Who, What, Where, When, Why:
A Utah War Primer
Ardis E. Parshall

Introduction
I do not think my fourth grade teacher mentioned the Utah War when we learned about Utah history in my Sandy elementary school. Ironically, the first time I heard of the Utah War was in Jackson County, Missouri, when I studied LDS church history in a home study seminary course.
That was also the year I took American History from Miss Craddock, one of my favorite high school teachers. As the story of American history moved closer to the 1850s, I looked forward to finding out whether Miss Craddock’s version of the Utah War was any different from what I had read in seminary.  I remember my anticipation on the day I figured we had reached the Utah War – I was early to class, and bounced in to ask Miss Craddock eagerly, “Are we going to talk about the Utah War today?”  And I remember how embarrassed I felt when she almost sneered, “Noooo,” as if my question were the silliest she had ever heard.

Today I think I understand. It wasn’t that my question was silly; it was that Miss Craddock had never heard of the Utah War. Few people have. Even in Utah, my experience is that the phrase “Utah War” brings a blank stare; calling it “Johnston’s Army” or “the Echo Canyon War” brings a flicker of recognition, but seldom much more than that.

We have heard some fine speeches and papers at this conference about specific aspects of the Utah War, and we’ll hear far more over the next two years of the sesquicentennial observance. Rather than a detailed report of some particular phase of the Utah War, however, this article aims to give a broad outline, to provide a framework for listeners who, like most Utahns and like virtually all Americans outside of Utah, need some background to follow the conversation. We’ll do that by answering the “W questions” asked by good journalists:

Who
The “Who” is fairly easily defined:
The Utah War pitted the Mormons of Utah against the government of the United States of America.

The leader on the federal side was James Buchanan, a 66-year-old Pennsylvania bachelor, Presbyterian, Democrat, and lawyer, inaugurated as president of the United States in March of 1857. The leader on the Mormon side was Brigham Young, 56 years old and much married, who had been appointed as Utah’s first governor, and who was sustained by the Mormons not only as governor, but as church president and prophet.
Each leader had an advisory council: Buchanan had his cabinet, of course, and looked for help to such men as Secretary of War John Floyd and Army commander Winfield Scott. Buchanan also looked for information to federal officers who had served in Utah, with Judge William W. Drummond being the former officer most familiar to modern Utahns.

Brigham Young had as his council the Twelve Apostles of the LDS church, men like John Taylor and George A. Smith, and  lesser-known men with military  experience, such as James Ferguson, formerly of the Mormon Battalion, and Seth M. Blair, who had fought with Sam Houston in Texas’s war for independence. Like President Buchanan, Governor Young called on advisors outside of his immediate circle, notably Thomas L. Kane, the Pennsylvania lawyer and public servant who befriended the Mormons when they lay stranded in the Iowa mud after their hasty exodus from Nauvoo, Illinois.

To prosecute the war, President Buchanan had the professional United States Army. He originally called for 2,500 men for the Utah Expedition, but that professional force had melted away to 1,710 by the time the army went into winter quarters at Fort Bridger; these soldiers were supplemented by another 170 volunteers drawn from teamsters and other civilians dependent upon the army. The forces included foot soldiers, mounted dragoons, and artillery batteries. Brigham Young’s force was Utah’s territorial militia, called the “Nauvoo Legion.”  Numbers are hard to pin down, but the Nauvoo Legion vastly outnumbered the federal forces, although their training and equipment was very much inferior.

As military leaders, the federal forces were first commanded by Brevet Brigadier General William Harney. Harney was removed from the Utah Expedition to handle civil unrest in Kansas, and Colonel Edmund Alexander was placed in temporary command to lead the troops across the plains. Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston replaced General Harney, but didn’t catch up with the troops until they were halfway across what is now Wyoming. Commanding the Nauvoo Legion was Lieutenant General Daniel H. Wells, a counselor to Brigham Young in the LDS First Presidency; his “counselors,” reflecting a Mormon organizational pattern rather than a military one, were George A. Smith and John Taylor. This triumvirate planned strategy with Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders and kept Salt Lake informed by almost daily dispatches; once the Nauvoo Legion was in the field, these three men, counseling with their subordinates, made the military decisions.

These are the major players in the Utah War, but there were others: Native Americans were keenly aware of the goings on, and both the federal and Utah armies made efforts to sway the Indians to their sides. This included the Shoshones and Flatheads in the north, the Utes in central Utah, and the Paiutes of southern Utah. The Utah War also affected an unknown number of mountain men—the French and Indian fur trappers and the traders who had preceded the Mormons to the region.

What
The next “W” is “What”—What was the Utah War?  I have defined it above as a conflict pitting the Mormons of Utah against the government of the United States. The nature of that conflict depends upon where you stand.
At one extreme, the conflict was the lawful and necessary exertion of American authority over a lawless gang of thugs, thieves and murderers, who threatened the rights of American citizens, the safety of overland travelers, and the moral decency of a civilized nation.

At another extreme, the conflict was the inevitable clash of good versus evil, with a  persecuted band of pilgrims standing up against an armed mob, sent by a corrupt government to destroy them for no other reason than their religious faith.

Rather than positioning myself anywhere along this spectrum, I am trying to represent both sides from their own positions as fairly as I can. There will be plenty of opportunity over the two years of sesquicentennial observance for everyone to adopt and modify his own understanding of what the Utah War really was.

Regardless of polemics, there are some “whats” about the Utah War that we can probably agree on.

First is a consideration of the name for the conflict. Utahns have traditionally referred to it as “Johnston’s Army”—an illogical and inaccurate name, as if Johnston, the army’s third commander, had decided on his own to round up some soldiers and march on Utah. Also inaccurate is the “Echo Canyon War.”  Very little of the action took place there, and it reflects an entirely Utah perspective. By the same token, the designation “Utah Expedition” used in army records accurately reflects the federal point of view but ignores the Utah perspective. Historians have adopted the label “Utah War” as the most neutral title, and it is what you will hear almost exclusively from speakers with an intent to be all-inclusive and balanced in their presentations.

Second, the Utah War was a real war, not a weekend in the wilderness for the federal troops, not a David-conquers-Goliath comic opera for the Nauvoo Legion. Shots were fired by each side on the other, with intent to kill. Men died, of exposure, of gunshot wounds, of accident. Men on both sides suffered from hunger and cold during the winter standoff. To the extent that the Mountain Meadows Massacre was the consequence of war hysteria or calculated strategy, the victims there were casualties of the Utah War. Vast amounts of property were wasted, lost, or destroyed. Enormous hardship resulted when the entire Mormon population of northern Utah moved southward near the end of the war; to the extent that any sick Mormon died sooner than necessary because of the move, or that any Mormon newborn or mother suffered from exposure, or that any Mormon child was injured because he fell under the wheel of a wagon moving south, these are all casualties of the Utah War.
And third, the Utah War marked a significant change in Utah’s social and political life. Exactly what the consequences were, and which of those changes were good or bad, are matters of debate for historians now and in the future.

Where
The “Where” of the Utah War is surprisingly broad. The bulk of the action took place in what is now southwestern Wyoming, but which was then northeastern Utah: The area of Utah’s “notch” encompasses Fort Bridger where the federal army spent the winter, where Lot Smith and his raiders burned government wagon trains, where Mormon scouts spied on army movements to learn whether the army would advance toward Salt Lake (which would have meant battles and more bloodshed), or whether they would go into winter quarter (as they did in fact do).

But the “where” of the Utah War is broader than that. It includes Echo Canyon, of course, running northeasterly from Salt Lake, which was fortified against any attempt of the army to force its way through. It includes Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where the federal army was assembled from units pulled out of Minnesota, Florida, and Texas. It includes the Platte River Valley through Nebraska, because Mormon scouts went east that far to track the army’s early movements toward Utah. It includes present-day Idaho, where the Mormon station at Fort Limhi was attacked by Indians, who killed two settlers, which attack appears to have been urged by civilians connected with the federal troops. It includes southern Utah, including Mountain Meadows and other regions. It includes the Colorado River, with the possibility that federal surveyors and explorers then mapping the river might open up a southern front in the event of a shooting war. It includes California, which was actively raising volunteer units to attack Utah from the west.

The Utah War even involved reluctant foreign powers: Great Britain, with its interests in the region of Oregon and Washington, watched developments very carefully, as did the Russian Czar, who saw a potential flight of Mormons into his possessions in Alaska as a real threat.

When
The “When” of the Utah War is also surprisingly fuzzy. We usually think of the Utah War as opening in the summer of 1857 when federal troops assembled at Fort Leavenworth to march on Utah, and we usually think of the War as concluding in June 1858 when those federal troops marched peacefully through Salt Lake City to camp, first on the banks of the Jordan River, and soon at Camp Floyd, on the western side of Utah Lake.
Historian David Bigler has suggested that the Utah War was twenty years in the making, that inevitable conflicts between Mormon theocracy and federal authority had been building ever since the Mormons arrived in Utah in 1847, if not for ten years before that, when the Mormons as a people had been forced to leave first Missouri and then Illinois, without recourse to federal protection. Without detailing the earlier conflicts, however, we can probably all agree that the Utah War did not spring into existence with the inauguration of James Buchanan, but was the culmination of a long-time build-up of tension and hostility.

And at the other end, we should agree that tensions did not cease with the army’s settling into Camp Floyd in the summer of 1858. The army remained there until 1861; after a few months’ withdrawal, the army returned to build Camp Douglas on the high ground east of Salt Lake City. As long as the nation saw the army’s presence as a necessary check on Mormon rebellion, and as long as Mormons saw the army presence as a threat to their vision of society, the Utah War could not truthfully be said to have concluded.

Why
The “Why” of the Utah War is the trickiest question to answer. We have already touched on the hostile view held by each side toward the other:
The American public watched Utah’s Mormons giving greater allegiance and loyalty to the institutions and leaders of their church than to the traditional government, and saw that as a threat to American sovereignty. They viewed Mormondom’s polygamy as a threat to the sanctity of the American family and, consequently, to the decency and morality of American society. They feared that Mormon interest in Native Americans was “tampering” with them, priming and arming them for massacre. They read the reports of federal officers who had served in Utah—reports that should have been trustworthy as eyewitness accounts of men found worthy to serve by the president and Congress of the United States—and heard lurid tales of wholesale slaughter and robbery. From the federal perspective, the people of Utah were out of control and required the strong hand of discipline to bring them into subjugation.

The Mormons, on the other hand, saw their treatment by the federal government as outrageous, worse than the colonial treatment that had sparked the American revolution against Great Britain. Federal officers sent to Utah were not worthy to represent the American government; in the eyes of the Mormons, they were political hacks, corrupt men, who, rather than performing the tasks assigned to them by law, preferred to meddle in the social and religious affairs of Utah. The official reports of such unworthy men were filled with distortions; the letters they wrote for sensation-seeking newspaper editors were vicious slander. Utah, claimed Utahns, had not been treated as other American territories had: the Mormons, who had settled there prior to Utah’s transfer from Mexico to the United States, had not been granted the same land preemption benefits allowed to settlers in similar situations in other new territories; the federal government did virtually nothing toward protecting Utah’s white citizens from Indian depredations; and, although Mormon frontiersmen regularly crossed the plains in all but the harshest winter weeks, the United States postal authorities could not seem to find contractors who would deliver the mail in any but ideal warm weather conditions. Utah had had enough of such territorial serfdom, and demanded either full statehood or the independence to conduct its own affairs.

As is usual in human disputes, the truth fell somewhere between the two extremes, and every Utah War scholar will produce his own catalog of “whys.”  The practical effect of all the “whys” is that soon after taking office in Washington, President Buchanan appointed a new slate of officers for Utah, including a new governor, and sent the new officers westward escorted by a large military force. The Mormons, aware of the army’s dispatch not through official channels and diplomatic explanation, but only through public rumor and sensational newspaper report, saw an armed force advancing toward them, as they had seen similar armed forces advancing on their homes in Missouri and Illinois. If American military might was an irresistible force, the Mormons determined to be the immovable object, and the Utah War was underway.
And because this essay is intended as a primer for those whose knowledge of the Utah War is fuzzy, here is a crude, two-minute summary of the events that followed:

Pursuant to lawful orders, a large contingent of the United States Army assembled at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, with orders to garrison Utah and assist the newly appointed governor, Alfred Cumming of Georgia, to the extent necessary to establish American law and quell any Mormon rebellion in Utah.
Word reached Utah late in July that the army was en route. Although the first public announcement of that fact was made at the July 24, 1857, Pioneer Day celebration in the mountains, Mormon leadership had undoubtedly learned of the march days earlier. Mormon leaders responded by dispatching scouts eastward to study the army and its intentions, by instituting martial law and forbidding the army to enter Utah’s borders, and by preparing to defend the Utah settlements again invasion. This preparation included calling up the Nauvoo Legion, obtaining and conserving critical supplies such as foodstuffs and gunpowder, and seeking refuges in the mountains and deserts of Utah should it be necessary for the people to abandon the settlements to wage guerrilla warfare from the wilderness.

As the army progressed westward, Utahns fortified the most likely path to the Salt Lake Valley by booby-trapping Echo Canyon with boulders perched to roll down on soldiers’ heads, dams built to breech and flood the narrow canyon, and breastworks from which to fire on federal troops. A large number of raiders—the most famous of whom were Porter Rockwell and Lot Smith—were sent further east to harass the federal army by running off its animals, to burn grass necessary for those animals, and to weary the soldiers with night raids and verbal taunts. Although these raids make up our most colorful memories of the Utah War, and did in fact cause loss and some distress to the federal troops, the army was hampered even more seriously by a harsh and early winter, and by its own ineffective leadership.

In the early stages of the war, the Nauvoo Legion was indeed acting under orders to avoid bloodshed if at all possible, except in the protection of their own lives. As the war progressed, however, provision was made to change those orders: If the army pushed on beyond Fort Bridger (which the Mormons had burned as part of their scorched earth policy), or if the army turned northward and attempted to march on Salt Lake from the direction of Bear Lake, then the Nauvoo Legion was authorized to take life, beginning with the army’s officers.

Fortunately for both sides, however, the army did not push beyond the dead line. Weakened by loss of supplies and especially by the loss of the animals necessary for mobility, the army built a winter quarters camp—dubbed Camp Scott—near the ruins of Fort Bridger. Leaving a skeleton crew to watch the encamped army and to warn against a surprise advance, the Nauvoo Legion withdrew from the mountains and returned to their homes to await springtime developments.

Those developments included the arrival of Thomas L. Kane, with an unofficial assignment and the permission, if not the encouragement, of President Buchanan to work out some sort of accord with the Mormons. Kane shuttled between Salt Lake City and Camp Scott. Although he had no authority to interfere with the army’s assignment, Kane did convince Governor Cumming that peace was possible, and Cumming, against army advice, bravely accompanied Kane to Salt Lake City. There he was greeted by the appalling sight of Mormon families fleeing southward, out of the path of the federal army, and he learned that preparations were being made to burn all Mormon improvements rather than to leave them for invaders to enjoy. After meeting with Mormon representatives, who recognized him as governor, Cumming returned to Camp Scott to confer with military leaders. Remember that although the army had orders to garrison Utah regardless of the conditions of peace or war, the army was under the governor’s control as to the enforcement of civil law, and Cumming decided that military might was not necessary to install him in office.

Meanwhile, President Buchanan had taken steps of his own to negotiate a settlement of hostilities, dispatching two Peace Commissioners. The commissioners arrived in Utah, met with Mormon leaders, listened to their grievances (without, however, admitting the validity of those grievances), and worked out the terms of a peaceful settlement. The commissioners and the new governor returned to Camp Scott and informed the military leaders that force was unnecessary and would be counterproductive. Under the terms agreed to by the Mormons and the federal representatives, the army marched quietly and peacefully through a deserted Salt Lake City, and soon afterward established their base at Camp Floyd in Utah County.

Conclusion
Maybe it was possible 30-some-odd years ago, in a high school halfway across the country, for Miss Craddock to teach an adequate American History course without knowing anything about the Utah War. Today, though, in Utah, such a blind spot is untenable.

This essay might have been called “Everything you always wanted to know about the Utah War but were afraid to ask.”  I hope it has answered the questions some might have been afraid or embarrassed to ask, but I certainly hope such a rapid, simplified overview hasn’t answered all your questions. The story of the Utah War is filled with colorful characters, dramatic moments, tensions that echo in Utah today, cowardice and heroism—I am proud to be part of a community that faces its past and always wants to know more.