The Story of the Salt Lake Trail
I
‘September 6. Leaving the encampment early . . . we reached the butte without any difficulty, and, ascending to the summit, immediately at our feet beheld the subject of our anxious search, the waters of the inland sea, st retching in still and solitary grandeur far beyond the limit of our vision. It was one of the great points of the exploration; and, as we looked eagerly over the lake, in the emotions of excited pleasure, I am doubtful if the followers of Balboa felt more enthusiasm when, from the heights of the Andes, they saw for the first time the great western sea.
‘Septembers 8 . . . The evening was mild and clear. We made a pleasant bed of the young willows; and geese and ducks enough had been killed for an abundant supper at night, and for breakfast the next morning. The stillness of the night was enlivened by millions of waterfowl.
‘ September 14 . . Taking leave at this point of the waters of Bear River, and of the geographical basin which encloses the system of rivers and creeks which belong to the Great Salt Lake, ... I can say of it that the bottom of this river, and of some of the creeks which I saw, form a natural resting and recruiting station for travelers, now and in all time to come. The bottoms are extensive; water excellent; timber sufficient; soil good and well adapted to the grains and grasses suited to such an elevated region. A military post and a civilized settlement would be of great value here, and cattle and horses would do well where grass and salt so much abounded. The lake will furnish exhaustless supplies of salt. All the mountain sides here are covered with a valuable, nutritious grass, called bunch-grass from the form in which it grows, which has a second growth in the fall. The beasts of the Indians were fat upon it. Our own found it a good substitute; and its quantity will sustain any amount of cattle, and make this truly a bucolic region.’
These words placed Utah upon the map. They are from Fremont’s report of his explorations in 1842, 1843, and 1844, extending from Missouri to California. The entries here cited are from the journal of 1843, and describe the region in and near the Salt Lake basin. Published in 1845, they were read eagerly by Brigham Young when, after being compelled to leave Nauvoo, Illinois, with his people, in 1846, he was casting his eyes over the continent in search of a place to which to lead them, where they could be free from further molestation.
The religio-social organization of which he was the head had already contributed an interesting chapter to United States history. In Fayette, Seneca County, New York, on April 6, 1830, Joseph Smith, his brothers Hyrum and Samuel H. Smith, Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and his brother Peter Whitmer, organized, under the laws of the State of New York, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. This is an important date in the story of the building of the West. On that day, and under those auspices, the corporation popularly known as the Mormon Church, which was destined to open to civilization the then darkest spot on America’s dark continent, to figure conspicuously in America’s social and political annals in the after time, began its legal existence.
Joseph Smith was born in Sharon, Vermont, in 1805. According to Mormon history, the angel Moroni came to him on the night of September 21, 1823, and told him that God had a great work for him to do; that a revelation written on gold plates was deposited in a hill near by, and that with it were two transparent stones in silver bows, called the Urim and Thummim, on looking through which the plates could be deciphered. Plates and stones were delivered into Smith’s hands on the night of September 22, 1827. The characters on the plates were what the Mormons called the ‘reformed Egyptian.’ Putting a blanket over the plates to conceal the record from profane eyes, Smith read the plates, and Oliver Cowdery wrote down the words. These disclosures, which were printed in Palmyra, New York, in 1830, were what was known as the Book of Mormon, and marked out the work which Smith and his people were to do. It had as an appendix a statement by Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris, that they had seen the angel, the plates, and the characters thereon. A few years afterward these persons, having renounced the Mormon faith in the interval, declared that their previous testimony was false. The Book of Mormon, however, is history, and not a body of precepts or dogmas. The articles of faith, which were adopted later, are set forth in the code entitled Doctrines and Covenants. Removing to Kirtland, Ohio, in 1831 (an episode which figures in Mormon church history as the ‘first hegira’), the saints quickly aroused the distrust of their Gentile neighbors, and at length they fled to Missouri (the ‘second hegira’), settling at Independence, on the western border of that state. Finding that spot inhospitable, they moved to other parts of the state. Trouble pursued them, however; a miniature civil war resulted between them and the rest of the community, and in 1838 Governor Boggs issued an order declaring that they ‘must be exterminated, or driven from the state, if necessary, for the public good.’ Once more they migrated (the ‘third hegira’), this time crossing into Illinois, where they purchased the little village of Commerce, and there on the bank of the Mississippi, laid out a town which they named Nauvoo.
II
Charles Francis Adams, son of the sixth President of the United States, and Josiah Quincy, visited Nauvoo early in 1844. Writing long afterward, Quincy said that some text-book of the future might contain a query like this: ‘What historical American of the nineteenth century has exerted the most powerful influence upon the destinies of his countrymen?’ and he thought it possible that the answer might be: ‘Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet.’ Quincy closed his chapter thus: ‘If the reader does not know what to make of Joseph Smith, I cannot help him out. of the difficulty. I myself stand helpless before the puzzle.’
Others besides Adams and Quincy marveled at the Mormon phenomenon. The Illinois legislature in 1840 granted a liberal charter to Nauvoo, and the ten thousand men who started to build it in that year had grown to twelve thousand in 1844. In addition to a university and a temple, the city had most of the accompaniments of a modern town of that period. The Mormons had reached a dignity and a prosperity never before attained by them. Believing that persecution for his people had ended, Smith became arrogant, so his Gentile neighbors said. Early in 1844 some of his people proposed him for the nomination for President of the United States. He sent letters to Clay, Van Buren, Cass, Buchanan, and others who had been mentioned in connection with the candidacy, Whigs and Democrats, asking what, if they were elected, would be their attitude toward the Mormons, and in every case the answers were non-committal.
But disaster was lying in ambush for Smith and his people. The wrath of the Gentiles was rising, and for several reasons, one of which was the acts, or the alleged acts, of the Danites, or Destroying Angels, an assassination society with which some members of the Mormon hierarchy were affiliated. In his History of Illinois, however, published in 1854, Governor Thomas Ford said, ‘The great cause of the popular fury was that the Mormons, at several preceding elections, had cast their votes as a unit, thereby making the fact apparent that no one could aspire to the honors or offices of the country, within the sphere of their influence, without their approbation and votes.’
As a dogma of the church, polygamy was not proclaimed until 1852, five years after the Mormons had settled in Utah; but cohabitation, it was said, had been secretly practiced by Smith in Nauvoo, and this was the immediate cause of his downfall. His suggestions to some of the women of his flock in 1843 to become his spiritual wives led them and their husbands to separate from the church, and they started a paper in that town named the Expositor, which disclosed and attacked his practices. On May 6, 1844, Smith and a few of his followers destroyed the pressand type of thepaper. A warrant for their arrest was resisted. The county authorities called out the militia, and Smith and his brother Hyrum gave themselves up. On their promise to appear for trial they were released, but were immediately rearrested and placed in jail at Carthage, the county seat. Hearing that Governor Ford was about to give them their liberty, a mob, of which some of the jail guards were a part, attacked the jail on June 27, and shot the Smiths dead. The assassins were never punished.
The murder of Smith caused a sensation throughout the country, but local hostility compelled the legislature to revoke the charter of Nauvoo, in January, 1845. A deputation of prominent citizens, Whigs and Democrats, including Stephen A. Douglas, went to Nauvoo and told the Mormon leaders that they must leave the state. In October, 1845, Brigham Young, who became the head of the church after the death of Smith, announced that they would begin at once to sell their property, and seek a home in the Western wilderness. The large amount of property which was thrown upon the market, with the comparatively small number of buyers, most of whom were hostile, compelled the Mormons to let their farms, residences, and workshops go for any price which was offered, much of the property being exchanged for horses, wagons, horned cattle, and sheep.
It was then that Frémont’s report reached Young’s eyes. At the beginning of 1846 there were no states west of the Mississippi except Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, the last-named having just been annexed. Beyond the Missouri was a wilderness roamed over by Indians and wild beasts. The territory comprised in the present Oregon, Idaho, and Washington was in dispute between the United States and England and had been for more than a generation, though it was to come under the flag by a treaty with England before that year expired. Utah, as well as New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California, belonged to Mexico. Mexico was feeble, and its seat of government was two thousand miles from Salt Lake. In that region, far away from his persecutors in the United States, Young probably dreamed that he could erect an empire in which his people would be free forever from espionage or attack.
III
The bluffs of Hancock County, Illinois, where, in its northern and southern stretches, the Mississippi swings eastward, saw stirring and pathetic scenes on February 1, 1846. This was the beginning of the fourth and the last of the Mormon hegiras. The crossing of the river into Iowa territory, first on the ice and then on flat boats, skiffs, and such other craft as were obtainable, lasted until spring, the temperature, in the mean time, running the gamut of the Fahrenheit scale, from twenty degrees below zero to ninety degrees above.
With halting-places at Garden Grove, Mount Pisgah, and other points, some of which retain to this day the names which were then given to them, the exiles’ line stretched almost from the Mississippi to the Missouri. It comprised fourteen thousand people, with three thousand wagons, thirty t housand head of cattle, and large numbers of horses and sheep. Births and deaths took place on the march. Some of the fugitives tarried on the way to plant and gather crops in the great vacant spaces which they traversed. It was the pilgrimage of a whole people.
The head of the column, with Brigham Young and most of the twelve apostles, reached the Missouri, near Council Bluffs, in June, crossed into Nebraska, and built a temporary town which they named Winter Quarters. This was near the present village of Florence, and a few miles north of the spot on which Omaha was afterward to rise. Nebraska, which was not organized as a territory until eight years later, had only a few dozen white inhabitants at that time, chiefly furtraders, and was part of the region which was vaguely called the ‘Indian Country.’ Some of the fugitives went further into Nebraska, and found a refuge among the Sioux, and others stayed in Iowa for the time, but the main body passed the autumn and winter at Winter Quarters.
From the camp at that point, on April 14, 1847, started the advance detachment which was to blaze the path to the new Zion. It comprised one hundred and forty-three men, three women, and two children, with seventythree wagons. The women were the wives of Brigham Young and of the apostles Lorenzo D. Young and Heber C. Kimball. Brigham was in command. The detachment was divided into companies, with regularly recognized officers, because, as they were to pass through a region in which Indians abounded, a semblance of military organization for purposes of defense was felt to be necessary. The objective of their migration was not definitely fixed in the minds of their leaders, except that they intended to cross the Rocky Mountains, and they were to attempt to seek out the locality which had been described by Frémont.
On the North Fork of the Platte they struck the Oregon Trail, which by 1847 had become broad and plainly marked by the thousands who had traversed it, and reached Fort Bridger, on Black’s Fork of the Green River, on July 7. According to the narrative of Orson Pratt , one of the twelve apostles, a leading spirit in this pioneer corps of the saints, that post then consisted of ‘two adjoining log houses, with dirt roofs, and a small picket yard of logs set in the ground, about eight feet high. The number of men, squaws, and half-breed children in those houses and lodges may be about fifty or sixty.’
Leaving Fort Bridger on July 9, the pioneers bade good-by to the Oregon Trail which had been their companion for more than seven hundred miles, and struck out toward the southwest. Except as they encountered traces of paths made by fur-traders, Indians, or casual emigrants to California in the earlier days, they had now entered the unknown. They crept through gorges of the Uintah and Wasatch ranges, their course, for part of the way, having to be opened for them by their improvised corps of sappers and miners. Having a presentiment that the object of their quest was near, Pratt, who commanded the advance party, pushed ahead of the wagons on July 21, taking Erastus Snow, another of the apostles, with him. They ascended a western spur of the Wasatch, when suddenly there opened before them a broad valley which they believed to be about thirty miles long, while far off toward the northwest the waters of Great Salt Lake flashed back the sunshine.
Hastening back to their companions with the glad tidings, they led the whole party into the valley the next day, and selected a halting-place. ‘Here we called the camp together,’ says Pratt in his journal, ‘and it fell to my lot to offer prayer and thanksgiving in behalf of our company, all of whom had been preserved from the Missouri River to this point; and, after dedicating ourselves unto the Lord, and imploring his blessing upon our labors, we appointed various committees to attend to different branches of our business preparatory to putting in crops. In about two hours after our arrival we began to plough, and the same afternoon we built a dam to irrigate the soil, which at the place we were ploughing was exceedingly dry.’
Here were displayed the courage, the discipline, unity, and prompt adaptability to environment which made the Mormon community in its latest home powerful and prosperous. Thus, fiftyfive years before President Roosevelt placed his signature to the national irrigation act, irrigation on a large scale, and under private direction, began to make its conquests in the Salt Lake basin.
President Young, who, with some of the others of the company, had been delayed by illness, and had fallen to the rear, was informed by messenger of the discovery which had been made by Pratt, Snow, and their associates, and the work which they had done; and he, at the head of his companions, hastened forward in Elder Wilford Woodruff’s carriage. Emerging from an opening at the summit of the Wasatch on July 24, and obtaining a glimpse of the future home of the saints, he waved his hat and shouted, ‘Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah!’ Then, referring to his vision of the final dwelling-place of his people, he turned to Apostle Kimball and exclaimed exultantly, ‘Brother Heber, this is the spot.’ Then all descended into the valley.
From that day onward for fifty years the story of Utah was the history of the Mormons. Out of their various places of refuge the remainder of the fugitives from Nauvoo drifted to the Salt Lake Valley in 1848,1849, and 1850, and subsequently these were reinforced by the converts which their missionaries made in the rest of the country, and in Canada and Europe. A town was at once laid out by Young in blocks of ten acres, and Salt Lake City, which eventually became one of the most attractive cities on the continent, sprang into being. For irrigation and for the cruder forms of manufacturing, the streams from the mountains were quickly impressed into the service of the community. While only a few dozen white inhabitants, chiefly hunters and missionaries, were in Utah in July, 1847, the census-takers found eleven thousand there in 1850, and many undoubtedly eluded the search; and there were six thousand in Salt Lake City.
When, on July 24, 1847, the foundations of the New Jerusalem of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints were laid in Mexico’s northern wilderness, Brigham Young could have been pardoned for dreaming his dreams of empire. The two thousand miles of physical obstructions which stretched between Salt Lake and Santa Anna’s capital represented a time-distance almost as great as that which separated Cortez’s field of operations of the earlier day and the court of Charles V. In the vast expanse which extended from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, and from the Oregon line to the Gulf of California, he doubtless believed that he could build a nation which would be virtually independent, and which would soon become absolutely independent, of the feeble government of Mexico. Unhampered by prying Gentile neighbors or a hostile United States, the nearest important settlement of which was more than a thousand miles away, he could, as he had some excuse for assuming, quietly develop the power which would carry out Joseph Smith’s prophecy, and ultimately make the Mormon Church master of the continent.
IV
But events that were already taking shape were destined to change the whole face of American affairs, and place Young’s new empire under the American flag. While the Mormons were making their way through Iowa in the spring of 1846, the news of the collision between General Arista and Zachary Taylor on the Rio Grande reached Washington. President Polk sent a belligerent message to Congress on May 11; that body, two days later, declared war upon Mexico; fifty thousand volunteers were called for, and Mexico was to be attacked at three points, — from the lower Rio Grande by Taylor, at Chihuahua by General John E. Wool, and at Santa Fé by General Stephen W. Kearny.
One day near the close of June, Captain James Allen, of the First Dragoons, entered the Mormons’ camp at Mount Pisgah, and presented a letter to Brigham Young which said that General Kearny ‘would accept the service, for twelve months, of four or five companies of Mormon men’ who would meet the physical requirements of the service, to form part of the Army of the West in its march on New Mexico and California. The recruits were to receive the regular pay and bounty which the government granted to all its volunteers, and they were to be discharged in California, and allowed to retain their arms and equipments. Under this call, about five hundred men enlisted. They were known as the Mormon battalion.
Thus, though the war was ultimately disastrous to the saints by placing Utah and California under United States sovereignty, it was advantageous to them in its immediate effects. A large part of the pay, together with the bounty of forty dollars given to each of them, was collected by Elder Taylor and other officials of the church at Fort Leavenworth and Santa Fé, and carried back to Young’s headquarters for use in the migration. The volunteers were armed and paid for going to California, a point to which many of them wanted to go, for at that time the exact spot for their final halting-place had not been definitely fixed, although, through Frémont, the Bear River Valley and the Salt Lake region had made an impressive appeal to their leaders.
Organized, armed, and equipped at Fort Leavenworth, the battalion started for Santa Fé over the traders’ old trail on August 1, and reached that point on October 12. This was seven weeks after Kearny and his column had entered that capital and raised the flag over Governor Armijo’s palace. Then their real work began.
‘To-morrow three hundred wilderness-worn dragoons, in shabby and patched clothing, who have long been on short allowances of food, set forth to conquer or annex a Pacific empire; to take a leap in the dark of a thousand miles of wild plains and mountains, only known on vague reports as unwatered, and with several deserts of two and three marches, where a camel might starve, if not perish from thirst. Our success — we never doubt it! and the very desperation of any alternative must insure it — shall give us for boundary that world-line of a mighty ocean’s coast, looking across to the cradle-land of humanity, and shall girdle the earth with civilization.’
This is an entry, dated at Santa Fé on September 25, 1846, in the diary of Captain Philip St. George Cooke, of the First Dragoons, a part of General Kearny’s Army of the West.
At the end of the march we find this entry: —
‘History may be searched in vain for an equal march of infantry. Half of it has been through a wilderness where nothing but savages and wild beasts are found, or deserts where, for want of water, there is no living creature. There, with almost hopeless labor, we have dug deep wells, which the future traveler will enjoy. Without a guide who had traversed them, we have ventured into trackless table-lands where water was not found for several marches. . . . The garrisons of four presidios of Sonora concentrated within the walls of Tucson gave us no pause. We drove them out with their artillery, but our intercourse with the citizens was unmarked by a single act of injustice.’
Colonel Frémont and Commodore Stockton had already completed the conquest of California. After doing garrison duty, successively, at San Luis Rey and Los Angeles, the battalion was mustered out of the service at the latter place on July 16, 1847. This was just a week before Apostles Pratt and Snow, President Young, and their associates crossed the Wasatch and set up their new Zion in the Salt Lake Valley. The battalion, however, two thousand miles away, which had received no tidings of its people since leaving Santa Fé nine months earlier, had no means of knowing their whereabouts, or even their fate.
Pushing northward, and meeting a party of Americans on the way, who told them that the refugees from Nauvoo were moving toward Salt Lake, most of the members of the battalion reached Sutter’s Fort, five hundred miles from Los Angeles, in the latter part of August. A few of them remained at that post, but a majority of them crossed the mountains and entered the Salt Lake Valley on October 16. Two of those who stayed behind were digging the raceway at Sutter’s mill when, on January 24, 1848, James W. Marshall made the gold discovery there which sent, adventurers from all parts of the globe to that point, and altered the history of California, of Utah, and of the whole country, A week after the gold ‘find,’ but long before it became known to the outside world, the American and Mexican commissioners placed their signatures to the peace treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, by which Mexico ceded California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico to the United States, and which pushed our southwestern boundary to the Pacific.
v
Finding himself back under United States sovereignty, and his dream of empire shattered, Young, with characteristic promptness and decision, adjusted himself to the circumstances, and attempted to turn them to his own account. A convention called by him met in Salt Lake City on March 4, 1849, and framed a constitution for the State of Deseret, under which state officers and a delegate to Congress were chosen. Young himself being the governor. The proposed state not only comprised the present State of Utah, but included parts of the present New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming, all of Arizona and Nevada, and a portion of the southern end of California. It was a stroke of magnificent audacity. Young probably believed that isolation and the privileges belonging to statehood would give him virtual independence, while the recruits from the United States, Europe, and Canada whom his missionaries were sending him would eventually enable him to make his independence actual.
Congress refused to admit the delegate, and rejected the proposed state, but as a part of Clay’s compromise scheme of 1850 it passed an act creating the Territory of Utah, comprising all of the present state, with parts of Nevada, Colorado, and Wyoming. President Fillmore made Young governor, but a clash with the United States authorities came shortly afterward. It came through the adoption of polygamy, which had been secretly practiced for years, but which was formally proclaimed as an article of the Mormon faith in 1852, and made compulsory; through the dominance of the Mormon hierarchy in the civil affairs of the territory; through the claims, which had been made from the beginning of the church’s days in Kirtland, that the revelations of the Mormon prophets were of higher authority than the Constitution and statutes of the United States; and through the expulsion of some of the government officials from the territory and the murder of others.
Realizing that the Mormons were in rebellion against the government, President Buchanan, a few months after he assumed office in 1857, removed Young from the governorship, appointed in his place Alfred Cumming, who had been Superintendent of Indian Affairs on the upper Missouri, and sent twelve hundred soldiers under Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston to reëstablish United States authority in the territory.
The campaign was inglorious. Starting from Fort Leavenworth in July, the army was compelled to move slowly because of its immense supply-trains and the herds of beef cattle which it convoyed, and because it was attacked by bands of armed Mormons acting under Young’s orders. On the night of October 3, a small force of guerillas swooped down upon three trains of seventy-five wagons camped on Green River, seized all the supplies which they could carry, burned the rest, and fled. The grass in front of other supply-trains was burned, so that the animals had very little to feed on. Hundreds of cattle were captured and sent to Salt Lake City. Heavy snows in the mountains obstructed the soldiers’ movements, and in the latter part of November, when the various sections of the army converged at; Fort Bridger, that post and Fort Supply, a few miles away, were found to have been burned by the Mormons, and winter quarters were established near there, at Fort Scott, a hundred and fifteen miles north of Young’s capital.
Buchanan’s orders to Johnston were to avoid a conflict if possible. This was difficult, for on September 17 the massacre of Mountain Meadows, three hundred miles south of Salt Lake City, was perpetrated, in which one hundred and twenty persons, on the way to California, were killed, seventeen children under seven years of age being spared. The murders were committed by Indians, instigated by the Danites, and participated in by some of them, Elder John D. Lee being one of the leaders in the atrocity. In 1877, the earliest practicable date, Lee was tried and convicted by the United States Court, and shot on the spot on which the crime was committed. A truce was arranged with the Mormons. Johnston’s army marched into and out of Salt Lake City on June 26, 1858, established Camp Floyd, a few miles away, and the Mormon War was ended.
Soon after the War of Secession, two powerful agencies — the Christian Church and the railroads — began to coöperate to end Utah’s isolation. The Episcopalians began their work in that territory in 1867, the Methodists in 1870, the Catholics and the Presbyterians in 1871, and other denominations soon afterward. Near Ogden, thirtyseven miles north of Salt, Lake City, on May 10, 1869, the rails of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific met, and the continent was spanned by iron bands. Then, in quick succession, came the Utah Central, the Utah Southern, and the Utah and Northern lines, which brought most of the important towns in the territory into rail connection with the rest of the country. Discoveries— some of them before, but most of them after, the building of the transcontinental railway — of gold, silver, copper, iron, coal, and other minerals, started an inrush of Gentiles into the territory, and before Brigham Young’s death in 1877 the Mormon Church began to find itself encompassed by the wave-circle of the world’s interests and activities.
Long before his death, too, trouble came to his church through the attacks by Congress on polygamy. The Republicans, who, in their first national platform, that of 1856, coupled polygamy with slavery as ‘twin relics of barbarism,’ assailed it also in their conventions of 1876, 1880,1884, and 1888. Indirectly the Democrats attacked it in their platforms of 1876, 1880, and 1884, By the Morrill act, passed by Congress in 1862, polygamy was classed as bigamy, and made punishable by fine and imprisonment. Under the Edmunds law of 1882, polygamists were disfranchised, prohibited from holding office, and the territorial legislature’s act giving the ballot to women was annulled. The Edmunds-Tucker law of 1887 confiscated the property, except parsonages and church buildings, of the Mormon Church and the Perpetual Emigration Fund Company, and gave the proceeds to the support of the common schools of the territory; abolished the Nauvoo Legion, a Mormon military organization, and provided for the creation of a militia under the laws of the United States.
Then came surrender. All its resources for obstruction and resistance having been exhausted, Wilford Woodruff, the head of the church, issued a proclamation on September 25, 1890, denying that the hierarchy still countenanced polygamy, declaring that plural marriages were no longer solemnized by the church, and advising all his people to obey the marriage laws of the land. At a general conference, Woodruff’s pronunciamento concerning plural marriages was accepted as ‘authoritative and binding.’ This was ultimately received by the country as a renunciation of polygamy, and the popular aversion to the Mormons gradually subsided.
In answer to an appeal made by the Mormon hierarchy for a general pardon for themselves and their followers, supplemented by a promise to obey the laws, President Harrison, on January 4, 1893, issued a proclamation granting an amnesty to all persons liable to the penalties of the Edmunds act, who had, since November 1, 1890, refrained from polygamy. A bill to enable the people of Utah to frame a constitution and set up a state government, the constitution to provide for the toleration of all forms of religion, for the establishment and maintenance of a system of public schools free from sectarian control and open to the children of the whole state, and for the prohibition of polygamy, passed Congress without a division, and was signed by President Cleveland on July 16, 1894. A constitution which met these requirements was framed by a convention which assembled in Salt Lake City in March, 1895. It was ratified by the people in November, and the contest which began when Brigham Young, in 1850, asked for the creation of the State of Deseret, closed on January 4, 1896, by Utah’s admission into the Union ‘on an equal footing with the original states.’
VI
‘I congratulate all of you, my fellow countrymen, on the richness which your valley spreads out before us, and on the industry and intelligence of your people, the fruits of which I see everywhere around me.'
Thus Mr. Taft saluted the residents of the little city of Provo, out at the western foothills of the Wasatch, when, on September 24, 1909, he passed through that region on his tour to the Pacific, It was just, sixty-two years and two months earlier, and forty-five miles to the northward, that Orson Pratt, heading the advance couriers of the saints, wrote these words in his journal: ‘In about two hours after our arrival we began to plough, and the same afternoon we built a dam to irrigate the soil, which at the place we were ploughing was exceedingly dry.’ Provo and its neighborhood showed Mr. Taft one of the results.
On September 25, from the tabernacle in Salt Lake City, in the place from which Brigham Young, in the earlier age, hurled defiance at the laws and the President of the United States, a President of the United States, as the guest of Young’s people, talked of religious and political toleration, and praised that people’s patriotism and educational progress. And an especially interested hearer was Young’s successor, Joseph F. Smith, nephew of Joseph Smith, the prophet, and son of Hyrum.
Not only does the despised and hunted sect which began to cross the Wasatch in 1847, comprise a large majority of the three hundred thousand people of Utah to-day, I but it ranks first among the religious denominations of Idaho, and second among those of Wyoming and Arizona. ‘The settlements of our people,’ said Joseph F. Smith, in a recent newspaper article, ‘extend from a group of colonies in the province of Alberta, in Canada, down through the wide-spreading Rocky Mountain valleys of the United States to another group of colonies in Northern Mexico.’ And, including the author of the foregoing words, some are alive who made the hegira with them from Nauvoo, and crossed the plains to their New Jerusalem.
In its returns for 1906 the Census Bureau placed the number of members of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints, in round figures, at two hundred and fifty-six thousand. Forty thousand of these, however, belong to the Reorganized Church, which rejected polygamy and separated from the parent body in 1852, when it incorporated that practice in its creed. The headquarters of the Reorganized branch are in Lamoni, Iowa, and its president is Joseph Smith, son of the prophet. Through the activity of its missionaries in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Europe, the Utah church is increasing with great rapidity.
For more than six years past Reed Smoot, one of the leading members of the Mormon hierarchy, has been in the Senate at Washington, and he was recently elected to another term. Mr. Taft’s party, which in its platform of 1856 denounced polygamy as a relic of barbarism, and which enacted nearly all the laws directed against that practice, has swayed the politics of Utah most of the time since its admission to statehood. Salt Lake City, however, has been controlled for a few years past by a local organization called the American party, composed chiefly of Gentiles and of Mormons who oppose church domination in secular affairs. At Sharon, Joseph Smith’s birthplace, in the Republican State of Vermont, a monument was erected to him in 1905.
In the government building at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition at Seattle, Mr. Taft, as well as tens of thousands of the other visitors, saw many exhibits of the work of the Mormons as colonizers of the West. Wagons were there which accompanied Young’s pioneer corps from the Missouri to Salt Lake in 1847. There also was an odometer, invented by two of the pioneers, which was used by this advance detachment of the saints in measuring the day’s march, and in computing the distance between the starting-point of the expedition at Winter Quarters and its arrival at the lake. And the government engineers who went over the route in later times testified that its work was marvelously accurate. Likewise the press was there on which the Deseret News was printed in 1850 and for years afterward. This was the first printing-press to cross the plains, and the News was the first paper to make its advent in the Rocky Mountain region. And to this day it is one of the most widely read and influential journals in its territory.
And another exhibit was there which, it is to be hoped, Mr. Taft did not miss:
Pioneers
camped here
June 3d 1847
making 15 miles to-day
All well
Brigham Young
At the sight of these words, traced on the skull of a buffalo, as a guide to the friends who were behind in the great hegira, imagination rouses itself. From the shadow of the past, long-vanished yesterdays emerge. The West’s wild, free, vivid days return. With its hardships, its heroism, its romance, and its story of splendid achievement written across the landscape of half a continent, the old trail lives for us again.