Andrew Kimball, born 1858 in Salt Lake City, Utah, stood eight generations removed from Richard Kimball, immigrant wheelwright from England to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634. Andrew’s father, Heber Chase Kimball, born in New England, moved in his youth with his family westward to New York, where he worked as a farmer and a potter and married Vilate Murray.1
In 1832, Heber and Vilate became followers of Joseph Smith, the Latter-day Saint prophet.2 The Kimballs thereby set their own and their descendants’ lives on a new, much different course. With the Mormons, Heber and Vilate settled successively in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. When Joseph Smith died by assassins’ bullets, his successor, Brigham Young, led thousands of Saints across the Great Plains to the valley of the Great Salt Lake. There they intended to build the Kingdom of God. In this undertaking, Heber served as Brigham’s first counselor and chief lieutenant.3 Beginning with the first Mormons who arrived in 1847, Church leaders directed the colonization of the Great Basin and beyond, so that in a few years Mormons occupied nearly all the arable land in a vast desert area of the American southwest.4
When Mormons arrived in the region in 1847, the whole of the American southwest was a part of Mexico, but in 1848, with the ending of the Mexican-American War, Mexico ceded that territory to the United States. Congress organized Utah Territory in 1850 and U.S. President Millard Fillmore named Brigham Young territorial governor.
In 1852, Church leaders publically announced the practice of polygamy.5 Heber and a few other leaders had been dutifully inducted into the institution in Nauvoo a decade earlier.6 Once publically announced, the practice became a lightening rod for anti-Mormon sentiment.7
One among Heber’s plural wives was Ann Alice Gheen, who in 1858 would bear a son she and Heber named Andrew. Heber had come to the Great Salt Lake Valley with the original 1847 pioneer company, but he then returned to Winter Quarters for the winter. In 1848 he moved his several families to Utah and housed them in a row of log huts in the original fort. That second year about five thousand people occupied the settlement and they put a thousand acres under cultivation. Heber received a ten-acre plot immediately northeast of present-day Temple Square, and there he built more permanent frame and adobe housing, along with shops and mills. He also laid out gardens, orchards, and corrals.8
This 1860s view of Salt Lake City looks north-northeast from Temple Square across the Brigham Young block and the Heber C. Kimball block, where Andrew was born in 1858. The city wall, built to protect against Native Americans and to give work to immigrants, is a horizontal line beyond the buildings. Courtesy L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, BYU.
Anti-Mormon sentiment against polygamy and Mormon political domination in Utah Territory fueled national criticism, leading to a conclusion by U.S. President James Buchanan that Mormons stood in a state of rebellion; in 1857, he sent a military expedition of twenty-five hundred men under Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston to put down a supposed rebellion and replace Brigham Young as governor.9
In fall 1857, before Johnston’s Army arrived in Utah, difficult weather stalled its progress and the federal troops established winter encampment in Wyoming, allowing time for negotiations. In April 1858, Mormons agreed to accept Alfred Cumming as the new territorial governor, replacing Brigham Young, and the army agreed to leave Salt Lake City untouched. In May 1858 the Saints vacated their homes in the Salt Lake Valley, ready to torch them if the army failed to keep its word. Thousands of people had already moved south to Utah Valley and the troops passed through the empty city of Salt Lake without incident. The army established Camp Floyd, forty miles south in Cedar Valley, ending the “Mormon War” peacefully. In July the people returned to their homes in Salt Lake City.10
Heber’s wives, including Ann, participated in the move south. She carried with her two little boys, Samuel and Daniel, and she expected soon to deliver twins. A few weeks later, on September 6, 1858, Ann bore the two babies and named them Andrew and Alice Ann. At that time, Ann lived in a row of low adobe houses on the Kimball ten-acre block, just above City Creek where the stream split as it emerged from the canyon and one branch ran west along North Temple Street. Three years later, Ann bore a second daughter, Sarah, who completed Ann’s family.
In all, Heber had sixty children by sixteen of his wives. Andrew was the thirty-sixth of forty-five sons, thus one of the younger children. Some of the wives lived together in the large frame “White House” on the Kimball block. Ann and others lived in a succession of other homes.11 Unfortunately, since they did not live in the same quarters, Andrew did not have the opportunity to interact with his father frequently and thus did not know him well.
During Andrew’s childhood, Church membership in Utah Territory grew rapidly by immigration. The period also saw increasing pressure by the federal government to end polygamy and give up Mormon political domination.
A cobblestone wall surrounded the Kimball block, located at the north edge of the city. The wall served as part of the city’s precautions against Native Americans12 and as a make-work project for new immigrants. Another ten-foot wall surrounded Temple Square, enclosing the temple under construction, a small tabernacle, and the Endowment House. The streets were all dirt, and the only streetlights were a few on Main Street. City population during Andrew’s boyhood in the 1860s ranged from about eight to ten thousand.13
In 1861 the Civil War began and Johnston’s Army vacated Camp Floyd. By 1862 a daily mail delivery arrived by stagecoach, but frontier Salt Lake City was still many days of travel away from midwestern and eastern population centers. In 1862, Colonel Patrick E. Connor and seven hundred soldiers established Fort Douglas, on a hill east of the city, to keep watch on Brigham Young and the Mormons, and with a cannon aimed at Brigham’s residence.14 In 1862, Congress enacted legislation against plural marriage.15 In 1869, when Andrew was ten, the transcontinental railroad linked Utah in a more substantial way to the rest of the country and ended immigration by wagon train or handcart.16
The Walker War (1853), the Tintic War (1856), the Battle of Bear River (an 1863 massacre of Shoshones by Connor’s troops), and finally the Black Hawk War (1865–68) ended Native American conflicts in the Great Basin. A treaty forced the removal to the Uintah Basin of about five thousand Utes and lost to them most of their hunting grounds and fishing waters. Mormon farms and ranches occupied the former Indian homelands.17
Thus, Andrew’s childhood came after the first phase of pioneering had ended. Salt Lake City was rapidly growing into a real city.
Notes
1. For general information on Heber C. Kimball, see Kimball, Heber C. Kimball; Whitney, Life of Heber C. Kimball.
7. Much of the early reaction to the announcement of polygamy can be seen in the pages of the St. Louis Luminary. See Black, Best of the St. Louis Luminary.
12. Only about six miles of mud and rubble “Spanish wall” was completed. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 112.
13. The 1860 U.S. Census lists the population as being eight thousand, the 1870 U.S. Census lists it as thirteen thousand, and the 1880 U.S. Census lists it as twenty-one thousand.
