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Date Posted: 09:51:25 08/25/12 Sat
Author: SWC
Subject: The Mormons Part 3

Brigham Young

Like Joseph Smith, Brigham Young was a native of Vermont. Four years older than Smith, Young worked as a carpenter and blacksmith as a young man. He was married to Miriam Angeline Works at age 23. He had became a Methodist in 1823 but converted to Mormonism shortly after reading the Book of Mormon in 1831. He was sent to Canada as a missionary in 1832. Later he was sent to England and Europe.

He was appointed to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1835. “Members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles are apostles, with the calling to be prophets, seers, and revelators, evangelical ambassadors, and special witnesses of Jesus Christ. The quorum was first organized in 1835 and designated as a body of "traveling councilors" with jurisdiction outside areas where the church was formally organized, equal in authority to the First Presidency as well as to the Seventy, the standing Presiding High Council, and the High Councils of the various stakes. The jurisdiction of the Twelve was originally limited to areas of the world outside of Zion or its stakes. After the Apostles returned from England, Joseph Smith altered the responsibilities of the quorum. They were given charge of the affairs of the church, under direction of the First Presidency“.

After Joseph Smith’s death, there was a struggle for power within the church that ended, as so many struggles did, with one fraction going one way and the other another way, both spiritually and geographically. Sidney Rigdon argued that there should be no successor to Smith but that he, Rigdon, should be appointed “protector” of the church. Brigham Young claimed that the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles was “equal in power to the Presidency” and thus now had the leadership responsibility. The dissidents tended to support James Strang as church president. He eventually became head of the “Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints“ and moved to Michigan. Rigdon took his followers back East to Pennsylvania where they became the “Church of Christ”. Young’s followers eventually followed him out west to Utah. Each church claimed to be the valid successor to the church Joseph Smith had founded.

Young’s followers claimed that when he stood to speak, he took on the appearance of Joseph Smith and they thus knew he was the man to be followed. They also called him the American Moses, who led his flock through the desert to the promised land. He had decided that they needed to go so far west that they could find a place that had not been settled and create their own society to avoid the conflicts that had plagued the church in it’s infancy.

Various possible locations were considered, including California. Sam Brannan, the publisher of The Prophet, a church newspaper, was instructed to lead 240 Saints to New York and charter a boat to take them around Cape Horn to California. After a stop in Honolulu, they sailed east and landed in a great bay at a spot called Yerba Buena- meaning “Good Herb” in Spanish. They immediately tripled the size of the local village. (It’s now called “San Francisco”.) Brannan started publishing a newspaper, the California Star and established a store near Sutter’s Fort. He became enthusiastic that California was the ideal place for the new Zion and organized a party to travel east across the mountains and convince Brigham Young to bring his people there.

Young was doing some organizing of his own. He was interested in getting the co-operation of the federal government for his plans. The government was engaged in a war with Mexico and needed recruits for the Army. President Polk agreed to allow the Mormons to “occupy Pottawattamie and Omaha Indian lands along the Missouri” for a winter encampment on their way west if they agreed to raise a battalion for the war. Several church leaders were suspicious of this: the federal government hadn’t helped them in Missouri or Illinois. But Young felt that the formation of a Mormon Battalion “would be a propaganda victory for the church, demonstrating evidence of its loyalty to the United States, and would help to keep the U.S. government at bay later on.”

They raised five companies of volunteers who accompanied Colonel Stephen Kearny’s 1st US Dragoons, who went along the Santa Fe Trail from Kansas into New Mexico. The Mormon’s commanding officer fell ill and died before they left Fort Leavenworth. They came to resent the regular army officers assigned to command them and the army itself. But they fulfilled their mission, although the only battle they fount in was “The Ball of the Bulls” in Arizona, when a herd of wild cattle stampeded through their supply train and had to be driven off with gunfire. They occupied Tucson after the Mexicans had evacuated it. They took no part in the Battles of San Pasqual, San Gabriel or La Mesa, which secured southern California for the United States but were called on to defend the Luiseno Indians, who were under attack by the remaining Californio soldiers after most of their warriors were killed in a battle. They learned a lot about irrigation from their contacts with the Indians. The Mormon Battalion wound up part of the forces that occupied San Diego. Some of them remained in California. Others returned with a wealth of knowledge about the west.

Young’s group had left Navoo in March, 1946, “coming from all directions, from hills and dales and groves and prairies with their wagons, flocks and herds by the thousands. It looked like the movement of a nation.” It was. “Teams were formed to build and repair wagons and to make chairs, stools, beds, tubs and barrells for sale on the road. Others split logs and still others roamed the countryside to “invite“ rich Gentiles to contribute to the need of the Saints.”. They built 558 log cabins, 83 sod buildings and a large tabernacle at their winter quarters in Nebraska. The place was called Kanesville, after the Mormon’s chief advocate within the government, Thomas Kane.

Young talked to every mountain man and trapper who emerged from the wilderness, trying to get details about the region, including the legendary Jim Bridger, who had been exploring the region since the 1820‘s. Bridger was the first person of European descent to see the Great Salt Lake, which he at first took to be an arm of the Pacific Ocean due to it’s salinity. Perfectly willing to put aside theological differences to ensure the success of the endeavor, Young also conferred with a Jesuit priest named Pierre Jean de Smet, who had done missionary work among the Indians of the Great Basin. Finally, Young talked to John Charles Fremont, the great, (just ask him), explorer of the west, on his way back to Washington, who was not entirely trusted by those who really knew him. Brigham Young was not one of those. Fremont told him that the area known as Utah was a “garden spot”, explaining that fresh water Utah Lake was actually the same body of water was the “Great Salt Lake, which was only salty in the north. (Young took the more optimistic view but subsequently became one of Fremont’s fiercest critics, having gained knowledge of him.)

The Mormons were also buoyed by a theory put forward by the Reverend Cyrus Thomas , who was both a Lutheran Minister and a professor of natural science at Southern Illinois University that “ rain follows the plow”: “ It is a common expression among the Mexicans that the Americans bring rain with them. As the population increases, the amount of moisture will increase. This is the plan which nature herself has pointed out. The perpetual snows of the great central axis are the sources of the various streams which rush down upon the margin of these plains, but sink in their effort to cross it. Let the population gather around the points where these burst from the mountains and as it increases pushing out on the plains westward, I believe the supply of water will accompany it.” In other words, however dry Utah might be at present, when the Mormons get there, it will get wet. That may seem like a strange idea to us but you’ve got to remember that being a Mormon was all about believing in things. And people who “push the envelope” to extend the frontier of a society have to be able to believe in things. (And Utah did “get wet” when the Mormons irrigated it.)

Even if you believe in things, you’ve got to be careful. Young was aware what had happened to the Donner party, who, on their way to California, had gone through the Wasatch Mountains in Utah and the desert of the Great Salt Lake only to reach the Sierra Nevada in November 1846 and get trapped in a snowstorm. They weren’t rescued until February, 1847, by which time only 48 of their party of 87 were still alive. Those who survived, it was said, had resorted to cannibalism to survive. Part of their problem had been all the wagons and supplies they had lost going through the rugged territory of Utah. Another factor was the timing of their trip, which got them to the wrong place at the wrong time.

Mormons came from all over to the Winter Quarters, some of them from as far away as the British Isles and Europe, where Young’s mission had found many willing to believe in the new religion. Sam Brannan showed up with his party from California. All his efforts couldn’t dissuade Young from creating his new nation in Utah. Their dispute became so heated that Brannan was excommunicated. This didn’t prevent Young from demanding the tithes Brannan had collected from the California flock. Brannan’s reply was "You go back and tell Brigham Young that I'll give up the Lord's money when he sends me a receipt signed by the Lord."

The government wanted to avoid the problem Mexico always had about the territories it claimed: they had been unable to populate it. The Mormons would be a partial answer to that. (Bigger answers- gold and cattle -were to come.) I suspect they also saw the Mormons as a group that would remain loyal to the government in the event of a rebellion over slavery, which Joseph Smith had been opposed to. The government had already passed the 1841 Pre-emption Act, which “granted people title to a quarter section of land, if they improved and lived on it, with payment for the acreage deferred and sometimes entirely forgiven.

Young organized a “vangard” company of 143 men, (and three women) and 73 wagons to scout the route and establish fords and ferries across rivers, even to plant crops for later harvest. It included 8 members of the Quorum of the Apostles, led by Young. (There was also a man named Heber Kimball- Eric Fleming in “The Pursued” plays Heber Clawson.) Young wanted a new route from traditional routes to avoid conflict with other travelers who might claim land, grazing rights or water rights.

They started out from winter quarters on April 5, 1847. Young was in complete command. Everyone was awakened by a bugle at 5AM and had to be ready to move by 7AM. They stopped moving at 8:30PM and were in bed a half hour later. Anyone who spent too much time on recreation or shirked their duties answered directly to the leader, who once had to issue an advisement against “ being wasteful of flesh”- doing too much killing for food. A mechanism was devised for counting wheel turns using wooden cog wheels attached to the hub of the wagon wheels to determine how far they went each day. They averaged between 14 and 20 miles a day. They also invented the “Mormon Brake”, a devise to allow them to go down steep hills without losing control of the wagon. “The rear axle was raised and a long log or tree trunk was lashed to the center pole just in front of the axle, jacking up the wagon’s rear wheels; as the wagon descended, the log, bearing the weight of the rear of the vehicle, served as an effective drag. Once at the bottom, the log was simply discarded.

They started “over a route parallel to the Oregon Trail, and leading from South Pass in the Rockies through the Watsatch mountains and into the Great Salt Lake Valley. This trail, with it’s final descent from dizzying heights into scorching desert…(required) an immense expenditure of toil and sweat. They removed obstructing boulders and timber, established ferries across streams and even erected guideposts. No other emigrants had bothered with such matters but the Mormon vangard knew that bands of their brethern would be following in their footsteps.”

Their work allowed the use by subsequent groups of another invention of Young’s, the Mormon handcart. “Built to Brigham Young's design, the handcarts resembled a large wheelbarrow, with two wheels five feet in diameter and a single axle four and half feet wide, and weighing 60 pounds. Running along each side of the bed were seven-foot pull shafts ending with a three-foot crossbar at the front. The crossbar allowed the carts to be pushed or pulled. Cargo was carried in a box about three feet by four feet, with 8 inch walls. The handcarts generally carried up to 250 pounds of supplies and luggage, though they were capable of handling loads as heavy as 500 pounds. Carts used in the first year's migration were made entirely of wood ("Iowa hickory or oak"); in later years a stronger design was substituted, which included metal elements….The handcart companies were organized using the handcarts and sleeping tents as the primary units. Five persons were assigned per handcart, with each individual limited to 17 pounds of clothing and bedding. Each round tent, supported by a center pole, housed 20 occupants and was supervised by a tent captain. Five tents were supervised by the captain of a hundred (or "sub-captain"). Provisions for each group of one hundred emigrants were carried in an ox wagon, and were distributed by the tent captains.”

They reached Fort Laramie in six weeks. There they met another group of Mormons who had taken a more southern route and Members of the Mormon Battalion who had been convalescing in Colorado. Many of Sam Brannan’s group stayed with Young as well after Brannan left in a huff.

Mountain man Jim Bridger came through at this time and Young discussed the Salt Lake area at length. Bridger reported that there was a large supply of fish in the region and that local Indians had had success growing crops, although you had to watch out for the frost. “The company pushed on through South Pass, rafted across the Green River and arrived at Fort Bridger on July 7.” The next step was to get through the Rocky Mountains. Young decided to use the same trail used by the ill-fated Donner-Reed party the year before. The group broke up into three units: a scouting detachment, the main unit and a group that lagged behind due to illness. Wood ticks were a source of “mountain fever” and even Young was affected. On July 21, the scouts reached the Salt Lake Valley and began to explore it.

Young caught the first view of it from his sick wagon on July 24. His famous quote is “it is enough. This is the place. Drive on.” (into the valley). This was shortened to “This is the place” and a great statue of Young saying it was erected on the presumed spot. “This is the Place” is the state song of Utah. (Actually, I prefer to think he said “Feast thine eyes on a sight that approacheth heaven itself!”)

By July 28, Young had prepared a plan to build a temple and create a city. He then returned with a small party to winter quarters to lead the rest of his church to the valley. By December, 1847, more than 2000 Mormons were in the Salt Lake Valley. The subsequent migrations included many poorer people, (largely made poor by the deprivations that had occurred in Missouri and Illinois), who could not afford wagons or oxen. They became famous for pulling and pushing their belongings in Young‘s handcarts. Many simply walked. Some came from as far away as England, Scotland and Scandinavia. They also went at less than ideal times of year and many died under severe winter conditions. “Many a father pulled his cart with his children in it, until the day preceeding his death.” (One group of emigrants from England and Wales boarded a steamer at Lexington Missouri to take them to Council Bluffs, Iowa. It’s boilers exploded killing over 200 of them.)

But another emigrant said “People made fun of us as we walked, pulling our handcarts, but the weather was fine and the roads were excellent and although I was sick and we were very tired at night, still we thought it was a glorious way to go to Zion.”

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