Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West

by Nies, Judith

  *Francis Peabody of Boston, who was one of the founders of Kidder Peabody & Co., an investment bank, was not a relative.

  *The federal government set up tribal councils in the 1930s and ’40s as a way of organizing Indian tribal structures to fit into the American legal system. John Collier sent author Oliver LaFarge to the Hopi to help them write a constitution. In 1936 the Hopi held a referendum on adopting a constitution and an electoral system, but only a third of eligible voters participated. Consequently, even though the BIA counted the small majority vote as approval, the tribal council was out of sync with cultural forces of clan and village.

  *The Bureau of Indian Affairs had to approve the Claims Commission attorneys the tribes selected. The BIA generally recommended those lawyers they knew to be sensitive to the needs of the US government and energy companies. Before the Indian Claims Commission went out of business in 1978, it had facilitated many tribal mineral leases with large mining corporations by serving as a vehicle for inserting BIA-appointed lawyers into already weak tribal structures. Twenty-five tribes in the western states became known as the “energy tribes” because they held 30 percent of America’s untapped mineral resources, large deposits of oil, coal, uranium, and natural gas.

  *During the official period of termination, 1953 to 1962, thirteen tribes and more than a hundred bands, communities, and California Mission Indians were terminated or lost many federal protections and services. In practice, termination meant that the tribes lost trust status and had to start paying taxes, often selling off land to meet tax obligations, and providing their own educational and health services. In 1961 the National Congress of American Indians met in Chicago and declared termination to be “the greatest threat to Indian survival since the military campaigns of the 1800s.” Termination was officially ended in 1962 by the Kennedy administration.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE MORMON WEST

  “Polygamy? Yes. Fundamentalists in the Mormon Church still practice polygamy, although the church doesn’t condone it,” the wife and manager of the motel was telling me. I was in Utah in a town called Big Water, somewhere north of Page, Arizona.

  I had gone to see the Navajo Generating Station outside of Page and then stopped to take a tour of the Glen Canyon Dam. Glen Canyon was the second-biggest dam on the Colorado River, after Hoover Dam. Designed to provide water and hydroelectricity for the Upper Basin states (Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico), the reservoir behind Glen Canyon Dam was the second-largest man-made lake in the world after Lake Mead. Deciding that I should balance two days of looking at concrete, smokestacks, and turbines with some natural landscape, I drove north into Utah on my way to red-rock country and Bryce Canyon. But it got late and I was tired, so I stopped at a rather odd-looking motel made up of double-wide trailers that, I learned later, had once housed the construction workers building the Glen Canyon Dam.

  The motel manager was young, fair, and pretty. She had three beautiful blonde daughters, ages somewhere between nine and thirteen, who had knocked on my door to return my credit card and then stood in the doorway silently staring. Is anything wrong? I asked. “We’ve never seen a woman traveling alone before,” said the oldest. The three girls, all blue eyed and long-haired with perfect complexions, looked as though they could be waiting to go on set for an Ingmar Bergman movie.

  I described this incident to their mother as I was getting ready to leave the next morning. She allowed that not many women traveled alone in Utah, at least not to Big Water. She acted as though I should have heard of the town, but I shook my head.

  Big Water, I repeated. How big is this town? “Two hundred,” she answered, adding, “and at least eighty are children under seven. Mayor Joseph believes in polygamy.”

  That’s when I said, “Polygamy?” in a high voice. “This town is a center for fundamentalist Mormons,” she continued in a matter-of-fact tone. “Like my father-in-law. He believed in polygamy. When he died, he had eleven wives and sixty-four children at his funeral.”

  I’m sure my eyes grew wide. “The family must have filled up the entire church,” I said, trying to come up with some mild conversational response to this rather remarkable fact. I was having troubling keeping up my end of this conversation. I thought polygamy had died out in the 1890s when the Mormon Church outlawed it in order for Utah to become a state. One Mormon woman I knew in Boston told me that as a child, she used to visit the Navajo reservation with her mother in order to visit her grandmother. Her grandfather had returned his Navajo wives to the reservation and kept his Anglo wife and children in Salt Lake City.

  The motel owner’s wife expanded on the fundamentalist beliefs of her father-in-law and concluded with an interesting explanation of the Mormon diaspora. “It took forever to probate my father-in-law’s will because he had property all over Utah and Arizona and Nevada. There are lots of Mormons in Arizona and Nevada. Idaho has the most Mormons after Utah and California. Pioneers went everywhere. With all those mouths to feed, they had to keep moving.” She didn’t believe in everything the Mormon Church did, she continued, but added approvingly, “It is a culture that supports its people.”

  She appeared remarkably curious and open, quite different from other Mormon women I had met in Utah and Nevada. They were careful and cautious in speaking with an outsider. She told me that she and her husband owned the motel but he had another job, so she pretty much ran it herself. She also seemed in no hurry to get back to work and interested in pursuing a conversation, so I asked where her daughters went to school. “The kids used to go to a school in Page. But when there were too many kids, Big Water built a school.”

  Did I have any children? she asked. One daughter. How many children did she and her husband have? “Ten, seven from his previous marriages. The three girls are ours.” Then she offered, unprompted, that she and her husband had a monogamous marriage. I asked what a Jack Mormon was. I had recently read an interview about Stewart Udall, and he described himself as a Jack Mormon. “They believe in the culture, but they don’t tithe. If a man doesn’t tithe, he can’t be part of the church.”

  “Where are you from?” I finally asked, deciding that she couldn’t have been brought up in Utah. “My husband’s from Utah, but I’m from Washington State. I find the desert a hard environment. I have to hug a tree every so often. But my kids all have alkali in their veins.”

  THE ALKALI KINGDOM

  Alkali is a soluble salt found in arid soils, a common ingredient in the lands of Utah and Nevada and the arid territory that make up what is still called the Great American Desert. It was the alkali soil along with lack of reliable water that made agriculture difficult in what otherwise should have been the Mormons’ promised land. It is also what sent so many Mormons from these arid states into working for the Bureau of Reclamation, building dams, flood-control barriers, and irrigation systems throughout the West.* Reclamation meant reclaiming land from flood and irrigating desert into farmland. When Mormons lost their rich farm- and grazing lands in Missouri, Joseph Smith had asked the US government to reimburse the twelve thousand Mormons more than $1 million for farms and ranches taken from them illegally by the State of Missouri. (The federal government said it had no jurisdiction. They would have to work it out with the state government.) Alkali soils were not what they expected when they moved west, crossing the Wasatch Mountains to the uninhabited lands beyond the Rockies where they planned to found their own Zion in the desert.

  It is important to know that in 1847, when the Mormon pioneers began their legendary fifteen-hundred-mile journey from Illinois across the plains and over the Rocky Mountains to settle Salt Lake City, they were not going to Utah. There was no Utah.

  They were going to Alta California, a vast, arid, mountainous region that belonged to Mexico and filled the map between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada at the edge of California. This alkali kingdom was originally part of Spain and then part of Mexico after the Mexican War of Independence, lightly inhabited by Europeans and barely admi
nistered by Mexico. In the East, Alta California was known mainly for the cattle ranches that exported leather to the shoe factories of New England.

  From the Mormon point of view, Alta California’s status outside the boundaries and legal system of the United States was its main attraction. The Mormon leaders believed that once on the other side of the Rockies, they would be outside the US laws and free to set up a theocratic government, enjoy plural marriage, create their own laws, and live as they believed the Book of Mormon instructed them to live.

  Their tormented experiences in the previous seventeen years—as they moved west from New York to Ohio, then to Missouri, and finally to Illinois—led them to believe they would be safe only after they were beyond the reach of the United States’ legal system. When they first began planning the move in the 1840s, the territory of the United States ended at the Missouri border. After that, there were no roads, only tracks and trails—the Oregon Trail, the Santa Fe Trail. The Plains Indians were still dominant on the plains because the US Army under President Andrew Jackson was still occupied in clearing the Five Civilized Tribes from southeastern states in order to open up their lands for cotton production. Jackson, whose supporters included the richest men in the southern states, ordered the federal troops to join with state militias to forcibly move the Cherokee out of Georgia and the Choctaw, Creeks, Chickasaw, and Seminoles out of Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. Their fertile lands became cotton plantations. After passage of the Indian Removal Act, the Natives were removed “legally” and forcibly marched to Indian Territory, in what are now Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Kansas. It wasn’t until the 1860s, and the construction of transcontinental railroads, that the US Army began building forts along the routes of the Oregon Trail and negotiating treaties with the Plains Indians before confining them to reservations.

  The second element to consider was that many of the Saints’, as Mormons called themselves, troubles in Missouri and Illinois arose from apostate Mormons, that is, disaffected Mormons who became disillusioned but refused to leave the church quietly. When former Mormon believers left the church, they often sued in state courts to recover the titles to properties that they had signed over to the Mormon leadership. Called the United Order, the Mormons’ system of communal ownership meant private property became church property. During the relatively short life of the early Mormon Church—founded and led by Joseph Smith from 1830 to 1844—the new converts pledged their wealth to the church. If they died, the church, not their children, inherited. When someone wanted to leave the church—and they did for many reasons—or if their children tried to retrieve their inheritance, the only recourse was to sue through the state legal system. In the process of making their case to state attorneys, the apostate Mormons revealed Joseph Smith’s proclivity for marrying multiple young, attractive female converts (many of them with money), the widespread practice of plural marriage among the leadership, illegal land speculation, and the practice of doing business only with “their own kind.”

  Evidence of polygamy came out in court documents when disaffected Mormons testified that they had personally seen or read about Smith’s revelation granting every man the privilege of “marrying ten virgins.” They described the different kinds of marriage among the leaders, some sanctified in the temple, some for eternity, some in name only. They told about Smith’s sermons in which he included reference to polygamy mentioned in the Koran (permission for a man to have four wives), and he frequently preached on the polygamous marriages of Jacob in the Old Testament. He is believed to have begun his first polygamous marriage in 1835 and disclosed this fact as a revelation to his closest followers sometime in 1839, when he encouraged them to take additional wives as well. At first cautiously, then enthusiastically, most of the top leadership had followed his lead into the institution of plural marriage. (Plural marriage was only for the men; women couldn’t have multiple husbands.)

  The issue of polygamy engaged the opposition of disaffected Mormons as well as disapproving Gentiles. The difference was that the disaffected Mormons, unlike the Gentiles, didn’t want to bring about the downfall of the church. They wanted to reform Joseph Smith and the church. To that end, they started a reform movement.

  The Mormons’ closed economic system and other aspects of what historians have described as “evangelical socialism” enflamed hostility among their neighbors and created confrontations so violent—in Missouri their land was confiscated and outlying farms were torched, killing thirteen people—that the Mormon leaders believed they had no choice but to leave the United States. Like the seventeenth-century Pilgrim separatists who left England to found a theocracy in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the nineteenth-century Mormons wanted to found a theocratic community “beyond the Rocky Mountains.” Their vision was to create a Christian church in the form that they believed it to have been in the days of Jesus Christ, thus the naming of their church as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

  In their quest for a theocratic state, Mormons violated the separation of church and state embedded in the US Constitution. Their private armed militias and their elaborate system of plural marriage, which Joseph Smith denied in public but expounded in private as a divine revelation, seemed to be legal evidence that the Mormon leaders saw themselves bound by religious revelation rather than the US Constitution.

  At the time of his death on June 27, 1844, Joseph Smith was a candidate for president of the United States, a lieutenant general commanding a private army of four thousand armed men (the Nauvoo Legion), the president of the Council of Fifty (a political arm of the church), the secret husband of perhaps fifty wives, and the best-known man west of the Mississippi. The New York Herald predicted, wrongly, in its obituary, “The death of the modern Mahomet will seal the fate of Mormonism. They cannot get another Joe Smith. The holy city must tumble into ruins and the ‘latter day saints’ have indeed come to the latter day.”

  BEYOND THE ROCKIES—DESERET

  One of the first references to the planned settlement “beyond the Rockies” came from Lucy Walker, one of Joseph Smith’s wives. (Smith had forty-seven recorded wives.) In 1842, five years before the actual migration to Utah, seventeen-year-old Lucy Walker later reported that Joseph Smith told her, “I have been commanded of God to take another wife, and you are the woman.” He assured her that eventually, after they left Illinois and went to Alta California, she would be acknowledged as his legal wife: “Although I cannot under existing circumstances, acknowledge you as my wife, the time is near when we will go beyond the Rocky Mountains and then you will be acknowledged and honored as my wife.” “Existing circumstances” meant that public admission of his multiple marriages was impossible outside the small circle of privileged Mormon leaders.

  Lucy Walker was seventeen years old and a ward in his home when Joseph, age thirty-six, told her God had commanded him to take her as a wife. She had come from Vermont, Joseph’s home state, to live in the prophet’s home following the death of her mother. She was shocked at Joseph’s revelation. “My astonishment knew no bounds,” she recalled. Atypically—women’s voices are not an integral part of Mormon history—she recorded their conversation. “It is a command of God to you,” he told her. “I will give you until tomorrow to decide this matter. If you reject this message the gate will be closed forever against you.” Lucy became Joseph’s twenty-fifth wife. Following his murder two years later, she became the plural wife of Heber Kimball, second in the leadership after Brigham Young. (Kimball had a recorded forty-three wives and sixty-five children by seventeen wives.)

  Joseph Smith was young, only thirty-eight years old, when he died, and his religious martyrdom obscured the power of his charisma and personal magnetism. He did not look like the stern, bewhiskered men who came to dominate the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City. He was clean-shaven, more than six feet tall, robust, and by many accounts handsome, charismatic, and with prodigious charm. He was known to drink wine and whiskey, loved to wrestle, and could speak poetically and compell
ingly to men and women alike. Surrounded by people who hungered for the transformative experience of the spiritual realm and believed in the power of his revelations, Smith’s Mormon Church attracted thousands of converts who signed over their property and wealth for the opportunity to live in an ecstatic religious community. Smith was said to have developed a gift for liturgy—much of it based on the secret Masonic rituals—and during church services the congregants were said to be so transported that they spoke in tongues and other languages of the biblical-era Mediterranean. When he and Brigham Young met for the first time, for example, the two men spoke in tongues. Smith’s power was not in doctrine but in his imagination and his powerful use of symbols. As Fawn Brodie wrote in her biography of Joseph Smith, “He was a mythmaker of prodigious talent.”

  Few ministers in the nineteenth-century West had ever seen the inside of a seminary. Many were self-invented. Some were insane. Many of their converts could not read the Bible even if they owned one. In the Book of Mormon, people learned a theological doctrine that persuasively described North America in biblical times. Its stories gave wholeness and unity to the actual experience of their lives. The Book of Mormon provided a story for many things they had seen, like the impressive Indian ruins that dotted the landscape, for which neither they nor anyone else had an explanation. As a modern-day prophet, Joseph Smith was both approachable and personable. He had four handsome brothers, and the vigorous, masculine family that surrounded him was an important element of his charisma and his power. His parents and siblings had all been with him since the beginning in upstate New York, and the faithful had followed him, first to Ohio, then to Missouri, and then back over the border into Illinois.

  Mormonism is America’s only homegrown religion, and much of its power came from its ability to speak to the nineteenth-century mind, its belief that prosperity was evidence of God’s favor, its unique explanation of North America during biblical times, and its exceptional ability to organize people into cohesive communities. The Book of Mormon explained the reality of vast cultures that had previously existed in the United States. (Estimates of the pre-European population of North America at the time of Columbus, excluding Mexico, range from sixteen million to forty million. In 1491 Mexico alone had twenty-five million people.)