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

by Nies, Judith

  THE GREAT MOUNDS

  The American West in the 1820s began in western New York and flowed into Ohio, particularly the rich farmland of the Ohio River valleys. Settlers moving into the Ohio Valley, still called the Western Reserve, as Joseph Smith and his family did, saw countless impressive, but unexplained, remnants of former residents—large earthworks in precise and geometrical forms. Henry Brackenridge, a Pennsylvanian who had invested in Ohio real estate, was one of the first to write and publish about the Indian antiquities of his day. He wrote about the extensive mound complex at Newark, the great site at Chillicothe, and other sites at Cincinnati. He noted in one of his letters that “all of these vestiges invariably occupy the most eligible situations for towns or settlements.”

  That America had a large population of previous inhabitants was evident in the thousands of archaeological ruins that dotted the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys. Some of the grave goods the settlers discovered in the mounds were so sophisticated and so well made that many believed the makers had to be ancient Egyptians or people from the lost tribe of Israel. The lost tribe of Israel was the most popular and widely held theory of the time to explain the origin of all the ubiquitous Indian mounds and impressive ruins. Joseph Smith borrowed from both theories. The original documents for the Book of Mormon were written in “reform Egyptian”; the stories in the Book of Mormon were about the lost tribe of Israel, the Lamanites and the Nephites, who had come to America in 600 BC.

  Some white settlers called the mounds “Spanish forts” because they couldn’t credit such immense structures to a non-European source. Only a few unusually well-placed Americans—among them Albert Gallatin, Henry M. Brackenridge, and Thomas Jefferson—were able to invest the indigenous earthworks with historical meaning and understood that this “virgin land” contained a vast history of previous inhabitants. Albert Gallatin, Jefferson’s secretary of the treasury, correctly theorized that the builders of the great mounds had migrated from Mexico, bringing corn and horticultural techniques with them as they migrated up the Mississippi and its tributaries. Gallatin personally traveled through the Old Northwest Territory (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and the Great Lakes region), studying Native American tribes of his day, their extraordinary artifacts, and their extensive trade routes. (Turquoise jewelry, for example, was unearthed in Michigan.) Treasury Secretary Gallatin sponsored the first major study of the Indian archaeological mounds, at first privately published, then years later issued as Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley by the newly established Smithsonian Institution.

  Henry M. Brackenridge was an attorney from Pennsylvania who had invested in Ohio land and explored the profusion of Indian mounds he found along the Ohio and Scioto Rivers as he looked for town sites. Later appointed as a federal judge in St. Louis and subsequently sent to New Orleans as assistant attorney general, he made the correct connection between the similarities of the great mounds he had seen at Cahokia on the Mississippi River, opposite St. Louis, and the similar ruins of geometric settlements he saw around the tributaries of the lower Mississippi River near New Orleans. Cahokia was the center of what is now called the Mississippian civilization, and similar sites were found throughout the tributary river system flowing into the Mississippi.*

  In what is today Illinois, some fifteen miles from East St. Louis, the enormous pyramid mounds of Cahokia rose on the banks of the Mississippi River. Archaeologists have since determined that a city existed there from AD 750 to 1250 and held a population estimated at between fifteen and forty thousand people, far larger than Paris or London at the time. The original massed pyramid structures of Cahokia are the largest pyramids outside of Egypt. The pyramids were arranged in mathematical measurements having to do with the seasons and planting times. (The pyramidal shapes gave rise to the belief that ancient Egyptians had lived in North America.)

  Today most of those ancient ruins have been bulldozed into shopping malls or housing developments, but a few remain to give testimony to a mysterious population with considerable engineering skill and artistic finesse. The Great Serpent mound in the Ohio Valley, for example, is four football fields in length, ranges from three to twenty feet high, and holds a globe or a comet in its mouth. It was saved from destruction only in the 1890s when a former director of the Peabody Museum of Ethnology purchased sixty acres surrounding it.*

  The majority of settlers in the 1800s were not interested in archaeology; they were interested in land. The impulse for land was a sacred hunger. The settlers knew that it was important that the mounds and artistic objects not be related to the Indians of their day because they needed to take their lands. It was equally important that the Indians be perceived as wild, uncivilized savages of the forest, and in this conceit the Book of Mormon obliged them.

  THE LAMANITES

  The Book of Mormon holds that an original tribe from Israel came to North America sometime around 600 BC and divided into two factions—the Lamanites and the Nephites. Much of the description of the Lamanites, as predecessors of the Native American tribes, is found in the Book of Enos, where Enos describes the depravity of the Lamanites: “Their hatred was fixed, and they were led by their evil nature that they became wild and ferocious; feeding upon beasts of prey; dwelling in tents and wandering about in the wilderness with a short skin girdle about their loins and their heads shaven; and their skill was in the bow, and in the cimeter [scimitar] and the ax. And many of them did eat nothing save it was raw meat; and they were continually seeking to destroy us.”

  The Nephites, on the other hand, were a thrifty, hardworking people, “a pure and delightsome people.” They “did till the land and raise all manner of grain, and of fruit, and flocks of herds, and flocks of all manner of cattle of every kind, and goats, and wildgoats, and also many horses.” They were white-skinned, lived industriously, were devoted to their large families, and prospered. The Indians were descendants of the Lamanites; the Mormons were descendants of the Nephites.

  As the personification of the fallen, the Lamanites’ skin turned dark, and they became “a blood-thirsty people, full of idolatry and filthiness.” Enos, himself a former Lamanite, tells of constant wars between the Nephites and Lamanites, and much of the Book of Mormon is devoted to describing these savage battles between the two branches of the Israelites.

  The Book of Mormon was a holy script mystically transmitted to Joseph Smith, at the age of twenty-one, by the angel Moroni, who directed him to discover ancient golden tablets buried in a hill near his home in Palmyra, New York. Palmyra was near Rochester, a region visited by so many evangelical, spiritualist, Shaker, and fire-and-brimstone itinerant preachers that it was said to be “burned over.” (The hill at Palmyra is now a holy site, and when I visited, I saw tour buses of Mormons coming to visit, although I was too early for the annual pageant of Cumorah, enacting the story of the ancient American inhabitants of biblical times.) Written in a form of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the translation was accomplished by Smith through divine intervention and a gift of tongues. He dictated the contents to a local schoolteacher, Oliver Cowdray. No one ever saw the tablets because the angel Moroni asked for the tablets to be returned, and Smith obliged.

  The resulting text was the story of North America in biblical times, which combined many of the stories of the Bible with the archaeology of the frontier. The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ proved to be hugely persuasive to many disoriented European settlers, as they tried to make sense of the foreign environment in which they found themselves. Instead of a “virgin continent,” they encountered Native Americans of many different tribes, customs, and languages. They also saw many mysterious and unexplained ancient ruins of previous inhabitants.

  Published in 1830, and underwritten by a neighbor of Smith’s who mortgaged his farm, the Book of Mormon became the foundation for the church that Joseph Smith named the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Converts to Mormonism established a utopian agricultural community and a church as it supposedly existed d
uring the historical time of Jesus. Many were called and many were true believers. But not everyone.

  THE DEATH OF JOSEPH SMITH

  By the 1840s a critical mass of disaffected Mormons had publicly charged Smith with being a false prophet. Even one of his brothers, William, left the church, charging him with “false prophecy,” but he later returned. His brother’s defection, however, was an injury that—combined with a dozen lawsuits, a failed bank, undocumented land titles, anger at taking other men’s wives as a “commandment from God,” irregular business dealings, and an armed militia of four thousand men—signaled internal institutional unraveling.

  The final chapter of Joseph Smith’s life came about not from anti-Mormon Gentiles, but from disaffected Mormons who set in motion the events that led to his imprisonment and murder. The apostates sued him in court. Most dangerously, they started a newspaper criticizing his behavior and that of other church leaders. His death was not an “American Crucifixion,” as some writers have suggested. There is considerable irony in the fact that Joseph Smith’s ultimate downfall was set in motion by a man whose last name was Law.

  William Law was a wealthy Canadian who joined the Mormon Church in Nauvoo, Illinois, with his wife, Jane. Law was a good businessman and invested in real estate, land development, and steam mills. More than anyone else, Law helped to guide the economic development of the settlement, and Joseph Smith depended on his financial acumen. Their break came after Joseph Smith told the attractive Jane Law—while her husband was away on a business trip—that God had commanded him to take her as one of his wives. Jane Law told her husband, and soon the Laws joined the camp of disgruntled Mormons, filing suit in Illinois courts, charging Smith with adultery, polygamy, and slander. Most dangerous to Joseph Smith, Law became editor of the Nauvoo Expositor, a newspaper that exposed some of Joseph’s financial maneuverings, polygamy, land speculation, and misuse of state charters. Smith responded by ordering his Nauvoo militia to wreck the press, destroy the type, and burn every issue of the paper. This took place in early June 1844.

  Governor Thomas Ford of Illinois could not afford to turn a blind eye to the destruction of the press and violation of the federal statute of “freedom of the press.” After first trying to escape, Joseph Smith gave himself up and landed in the Carthage, Illinois, jail. Although the Illinois governor was determined to hold a legal trial—or perhaps follow the example of the Missouri authorities, who had arranged for Joseph to “escape” from the state—the governor was weak, and units of his state militia were out of his control. As soon as he departed from Carthage, some of his troops stormed the jail and shot Joseph Smith and his brother Hyram.

  ALTA CALIFORNIA

  The second phase of Mormonism “beyond the Rocky Mountains” began under the leadership of Brigham Young and the removal of the church to the alkali kingdom of Alta California, called the Empire of Deseret by Brigham Young and his apostles and Utah Territory by the US government.* The map of the Mormon state of Deseret included much of Alta California, including some or all of nine future states—slices of Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, all of Southern California, all of Nevada and Utah, half of Colorado, much of northern Arizona, and a wedge of New Mexico.

  The great success of the Mormon settlement in the Far West was due to both Young’s leadership and changes by the leadership in religious practice and governance. The former United Order of communal property ownership, for example, was abolished and the practice of tithing substituted. A tithe was calculated at 10 percent of a man’s income. Material prosperity was identified as God’s favor. Polygamy was openly practiced and the number of wives seen as testimony to a man’s faith. In Utah there were no apostates, no tolerance for disaffected Mormons. If someone wanted to leave the church, they slipped away quietly in the dead of night. Rumors surfaced that certain disaffected members were murdered. (The Mountain Meadows massacre of a wagon train of white settlers illustrated that Brigham Young was not squeamish about killing.)

  Young was an organizational genius who had both a vision and a plan. Equally important, the new Mormon leadership recognized the practical failures of Smith’s governance and corrected them. They no longer ruled by prophetic revelation. Historian Bernard DeVoto called Young “one of the foremost intelligences of the time” and “the first American who learned how to colonize the desert.” Although Joseph Smith’s martyrdom gave the migrating Mormon pioneers a sense of divine mission that fueled the incredible stamina required to undertake a journey of more than fifteen hundred miles over the Rocky Mountains, it was Brigham Young’s command of logistics that successfully delivered some ten thousand Mormons into Salt Lake City.

  It is possible that without Young’s leadership to execute the stages of the long migration—setting up colonies at planned intervals along the route to grow food and provide supplies for successive waves of thousands of Mormon pioneers—Mormonism might have remained a small sect that disappeared in the nineteenth century like the Shakers of Annie Lee or the utopian colony of Robert Owen in New Harmony, Indiana. Instead, Brigham Young and his Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and his Council of Fifty designed an empire. They drew a map of their new lands in the West and called them Deseret. Deseret was short-lived because the year after the Saints arrived in Salt Lake Valley, the United States won the Mexican-American War and Alta California became part of the United States, the country the Mormons had tried to leave behind. The Mormon leaders were not deterred. Within the first ten years of arriving in Salt Lake, Brigham Young sent out explorers and missions to establish more than one hundred colonies in the nine states within the original boundaries of Deseret. Two of those missions are important to this story. One was in Tuba City, Arizona, which contained the Mormons who caused the Indian agent of Chester Arthur’s era such annoyance that he threatened to resign unless the Indian Bureau created a reservation boundary for the Hopi; the other was a small outpost and fort in Las Vegas that lasted for only two years but remained a location for future Mormon settlers.

  To successfully colonize these lands required significant planning. Unlike the individual pioneers who claimed lands under the Homestead Act and frequently lost them for lack of water, the Mormons scouted water sources ahead of time and sent parties of twenty or thirty families at a time to establish a settlement. They were equipped with the layout for a town plan and tools for farming, irrigation, or mining. The church also provided them with information about how to file mining claims and claim public domain lands through the Homestead Act, the Desert Lands Act, and the Timber Act.

  The Mormons claim they settled the West, and to a significant degree they are right. The geographical location of their colonies was always based on sites with water, minerals, or timber. Successful settlement required locating water sources for irrigation, iron ore to produce tools and machinery, and timber for charcoal and construction. By the time Brigham Young died in 1877, he had plans for the establishment of more than 350 colonies throughout the West. By 1869 there were as many as sixty thousand Mormons in Utah, many of them recruited in England, former rural farmers who were eager to escape the factory life of England’s industrial cities. Land was the key enticement to emigrate.

  In Washington government mapmakers were rearranging lines on their maps, reducing the state of Deseret into Utah Territory, which included present-day Nevada and Utah (land of the Ute). Brigham Young was appointed territorial governor, with the provision that the Utah legal system include non-Mormon judges. The Mormon leadership, however, implemented their original vision. Brigham Young openly advocated the practice of polygamy, a policy enthusiastically adopted by the male population of the church, not just the leadership. Among the male Mormons, patriarchal polygamy and multiple wives were seen as a testament of their religious zeal as well as witness to their economic prosperity.* (Young himself took fifty-five wives and had fifty-seven children by sixteen women.) Deseret existed with its own government, courts, and judicial system for only three years, from 1849 to 1851. A map in the Library of Co
ngress shows the successive lands taken from Utah Territory and transferred to the states of Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Arizona.

  But the original map of Deseret remained permanently imprinted in the minds of Mormon leaders. Unlike the settlement pattern of individual homesteaders who claimed free land under the Homestead Act and established individual farms and grazing lands, the Mormons thought in terms of town sites and supplied the colonies (called missions) with a town plan, instructions for irrigation, and a design for agricultural lands spread out around a town center.

  From the very beginning, the Mormon leadership realized that success in the alkali kingdom required colonizing locations with significant resources. Tuba City, Arizona, was one of those missionary settlements, containing both water for irrigation and coal for heating. And it had a direct connection to John Boyden, the Hopi legal suit, and the coal-fired electricity that eventually powered the Sunbelt Boom of the urban Southwest.

  *The Bureau of Reclamation, still largely unknown in the East, was founded in 1902 to build and operate water projects in the western states. It should not be confused with the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation, which deals with land restoration from mining.

  *A chronicler from de Soto’s 1539 expedition across the southeastern states described the lush and extensive agricultural fields of the Coosa kingdom, spread across Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee. They saw hundreds of settlements with temples and houses and fields laid out in identical geometrical designs. They told of the Great Sun of the Coosas being carried out on a stretcher to meet de Soto, accompanied by a thousand men in “great feathered headdresses.” Almost two hundred years later, around 1719, a French architect named Antoine Le Page du Pratz spent four years among the Natchez Indians, near present-day Natchez, Mississippi. A trained architect and engineer, he drew a site plan of their grand village, including the central ceremonial site for nine surrounding villages, with two temples at the south end flanking the temple of the Great Sun, also known as the Tattooed Serpent. He also drew and described the rectangular dwellings of ordinary people, the class structure organized around sun worship, and the flood-plains in which individual families tended gardens of corn, beans, and pumpkins. Within two years of Le Page’s final visit in 1725, the Natchez, including the Great Sun, were conquered by the French and sold into slavery in the Caribbean. A few survivors went to live with the Cherokee and took on mystical stature as the last descendants of the Mississippian civilization.