Joseph Smith and the Great West

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST How the Situation was Created Between Rival American and British Fur Hunters Which He Proposed to Solve by a Migration Westward of His People By I. K. Russell, Author of "Hidden Heroes of the Rockies" XIV I will now give you my opinion in relation to this matter [of Congress author- izing Joseph Smith to head a migration of Americans, including his own persecuted Church followers to Oregon]. It is that Congress will pass no act in relation to Texas or Oregon at present. She is afraid of England, afraid of Mexico, afraid the presidential election will be twisted by it. The members all appear like un- skillful players at checkers, — afraid to move, for they know not what way to move advantageously. — Orson Hyde in a letter to Joseph Smith, dated at Washington, D. C, April 25, 1844. Apostle Hyde was at Washington with Orson Pratt as a Church agent to forward Congressional action authorizing Joseph Smith to lead the American way to the Far Northwest. I instructed the Twelve Apostles to send out a delegation and investigate the location of California and Oregon, and hunt out a good location where we can remove after the temple is completed, and where we can build a city. — Dicky of Joseph- Smith, Feb. 12,1844. The great Inland Empire of the Far West is so easily thought of today as just naturally American, that it is hard for the present generation to visualize a time the British flag ruled at the Great Salt Lake and the title America conceded to Mexico, for this country was laughed at by bold Scotch leaders*, hardly less tribesmen than the Indians whom they taught to help them drive and keep the "Boston men" east of the Rocky Mountains. We know that the wagon road over which Americans rolled into the Far West headed on the west bank of the Mississippi, at Montros>e, just opposite Nauvoo — if the travelers were from the North — and at Independence, if they were men of Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri. We know that the roads converged and passed down Echo and Emigration canyons for Utah and California, or turned northward down the Bear River Valley if the traveler was bound via Fort Hall and the Snake River to Oregon. We know that the verdure of the Bear River Valley saved thousands of emigrant outfits from disaster. There their cattle recuperated for the hard pull over the Blue Mountains, and the weeks of resting the emigrant trains there seemed, to the weaker and more worn among them, as days in Paradise. Thus Soda Springs and Bear River became famous long before the first settler's plow turned a furrow within that region. There is a charm in the names of all this country's mountains, for they give us precious keys to the kind of conflicts that were waged. There is Mt. St. Helens, Mount Hood, and Mt. Ranier — all in

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST 221 American territory, but all named for .members of the British nobility. There is Ogden's Hole, named for a Scotch clansman, who brought the flag of British dominion to our own Great Salt Lake, and there is Ross' Hole, far to the northward, where Alexander Ross held forth at an outpost of British power. "Congress fears England," they explained in Washington to Joseph Smith's agents when he first proposed to set up Montrose as the head of a great wagon road to the West, which it afterwards precisely and exactly became. How did that come about, if Captain Gray of the American ship Columbia discovered the Columbia River, if Lewis and Clark explored it, under charter from President Jefferson of the United States, and John Jacob Astor settled an American colony on its banks to make good the three requisites of title theretofore universally recognized — discovery, exploration, and settlement? The story is worth telling, in relationship to the life of Joseph Smith, for he lived out his years of leadership on the American frontier where the issue, being waged among the fur hunters farther west, first echoed home to American ears. There is something odd in this connection about the religious body of which Joseph Smith became the head. It is something the world little understands. Yet to me it is the heart of the charm of being one of the people whose culture is based upon Joseph Smith's life work. PRACTICAL RELIGION BASED ON SERVICE That something is that the Prophet Joseph planned for no paid clergy, and no aloof, separated, clerical class. His was a religion without a cloth. Just as I write these words there appears in the October number of an American magazine a discussion of the life of Senator Reed Smoot. It speaks in wonderment of the fact that he was once an apostle and drug store owner, once apostle and woolen mill manager, once apostle and farmer, and now is apostle and senator. It is hard for the world to conceive of a high religious official who is yet a humble toiler in this world's affairs. Just so they wonder at Joseph Smith leading a great people and still planning to set up a boarding house as a means of obtaining personal revenue. It is beautiful to consider that they might note the same status as to anybody and everybody in the Church, just as they may hear sermons opposing priestcraft from any one of the apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was, then, under the conception of religion held by Joseph Smith, perfectly natural for a religious leader to preach to his people on Sundays and on week days engage in all the normal activities of an American citizen and pioneer. Joseph thought of the issues around him — of all of them that affected the life of America and the lives of his people. Andrew Jackson had been a great president — he had

222 IMPROVEMENT ERA stamped out fires of sedition — the fires that thirty-odd years later started the Civil War. So Joseph Smith praised and loved him. He saw that his successors had all been mere tools of the pro-Slave oligarchy and he felt sad about them and wrote of them as destroyers of his beloved country. And it was perfectly natural, too, for him to give his time to thinking of the issue of the Far West, then rampant, and of the way he would solve it — by taking over to the west coast all who might wish to join him, whether of his own congregation or not. Just so the first "Mormon" apostle I ever knew intimately could handle a scraper as well as any scraper hand, and I saw him do it in making the ditch connecting the Big Horn settlements with their irrigating water supply in the Big Horn River. The second apostle I came to know personally could throw a lasso with the best of the cowboys in the Wind River range, and he taught me a few of the tricks of roping and branding colts. Another I knew had slept out of doors in the open without tent or accompanying wagon, in every Far West- ern state from the Mexican border to the Canadian. And away back in the sixties he had blessed that country, in prayers in which he knelt alone in desert stretches, to the later settlement of the Saints. And this was long before the swarming of the Utah hive over' into Idaho, Arizona, Montana, and Colorado. I rode with him, Brigham Young, Jr., as he pointed out spots where in 1901, when we made this journey, splendid "Mormon" settlements had sprung up at spots he had dedicated for such growth almost half a century earlier. Only to one outside of the Church spirit, then, is there anything strange or incongruous in the activities of the Prophet Joseph Smith as an American intent on settling the Oregon question by speedy American settlement in force — overwhelming force of numbers, with axe, plow, seeds, and rifle in hand. At Nauvoo there is a remarkable house — half log, half frame. The frame half of that house is to me the most beautiful tribute to the memory of Joseph Smith that I have ever seen. The house stands just on the crest of the hill that forms the immediate bank of the Mississippi. Down the hill a little ways lies the grave of Joseph Smith under a clump of lilac bushes. The beautiful part of this house is the frame part — not the log part. For the log part was one some hunters and trappers had built before Joseph made his stand at Nauvoo. Into the log part he moved his wife and his mother, when he sought refuge there from the drivings in Missouri. But to this house were carried the sick and the afflicted of his people. It is a wonderfully Christian thing for one so to live that the sick will wish to be carried to him for comfort. Joseph was their comforter. His first act in the building

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST 223 up of Nauvoo was to build on the frame section of the house — not for himself or his family — but for the sick and the weary and those without shelter. It was where the hurt and driven of Missouri first were comforted. As I stood at the well in front of it, refreshing myself with its cool water, a man came up who sneered that he had just seen a " 'Mormon' priest of the high order of Melchizedek." What made him sneer was that this "priest of the high order of Melchizedek" was atop a hay wagon in overalls harvesting hay in a field at Nauvoo. He couldn't understand it. "Yes," I suggested, "every adult 'Mormon' practically is a priest of the same high order. And not one of them in his call to the priesthood ever had to get off his hay wagon. The call never brought a living with it. That was so at the beginning, for Joseph Smith laid down to his people a gospel, and earning their own livings was an essential part of it. They were not to make mer- chandise of men's souls. Right down there is the Nauvoo House where he was going himself to board strangers to make his own living." I pointed to a modern brick superstructure on an ancient foundation of cobble stones. And I added, "Joseph Smith not only prepared to keep himself financially, but he never gave over his citizenship to ecclesiastical service. He honored both, for he did his duty under the law requiring military service at the time, and organized a Nauvoo Legion at the head of which he proposed to carry American interests on over to capture our Far West, and make us an ocean-to-ocean nation." "Oh, that was inevitable," this stranger replied, "there was noth- ing there but savages and rattlesnakes. It could not have lain desolate for much longer than it did." "Savages, and the British of the Hudson's Bay Company," I retorted, "and the British war ship Wasp, with its Captain Gordon and his 500 marines, under orders to keep all Americans in the Mississippi Valley, as their Far West limit." And so, sitting down beside Joseph Smith's first Nauvoo home, I read over again the pages of Brigham H. Roberts' Rise and Fall of Nauvoo, in which Joseph Smith's discussions of the Far Western problem are recorded. It was fine to read of the spirit of Christ that pervaded them all, with its meekness and its spirit of "come, all ye that labor and are heavy laden." He wished the heavy laden to flee oppression and savage cruelty, as it was evidenced on all sides — as it soon was to make him, even, a martyr at Carthage, just a little distance to the south-eastward. ALEXANDER ROSS' STORY And so from the writings of Joseph Smith, I turned to those of Alexander Ross, the Scotch lad who was with the first Americans to

224 IMPROVEMENT ERA set up an American colony in the Far West, and who gave his name to Ross' Hole, as his friend and intimate associate, Peter Skene Ogden, gave his name to the next Southward British outpost — Ogden's Hole. It seems doubly appropriate to go back of the work of Joseph Smith for the Far West to that of Alexander Ross, for Ross tells us in terms of such sharp contrast what cruelties ruled, at that time, the minds of men in authority — what a man possessing authority thought his right to do, in contrast to the way Joseph drew those to him who needed comfort and succor. It was a Rule of Fear against the Christian Rule of Love. Let us then glimpse at that journey to Oregon in which Alexander Ross participated under American auspices in 1810-11, remem- bering as we do so that he soon transferred his allegiance to British auspices, and carried on for them for many years in what is now the American Far West, after American authority had been driven out during the War of 1812. Yes, the War of 1812 had its Utah chapter. It opened the way for creating the British outpost at Ogden's Hole, and for the erection of British forts at Spokane, Boise, Walla Walla, Okanogan, and on the Portneuf, with a great mother post for them all at Fort Van- couver, Washington, erected in the early twenties. It opened also, the way for the discovery of Bear Lake by a Scotch leader for the British, and for their use of our Cache Valley as a place to bury their furs until enough were gathered to justify a mile-long horse cavalcade from the banks of Bear River to the navigable stretches of the Colum- bia. Such annual horse caravans went steadily from Utah country to Vancouver from 1824 on, until the coming of Brigham Young's pioneers in 1847. The story which Ross leaves us of the genesis of it all gives us also a fine picture of the disastrous folly of cruelty in leadership, against which Joseph Smith's life was so wonderfully a Christian adventure. Ross and his associates, among whom he was only a minor subordinate, set sail from New York on the Ship Tonquin, Sept. 6, 1810. There were 33 passengers aboard, all going out under the auspices of John Jacob Astor to found an American post at the mouth of the Columbia. Most of them were Canadian fur hunters, for Astor had recognized their skill in this business and had gained his inspiration to found the enterprise while watching such fur hunters in the vicinity of Montreal. CRUELTY OF THE SHIP'S CAPTAIN To command- his vessel, Mr. Astor had obtained a leave of absence for Captain Jonathan Thorn of the American navy. Thorn had fought the Tripoli pirates, but always in his naval career he had been a subordinate. The first quarter-deck he trod as master was that of the Tonquin. And there he felt that the prevailing code made

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST 225 it necessary to inflict every possible human cruelty on weak subor- dinates in the name of "discipline." The passengers aboard he would not speak to, but lived aloof and alone on his quarter deck. The passengers retaliated by holding their own conversations in Scotch, if they were senior partners in the enterprise; and in French, in case of the minor clerks, who were French Canadians. They gave him their own versions of "the silent treatment." Finally, as they neared Cape Horn they ran short of water and put ashore at the Falkland Islands to obtain a supply. On shore some of the ship's passengers discovered unkept graves of their own countrymen with broken headstones of identification. They set about to restore the grave marker over the grave of one Benjamin Peak, of Providence, R. I., who had died while a member of the crew of the ship Etenora. But while thus engaged the last cask of water was taken aboard, and Captain Thorn refused to wait a minute for the missing men. He ordered up the anchor and planned to leave them to their fate. You see he had none of the spirit of the Utah pioneers, or of those rescued and established at Nauvoo after the Missouri drivings. The bereft men set out in a gig to follow the ship — and fol- lowed despairingly until darkness and a storm shut them out from view. But on board the Tonquin there was insurrection. One bold Scotchman, Robert Stuart, who two years later became leader of the party that discovered our Bear River and named it Miller River, drew his pistol on the captain. "Turn about," he said, "and pick up those men or you are a dead man this instant." That was strong medicine at sea — but Captain Thorn broke under this threat of a killing, and put about. The men were picked up and the ship proceeded. A little later other incidents of a like character afford us the contrast by which to judge the sweetness and nobility of spirit in our own people's pioneering. At the Hawaiian Islands a sailor was sent ashore for provisions, and did not return on the native boat carrying them. He came a minute later in another boat. The captain felt he must be "disci- plined," and to do it jumped upon him personally with a blacksnake whip. He whipped him mercilessly on deck and then hurled him overboard into the sea. He would let no person aboard throw him a line or help him back on deck. As this was a member of the crew the passengers did not make it their battle. The ship sailed away leaving this sailor thus bereft, although they saw the natives rescue him and take him aboard a canoe. A friendly mate secretly slipped his bundle of clothing out of a port hole thinking he might have to live or die on a friendless shore, bereft and naked. What actually befell him no one knows.

226 IMPROVEMENT ERA FIRST MATE AND OTHERS DROWNED The last cry those on the Tonquin heard from him was his cry that he would have Captain Thorn up for an accounting when once again they met "in the states." But there was to be no such meeting. Captain Thorn was sailing speedily to disaster and death at the hands of furious natives. The ship reached the mouth of the Columbia on March 22, 1811. And there the vengeance-hunting captain ordered the mate, who had mercifully passed out the shunned sailor's clothesi at the Sandwich. Islands, to go forward in a small boat to make soundings. It was an order bound to mean sure death — for the water ahead was churned up by a storm and was breaking furiously over the Columbia River bar. The mate pleaded for delay until the storm abated. The Captain breathed fire upon him — and stood upon his rights as com- mander. The mate, a Mr. Fox, obeyed orders. And with four men, only one of whom was an experienced sailor, he went aboard a small boat to row into the raging waves. Soon those on the Tonquin saw a signal of distress — the small boat was sinking. But no notice was taken of it, no help was offered. The second mate remonstrated — ■ and was sent below for his pains. All on board had been aware that the plucky first mate knew of his impending death, for he had bidden all an affectionate farewell and had told them they would never see him alive again. His father had died there, as a sailor, he said, and he was going to offer his own bones to the same furious waves. The boat sank, and a gloomy group was left to found the first American settlement on the Pacific. The storm abated after two days, the Tonquin crossed the bar with some bumpings upon a reef, after the loss of another boat and part of its crew, whom the Captain likewise refused to succor, although passengers and crew unitedly begged him to do so. CAPTAIN THORN KILLED As for Captain Thorn, he sailed northward, minus all of his crew who could possibly avoid going with him. Off Vancouver's Island he was visited by native chiefs who brought furs to trade. He threw one overboard when he named a price not to the Captain's liking. After several days came the same chief with furs for which he would now accept the Captain's price. He was welcomed aboard; so were his followers. From each bundle of offered furs they drew weapons at a given signal and Captain Thorn fell, thrice pierced bv native knives. His own pocket knife, which he had opened at the sudden onslaught, did some little execution, as he expired. Officers and men were all killed or wounded. And the natives swarmed aboard after a day of watching the ship drift about, to loot the vessel's stores. Some wounded sailor below reached the powder magazine and touched

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST 227 it off. The ship burst into a thousand pieces and the natives later reported their own loss at more than 200 warriors. But the end of Captain Thorn and the ship was not the end of this American adventure. The thirty men under American leader- ship left at Astoria began to cut down trees, erect a shelter, palisade it, and set up a trading post. Slowly there straggled in during the Winter and Spring of 1811-12, recruits who had come overland bv way of the Missouri, the Teton passi, and the Snake River. We think of pioneer Washingtonians and Oregonians as natural woodmen. But note this narrative of the first tree in the Far West Americans ever tried to cut down. It is from the diary of Alexander Ross: "It would make the cynic smile to see this pioneer corps, composed of traders, shop-keepers, voyagers, and Owyhees, all ignorant alike in this new walk in life, and the most ignorant of all, the leader. Many had never handled an axe before 'and but few knew how to use a gun. But necessity, the mother of invention, soon taught us both. After placing our guns at some secure place at hand, and viewing the height and the breadth of the tree to be cut down, the party erected a scaffold around it; this done, four men mounted the scaffold and commenced cutting at the height of eight or ten feet from the ground. At every other stroke a look was cast around to see that all was safe. When nearly cut through the tree would be viewed fifty different times and from as many different positions, to ascertain where it was likely to fall and to warn parties of the danger. There is an art in felling a tree but unfortunately none of us had learned that art. And hours together would be spent in con- jectures and discussions: one calling out that it would fall here; another, there. But, alas! when all hands were assembled to witness the fall, how we were disappointed! The tree would still stand erect, bidding defiance to our efforts while every now and then the most impatient or foolhardy would venture to jump on the scaffold and give a blow or two more." These fathers of the great foresters who came after them, thus painfully learned the Pioneering Way. WAR OF 1812 AND BRITISH ACTIVITIES They flew the Stars and Stripes at last over a finished post a replica of some parts of which may now be seen nestling in a forest that has grown up again back of the present citv of Astoria. But bad news overwhelmed them: the War of 1812 had broken cut, and news of it came to Astoria via Montreal and the Saskatchewan River. British fur hunters brought it, with the additional news that a British fleet had been ordered to Oregon to blow up the American fort. Would those in charge sell the goods to the Northwest Com- pany of Montreal before warships should come and capture them? Or would they wait — and lose all? There was trader's cunning in the guile with which John George McTavish bargained the Americans into a sale, for if the warships took the American post then its goods would be a sailor's prize and would

228 IMPROVEMENT ERA be rich loot for the fleet commander. If British subjects already owned them — the Northwest Company would be in the saddle in the American stronghold; with full trading outfit! The sale was made November 12, 1812. And from that date on Britishers began to pour down into the Columbia country, claim ing dominion, and pressing out to the South and East, to our Utah territory. They sought the peltries of the Snake River branches, the Green River country, and the Uintahs. Many of their men nearly perished in the alkali deserts north of Great Salt Lake as they sought fur-bearing rivers. Ogden, their greatest leader in these researches, discovered and named Mt. Shasta and discovered the Humboldt River, which he named the Jo Paul in honor of one of his men who died beside it. He traced with his lodge poles the route of the Central Pacific through Nevada to the Sierras. The finishing touches to Astoria were applied by the British ship Racoon, a sloop-of-war of 26 guns, Captain Black commanding, which drew up opposite the American post. December 1, 1812. "Ho, ho, and so this is the American fort I w,as sent out to capture," he snorted contemptuously as he came ashore and looked over its wooden palisades and blockhouses. Knowing nothing of the Indian warfare they were built for, he voiced an opinion: "Why, I could batter those all down in half an hour with my four pounders." Having no need to do that. Captain Black ran up a British Union Jack where the Stars and Stripes had flown, broke a bottle of rum over the flag staff, and proclaimed the "whole country British territory." Some of the American Company's employees, who were Britishers by birth and allegiance, hung on, taking service, as did Alexander Ross, with the Northwest Company. But those who were American- born retreated out of Oregon by ship to Alaska or to Mexico, and thence overland, or by canoe up the Columbia and down the Saskatche- wan to Montreal. How Stuart, McClelland and Crooks and a party of three others, who left with messages before the news of the war reached the Columbia, broke the trail for the great Wagon Road to Oregon we have already told in detailing their adventures in Utah and out by a weirdly circuitous route through the South Pass, to St. Louis. We will have much to do with these men in the future develop- ment of our story. For they haunted Congress with the view that the Great West was worth redeeming; they haunted the Peace Com- mission at Ghent with pleas to have the Columbia country restored to America — the victorious nation in the war as a whole. And they haunted the fur merchants of New York and St. Louis with the word that there were riches in the Rockies and beyond — riches for which America must not give over the seeking.

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST 229 Thus a thirty years' war of rival fur traders was precipitated, with Britishers pouring in from the Saskatchewan-Columbia trail, and Americans by way of the Platte, the Sweetwater, and the Bear, to contest every foot of the ground. It was into the final stages of this war that Joseph Smith proposed to project his Nauvoo Legion as a force of law and order with 100,000 American settlers to back it up. How events rolled on until he saw that it was time to take de- cisive action will be told in the coming chapters-. Chicago, III. The Witness More sure than what I see or hear or measure, Is the spirit's witness to the truth revealed — More precious far than any earthly treasure, Are the covenants by keys of Priesthood sealed. The perfect guide, through life to point the way. Is freely given to each repentant soul; It fills with purpose our beclouded day, Disclosing whence we came and what our goal. The great Archangel came, with glorious Eve, And ate the fruit which genders mortal flesh, That waiting spirits might new powers achieve And here pursue their destiny afresh. We walk by faith and, using, gain its power; And here we learn by contrast wrong from right; We add the body to the spirit's dower And train its strong desires with growing might. This life's a test — a time of quick unfolding — In which we make' or mar our destiny, — Creative urge and new-found freedom holding — Our adolescence in eternity. Lest death our hopes destroy, with love divine Our loving Father sent his first-born Son To bear the shame and guilt that's yours and mine — And cleansed, each temple from its grave is won ! As a mother knows, when joy her heart has filled, That she loves her babe close-folded to her breast, So I know, whep my soul's illumed and thrilled, That prophets speak the truth at God's behest. Hollywood, Calif. WALTER W. MORRISON.