--- title: Improvement Era description: Monthly periodical of the Mormon church, 1897 onward. This library holds the issues of November 1897 to December 1930. authors: - Russell, I. K. collections: - periodicals tags: - magazine - improvement-era periodical: Improvement Era volume: 28 number: 10 published: 1925-08 publisher: Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations publisher_place: Salt Lake City language: en type: magazine reference: "I. K. Russell, “Joseph Smith—and the Great West,” *Improvement Era 28, no. 10 (August 1925)*: 932–940." source: url: https://archive.org/details/improvementera28010unse transcription: Transcribed from the Internet Archive scan of each issue (the item for each issue is named in the issue's own source); unnumbered advertising leaves are omitted, printed page numbers are kept as page markers. identifier: improvementera28010unse start_page: 932 end_page: 940 rights: status: public-domain basis: US publication 1930 or earlier (published 1925-08) source: https://archive.org/details/improvementera28010unse publication_year: 1925 note: The Internet Archive item metadata carries a blanket "© Copyright by Intellectual Reserve, Inc." notice. The library owner judged it inapplicable because this issue was published in 1925, before 1931; a scan-level notice does not restore copyright. --- # Joseph Smith—and the Great West JOSEPH SMITH— AND THE GREAT WEST By I. K. Russell Author of Hidden Heroes of the Rockies. Shall we have to write a new thesis as a basis for the Story of the Great West? I have just read three volumes purporting to tell the story, and all assault bitterly the "Mormon" people and the "Mormon" leaders, and none of these assaults could be made, I believe, if the real story of the "Taking of the Great West" could be brought forth from the darkened shadows of the era in which the events narrated occurred. The usual narrative is one in which California is pictured as lying peacefully in the possession of Mexican vaqueros until the dis- covery of gold brought a rush of Americans. And the heroic epic of this rush of '49ers becomes the basis of an organization of Cali- fornia's "native sons." Oregonians look to the days of the Covered Wagon, that rolled its settlers in from '43 to '52. In Utah the natural shrine of the Past has to Ao with the noble band that came with Brigham Young in '47 and settled in a part of the Great American Desert, then belonging to Mexico, which desert thev proceeded to irrigate and make to blossom as the rose. In all parts of this Great West it has been a common practice to quote such men as Daniel Webster, the chief New England statesman of the settlement era, to the effect that the Great West was a sterile desert "fit only for grizzly bears," and Col. Dodge, famous officer and student of Indian life, to the effect that it was "only a desert waste unfit for habitation." There has been quoted also a continuous literature that sprang up in New England to the same effect. And all this literature truly exists. But digging back of the era of its creation an enormous amount of new data is revealed. I believe these new data will slowly force themselves upon the consciousness of dwellers in the Great West and that they will give us an entirely new perspective. It was just so with New England's story. Miles Standish lived and died and was little thought of. The people founded Yale and Harvard Universities and these universities sheltered literary men who dug back over the New England trail and gave us "Evangeline," "The Courtship of Miles Standish," "Paul Revere's Ride," and the rest of the beautiful literature of New England. They gave us per- spective for the first time on New England's story. In the Middle West, Father Marquette lived and died and went to an almost unknown, unmarked grave. And Parkman, a writer, took hold many scores of years later. With Reuben Gold Thwaites who came after* him, they so told the Marquette story, along with the JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST 933 Tonty and La Salle stories that Col. Roosevelt, even, made the great blunder of imagining a Mount La Sal was meant to honor him, al- though Mount La Sal was located in southern Uta'n and not in the Mississippi Basin at all. When Col. Roosevelt changed the spelling to La Salle and set apart the La Salle Forest Reserve, the writer was having fun at night time, after days as a reporter on the Deseret Even- ing News, in studying the trapper trails of the Great West. And he had noticed in Father Escalante's diary how, on his way to Utah Lake, he had passed a salt mountain and had named it La Sal. Therefore a contention arose between the writer and the Presi- dent, which led to an admission of error due to the fact that the President knew immensely more about La Salle than he did about the Spanish name for a salt mountain. The spelling was restored to the Spanish form and the statement that the forest reserve was named in honor of the great Mississippi Valley explorer was withdrawn. It also led to a beautiful friendship that fructified in a score of ways before Col. Roosevelt finally passed on. That little incident is illustrative of the many lapses in the story of the Great West that shall have to be brought into action before the final warp and woof of the story can be put together. For this new thesis we shall have to revise the color put upon the actions and conduct of a number of the great actors in the pre- settlement era of the West. Among the worst sufferers from the present miscoloring is Captain Bonneville, whose fort in our own Green River country was dubbed "Fort Nonsense" by men utterly ignorant of the reason that called it into existence. Another who suffers sadly is Captain John C. Fremont, whose midwinter journey through the Sierras in 1844-5, has been almost unanimously con- demned by explorers as a piece of foolhardy misadventuring. It was on this midwinter dash, by the way, that Fremont's famous horse, Proveaux, in whose honor early historians insisted that our own Provo, Utah, took its name, came to an untimely end in a snow drift. Those who have misjudged Fremont have simply known him not, for his real purpose could not, in his day, be declared. James Bridger, first of the mountaineers to settle in our Uintah mountain country, and last of his hardy class to leave the mountains, must be entirely recast for the Drama of the Great West, as I believe the facts will finally compel its production. And among our own people of the Pioneer Utah period we shall have to set down a new basis on which to judge the persecutions in Missouri, the public life of the Prophet, Joseph Smith, and the character of the opposition forced upon them after they had marched to Utah, until Brigham Young obtained an opportunity to wire his great message to President Lincoln assuring him, as the first word to go over the telegraph from Utah, that Utah was with him and not with the secessionists, and was a loyal, devoted community. 934 IMPROVEMENT ERA This article is merely a preliminary sketch of the general field. Many more must follow it to develop the data in each of its phases. Authorities must be marshaled. Old conceptions must be crashed with new facts, and what looked like standard authority must be superceded by material rescued from the dust heaps of a forgotten day. Many scholars will no doubt find the field inviting before its data are fully garnered. The thing we must first prepare to abandon, to comprehend the drama of the Taking of the Great West, as I believe the actors who really count most, played their roles, is the idea mat such a great abundance of New England literature seems to fully justify us in holding. This is that the Great West was comparatively unknown, except for a few wandering trappers, and was unwanted and waj scornfully regarded in American public esteem, when settlers forged on out from the Missouri frontier to brave its wastes. The literature of New England that has been quoted so abund- antly, turns out on further examination of the facts, to be biased literature, part of political propaganda, aimed by a certain group of New Englanders at another group of propagandists entirely. This other group dwelt mostly in Virginia and its spokesmen were as intent upon taking the Great West as the New Englanders were on preventing that idea from coming to fruition. The issue was debated as is the "League of Nations Issue" to-day. The West was wanted in the South — but for slavery. To get' our new perspective into the field we shall have to bring forward for principal roles, characters whose work has all but passed from the horizon, on which we have pictured settlers in covered wagons venturing into unknown areas to face unchartered trials. Among these new characters are men of many nations. The drama they played out in the pre-pioneer West was one of lust for conquest. The stage did seem a clear one when the Settler ventured forth, but it was only because they had marched off the stage, with the issues they had fought out — not because the stage had never been trodden upon. An interesting group of these actors came from England. They came to our own Utah country in the year 1819 and they remained there until the year 1846. Who would imagine, for instance, that our own Shoshone Indian maidens knew the Scottish reel and had danced it at many trappers' rendezvous, before they looked upon the face of the first Pioneer settler? Who would think that a Scottish giant in armor had danced around their campfires in all his medieval glory? And who would think that the very name "Bannock" is not an Indian name at all but was! given to this Rocky Mountain tribe by Scotchmen who found them eating cakes remarkably like in size and shape to the Scotch oat cake or bannock cake? Only, the Indian cake was of acorn flour and pulverized grasshoppers, this mixture JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST 935 cemented adhesively together by red currant jelly of Indian manu- facture. From the English group we shall have to bring upon the scene of our Far Western drama, two blithe young hunters, one of the British navy, one of the British army. And both disguised as gentle- men sports when they ranged the Far Western mountains. They hunted fort sites — and of course, worked under cover. And worked so well that it was only a decade ago that a Northwestern college professor, interested in the Great West's story, unearthed the facts that their sport suits of corduroy, their sporting rifles, their tooth brushes, and even their store of liquor, was bought and paid for on the expense account of the British army and the British navy. These gay Englishmen, pretending a desire to hunt buffalo, were Lieutenants Ware and Vavaseur, As fort-site hunters of the early 'forties they were backed by another principal actor in our revised vision of the Great West's drama. This man was Sir George Simpson. 1 look for his name in vain in the index of almost every volume on the Great West. Yet he ruled it for many years from San Francisco on the south to Alaska on the north, and from Bear Lake and Ogden Valley, discovered and named by his men with the names they now bear, to the shores of Hudson's Bay. It was he who came speeding west in the days of Joseph Smith —west from Hudson's Bay, up the Saskatchewan route to the mouth of the Columbia. And it was he who uttered the cry, "Keep every damned yankey (he spelled it that way) east of the Rockies." It was Sir George who summoned our own Peter Skene Ogden from our own Far West to London and there filled him full of plans to seize and fortify the Columbia River cape, known as Cape Disappointment, and to fortify other places, and start a re-1 anti-yankey drive with the crest of the Rockies as the limits of American toleration. In a later article in this series we shall give his own view of the pro-British destiny he saw for Utah and Idaho, California and Oregon, as he shook his fist in rage at Captain Sutter and Captain Sutter's American fort which commanded the western gateway to the Sierras. We shall see from his own words how he struggled to get hold of the Russian cannon that Russian agents sold to Captain Sutter, and to put them to British instead of American use in shaping the destiny of the Great West. We shall see, even, how two of these cannon were Napoleon's and how their ultimate destiny, after Brigham Young had taken a hand in the Far Western drama, was to be hauled to Utah by veterans of the "Mormon" Battalion, and to make the Sierras echo to their belching thunder as they had made the buildings of Moscow echo for the great Napoleon himself. It was not until after I had read the British story of Britisli desire for the Great West that I understood the first rudiments of the public life of Joseph Smith. When we find Joseph Smith running 936 IMPROVEMENT ERA for president of the United States, and sitting at the teet of the Presi- dent in Washington with a plea that he believed America should send armed forces west, and that he would like to take the "Mormon" peo- ple, "twenty five thousand armed men strong" to Oregon and settle the Oregon issue, the Prophet's stand on this matter seems, in the light of our conventional Far Western story, to be visionary and aloof from current events. But when I had become acquainted with the British documents of the period, the Prophet's work seemed noth ing of the kind. He spoke into the teeth of an armed opposition to America that had just landed thousands of marines on the shores of the Columbia River and that proposed to bring on a war before seeing Americans come in volume through the South Pass. No American could speak out loud in those days. It would have been a breach of neutrality. Things were done under cover. Joseph Smith organized and drilled the Nauvoo Legion. It was interpreted in the light of Nauvoo affairs and Illinois situations. In- terpret it now in the light of the Far Western situation, and it was a gesture in the direction of American destiny, made at a time when armed answers were all that fitted a situation of armed anti-American action. Look west from Illinois at the time Joseph Smith made his offer of the Nauvoo Legion, and you find in the Uintah mountains old Jim Bridger. He comes into our drama for a most important role. For in his back had been two arrowheads that remained there for years before Marcus Whitman came along and removed them with a surgeon's knife. The important thing about the arrowheads is that they were not Indian arrowheads. Such would have been made of fiint and could easily have been drawn out. They were arrowheads made of wrought iron and so built that the tips bent on striking bones within the body, and so formed vicious hooks that prevented their removal. They were British arrowheads furnished to the pro- British Blackfoot tribe, which never did become reconciled to Ameri- cans until at last it was whipped beyond recovery into final submission. Joseph Smith was thinking as an American of the destiny of America and not of his Church alone. He was thinking in conformity with his declaration that the constitution of the United States was in- spired, and that this government itself was an inspired government, erected to play a great role in the world, and not to be thwarted or driven away from its destiny. If Joseph Smith had to make his proposals for American policy in the Great West privately to the President and under cover, he was not the only one similarly situated. President Jefferson set the fashion for secrecy when he ordered Lewis and Clark to winter on the east side of the Mississippi on their first winter out, so that they could draw army stores and army rations — but to completely disguise their army connection the minute they had passed over, since they were to JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST 93 7 go into foreign territory and must always appear as mere explorers. We know how the British explorer David Thompson rushed down the Columbia right behind them, claiming all the river's waters for England, until he emerged from the north branch into the main river, and there found notice of the Americans that had gone before him. We know how in the war of 1812, England captured the American outpost in the Great West at Astoria, and how their trappers tracked the Snake River courses southwestward from Fort Vancouver until by 1819 they had reached our own Bear Lake and there set up as a winter camp which was used until their leader, Peter Skene Ogden found that Ogden Valley offered a better place for winter forage. We have never understood the true character of Captain Bonne- ville's apparently rash adventure because we have not had the British situation in mind. He could not proclaim himself an American soldiev with soldiers to act as his aides. So he has been laughed at for almost a century because of the fiasco he made of his work as a "fur trader." But when we cast his conduct up in the light of British actions of his hour, he emerges as a very intelligent American doing a very useful oiece of work. He forted up the road to the Great West for America at a critical point in the Rockies, and of course his "Fort Nonsense" had nothing to do with Indian strategy, in the light of which it has always been judged. If we find what he was doing when others who sneered at him were getting rich winter heaps of peltries, we find he was knocking at the doors of the chain of British forts that led from Boise, Idaho, down to the great fort on the Columbia — Vancouver. And we find, in another winter when he was supposed to be loafing around foolishly, he was actually examining the winter camps of Indian tribes and studying how to fight and conquer them. We know he was the first of all Americans to cow a Blackfoot war party and send it scurrying off the war path into the haunts of hat-in-hand peacefulness. And as for myself I got my first glimpse of the real meaning of his life work when I read a faded, yellowed, newspaper clipping I found between the leaves of an original edition of Irving's narrative of his life and times. In this newspaper clipping Bonneville pleaded with America for cavalry — for horses trained to fight and to stay in a fight, through being remounted, after one soldier had fallen from one such horse's back. He pleaded that Indians of the Rockies must be ridden down and fought horse-back style, and I traced the cavalry story through from that plea. It was taken up in Congress, a law was passed, and our own Philip St. George Cooke, after whom some say St. George, Utah, is named, was sent out as a recruiting officer for the first cavalry for our regular army. Two regiments were raised and General Kearny commanded the second one — with Cooke for one of its officers. With fifty handsome bays, fifty handsome greys, fifty handsome sorrels, and 100 handsome blacks, it wintered on the Arkansas and then took the trail — for our own 938 IMPROVEMENT ERA Utah country. With spurs and sabres gingling, Kearny marched it up the valley of the Blue, across to the valley of the Platte, up the Platte to the Continental Divide — and Cooke went on over with a detachment until in 1845, he and his men bivouacked on a branch of Green River a year before Cooke was destined to lead the "Mormon" Battalion, as the armed fringe of the Westward migration, when it made its way from Leavenworth to the edge of the Western Sea. As Bonneville pleaded that it should be — the Dragoons went into Indian service to open the Sweetwater trail to the West. We know that the "Mormon" Battalion was much more than a battalion — that it was the "Army of the West" — and was so jeered at by even its immediate commander as he contemplated, jestingly, Colonel Kearny becoming general on the strength of having such a formidable army to command. But the very method by which it happened that this battalion, (save for a handful of these same dragoons Bonneville had given America a vision to create,) became the "Army of the West," forms a most dramatic chapter in our revised drama of the Great West's Taking. Picture, then, the situation in front of the "Mormon" people when Joseph Smith occupied Independence, Missouri, and later moved to Nauvoo, Illinois. Americans were trying to go west as Bridger had tried. One of the greatest of them, Jedediah Smith, had been forced to knock at the doors of the British Fort — Vancouver, after his men had been massacred and his peltries stolen by Indians admittedly inspired by a slave of one of the head men of the British fort. He had been forced to sign an agreement never again to cross the Rockies — ■ which he kept as a Christian gentleman after 1829. Others of thest Americans had been worsted in battle, and came to the Missouri fron- tier, with bloody hands crying out for help and succor. The battles sometimes occurred in our own Ogden Valley and in our Cache Valley, sometimes on the Green River, sometimes on the Bear, and sometimes in the Teton country or in Ross's Hole, named for Alexander Ross, one of the greatest of the British leaders, after John McLoughlin and our own Peter Skene Ogden — the American who turned Britisher during the Revolution, and then turned Ameri- can again when asked to do what he would not in carrying out anti- American policies in our Great West. Who would hear these trappers and traders of American birth? We now come to the reason for New England hostility to the West New England ruled America then. She was the center of American wealth and prestige. She saw that if new states were carved out of the Middle West and the Far West her prestige would suffer. When Daniel Webster berated the West he had one thought for the West and two for New England. And besides he was busy over the codfish issue. New England fishermen were being told to stop dry- JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST 93 9 ing their fish on the sandy shores of Nova Scotia. A treaty must be negotiated with England to open these Nova Scotian sands to Boston cod fishermen or that industry, bulwark of New England revenues, would perish. He was doubly "off" the Western issue. In the South were men equally ready to evade it, publicly. The Slavery issue was coming to the fore. With the Slavery issue behind him, and the Far Western issue in his front, Joseph Smith spoke where others in the political field remained silent. "Let me go and take the West" he pleaded with the President. British warships were then, as all our frontier knew, riding beautifully at anchor in the Columbia and their thousands of marines were drilling ashore to carry out Sir George Simpson's admonition to "drive every damned yankey east of the Rockies." We will know how truly Joseph Smith spoke for Americar destiny when he spoke up for the Great West, when we realize that he ran for president on the issue that elected Polk. His "let me take the Nauvoo Legion, and fortify a road to the West," was merely sloganized by Polk's adherents when they ran the successful candidate on the issue "Fifty-four Forty or Fight." Bridger and his friends had been appealing for years at their outfitting station on the Missouri frontier — at Independence, and at Franklin, and at St. Louis — for the kind of armed help needed to take the West for America. Joseph Smith created the national issue of whether or not to give it to them. And as he shaped the issue he made it the prelude to what actually eventuated. Recalled from a journey to this same Great West to be assassinated as a martyr to his course in life, his people went right on. singing their Hymn of Migration, "O, Upper California That's the land for me." That was the manner in which Joseph Smith taught his people to look forward to the Great West. And Brigham Young took hold with a bold and strong determination, just where Joseph Smith left off. Behind them always was another force, looking forward to- wards the West, from 1824 on. I have read in the Congressional Ga7ntte the speech of December, 1824 by the spokesman for this force. His name was Floyd — John Floyd of Virginia — uncle of the same Floyd from whom our Camp Floyd, in Utah, took its name before the Government cancelled that name as belonging to one who had not been faithful to the Government of which he was a trusted officer. John Floyd of Virginia urged in Congress, in 1824, that the Great West be taken — and by Southern action. He wanted Missouri settled by the South, at the same time he wanted Missourians, or Virginians and Kentuckians, who were the fathers of Missourians, to pass on to the Western seacoast. He saw in all this territory good pro-slave areas for a future day. Why this was so, .and the enormous 940 IMPROVEMENT ERA boon that was to come to Virginia for making it so, will form a chapter by itself in this narrative. In the meantime how ridiculous it is to read stones, assaulting the character of Utah's people such as three I have just finished, written in the past two years. All are based on the idea that Johns- ton's. Army paid a friendly visit to Utah when her people turned rudely and rebelliously upon it. When we know the pro-slave politics of the era and note that Floyd, who sent the army as Secretary of War, fled Washington as the Rebellion started while General Johnston was killed in the midst of the South's nearest approach to victory, we shall then be able to tie these incidents in with hundreds of others, all of which show that when Johnston's Army started for Utah a Southern cabinet dictated moves to hold and bring every other Far Western state to the side of Southern sympathy. It instigated move- ments at Santa Fe, in Idaho, at Walla Walla, in Oregon, in California, and in Montana, none of which could be immediately identified as such. We find, then, a pro-slave determination that the West shall be Southern in sympathy, antedating Joseph Smith's arrival in Missouri. How this sentiment affected the course of "Mormon" Missouri settle- ments will be taken up in the next article. The Chili Harvest Out in a Mexican pueblo And Barbarita is singing ] Now ripe is the chili harvest, While in the chilies bringing, Turned are the pods in the garden rows And Chonita a roundelay To scarlet and crimson gay; Over the garden floats. Where Barbarita is bringing . — , , ,. . , , , . Soon, on the gray adobie walls, 1 he full ripe pods for the stringing, . . » , ^. , . The strings of crimson chines, And Chonita upon the twine t T .« ,. , , , Hung in festoons up to dry, Is threading the pods today. f Are brilliant as flaming flowers; Barbarita, the little wife, While Chonita is musing, Chonita the pretty daughter, And in her fancies choosing, By the casa of Parea, What she shall wear at the baile An eaveless adobie home; In the festive evening hours. Near to the cottonwoods resting, n i »« -j „. Rich is her dower of contentment; Close to the riverside nesting, — ■r-~™, ( 11 f *i. u i .. i j Bright is her hopeful fancy; Brown folks of the bosket lands 6 " ' \\ru »-n *u u *> 1 As glow the chilies in the sun Who till the bottom loam. 6 So gay her future seems; Chilies and brown frijoles Tripping in tuneful measure Now yield their little garden; Her life is a round of pleasure, Ripening is their field of corn And the Mexican chili harvest time And fat are the pigs and goats. Is life in the joy of dreams. Pay son, Utah • JOSEPH LONGKING TOWNSEND