances taxed his leadership and the people’s faith to the utmost. Having lost their savings in Nauvoo, many of the migrants needed to find temporary jobs along the way to feed their families. Persecuted, divided, impoverished, and frightened as they were, Brigham Young forged his people into a cohesive, purposeful New Israel. He enforced a military-style discipline and the pooling of resources. People would plant crops in one location and move on to another, leaving the harvest for the next company. The famous advance party—known in Utah as “the Pioneers”—left the staging area west of Winter Quarters, six miles north of present-day Omaha, on April 19, 1847, for the trek across the plains and mountains. It consisted of 143 men (3 of them the slaves of southern Mormons), 3 women (6 more women later joined the party), 2 children, 93 horses, 66 oxen, 52 mules, 72 wagons, and (since they were exploring) sextants, barometers, thermometers, telescopes, and a cannon.
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Even in the advance party, most people did not know where they were headed.

Unlike most settler caravans, the Mormons employed no professional scouts or outfitters. Brigham chose the route west well, whether by divine guidance, careful preparation, or both. They managed good relations with all the Indian tribes except the Pawnee, who feared for the buffalo. Young admonished his people sternly to kill no more buffalo than they needed for food. On a good day the party made ten miles. The women cooked, washed, and gathered buffalo dung for fuel.
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Much of the time they paralleled the Oregon Trail. They left messages with advice for subsequent parties. They took the Hastings Cutoff but were better prepared for it than the Donners had been. Along the way, the Pioneers could be fortified by the hymnody of one of their own number, William Clayton, written in Iowa the year before, on Brigham’s order.

 

Why should we mourn or think our lot is hard?

’Tis not so; all is right!

Why should we think to earn a great reward,

If we now shun the fight?

Gird up your loins, fresh courage take,

Our God will never us forsake.
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On July 24, as the party emerged from Emigration Canyon in the Wasatch Mountains, the valley of the Great Salt Lake lay visible below. Brigham Young, ill inside one of the wagons, struggled up and looked out. Erastus Snow remembered him saying it: “This is the place.”
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It was isolated and barren, but those were assets, not liabilities. The Mormon leader did not want his people to settle in a place anyone else would want. Only one white person, a trader named Miles Goodyear, then made his home in the Salt Lake Valley; the Mormons bought him out.
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As soon as Brigham had supervised building a stockade, planting crops, and beginning the irrigation system, he was off, heading back across the plains to Iowa. Along the way he greeted ten more Mormon parties coming on schedule. By the end of 1847, seventeen hundred Latter-day Saints had made their way to Utah. Until the transcontinental railroad made the trip easier in 1869, they continued to come by the thousands along the trail the Pioneers had marked out, the poorest of them, who could not afford wagons, pushing their few belongings in handcarts.

The Mormons transplanted their culture whole. Unlike so many other frontiers (Gold Rush California, for example) Utah experienced no transition from anarchy to civilization. The closest analogy in American history to the Mormon exodus would be the Great Migration of the Puritans from East Anglia to Massachusetts Bay in 1630, likewise religiously motivated, well organized, and implementing a preexisting blueprint. Brigham laid out Salt Lake City very much as Joseph had laid out Nauvoo, with wide streets at right angles, and lots distributed to faithful Mormons, all centered on a temple site. The Mormons proclaimed the State of Deseret, with generous boundaries much larger than the present state of Utah, and, like Joseph in Nauvoo, for a time Brigham united the leadership of church and state in his person. Young announced the ideal of a self-sufficient community, and this time he had geography on his side. “We do not intend to have any trade or commerce with the gentile world, for so long as we buy of them we are in a degree dependent upon them,” he declared. “The Kingdom of God cannot rise independent of the gentile nations until we produce, manufacture, and make every article of use, convenience, or necessity among our own people.”
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Early Mormon Utah was the largest of American utopian communities, an example to the world but not a part of it.

In the summer of 1848, a plague of crickets descended on the Mormons’ first crop. Men, women, and children fought the horrid insects frantically. Then huge flocks of seagulls from Great Salt Lake appeared, devouring the crickets. Today, Seagull Monument in Temple Square, Salt Lake City, expresses gratitude for a providential deliverance, and Utah law forbids killing seagulls.
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Like the celibate Shakers and the Oneida perfectionists with their complex marriages, the Mormons had a pattern of gender relations all their own. The most distinctive feature of Mormon culture was the practice of plural marriage, or (as the gentiles called it) polygamy. Joseph Smith set out to restore the authentic religion of biblical times, and of course the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob took many wives. Joseph also taught that polygamous marriage constituted a step in the evolution of faithful Mormons toward godhood in the hereafter. (“As man now is, God once was: As God now is, man may be.”)
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The prophet shared his revelation commending plural marriage with a few Nauvoo intimates in 1843 while publicly denying the rumors of its practice. Careful inquiry has revealed that Joseph married between twenty-eight and thirty-three women, eleven of whom were already wives of other men. (It is not widely grasped that Joseph’s plural marriages involved polyandry as well as polygyny.)
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Among the prophet’s wives was the widow of William Morgan, the Antimasonic martyr, although Joseph himself joined the Masonic Order. Brigham Young married nineteen wives in the three weeks just before leaving Nauvoo; some of these women may have been seeking to place themselves under his protection during the coming journey. In Utah, the Mormons felt freer to practice polygamy openly; Young proclaimed the doctrine publicly in 1852. By most counts, the second president of the church eventually had twenty-seven wives, who bore him fifty-six children.
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Even in Utah, only about 10 percent of Mormon men practiced polygamy. A man was expected to support all his families, often in separate establishments, which confined the practice to an economic elite. Plural marriage usually accompanied a man’s advancement in the church hierarchy and showed his unreserved loyalty to the faith. Evidence of dissatisfaction with their situation among plural wives is less widespread than we might expect. Some women enjoyed their independence when their husband was living with his other families; others resented having to rear their children largely by themselves. Some felt jealous of the other wives, but sisterly affection was also common. Plural wives could divorce their husbands more readily than their husbands could divorce them; Ann Eliza Webb divorced Brigham Young.
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After Utah became part of the United States in 1848, the Mormons claimed that the First Amendment protected their practice of polygamy as a “free exercise of religion.” Eventually the Supreme Court ruled against them, and in 1890 the president of the LDS Church renounced the practice of plural marriage out of respect for the law of the land; the principle is still considered to enjoy divine sanction in the life hereafter.
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Ironically, the Mormons who sought to escape from the United States ended up playing a role in extending the United States. Their way of life, originally a millenarian critique of the larger society and a collectivist, authoritarian dissent from American individualistic pluralism, now impresses observers as the most “American” of all. How that transformation came about, however, is another story.

V

Sixty-eight United States dragoons commanded by Captain Seth Thornton rode out in the evening of April 24, 1846, on reconnaissance. They went to confirm intelligence that a Mexican military force had crossed the Rio Grande a few miles upstream from where Brigadier General Zachary Taylor’s army encamped across the river from the Mexican town of Matamoros. The reports proved all too accurate. The next morning a superior Mexican force surprised and surrounded Thornton’s soldiers at the Rancho de Carricitos. When the Americans tried to fight their way out, eleven were killed and the rest captured. The enemy allowed a wounded survivor to make his way back to Taylor bearing the news and assurances that the captives would be treated decently. (In fact, a few weeks later the prisoners were exchanged.) Thus inauspiciously began the war between the United States and Mexico. “Hostilities may now be considered as commenced,” Taylor reported dryly to Washington. When his message reached the White House fourteen days later, the president and his cabinet responded promptly and without surprise. They had been about to recommend to Congress a declaration of war against Mexico anyway, and the little battle facilitated this task. President Polk spent all day Sunday, May 10, drafting his war message with the help of Secretary of State Buchanan and Secretary of the Navy Bancroft, taking out only enough time to go to church.
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