In time, the two clans went to war and the Lamanites got the better of the fight. The Nephites were wiped out, the last one remaining alive being Mormon, who set down the history of the tribe on the golden plates and for safekeeping gave them to his son, Moroni, who was turned into an angel. For their part, the Lamanites devolved into the ancestors of American Indians, who over time lost any memory of whatever remained of their heritage and culture.
In themselves, these beliefs did not generate friction between the Mormons and other citizens, but when the sect began to attract a large following the clannishness and smugness of its members began to grate. The golden plates had also revealed that any church other than the Latter-Day Saints was the “church of the devil,” and that everyone but Mormons was an “apostate,” attitudes that did not go down well with many of the Saints’ fellow Americans. Mormons were forbidden to drink alcohol, gamble, or smoke tobacco,‖ which was for the good, and they were hard workers, but they sometimes aggravated their neighbors by what were then called “sharp business practices” (i.e., dishonesty) and a feeling of distrust ensued toward the Mormons. A further grievance was that the Mormons voted en bloc, for whichever candidate gave them the most money. Moreover, they attracted among their number a significant smattering of shady characters who became involved in such activities as counterfeiting, fraudulent land deals, and the like.
Joseph Smith began to receive converts soon as his Book of Mormon was published, but once the citizens in his neck of the woods got a gander at its contents their open hostility was enough to convince him that the flock better be moved as quickly as possible. The group of about fifty settled for a while in a town near Cleveland, Ohio, but soon enough it was on the road again. Seeking someplace isolated and remote from the scorn and fury of people that Smith had termed “Gentiles,”a he led his band west toward the frontier, then located on the Missouri River, beside the Kansas border. Along the way Smith was inundated with more revelations, including one disclosing that the Garden of Eden was not located on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers as once supposed but in northwest Kansas.
By the time Smith got his people settled in Jackson County near present-day Kansas City, there were more than a thousand. Eight years later, they numbered 10,000 and some had come from as far as Europe and Scandinavia, having seen the light from the Book of Mormon. But as in the Mormons’ previous relocation, the local citizens did not welcome this great flood of Israelites with open arms—most especially since, in addition to reasons previously enumerated, Missouri was a slave state and the Mormons were abolitionists. Also, since they were evangelicals, the Mormons at first went around trying to convert their Gentile neighbors, but this was not well received either and before long the Missourians began to beat, tar and feather, stone, shoot, and otherwise molest the Mormons.
By 1836 things had gotten so bad that the Missouri legislature decided to relocate the Mormons north, to remote Caldwell County, and within two years most had moved there, but it didn’t help. Wherever they went, riots and violence broke out. Thus far Smith had forbidden retaliation, but finally he had enough and whipped his Mormons into a carnival of boiling vengeance, which in turn prompted Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs to order state militia general Alexander Doniphan to either “exterminate” the Mormons or “drive them from the state.”
By then local militias had slaughtered seventeen Mormons, including three children, in a single massacre, incarcerated Joseph Smith and nine of his associates for treason, convicted them by court-martial the same day, and ordered their execution by firing squad next morning.
General Doniphan, however, was a fair man, and also a lawyer, and he wasn’t about to shoot down men like dogs after a drumhead court, no matter what he thought personally about Mormons. So he not only refused to obey the execution order, he informed the head of the court that “if you execute these men, I will hold you responsible before an earthly tribunal, so help me God!”
There the matter rested until Smith and his comrades managed to escape and flee eastward into Illinois, where the remainder of his miserable and now destitute followers had settled on an isolated peninsula on the Mississippi River that they named Nauvoo, or “Place of Peace.” In the coming decade, through dint of hard work, industriousness, and communal living, they built a substantial city of architecturally pleasing brick and stone buildings and neat and often elegant homes, in which they hoped at last to settle in for the long haul.
It was not to be. The same antagonisms that had bedeviled the Saints in Missouri bedeviled them in paradise Nauvoo. By then Smith’s congregation had swelled to 15,000, making Nauvoo second only to Chicago in Illinois population, which so encouraged Smith that in 1844 he declared himself a candidate for the U.S. presidency. He lost, to James K. Polk, but the Mormons had clearly established themselves not only locally but nationally as a force to be reckoned with.
Then somebody sneaked up to a side window of the home of Missouri governor Boggs, who had sicced the state militia on the Mormons back in 1838, and shot him multiple times. Fortunately for the governor, even with two balls entering his skull, another in his neck, and yet another in his throat, which he swallowed, he didn’t die, despite the obituaries that appeared in local papers. Unfortunately for Joseph Smith and the Mormons, the would-be assassin was traced back to Nauvoo and that got people’s dander up all over again.
The straw that finally broke the back, however, was when it was revealed that Smith had been acquiring multiple wives—or “celestial marriages,” as he called them—from the beginning, and that between 1842 and 1844 alone he married forty women and sired innumerable children. There was an immediate uproar, both within the Mormon community and without. Moreover, Smith had been encouraging selected elders of the church to do the same.
One of the Mormon newspapers published an angry denunciation of Smith “and his abominations and whoredoms.” It was its last publication. An organized mob of the Mormon leader’s followers—the Nauvoo Legion—broke into the newspaper office, smashed the press and type to smithereens, then burned the building and ran the offending editor out of town.
All this riled the Gentiles into an outrage beyond reconciliation. Locals tended to be Methodists, Baptists, or Presbyterians, and the revelation that Mormons kept multiple wives in addition to everything else was a clear call for action.
Warrants for the arrest of Joseph Smith and eleven other elders were again issued on June 24, 1844, on charges of, among other things, treason. Following a clumsy escape attempt, Smith turned himself in to a local sheriff after the governor of Illinois warned that, if he fled the state, militias probably could not be restrained from exterminating the entire body of 15,000 Saints. Three days later a vigilante party of 125 militiamen, politicians, clerics, and law enforcement officers broke into the jail and murdered Smith and his brother Hyrum, which presented the congregation with a crisis. The chief prophet and leader of the church of Mormon was dead at the age of thirty-eight, and practically the entire rest of the state was up in arms and talking genocide. What to do? Where to go? It was then that elder Brigham Young, the new leader, got the idea of moving west—so far west they would be forever out of the reach of the detested Gentiles.
When Young took the reins of the beleaguered sect as chief prophet he reversed a page from Moses and vowed to lead his people into the wilderness. A forty-three-year-old New Englander, Young was short, fat, and practical, and it was his conclusion that nowhere within the United States would Mormons be safe and left to their own devices and, worse, there was no appeal to government or law enforcement for help—state, federal, or local. No better example could be held up than the recent acquittal of all nine defendants in the murder of Joseph Smith, including several Illinois military officers, a newspaper editor, and a state senator. Afterward a predictable bloodbath was drawn between still irate citizens and the Mormons of Nauvoo. Dozens of Mormon homes were burned down and their occupants bushwhacked by vigilantes. For their part, a number of Saints went on ki
lling sprees in which their Gentile victims were mutilated with knives, and a blood oath of vengeance was permanently incorporated into the Latter Day Saints’ church litany.
By early 1846 the situation was completely out of hand. Hundreds of homes had been torched and dozens of citizens were dead, Mormon and Gentile alike. At last the governor called out the militia, never a good sign, and Brigham Young finally threw in the towel. He sent a letter telling the governor that the Saints were abandoning Nauvoo en masse for more collegial climes and would be gone by the following spring. Like many Americans, Young had read Frémont’s earlier published exploits and was enticed by the notion of forming a private, secure Mormon nation somewhere beyond the western slopes of the Rocky Mountains. In other words, he desired a place so far away and outlandish that nobody would bother to come there.
But even this did not satisfy the authorities, who issued a warrant for Young’s arrest on charges that, as headman of Nauvoo, he was harboring counterfeiters within the city, which happened to be true. This prompted the onset of the greatest concerted mass migration in the nation’s history, as six thousand disgruntled Mormons and their various wives and children began crossing the frozen Mississippi, trudging westward across Iowa to the land of the Potawatomi and Omaha Indians. When they reached the banks of the Missouri River, most chose to encamp for the winter because they were too worn out and broke to continue.
This they called Winter Quarters, which remains famous in Mormon history for the hardships people endured. They were “surrounded by the Lamanites on all sides,” declared a Mormon wife named Perrigrine Sessions, but “over one hundred miles from the cursed Gentiles.” The Lamanites were Omaha Indians, “an unmilitary but thievish race who constantly stole the cattle of their Nephite brethren.” Many Saints were able to construct rude log huts but some lived in tents, caves, and dugouts through the terrible Nebraska winter, and hundreds perished from illness and the elements. It was there that the U.S. government found them on July 1, 1846, in the person of Captain James Allen, First U.S. Dragoons, who was under orders to recruit a battalion of five hundred men for a march to California with the Army of the West.
At first the Mormons were highly suspicious of such an idea, since during their entire existence the government had provided them virtually no protection from the violence of their neighbors. But Brigham Young and other elders gradually persuaded men to volunteer, explaining that their pay and clothing allowances would provide dearly needed cash for food and supplies needed to cross the Rockies. In fact, their combined pay and allowances totaled more than $70,000—some $2 million today—a sizable grubstake. Furthermore, following a quaint custom of the times, each of the five rifle companies was authorized to bring along four women as laundresses, who would receive rations and allowances same as in the regular army. In all, when the 543-man Mormon Battalion marched out of Winter Quarters toward Fort Leavenworth, it included thirty-three women and fifty-one children.
After drawing weapons and equipment at Leavenworth, and receiving minimal instruction in military courtesy, marksmanship, and close order drill, the Mormon entourage departed on the Santa Fe Trail. Their commander, Captain Allen, now an acting lieutenant colonel, had become ill and remained at the fort. In less than a week he was dead. Lieutenant A. J. (Andrew Jackson) Smith assumed command. They were about six weeks behind Kearny and the weather had turned dry nearly to the point of drought. On the twenty-eighth of August, 1846, Jane Bosco, one of the laundresses, died of illness. Two days later her husband, John, one of the soldiers, was laid in a grave next to hers. Others would follow. On October 9, 1846, the Mormon Battalion arrived in Santa Fe, where it was met by its new commander, formerly a captain but now Lieutenant Colonel Philip St. George Cooke, who had been out rounding up mules. He was not pleased with what he saw.
The battalion contained “too many families,” he said. “Some [soldiers] were too old, some feeble, some too young. It was embarrassed by many women; it was undisciplined; it was much worn by traveling on foot; their clothing was very scant; their mules were broken down.”b In other words, Cooke summed up, “Everything conspired to discourage the extraordinary undertaking of marching this battalion eleven hundred miles through unknown wilderness, without road or trail and with a wagon train.”
That was about the size of it, but orders were orders, and Cooke understood that General Kearny was not a man who scrupled at excuses. Cooke and his fellow West Pointers A. J. Smith, a lieutenant once again, and Lieutenant George Stoneman picked through the rabble and weeded out eighty-six men as unfit, plus all of the children and nearly all of the women, and sent them under the care of two officers to stay in a town called Pueblo near Bent’s Fort.c
In less than a week they were off. From the army’s quartermaster Cooke had procured mules and packsaddles and rations for sixty days, after which they would be on their own. He also acquired road building equipment, since in addition to simply getting the battalion to California Kearny had also charged Cooke with the stupendous task of building the rudiments of a wagon road along the way, a daunting challenge to say the least. Cooke was “determined,” he said, “to take through my wagons,” but, he continued, “The experiment is not a fair one, as the mules are nearly broken down at the outset.”d
Cooke was fortunate, however, in having for a guide one of the more experienced mountain men of the era, forty-one-year-old Jean Baptiste Charbonneau. He came by his reputation honestly, being the half-breed son of the legendary Indian woman Sacagawea, whose exploits with the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804–6 had already thrilled a generation of schoolchildren. Charbonneau, whose father, Toussaint Charbonneau, was that expedition’s interpreter, had been born during the early days of the journey and rode as a papoose on his mother’s back during the great exploring trek to the Pacific. Having explored with Frémont and trapped with the crème of the mountain men at Bent’s Fort, Charbonneau was said to be “the best man on foot on the Plains or in the Rocky Mountains.”
On October 3, 1846, when Colonel Sterling Price and the Second Regiment of Mounted Missouri Volunteers arrived in Santa Fe, it freed Doniphan to begin his march against the Indian uprising. Price’s orders were straightforward and unromantic: stand guard over the city. This pacific duty did not last long, however, and when the uproar came it was from an unlikely source.
The Pueblo Indians were known among western Indians as “civilized” tribes who had given up warring against white men, adopted the Catholic faith, and lived in adobe apartment houses, growing grains and vegetables and raising livestock. In fact, when Doniphan drew up the Treaty of Bear Springs with the Navajos, Article 2 specifically stated, “The people of New Mexico and the Pueblo Tribe of Indians are included in the term ‘American People’ ”—as opposed to the Navajos and other “wild” Indians who were considered savages without standing.
So it was with the greatest surprise that Colonel Price and the authorities in Santa Fe learned that Pueblos had risen up in Taos and brutally murdered Governor Charles Bent and many of his staff in an insurrection designed to expel or exterminate the Americans in New Mexico.
Word had come down to U.S. authorities just before Christmas that an uprising was possibly afoot in Santa Fe, but quick reaction by the military averted actual revolt. A former officer under Armijo arrested on an informant’s tip was found to have a list of hundreds of disbanded Mexican soldiers.e After questioning, a number of others were also arrested and it was revealed that an insurrection was planned for the day after Christmas, which was to commence with the midnight ringing of the church bells. The conspirators decreed that every American in the territory would be murdered. Meetings had been held in the wee hours by various cells. Colonel Price and Governor Bent were to be assassinated first. It was rumored that Catholic priests, who feared an influx of Protestant americanos, were deeply involved. The two ringleaders were identified: the wealthy Tomás Ortiz and Don Diego Archuleta—Armijo’s former military commander who had wanted to resist Kearny’s advance
but relented after listening to Magoffin. Both of these men escaped into the mountains, Ortiz said to be disguised in a woman’s dress.
Bent, a Taos resident who knew the natives well and felt trusted by them, had been forewarned about the possibility of revolt. Weeks earlier he had written in a letter to Price that the U.S. soldiers needed to be restrained in their actions and attitudes toward the citizenry, especially after they had been drinking. The Missouri Volunteers, mainly, had adopted an attitude of disdain and superiority toward the Mexicans, which, on top of Armijo’s disgraceful surrender, reignited a smoldering humiliation and frustration that burst into anger and a desire for revenge.
After the plot was uncovered, Santa Fe was basically locked down and martial law declared. The plaza bristled with artillery aimed in all directions and manned night and day. Guards were posted and suspicious persons questioned. More conspirators were arrested. It was in this atmosphere that Governor Bent after Christmas decided to travel to Taos, where his wife and family were living, along with Kit Carson’s beautiful new wife, Josefa, who was Bent’s sister-in-law. He was warned that it was dangerous, because there were signs that the conspiracy was still alive. But Bent felt he knew his people and that, after twenty years among them, he would be respected and trusted. On January 14 he set out for Taos, eighty miles north.
As he entered the town Bent was accosted by a throng of Pueblo Indians who asserted that two of their tribe had been wrongfully arrested for stealing and demanded that Bent release them. He replied that he held no authority to release prisoners and that they would receive fair justice at the bar, which seemed to placate the mob and it dispersed. After an amicable evening with his wife and family and several houseguests, Bent was awakened at the crack of dawn by someone warning that the Indian mob along with some Mexicans had reassembled, drunk and bloodthirsty, and was headed his way. Bent met them at the door and asked their purpose. The answer was direct and not good.