Go West, Young Man

BRIAN: Now it’s safe to say that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is a true American success story. The exact number of adherents is contested, but according to a recent Pew Research Center survey, there are nearly 4 million adult Mormons in America.

PETER: Those numbers would have been hard to imagine back in 1844. Hundreds of Mormon converts had been killed or attacked as they attempted to build settlements in Missouri and Illinois. An angry mob had just murdered the church’s founder and prophet, Joseph Smith, in Carthage, Illinois. The Church was in turmoil.

JOHN TURNER: And it wasn’t clear who should take charge after his death.

PETER: That’s scholar John Turner. He says that following Smith’s death, rival leaders split the church. Some Mormons headed east to Pennsylvania, some north to Michigan, but most followed a forceful Mormon convert named Brigham Young out west to a part of Mexico called Utah.

BRIAN: Young’s decision to trek to Utah would have a tremendous impact on his struggling church, and on the American West as a whole. We’re going to take a moment to explore how this mass migration transformed Mormonism and almost caused a shooting war between these new settlers and the US government. Young’s colony grew very quickly once word spread that he’d founded the New Zion.

JOHN TURNER: There were thousands of Latter Day Saints who reached what became the Utah territory each year from the late 1840s through the 1860s, many of them coming from as far away as England.

BRIAN: But the Mormons weren’t the only ones interested in the territory. The US government soon claimed Utah and appointed Brigham Young governor. He oversaw not just present-day Utah, but most of Nevada, along with parts of Colorado and Wyoming. That made him the head of the church and state for an area the size of France.

Young saw an opportunity to create a new form of government, a theo-democracy.

JOHN TURNER: I think it was probably a little bit more theo than democracy, at least at first. The most simple way of understanding it is that those who ran for those local and territorial offices essentially needed Brigham Young’s approval to do so.

BRIAN: So he was a political boss of sorts?

JOHN TURNER: He was the political boss, absolutely.

BRIAN: But to Young, this meant more than just Mormons holding political office, it also meant that Saints were finally safe to publicly embrace one of the church’s most controversial teachings, polygamy. The rest of the country didn’t think much of Mormon marital practices. Politicians called polygamy a relic of barbarism that should be stamped out alongside slavery. And in 1857, President James Buchanan tried to put an end to Young’s experiment in theo-democracy once and for all.

JOHN TURNER: Buchanan decided to appoint a new governor. And he knew that this would create controversy and that it would meet opposition, and so he sent a substantial expedition of US Army troops to accompany that new governor.

BRIAN: By substantial, Turner means a fifth of the entire US Army.

PETER: But Brigham Young refused to back down.

JOHN TURNER: He gave what you could really call wartime sermons, he mobilized Utah’s militia. He sent that militia to obstruct the approach of the Army into Utah.

PETER: One militia leader ordered his men to obstruct the US troops by every means possible.

MALE SPEAKER: Use every exertion to stampede their animals and set fire to their trains. Burn the whole country before them and on their flanks. Keep them from sleeping by night surprises. Blockade the road by felling trees or destroying the river fords where you can. Leave no grasp before them that can be burned.

PETER: Young’s orders were to harass, rather than engage, US troops directly. The Utah militia never actually faced the US Army in battle, but as Turner reminds us, there were civilian casualties. Mormon militia killed more than 100 members of an American wagon train passing through southern Utah in what came to be known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

BRIAN: Why were the Mormons so belligerent? After all, Buchanan had every right to appoint a governor of the Utah territory. But Turner says that’s not how Young and his followers saw it.

JOHN TURNER: Any time they had settled anywhere else, there had always been trouble, and mobs and state militias had harassed them and driven them out. And I think Brigham Young could very persuasively tell his people look, this is what happened in Missouri and Illinois, it’s going to happen again. And we either fight or we let them come persecute us.

BRIAN: The Utah militia tactics, combined with a tough winter, prevented US troops from reaching Salt Lake City for months.

JOHN TURNER: And Brigham Young ultimately decided not to fight. I think Young recognized it was a fight he wasn’t going to win, and so he accepted the presence of this non-Mormon governor.

BRIAN: In the short term, Brigham Young came at a head. The new governor often sided with Mormons against the federal government, and Young still had a lot of political clout. He remained the leader of the church until his death in 1877.

JOHN TURNER: In the long term, it was a big step toward establishing national sovereignty over the territory. And so by the 1870s, there are successful prosecutions of Mormons for polygamy. So in the long run, the national government asserted its political sovereignty over Utah.

PETER: By the 1890s, it was clear that Young’s dream of a Mormon theo-democracy in the west would not survive. Church leaders, under intense pressure from the federal government, publicly abandoned the practice of polygamy. Secular officials were in charge of the territory. But Turner says that while Young failed to establish a Mormon kingdom, his decision to settle Utah forged something far more enduring.

JOHN TURNER: It turns the church into a people with a shared history, a shared place. In many ways, I think that developed that strong Mormon ethic of cooperation and self-sufficiency that is still very characteristic of the church.

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PETER: John Turner is a professor of Religious Studies at George Mason University, and author of Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet.