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Brigham Young and Mormon Indian Policies
6 Aug 2019

Brigham Young and Mormon Indian Policies

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Brigham Young has been acclaimed as one of America’s greatest colonizers, empire builders, and religious leaders, and there is no doubt that his achievements left an indelible imprint upon the pages of western frontier history. Many of his accomplishments, however, need to be seen against a silhouette of his experience with the native Americans. His relations with the Indians were more than pious expressions of good will or statements of empty dreams, hopes, and visions for the future of the Indians. They were also more than simple deeds of kindness or acts of violence. The relations of Brigham Young with the Indians were a blend of his social-religious humanitarian philosophy and practical measures that he thought necessary for establishing the Mormon kingdom of God on earth.

Even though he preferred to use peaceful means, he anticipated that conflicts would occur between the Saints and the Indians; so he urged his people to build forts for their protection. When the forts proved inadequate during periods of intense violence, he ordered the Nauvoo Legion to fight the “hostile” natives. Finally, when he realized that some Indian problems could not be solved either by military or peaceful means, he requested the federal government remove the Indians from the Great Basin to some remote unsettled region where the slow change of their life-style would be less troublesome.

The Trial of Don Pedro León Luján
6 Aug 2019

The Trial of Don Pedro León Luján

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In The Trial of Don Pedro León Luján: The Attack against Indian Slavery and Mexican Traders in Utah, Sondra Jones has written an excellent and accessible discussion of a little-known episode in the history of nineteenth-century Utah. In the first chapter, Jones makes it clear that the arrest, trial, and expulsion from Utah of Don Pedro León Luján, a New Mexican trader, has often been distorted or even glossed over in Utah histories; she then describes the event using as evidence extant primary records.

Jones contextualizes the story of slave trading in early Utah and supports it with substantial references and informative notes. The Utah Territory into which the Saints settled after being forced to flee from the Midwest was seasoned with tribal customs and traditional trading practices between Native Americans and traders. In particular, the Utes often traded Indian children—children from other tribes and even their own children—for goods and firearms. These children, then, were essentially slaves. Despite moral conflicts, the Saints became part of this slave trade: “The Mormons’ initial reluctance to purchase Indian captives posed no real problem for the Indian slavers. To make a sale [the Utes] needed only to threaten to sell [the children] to Mexican slavers or Navajos (another active market for domestics and herders) or to kill [the children].”

Sagwitch
6 Aug 2019

Sagwitch

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After publishing a few articles on Native American history and studying the Shoshone language, Scott Christensen has completed his first full-length work, Sagwitch: Shoshone Chieftain, Mormon Elder 1822–1887, which won the Evans Handcart Award at Utah State University. Christensen is to be commended for this well-written documentary of the man who was a leader of the Northwestern Band of Shoshone Indians as Indian-white relations developed in early Utah history.

Sagwitch’s life is significant in many ways and deserves the attention Christensen has given him. Sagwitch was born in 1822, a time when his people were enjoying the last days of the traditional life they had known for centuries. After the Mormon pioneers entered the Salt Lake Valley in 1847 and as western territories saw more and more exploration and settlement, the Northwestern Band of Shoshone were forced to forever change their patterns of living. Sagwitch was a wise man and a gifted speaker, and he fell naturally into the leadership role that he maintained among his band throughout his life. A survivor of the Bear River Massacre in 1863, Sagwitch believed his people would best survive by assimilating with the Latter-day Saints, who were inhabiting the traditional Shoshone lands. He and his band converted to Mormonism and attempted to follow their Church leaders’ directions in learning to farm and raise livestock. This book details the life of Sagwitch and his band as they interacted with the white pioneers and with other Native American tribes.

Utah’s Black Hawk War
6 Aug 2019

Utah’s Black Hawk War

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In 1977, Utah State University professor S. George Ellsworth asked ten dozen scholars, members of the Mormon History Association, to list their choices for the top ten books written in the field of Utah and Mormon studies. The criterion he used in that survey was excellence in both scholarship and literary quality. Standard titles such as Great Basin Kingdom and The Mountain Meadows Massacre topped the list, followed by others such as Nauvoo: Kingdom on the Mississippi and Homeward to Zion. A similar survey taken a few years from now may find John Peterson’s Utah’s Black Hawk War on many scholars’ ten best books list. Every student of Utah and Mormon history must hereafter consider Peterson’s account of the clash of Mormon and Native American cultures in nineteenth-century Utah.

Peterson, who now teaches at the Salt Lake City, University Institute of Religion (on the campus of the University of Utah) tells his readers that the relationship between the LDS Church and Native Americans is of singular importance in Latter-day Saint history. For not only is there a past but also an anticipated future to this story. According to Latter-day Saint doctrine, the “remnant of Israel” described in the Book of Mormon includes many present-day Native Americans. The faithful return of this remnant is fundamental to the timetable of eschatological events foreshadowing the second coming of Jesus Christ. Therefore, the interaction between the Saints and the Native Americans is of great consequence.

Light on the “Mission to the Lamanites”
6 Aug 2019

Light on the “Mission to the Lamanites”

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In September 1830, the Lord called Oliver Cowdery by revelation to “go unto the Lamanites and preach my gospel unto them” (D&C 28:8). The call came a few months after the United States Congress had passed the Indian Removal Bill, an act providing for the relocation of all tribes within United States borders to points beyond.

Peter Whitmer Jr., Parley P. Pratt, Ziba Peterson, and Frederick Williams also received calls to preach to the Lamanites. The 1831 expulsion of these missionaries from Indian territory and their subsequent proposal to establish territorial schools are documented in letters from the contending parties, which are reproduced at the end of this article.

President Young Writes Jefferson Davis about the Gunnison Massacre Affair
6 Aug 2019

President Young Writes Jefferson Davis about the Gunnison Massacre Affair

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John W. Gunnison was a West Point graduate who had been sent to Utah 1849–50 as an assistant for Captain Howard Stansbury’s topographical survey. Wintering in the Utah territory, Gunnison found time to study his unusual hosts and their singular religion. The result was his influential book, The Mormons, in which he attempted to navigate the usual extremes of the time, Mormon polemics and gentile censure.

Gunnison divided his command and led eleven men into the Sevier basin for what he thought would be the last mapping session of the season. The expedition had a much greater finality. At daybreak on October 26, a band of Pahvant Indians surprised and killed Gunnison along with seven of his men. Four others fled and narrowly escaped. In the document below, President Young tells his side of the story. In the fall of 1855, almost two years after the massacre, Young wrote to Jefferson Davis, U. S. Secretary of War at the time and Gunnison’s former superior. When Young wrote his letter, the Gunnison trial had already been held—with less than favorable repercussions for the Mormon people. An all-LDS jury refused to follow the judge’s instructions to convict or acquit on a first-degree murder charge and found the indicted Pahvants guilty, instead, of the lesser charge of manslaughter. The verdict outraged government officials and many American citizens, who clearly hoped the Indians might be executed. The Mormons, it was charged, were disloyally coddling the Indians for their own purposes.

Navajo Tradition, Mormon Life
6 Aug 2019

Navajo Tradition, Mormon Life

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Navajo Tradition, Mormon Life shows how Jim Dandy—a Mormon Navajo who participated in the Indian Student Placement Program, attended Brigham Young University, and taught school in San Juan County, Utah—combines his Navajo and Mormon lifestyles. He asked his Anglo neighbor Robert S. McPherson, a professor at Utah State University Eastern–San Juan Center, to help him record his history. 

On Zion’s Mount
6 Aug 2019

On Zion’s Mount

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On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape tells the tale of a beloved mountainous landmark and a disregarded lake. Jared Farmer’s penetrating and sweeping gaze invites readers to view connections between land, landscape, and peoples that have remained, like Poe’s purloined letter, hidden in plain sight. Farmer’s story of “Timp” relates directly to the story of Indians native to the land and Mormon settlers who became “neonatives,” in part by creating a significant landmark in Timpanogos and seeing imagined Indians while forgetting and displacing Utah Lake and real Indians. By illuminating these interwoven narratives with interdisciplinary research involving history, folklore, popular culture, and studies of place, Farmer cannily crafts a plea for recognizing homes and landmarks as signs of society and indicators of forgetfulness. He admits that his story of a lake and a mountain in Utah involves unique features but is not an anomaly in the colonization of the United States, where landmarks are created, imagined, and venerated with little awareness or consideration of historic events and displacements. As much a book about usable pasts as about American landscapes, On Zion’s Mount argues that this story and these landscapes matter because “what we see affects what we do.” The unspoken plea in Farmer’s closing call to move the love of the mountain down to the lake is for greater environmental and cultural awareness through more attuned historical understanding—with a hope to connect what we do, perhaps, more fittingly with what we believe.

In addition to presenting thought-provoking awareness of landmarks as a combination of natural, historical, and cross-cultural features and processes, Farmer writes with fine craftsmanship and abundant care in structure and style. The book is divided into three major sections, capturing the author’s commitment to regional, local, and extralocal history and storytelling. An informative introduction establishes the juxtaposition of the lake and the mountain within the time frame of “the nineteenth century, and for untold ages before,” while also engaging the scholarly discourse of landmarks, space, place, and the geographic practices of colonization.

Making Space on the Western Frontier
6 Aug 2019

Making Space on the Western Frontier

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University of Utah historian W. Paul Reeve has written an intriguing and engaging monograph examining the dynamic interchange between Mormons, miners, and Southern Paiutes along the Great Basin’s southern rim. Broadly covering the last four decades of the nineteenth century, Reeves focuses his lens most closely on southwestern Utah and southeastern Nevada during the turbulent 1860s and 1870s when the clash of cultures reached its zenith.

Paiutes, Mormons, and miners possessed quite different worldviews relating to their notions about identity. The “complicated and messy” story that unfolds tackles the economic, cultural, political, and religious clashes that intertwine (and entangle) these three groups’ perspectives. A cursory list of the historical actors includes a carpetbag governor, anti-Mormon military officers, corrupt Indian agents, jury members passing contested decisions, murderous scoundrels, and even lynch mobs. Notable Mormons and Southern Paiutes include Brigham Young, Erastus Snow, Bush-head, Tut-se-gav-its, Taú-gu (Coal Creek John), and Moroni. James Ashley, Patrick Conner, Thomas Sale, and George Hearst round out the cast of politicians, military personnel, Indian agents, and mining investors.

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