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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. VOL. 106- NO. 1

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 press and type of the paper. 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 flatboats, 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 thousand 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

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