Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

by Jon Krakauer

  A rising chorus of non-Mormon voices declared Brigham to be a dangerous tyrant who wielded absolute power over his followers. One Gentile visitor warned that “on the face of the whole earth there is not another people to be found, so completely under the control of one man.”

  Brigham was unmoved. As far back as 1851 he had blustered that “any President of the United States who lifts his finger against this people shall die an untimely death and go to hell!” Five years later he was no less ornery, declaring that he intended to make Utah “a sovereign State in the Union, or an independent nation by ourselves, and let them drive us from this place if they can; they cannot do it.”

  Such rhetoric, on top of ever more numerous reports of Mormon belligerence, alarmed the rest of the nation. The more Washington tried to rein Brigham in, however, the more brazen his insubordination became. In March 1857, shortly after James Buchanan was inaugurated as president, the Utah Territorial Legislature sent a truculent missive to Washington announcing that the Saints would ignore any and all federal statutes they determined to be unjust and would expel from their midst any federal officers who didn't meet the rigorous moral standards of the Mormon Church.

  It proved to be bad timing on the part of the Saints. Utah Territory was an annoying problem for the new leader of the nation, but compared to other national problems then looming it was a relatively small one, which President Buchanan thought he could handle quickly and easily. And in the Mormon insurrection he saw a means to distract Americans from much larger, much less tractable issues—the increasingly divisive rancor over slavery, for instance, which was threatening to tear the country to tatters. As a pro-slavery Democrat, Buchanan figured that by coming down hard on pro-slavery Utah,* he could gain favor with abolitionists without having to sacrifice much political capital, because the Mormons were so widely reviled. So he followed the counsel of lawyer Robert Tyler—the son of former president John Tyler and an influential operative within the Democratic Party—who urged him to “supersede the Negro-Mania with the almost universal excitements of an Anti-Mormon Crusade.”

  Launching a nice little war to divert national attention was a gambit no less appealing to nineteenth-century politicians than it is to their present-day counterparts. As historian Will Bagley noted, “Of all the complex difficulties facing the new administration, the Mormon problem offered the most tempting political opportunity and promised the most beguiling of solutions—military action, a course that might unify the nation in a popular crusade against the evils of Mormonism.”

  Alleging that the Mormons had committed a long list of treasonous acts, in May 1857 Buchanan dispatched a contingent of federal officials to restore the rule of law in Utah, including a new territorial governor to replace Brigham Young. More ominously, the new president ordered twenty-five hundred heavily armed soldiers to escort these officials into Salt Lake City and subdue the Saints if necessary. For all intents and purposes, the United States had declared war on the Mormons.

  The Utah War, as it was known, has been compared by more than one historian to a comic opera. As Leonard Arrington and Davis Bitton wrote in The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saints, “The President of the United States had dispatched the largest peacetime army in the nation's history to oversee the installation of half a dozen officials in a minor territory.” It turned out to be a war that generated much more smoke than heat, and a concord was ultimately negotiated before the Saints and American soldiers exchanged a single shot.

  The amicable resolution came too late, however, for members of a Gentile wagon train traveling to California through a lovely valley in Utah's remote southwest corner, high on the rim of the Great Basin. This bucolic sanctuary, named the Mountain Meadow, is now synonymous with one of the most chilling episodes in the history of the American West—an episode that exemplified the fanaticism and concomitant brutality of a culture that would be so enthusiastically idealized a century later by Dan Lafferty and his fundamentalist brethren.

  EIGHTEEN

  FOR WATER WILL NOT DO

  Mormons were different because they said they were different and because their claims, frequently advanced in the most obnoxious way possible, prompted others to agree and treat them as such. The notion of Mormon difference, that is, was a deliberate invention elaborated over time. It was both cause and result of a conflict in which all parties discovered reasons to stress not what Mormons had in common with other Americans, which was a great deal, but what they did not have in common. One result of the conflict was an ideology that sought to turn the self-advertised differences of the Mormons into a conspiracy against the American republic.

  R. LAURENCE MOORE,

  RELIGIOUS OUTSIDERS AND THE MAKING OF AMERICANS

  By the time it reached the uplands of southern Utah, 280 miles beyond Salt Lake City, the wagon train that would be known to history as the Fancher party included some 130 emigrants, mostly from Arkansas, as well as a thousand head of cattle and two hundred horses.* Over the preceding weeks, a downtrodden assortment of “backouts”—apostate Mormons eager to leave the territory after acrimoniously quitting the church—had joined the Fancher group as well, swelling the company's ranks to approximately 140.

  This unusually large train, spread out along miles of the Old Spanish Trail (the southern route to California), rolled into the Mountain Meadow* over several hours on the evening of September 6, 1857, and the travelers stopped for the night beside a clear artesian spring. Their campsite was in the middle of a shallow valley, fifty-eight hundred feet above sea level, carpeted with lush green sedges and bunchgrass gone to seed. Just beyond this high oasis on the edge of the Great Basin, the trail dropped sharply down into the scorching wastes of the Mojave Desert. Given the hundreds of miles of hot, hard country that stretched ahead of them, the emigrants must have been grateful for the opportunity to rest and graze their stock in such a verdant setting.

  The temperature dipped into the forties when the sun went down. At daybreak, after rousing themselves from their bedrolls, the group huddled around campfires to warm their hands and to cook. The crisp morning air smelled of sagebrush and juniper smoke. No one suspected they were about to be attacked; the Arkansans hadn't even bothered to circle their wagons the night before, as they customarily did on the trail.

  “Our party was just sitting down to a breakfast of quail and cottontail rabbits when a shot rang out from a nearby gully,” Sarah Frances Baker Mitchell recalled eighty-two years after the event, “and one of the children toppled over, hit by the bullet.” That first gunshot was the beginning of a furious surprise assault that would fatally wound seven Arkansans before the day was out. Although Mitchell was only three years old at the time, the horrors of that morning—and the even greater horrors of the week to come—were seared into her memory.

  The emigrants quickly circled their wagons into a defensive corral, dug in as best they could, and returned fire, repelling the first wave of assailants. They assumed they were being ambushed by Indians, a conjecture that seemed to be confirmed by glimpses of dark-skinned men in war paint shooting at them. As it happened, most of the attackers on that initial morning of what would become a five-day siege were indeed Paiutes, but others were Mormons from nearby settlements who had simply painted their faces to look like Indians. And commanding the assault was a well-known Latter-day Saint: forty-four-year-old John D. Lee, a battle-tested veteran of the troubles in Missouri and Illinois, as devoted to the church and its leaders as any Mormon alive.

  Although Lee was a blustery, brown-nosing martinet beloved by few of his peers, Brigham Young felt genuine affection for him and valued his unfaltering obedience. Back in Nauvoo, shortly after assuming leadership of the church, Brigham had adopted him in an esoteric Mormon ritual, making Lee his symbolic son, and in 1856 he'd appointed Lee “Farmer to the Indians,” the prophet's personal ambassador to the Southern Paiute tribe.

  To comprehend why Lee—an American citizen—would be leading an attack on an Americ
an wagon train, one has to look back to the beginning of that summer and consider the shock waves of panic and fury that roiled Deseret when word arrived that a hostile army was amassing to the east.

  Porter Rockwell was carrying a load of mail from Utah to Missouri when he learned of the impending American military action against the Saints. Near what is now the eastern border of Wyoming, he encountered the mayor of Great Salt Lake City (as the capital of Utah was then known), his friend Abraham Smoot, who was headed west with a herd of cattle. Smoot told Rockwell that the Mormons' mail contract with the U.S. Postmaster had been abruptly canceled, and that federal troops were mustering at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, with orders to march on the Kingdom of God.

  Rockwell immediately turned around and, accompanied by Smoot and two other companions, headed back to Utah to alert Brigham. Pausing at Fort Laramie, the Destroying Angel hitched a buckboard to the two fastest horses in the Mormon corral, then drove the animals hard all the way to Great Salt Lake, making the 513-mile trip in just over five days. On July 24, Pioneer Day, Rockwell and Smoot told Brigham of the coming invasion just as the Saints were kicking off a huge celebration to mark the tenth anniversary of their arrival in Zion; Brigham announced the electrifying news to the Pioneer Day gathering just after sunset. The crowd reeled, reacting with a mix of confusion, apprehension, and rage.

  Standing before twenty-five hundred of his subjects, Brigham assured them that they need not fear the army of the United States, for the Saints were sure to prevail. “We have borne enough of their oppression and hellish abuse,” he bellowed, “and we will not bear any more of it. . . . In the name of Israel's God, we ask no odds of them.” The commonwealth of the Latter-day Saints, he brashly declared, “henceforth constituted a new and independent state, to be known no longer as Utah, but by their own Mormon name of Deseret.”

  Brigham had actually been aware for more than a month that federal troops were en route to Utah, but had withheld the news until Pioneer Day for maximum dramatic effect. For the better part of a year, in fact, he'd been stockpiling arms and drilling his crack militia, the Nauvoo Legion. After the Pioneer Day announcement, he simply accelerated preparations for the defense of Deseret. And the cornerstone of this defense, says historian Will Bagley, “was to rally Utah's Indians to the Mormon cause.”

  The inspiration for Brigham's military strategy came directly from Mormon scripture: according to The Book of Mormon, the Indians of North America were descended from the Lamanites, and as such they were remnants of the same ancient tribe of Israel to which Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni had belonged. The Lamanites, of course, had rejected the teachings of Jesus, waged war on the Nephites, and eventually killed every last one of them—crimes that had resulted in God cursing the Lamanites with dark skin. Scripture nevertheless taught that the Lamanites/Indians would once again become “a white and delightsome people” when, during the Last Days before the return of Christ, the Latter-day Saints converted them to Mormonism. The Book of Mormon indeed prophesied that the Lamanites, once redeemed, would join forces with the Mormons to vanquish the Gentiles, and thereby usher in the Great and Dreadful Day of the Lord.

  This momentous alliance between Mormon and Lamanite, Brigham was certain, was about to become a reality, paving the way for the Second Coming. He had reached this conclusion as soon as the Saints had arrived in the Great Salt Lake Valley, when he'd realized that the Mormons' new homeland was in the midst of the Lamanites. God's plan seemed to be unfolding just as it had been prophesied in The Book of Mormon.

  It hadn't occurred to Brigham, though, that the Lamanites might balk at playing their divinely ordained role. The Indians were sometimes willing to act as mercenaries and attack “Mericats” on behalf of the “Mormonee”* in return for a share of the plunder, but they never considered the Saints to be their allies. The Indians regarded the Big Captain and the rest of the Mormonee as merely the lesser of two hideous evils—and sometimes not even that.

  Despite the Indians' lack of enthusiasm for fulfilling their prophetic calling, Brigham used every means at his disposal to enlist them in his campaign against the Gentiles. And when the spoils were sufficiently enticing, the Indians obliged. Numerous Gentile emigrants passing through Utah reported that their horses and cattle were driven off by Indian raiders, only to show up later in Mormon corrals. If the Indians fell short of the Saints' millennial expectations that they would function as “the battle axe of the Lord,” when the Lamanites could be induced to do the Mormons' bidding they were, nevertheless, a potent weapon.

  While they awaited the arrival of the federal army, Brigham and other church leaders did their utmost to inflame passions against the Gentiles. The Saints were reminded again and again of the murders of so many of their brethren in Missouri and Illinois, and how their beloved prophet, Joseph Smith, had been shot dead by a godless mob in Hancock County. Rumors were spread that the approaching troops had orders to hang Brigham and exterminate the Mormons altogether. As the sweltering summer of 1857 crept toward fall, observed Juanita Brooks in her courageous, groundbreaking book The Mountain Meadows Massacre,*

  speeches became more and more inflammatory, such speeches as have been used by patriots and zealots in many causes to stir the heart to anger and strengthen the arm for battle. From one end of the territory to the other, the people of Utah retold and relived their past sufferings, the mobbings and burnings and final expulsion from Nauvoo. They would never be driven again; they would fight first.

  By August, hatred for the Gentiles had been raised to a fever pitch. Militias had been organized and drilled in each of the hundred towns and villages across Utah Territory. Men from distant Mormon outposts in Nevada and California had been summoned back to Utah to help defend the commonwealth. Saints were instructed to supply no provisions whatsoever to the Gentile wagon trains that continued to roll through Utah on their way to California; in a letter distributed across the territory, Mormon bishops were admonished not to let so much as a kernel of grain “be sold to our enemies.” And if the wicked Gentile army somehow managed to march into Deseret, Brigham demanded to know of his Saints, were they prepared to torch their own towns, burn their own crops, “lay waste to and desolate everything before them?” The answer was a unanimous, unequivocal “Yes!”

  This was the explosive atmosphere that greeted the Fancher company when their wagon train crested the Wasatch Range and rolled down Emigration Canyon into the Great Salt Lake Valley on August 3, 1857. Noting the intensity of the Mormon hostility, the Arkansans rested only two days in the territorial capital before continuing south and west on the Old Spanish Trail to California.

  The Arkansas emigrants, it seems, were marked as victims from the moment they entered Utah. One of them later claimed that as soon as they arrived in Great Salt Lake City, it was obvious to him that the Saints were looking for “an excuse to slaughter the entire train.” One reason the Fancher party may have been singled out was the Arkansans' conspicuous wealth: it was reputed to be “the richest and best equipped train that ever set out across the continent.” Among the group's twelve hundred head of stock were prize Texas longhorns and a strikingly beautiful Thoroughbred racehorse that was alone worth $3,000 in the currency of the day—the equivalent of many hundreds of thousands of twenty-first-century dollars. Additionally, it was rumored that the Fancher party was carrying a strongbox filled with thousands of dollars in gold coins. In Utah, where plagues of crickets and an extended drought had left many Saints contemplating starvation, such riches could not have failed to arouse the interest of people who considered it righteous to steal from the godless.

  But the wagon train from Arkansas was probably imperiled less by its affluence than by the Saints' carefully nurtured sense of persecution—a mood that was stoked relentlessly from the pulpit that entire summer. More than ever, the Mormons wanted payback for the assassinations of Joseph and Hyrum Smith. And they had just learned of another, more recent crime to avenge, as well: the slaying of Mormon Apostle Parley Pratt,
who had been hunted down like an animal and savagely killed in the same part of Arkansas where the Fancher train originated, just two weeks after the Fanchers embarked for Utah.*

  The seeds of Pratt's demise had been planted by an act of charity, when he'd provided succor to a troubled woman from New Orleans named Eleanor McLean. A recent convert to the faith, Eleanor was married to a nasty drunk, a Gentile named Hector McLean, who disapproved of her conversion and regularly beat her. Touched by Pratt's kindness, Eleanor fell in love with him, abandoned her husband, left her three children in the care of her mother, and then found passage to Salt Lake City working as a cook for a party of Mormon emigrants. Although Eleanor remained legally married to Hector McLean, in Deseret Brigham sealed her to Parley Pratt for time and eternity, making her the twelfth of the apostle's plural wives. In 1856, while Pratt was in St. Louis doing missionary work, she returned to New Orleans and absconded with her three children, inducing murderous rage in her first husband, who blamed Pratt for wrecking his marriage.

  McLean set out in hot pursuit of Pratt and managed to intercept a letter from Pratt to Eleanor in which the apostle described his plans to meet her on the Arkansas River. Armed with this information, and working in cahoots with a federal marshal who hated Mormons, McLean had Pratt arrested and jailed in Van Buren, Arkansas. The non-Mormon magistrate assigned to hear the case quickly saw that the charges against Pratt were without merit. Concerned that the Mormon apostle would be lynched by vigilantes if he remained locked up, the brave magistrate surreptitiously released Pratt, but McLean was notified immediately by jailhouse spies.

  The obsessed McLean and two accomplices tracked Pratt down twelve miles outside of Van Buren, where they stabbed him, shot him for good measure, and then left him by the side of the road to slowly bleed to death. Afterward, McLean boasted that killing Parley Pratt was “the best act of my life,” and he was cheered as a hero across western Arkansas for the deed. He was never arrested or charged with any crime.