Coming to Terms with the Mormons

II - What problems faced the Mormons at Salt Lake, and how did they overcome them?

Source A

Salt Lake City, Utah, 1891 by Henry Wellge.  Note the smoke rising from the smokestacks on the city’s west side

It is very difficult to evaluate how successfully the Mormons settled Salt Lake City because so many of the people who have written about the issue have been biased one way or the other.

Writing in 1859, for instance, newspaper editor Horace Greeley declared Mormon industry at Salt Lake City a failure “most unhappily directed” ...  but Greeley had his own agenda for the American West and was to set up his own colony in 1870. 

By contrast, Orson Pratt claimed in 1870 that “everyone knows that, fruitful as it is now, when we came here it was called a desert” … but Pratt was one of the Mormon Apostles so it is equally difficult to know how far this was religious propaganda to attract migrants and to make it seem that the Mormons had achieved the Old Testament prophecy to “make the desert bloom”. 

Going Deeper

The following links will help you widen your knowledge:

Basic accounts from Utah.com and the Visit Salt Lake

A timeline (pdf)

The Mountain Meadows Massacre

YouTube

What the first Mormon pioneers did when they got to Utah - a video from Saints Unscripted

1.  The Vanguard

Salt Lake City was founded on 24th of July 1847 by a group of Mormon pioneers, 143 men, three women and two children.  Shortly after, the Mormon Battalion, which had been disbanded at the end of the Mexican War, arrived to bolster their numbers. 

They immediately began planting crops; when they found the soil was so hard that it broke their ploughs, they built a dam in nearby City Creek and flooded the land to soften it … and remove the toxic salt layer that had formed on the surface.  They built a Fort and laid out the ground plan for Salt Lake City.  Young sent explorers and surveyors to suss out opportunities for other settlements.  When the Camp of Israel arrived in 1848 – despite an unusually severe winter – they found waiting for them simple adobe houses, a small settlement, and a limited crop of food. 

2.  Agriculture and Its Difficulties

When William Chandless visited Salt Lake City in 1857 he found that the grass grew quickly and that Lake Utah had shoals of Trout.  The land could support good crops of wheat, corn (i.e. maize), sugar-beet, pumpkins and especially potatoes.  But he was also aware of significant problems: much of the area was “wholesale desert … it is hard to find a farm one-third of which is not nearly worthless”. 

The climate was harsh and changeable, with severe cold, frost, snow and winds in winter; and heavy rains in spring and autumn which turned the roads to an impassable quagmire.  Worst of all, Chandless commented, “from early summer till long after harvest not a drop of rain falls” … and the cattle, used to rich summer pasture in the east, died from “surprise”. 

Another major problem was insect pests, especially the grasshoppers, which all-but destroyed the crops in 1848 and 1849, and again in 1855 and 1856.  Flocks of seagulls arrived to eat them – the so-called ‘miracle of the seagulls’ – but to little effect. 

The Mormons survived through communal effort and shared water sources.  Large agricultural canals were dug to irrigate the land by bringing melt-water from the surrounding mountains and water from local streams – the first irrigation canals ever built by white men in the United States, and the kind of public works that could only be accomplished with massive labour by a unified community. 

Chandless noted that the cold water damaged the crops and leeched the soil.  Neither had the Mormons found a solution to the grasshopper problem: “The people struggle bravely and try to sweep the foe away; failing that, they plant crop after crop as each is eaten off, to the end of the season”. 

3.  The Effect of the 1849 Gold Rush

As a result, by 1849, after two years of disastrous harvests, to a degree we cannot assess, the Mormons were in trouble.  Writing in 1980, the historian Kenneth Davies suggested that it was the 1849 Gold Rush that saved the Mormon economy. 

Many 49ers passed through Salt Lake City on their way to California.  Although not the shortest route, it gave them a chance to rest and prepare for the remainder of the journey.  For this, they paid the Mormons.  Successful prospectors going back to the east also chose to stop over in Salt Lake City … and they paid in gold. 

Also, Brigham Young sent a few Mormons to California to hunt for gold; the gold they brought back was made into coin and increased the colony’s purchasing power. 

4.  Industry and Its Problems

Establishing industry was even more difficult than farming.  There was no local iron, and any timber (for building or fuel) had to be hauled 20+ miles from the mountain slopes.  Everything else had to be dragged by ox teams over 1000 miles of desert, plain, and mountain. 

Another early problem was lack of cash.  The Mormons traded using slips of paper known as ’tithing-house scrip’, or just by barter.  One thing that the area did have in abundance, and which the Mormons were able to sell at a profit, was salt, but Charlie White at the local saltworks was forced to trade the salt for “goods such as cattle, grain, flour, hams, bacon, and butter”. 

As a result, Mormon industry consisted of small artisan workshops and there were few factories – at first, Brigham Young told the Mormons to be self-sufficient in items like clothing, tools etc.  Later, when it was clear that this was not going to be sufficient, Mormon businesses were set up as cooperative companies, with settlers buying a stake in the business, sometimes in cash but more often in labour, and then taking a proportion of the profits as the dividend; perhaps as a result local Mormons bought local wherever possible.  The biggest cooperative business was the Zion Cooperative Mercantile Institution (1868), which made and sold shoes and clothing. 

Although Mormon industry grew twenty-fold 1850-1895, industrial output only reached $6 million pa… at a time when the value of manufacturing products for San Francisco was more than $200 million pa. 

5.  The Effect of the 1869 Transcontinental Railroad

The final rail of the first transcontinental railroad was laid in 1869 at Promontory Summit, 66 miles north of Salt Lake City.  Brigham Young had wanted it to go through Salt Lake City itself, and a branch line to the city was completed the next year. 

This had a transformative effect on the Mormon economy.  Now, raw materials could be transported quickly and cheaply to Salt Lake, and the region’s produce could be sold to the national market.  In particular copper, silver, gold and lead mines were opened in the surrounding hills; Brigham Young had always discouraged Mormons from engaging in mining because he feared that they would be seduced by the temptations of money … but he also saw the opportunity of profit in supplying the people who did come to the area to mine.  Smelters were built to refine ore (find the smoke arising on the right of Source A), and some mine owners constructed large homes in the City. 

One interesting effect of the railway was that the Church set up a ‘Women's Relief Society’ and asked Mormon women to open a store next to the railroad depot; the store sold dry and home goods, foodstuffs, fine clothing and some eastern manufactured products. 

6.  Housing and Salt Lake City

Salt Lake City was planned as Joseph Smith had imagined the city of Zion.  It was built on a grid system of 10-acre blocks.  The central areas contained religious, commercial, and cultural centres, while farming took place in surrounding greenbelts.  It had some very modern planning ideas, including the separation of industry from housing, residences set back from the street with a large garden, and streets wide enough for a horse-and-wagon to do a U-turn. 

“This beautiful city with noble trees, will render it, by contrast with the surrounding regions, a second ‘Diamond of the Desert’,” enthused scientist Howard Stansbury in 1849. 

Without trees, settlers initially built ‘dobies’ from mud bricks, and Chandless found few buildings higher than a single storey.  Nevertheless, when Sarah Hollister Harris went there in 1851 she found that: “At this time the Mormons had occupied the valley of Salt Lake four years, and marvellous was the result of their labors.  Hundreds of comfortable houses had been built, principally of adobe brick, though there were many pretentious homes of wood, occupied by the dignitaries of the Church”, and by 1855, the city also featured a temple, a tabernacle, and theatres, dance halls and lecture rooms. 

There were also schools, although at first they had no desks or books.  Local people dismantled their wagons to make desks, but for along time education in Salt Like City was substandard, especially as farmers demanded to keep their children home to help on the farm. 

7.  Government

Salt Lake City was a theocracy, ruled by the President, Brigham Young, and the ‘Quorum of the 12 Apostles’.  They controlled farming, construction and land distribution, and assigned workers to appropriate jobs. 

However, they ruled – at least at first – on the principle of equality.  As soon as he arrived Young sent back a message promising: “we expect that every family will have a plot on which they may build, plant and also farm, as much land as they can till, and every man may be a steward over his own”.  Each settler was allowed a maximum of 20 acres, and sharing crops was at first necessary for survival.  All this led historian Stanley Humphrey to declare in 1955 that: “almost a pure state of communism existed for a few years”; this was not true – the Mormons always believed in private property, and allowed wealth (as long as you weren’t corrupted by it). 

From the very beginning, the Church sought to expand, and by 1900, they had established around 500 settlements in Utah and neighbouring states.  These included satellite communities like Bountiful (1847), Ogden (1848), and Tooele (1849).  A Perpetual Emigrating Fund was set up to encourage Mormons from abroad to migrate to Utah. 

8.  Conflict with the Indigenous Peoples

The Mormons believed that the Indigenous tribes were descended from the lost tribes of Israel, and were destined to become Mormons and to return to the House of Israel.  Brigham Young sent out missionaries to preach to them, declaring that: “No people – no political party, no religious sect – places the aborigines of this continent so high in the scale of humanity as we do.” But this – even when local tribes converted to Mormonism – did not stop the Mormons treating them appallingly. 

At first, relations were good; the local people helped the Vanguard, and it has been suggested that it was they who suggested irrigation to the Mormons. 

However, as Mormon pressure on the land increased, relations deteriorated, leading to a number of ‘wars’.  All these wars consisted of raids and occasional murders by the Indigenous tribes, followed by massive reprisals by the Mormons:

• In 1849, Mormon militia ambushed and lynched a group of 17 Timpanogo at Battle Creek. 
• Unrest following the establishment of Fort Utah (later called Provo) on Timpanogo land, led to the ‘Provo War’ – i.e. the massacre in 1850 by 90 Mormon militiamen of an encampment of Timpanogo families, killing between 40 and 100 men and one woman. 
• In 1849, when local Ute Chief Walkara invited the Mormons to teach his people the techniques of farming, the Mormons set up on Ute land a settlement they called Manti.  The 225 settlers took with them a measles epidemic.  A short war (the ‘Walker War’, 1853-54) was ended when Walkara and 120 Ute converted to Mormonism.  The Uintah Valley Reservation was created in 1861 by order of President Abraham Lincoln, with promises of food and medicine. 
• By 1865 the Utes had endured 15 years of white encroachment and 10 years of reservation life, and a major conflict (the Black Hawk War, 1865-72) broke out.  In 1871, the federal government intervened, and the Ute were forced back onto the Uintah Reservation, where they were destroyed by poverty, disease, hopelessness and alcoholism.  The Mormons, by contrast, were now free to expand freely throughout the region. 

9.  Conflict with the US Government

When he moved to Salt Lake City in 1847, Brigham Young hoped to establish an independent Mormon state of ‘Deseret’ on Mexican land (see map).  This hope came to an end with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), which ended the US-Mexican War, and by which Mexico ceded to the US all its land in North America. 

In 1849, therefore, the Mormons petitioned the US government that ‘Deseret’ be accepted into the United States as a state.  Congress however, instead declared the 1850 ‘Compromise’ – that a reduced area (‘Utah’) would become a ‘territory’ … but with Young as Governor, and with most of its officials Mormons. 

Brigham Young and his apostles openly stated their disregard for the non-Mormon federal officials, and when Broughton Harris and a team of federal officials turned up in 1851 they faced intimidation and, in an atmosphere of mysterious disappearances and a regime of terror enforced by the Danites, they soon returned east in fear of their lives. 

In consequence, in 1857, the federal government sent 1,500 troops to enforce the 1850 Compromise.  Young was not prepared to go back to what things had been like in Nauvoo, but neither did he want a war with the US government, so instead of a pitched battle, the Mormons blocked the Army’s supply lines.  Fortunately, the federal troops were badly organised and supplied anyway, and the ‘invasion’ ground to a halt. 

It was at this point, with tensions at fever pitch, that the Mormon militia, disguised as Indians, massacred a party of settlers on their way to California – the so called ‘Mountain Meadow Massacre’.  Textbooks and your specification make a big deal of what happened (the Mormons besieged them, promised to let them go, and then killed them when they left their defences). 

The real significance of the event, however, was the response it generated in the east, where the federal government was pressured to respond strongly.  Fortunately, instead, the government offered the Mormons a pardon if they would allow a non-Mormon governor, Young stepped down, and the Army marched into Salt Lake Cityin 1858.  They found it deserted – the Mormons, fearing a massacre, had fled. 

This – despite the impression in many textbooks – did not end the conflict between the Mormons and the US government.  Mormon John D Lee was executed in 1877 for his part in the Mountain Meadows Massacre.  In 1882, the government ruled polygamy a felony, and in 1887 it outlawed the Mormon Church;  the Church’s property wasconfiscated and its assets frozen; the church leadership went underground, and hundreds of Mormons were thrown in jail for practicing plural marriage.  Utah only became a US state in 1896 after the Mormons decided to ban polygamy. 

Source F

A modern map showing the hoped-for state of Deseret.