Joseph Smith and the Great West

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST When the Prophet Set the American Issue of Going Overland to Take Oregon for America By I. K. Russell Author of "Hidden Heroes of the Rockies" XII "What do we want of this vast, worthless area, this region of savages and wild beasts, of deserts, of shifting sands and whirlwinds of dust, of cactus and prairie dogs? To what use could we ever put these great deserts, these endless mountain ranges, impenetrable, and covered to their base with eternal snow? What can we ever hope to do with the western coast, a coast of three thousand miles, rockbound. cheerless and uninviting, and not a harbor in it? What use have we for such a country. Mr. President, I will never vote one cent from the public treasury to place the Pacific coast one inch nearer to Boston than it is now." — Daniel Webster, most famous of New England statesmen, said to have been told in a speech to the United States Senate. Oregon belongs to this government, honorably, and when we have the red man's consent, let the Union spread from the east to the west sea. — Joseph Smith, in his appeal to the people as a Presidential candidate. In the two statements above we have Joseph Smith coming into direct conflict with the greatest statesmen of his times in American life. That is the greatest statesmen, as statesmen were then recognized. And as we read the two declarations over, who can gain a thrill, as he senses achievement following along in the line of the prediction? Is it the adherents of Webster, or those that have built up the cause and purposes of Joseph Smith? There is a beautiful bit of adventure anyone can have in history by just checking back on the grounds whence these two radically conflicting statements sprang. The environment in which they were uttered was one in which the fundamental destiny of the American nation was hanging in the balance. Either it was going to be a Nation of Atlantic coast states, jealous of one another, or a great Nation stretching from sea to sea, with the West, child of the North and the South, binding these two quarrelsome parents together. It is not too much to say that the Great West held the bonds of confederation together when Jefferson Davis gathered around him the worst of the Missouri persecutors of the "Mormon" people and built out of them a machine for bringing dissolution to the Union. We have already seen how the members of Buchanan's cabinet flocked to the South, after trying to annihilate the "Mormon" people with John- ston's army, and sent this same Johnston up to Shiloh to try to teach the North that it was useless to fight against the rebelling South. We have seen how Johnston drove the Northern troops into confusion — until he came squarely up against two new, untried generals, and there met his death and defeat. The new generals were from the West, —

1138 IMPROVEMENT ERA Sherman, former commissary officer of the Mormon Battalion in Cal- ifornia, and U. S. Grant, who shared with Lincoln a greater vision of American destiny than ever could be obtained in New England, New York, or Richmond, Virginia. We have seen how Joseph Smith encountered the rising hatreds of the pro-slave party towards New England men, when his "Mor- mons" settled Missouri. There, driven and pillaged, he did not know the master-strategy and the strategists behind that strategy, that made the Missouri persecution* merely a local application of a Nationally administered policy. And so he did what now appears to have been a futile gesture for redress but a gesture that turned his hopes to Oregon and the Great West. He applied to Washington, over the head of Governor Boggs of Missouri. Journeying to Washington without funds in 1839, he knocked at the door of the White House. There he was received by Martin Van Buren. Had the National president a fairer view than Missouri's governor? "Your cause is just, but I can do nothing for you," Joseph Smith records as the words of Van Buren after his reception at the White House. And then Van Buren added another sentence that Joseph Smith could not fully appraise at the time, for the Slave Policy, as we have seen, worked under cover always a full generation before any pub- lic announcement of it. "If I acted in your behalf," President Van Buren explained, "I'd lose the votes of Missouri." Joseph Smith considered the President to be merely a poor politician, putting opportunism before statesman- ship or administrative equity. He did not know that Boggs of Missouri and Van Buren of Washington were equally the tools of a stronger man — a man who for fifty long years had made officeholders his puppets and had broken or enhanced their public stature at will. This stronger man in the back- ground was John C. Calhoun. Holding whatever office he had pleased, either in Richmond or Washington, he had been the maker and un- maker of presidents from 1820 on, and the fixer of the firm, unrelent- ing policy that pro-slave territory must be found to the west and south of the Mason-Dixon line, in Texas, California and the Far West in general. Somebody suggested to Joseph Smith that he lay his case before Calhoun. He did so. And, pitifully he records that in taking up the task he first searched through Washington "for the cheapest boarding house in town." He had come sadly unprepared, financially, to plead his cause. Calhoun received him curtly. The "Mormon" leader was up to the "big boss" at last. Calhoun told him he would take no measures whatever to redress his Missouri wrongs. No wonder, — here was their creator who had lurked behind the scenes while Boggs had blust- ered upon the surface. That was a remarkable journey of Joseph Smith to Washington.

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST 1139 He faced the man who was shaping policies to capture the Far West for slavery. And as he turned away from him, Joseph Smith began to look to the Far West in another way. It was to him a possible refuge for a people driven before the coming gale over the slave issue. He records for us that on that journey some Congressmen were his companions in a stage coach, and that the horses on this coach ran away. Their driver at the time had left them to get a drink of grog in a grog shop. While all was confusion in the coach Joseph climbed out and gained the driver's seat. The horses had already made a mile at a wild gallop, but he gathered up the reins and gradually brought them down to a stop. Then the people inside wanted to praise him, highly. One of the Southern congressmen said he'd like to have the matter of Joseph's bravery made of record in Congress, — what was his name? He furnished it — "Joseph Smith, president of the 'Mormon' church!" The effect was electrifying — but like lightning that had struck where it was not wanted. The enthusiastic Congressman silenced down until he was tamer than the newly tamed horses. He had sensed how politic- ally inexpedient his gesture would have been! Joseph went humbly from door to door in Washington — sought out Congressmen and others, and finally returned to Nauvoo, beaten in his idea of gaining any redress for his people. That the yawning gap of a coming Civil War stood between him and any such redress he sensed, but did not know how intimately he had appealed to the chief framers of the coming disunion. Back to Nauvoo he came, and from that moment on Joseph Smith was a major character in American affairs. As he looked to the Great West he saw the vision of his people saved, and also of America built up and redeemed from men like Martin Van Buren, who, he freely declared, represented a spirit that, if uncurbed, would carry our Nation to its death. Joseph organized the Nauvoo legion. He has been pictured as a vain-glorious man who was creating a Church militant and armed! He even remarked as he became a candidate for a presidential nomina- tion, "Why, I would rather have my present position as head of the Nauvoo legion than be president." He talked Oregon, thought Oregon, organized his people for a great migration to the West, — and organized the Nauvoo Legion as a fighting fringe for that people, in a task he well knew would call for much fighting. And to understand these conditions we must realize that just when the Prophet organized his able-bodied young men into the Nauvoo Legion, and applied for the task of leading them west, the commander of the British warship, Wasp, had landed, under orders, 500 British marines on the Columbia river, had bivouacked them at Fort Van- couver, and had at his command 75,000 pounds of British gold to enforce a policy of "driving every damned Yankee east of the Rocky Mountains." We must also understand that San Francisco was being developed

1140 IMPROVEMENT ERA as a British, not a Mexican, city. Hndson's Bay House was its chief building, and underneath the Mexican vaquero make-up of gallants who dashed up and down the street with spurs ajingle, were sturdy Scotch and British leaders. They, too, were heavily financed, — and the money was to stir up anti-American revolutions. There was a strong man in the Northwest, just as in Calhoun there was a strong man in charge of pro-slave American politics. This strong man of the Northwest had ruled from 1820 on, even our own Utah as well as Oregon, Idaho, Nevada and Washington state. He was George Simpson, Sir George Simpson, governor of Rupert's land, and head, in America, of the honorable Company of Adventurers, trading out of Hudson's Bay. He was the same George Simpson to whose fair lady Peter Skene Ogden dedicated his own little narrative of his life and adventures through the years he maintained this company's outpost at Ogden's Hole, Utah, in the path of any possible American immigra- tion from the East. We must understand the whole life and drive of Sir George Simpson to maintain our Far West as a fur hunter's paradise and to buy California from the Mexicans, before we can understand Joseph Smith and the work his Nauvoo Legion ultimately did when it was sworn into the United States service under the name of the Mormon Battalion. Sir George had found a fortune for the British nobility in Utah's Uintah streams, and in Oregon's Snake River reaches, just as Calhoun had found a fortune for slave dealers and breeders in slaves — if only the market could be maintained by the constant expansion of American states through good slave-working territory. Both of these, then, wanted the Great West, when the voice of Joseph Smith was raised in Ameri- can affairs, "let me organize 100,000 people and go and take Oregon." It was neither for the pro-slaver nor the fur hunter that he wanted it — but for the American home maker, the identical group that after- wards captured it and held it for America. Joseph Smith in his diary tells us what his first moves were when Calhoun's curt indifference and Van Buren's pleas in avoidance led him to look to Oregon. "I prepared a memorial to John Tyler, president of the United States, he writes, "embodying in it the same sentiments that are in my petition to the Senate and House of representatives, dated March 26, 1844, asking the privilege of raising 100,000 men to extend pro- tection to persons wishing to settle Oregon and other portions of the United States." Joseph Smith sent these petitions to Congress by the hand of Orson Hyde, and from time to time he received from Hyde reports on the progress of affairs in Washington: "Congress will do nothing. Congressmen are afraid of England, afraid of Mexico, afraid the presi- dential elections will be twisted by it." Afraid of England? Washington knew what England was up to in our Far West. And where was the best place to learn about that?

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST 1141 Well, the American trappers who fought against Ogden in our own Ogden hole, beat their way back to the American frontier with their bloody hands, holding them up in pleas for help. Independence, Mo., was their outfitting point and returning point for contact with the States. And this was while Joseph Smith was there with his people. The environment in which Joseph Smith lived was redolent with the stories of intrigue leaking home from harried American trappers. Joseph Smith, far better than Daniel Webster, then, knew what was going on in the Far West. At one time, to save their plundered packs, the chief American trappers had to sign an agreement, never again to come west of the Rockies. This was at Fort Vancouver, in 1829. Having signed, and having had their packs restored by Sir George Simpson's agent .at Fort Vancouver, these trappers retreated from the Rockies. Thus disappeared from the Mountain country Jedediah M. Smith, discoverer of the south and west borders of Great Salt Lake and of the western wall of the Great Basin. Smith's men had carried their grievances right home — to the "Mormon" -settled frontier of Missouri and Illinois. Joseph Smith well knew, then, the kind of work for which an armed fringe, such as his Nauvoo Legion, would be needed. And he well knew the folly of such statements as Webster was making in his effort to keep New Eng- land the big factor in a little nation, rather than becoming reconciled to seeing New England play a more modest part in a far larger nation. And with this accurate vision of the situation before him, Joseph Smith devoted the remaining days of his life, from 1839 on, to prepar- ing his people for their great migration to the Far West. Before it was done his work struck terror into the British parliament for Gladstone there thundered in favor of homestead laws for Britishers, to keep "Mormon" settlers out of Vancouver Island, and in favor of breaking up entirely that Fur-Paradise theory of Sir George Simpson. We know that these Britishers, especially a Captain Grant from the British post at Fort Hall, were among the first visitors to Brigham Young when he was just starting to establish the "Mormon" pioneers in Salt Lake valley. And from the reports of the British agents on the young and growing Salt Lake City, we know that they saw in this desert settle- ment a final swan song on all their Far Western hopes. The name of Joseph Smith must thus be linked closely with that of Sir George Simpson in Far Western matters. Before going into de- tails of how this came about, we must go back far behind them, both to the genesis of American affairs in the Far Northwest. And here there comes into play a group of ten names, none of which yet stands out in anything like its destined glory as that of an American pathfinder. These men are they who first opened that path to Oregon, on whose eastern end Joseph Smith and the "Mormon" people settled at Independence, while Sir George Simpson struggled to open up another path — by way of Winnipeg, the Saskatchewan river, the Portage river near the crest of the Rockies, and the Columbia. It was g Q?np? route while the American was a Covered- Wagon route.

1142 IMPROVEMENT ERA And in the background of the Canoe route stood Sir George Simpson, stirring up Britishers at last to rush in and beat out the Americans. While behind the American route stood Joseph Smith, stirring up by his activities pro-slavers and others to "beat the 'Mormons' to it," as he organized and armed his own people to step out on the path of American destiny. In the end the covered wagon won its race against the British canoe, and that is the real story of how our Far West was won. And at the genesis of this situation stands the name of an Ameri- can whose descendants have just this Summer reared a moument for him at Astoria, Oregon. John Jacob Astor for whom the monument was reared established his American trading post on the Columbia in 1811, both by an overland expedition and a sea voyage by the ship, Tonquin. The Tonquin did not carry first settlers to Oregon, as the "Mormon" ship, Brooklyn, afterwards carried first settlers to California, but it carried trappers and traders. They joined with the land force in building an American fort at Astoria, and thus making the first gesture, either British or American, of Far Western possession. The important part of the Astorian adventure, to subsequent Utah history, is one that has been shamefully betrayed by historical writers. The ten men participating in this particular adventure not only opened the eyes of the American frontier to the situation Joseph Smith espoused and armed against, but one of them, Ramsay Crooks, went to Washington and stirred up Senator Benton, and Congress- man John Floyd of Virginia to a championship of the Far West, — the first such championship ever started. He was the father of Cal- houn's idea that good slave territory lay out in that direction. To work the story down from 1812, when ten Astorian adven- turers met on the Snake river, some distance below the mouth of the Portneuf, to the days when the "Mormon" people took up the hymn, "Upper California, O that's the land for me," will lead us through many mazes of International intrigue and politics. Of the ten men only one has even left his name on Far Western geography. This one is a Kentucky hunter named Hoback from whom the Hoback river, east of Jackson's Hole, takes its name. As for the rest, they are chiefly known in connection with narratives that poke fun at them, and revile them for one of the most heroic journeys in the annals of American exploration. The ten men are David Stuart, Ramsay Crooks, Robert McClellan, Benjamin Jones, Andre Valle, Francois Leclaire, Hoback, Rezner and Robinson, a trio of Kentucky hunters who were not of Stuart's party, and Joseph Miller, a resident of St. Louis, who was seeking to find his way back after coming as far as the Snake river with the original Astorian party. Four of this group, Hoback, Rezner, Robinson and Miller, were the first white men to stand on the banks of Bear river. And they were the first white men to cross the Rockies at a point where a covered wagon could find its way across. How they started the frontier movement on the crest of which

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST 1143 the "Mormon" pioneers rode to their Lovely Deseret, after Joseph Smith had given up his life in the midst of preparing his people to open and protect a road to Oregon, will be taken up in the next in- stallment of this series. Chicago, III. Sagebrush Winds of the western desert, Freighted with hints of Spring — Stirring blooms of the scented sage, Sweet is the breath you bring. Homely flower of the desert, Tell me the tale you know Of tragic battle with rainless years, As the parched sands around you blow. Clinging to rock and to chasm; Deeply loving the sterile plain; • Crushed and tramped and hated, Yet still do you bloom again! Somber and vast, your stretches Baffled the pioneers; Awed by your tragic menace They moistened your wilds with tears! Worlds of Wilderness everywhere, Level and dune and wide — Wide as the horizon's verges, Pathless on every side. Still do I love you, Sagebrush! You cling to the arid sod With a lover's fond embraces, As the faithful cling to God! Far from the desert gardens Bring me your scented musk, Sweet with a million perfumes, As a meadow-path at dusk. Freighted with unborn harvests; Rich with the hints of Spring; Laden with promise of newer life Are the messages you bring! I am a savage, Sagebrush! Here in your wild retreats, I love the altar you raise to God Better than crowded streets. Silent and vast and somber ,May be your desert land. Yet do your voices call me — Voices I understand! And I pray that the sweetest incense That soothes me at last in death May be but thy wild-winged perfumes — The spices of thy breath! Provo, Utah LAWRENCE A. BROWN