Joseph Smith and the Great West

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST What England Learned that America Didn't Learn About Far Western American Wealth By I. K. Russell, Author of "Hidden Heroes of the Rockies" Away back in the days of the Nauvoo Legion, when it was drilling upon its Nauvoo parade ground, and its commander, Joseph Smith, was urging upon the American president, upon his cabinet members, and upon congress that our government let the "Mormon" people settle the Oregon question by moving Over there, with the Nauvoo legion at their head, most Americans laughed at the thought that any such army would be needed. They had been fooled about the wealth of the Far West and the plans of England to hold, possess and guard this wealth. Stories had been industriously spread from Boston that the Far West was only a sterile wilderness, fit for grizzly bears but not for white men. In two sections of our continent the people knew better. One of these sections ran along the British pathway from Montreal to the Far West. These people had seen hundreds of thousands of dollars of wealth moving eastward from the Rockies towards London, each year, since 1818. The other section "in the know" was the American frontier to which beaten and baffled Americans had been coming back from the Far West since 1823, crying for American help. These people had told their tale where Joseph Smith and his people had heard it. And as good Americans they had responded to the realization that out there, out in the Far West, there wag both succor and safety for them- selves, and a task to do in fulfilling America's destiny. JOSEPH SMITH AND THE OREGON QUESTION While most Americans were still thinking lightly of Joseph Smith and the letter he had addressed to all candidates for the Pres- idency, in 1844, asking them where they stood on the question of America's taking Oregon, there arose in the United States senate an old veteran of the war of 1812. This was General Lewis Cass, a senator from Michigan, and destined in another fifteen years to resign indignantly from President Buchanan's cabinet as its pro-slave leanings carried it to the point of fostering secession, and digpersing Northern arms, as in the Utah expedition, so that the North should be helpless when the break should come. Now, at the opening of the Twenty-ninth Congress, Senator Cass, who had lived near the Canadian road to Oregon, brought for- ward a resolution which shows he was well informed on Great Britain's intent to have and to hold our Far Western country. "I

62 8 \ IMPROVEMENT ERA move," he proposed, "that the committees on Military Affairs, the Militia, and Naval Affairs respectively, inquire into the conditions of the National fortifications and their armaments, into the present con- dition of the militia of the states and militia laws, and into the condition of the naval supplies on hand." General Cass stated frankly, when asked why he brought in this resolution, that he did it because he expected Great Britain and the United States to go to war over the American Far West. Joseph Smith had, then, at least one believer in the United States senate, as to his proposal that an armed fringe was needed for American occupa- tion, and that he was ready to furnish this armed fringe at the nearest place to the promised theater of operations. The proposal of General Cass incited the wrath of one who had spent much time berating the American Far West and declaring it was worthless country. Daniel Webster did not want the Far West in the Union, for he saw that two United States senators from each state that might be formed out there would overbalance the senate and destroy the New England leadership. This leadership had ruled since 1800, imposing heavy tariffs on the South that had brought the profits of Southern cotton up to New England to be exchanged for highly protected manufactured goods. He caught at once the challenge of Lewis Cass, and launched into a speech of denunciation against his proposal. There must be no such war. Oregon was not worth fighting for. Diplomacy could fix a boundary and America would lose little wherever it might be fixed. Wealth? Why he had looked that up, and from so reliable an authority as the British Board of Trade, he had found that all the wealth reported from Oregon had been beaver worth $138,- 000 in the year 1828. Nothing here worth fighting for. Far better, he urged, to keep the United States at its present size, letting in no new territory, either south or west. At present it was a governable country and both North and South had come into a Union to bfe based on the then prevailing balance of power and interests. This balance must not be overcome by any mushroom expansion into wild far-western lands. Otherwise the Union would fail. This debate ran through December, 1845, and January, 1846, and some of its notable speeches are recorded in the collected orations of Daniel Webster. One of them declared New Mexico would not sustain 300 American families; so, if it should come in, "there would be two United States senators from 60,000 coarse land holders and miserable peons to the end of our lives and the lives of all our children." All followers of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young will recog- nize the issue Cass and Webster fought out as one Joseph Smith broached to the Nation when the buds were opening in the spring of 1844. They will recognize it as the issue that dominated his mind when he was borne down to his death at Carthage jail, when

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST 629 the flowers were blooming in the Summer of that year, and they will note it as the theme which, when sloganized into the issue of "Fifty- four-forty or fight," elected James K. Polk president of the United States when the leaves were just searing brown over the grave of Joseph Smith in old Nauvoo. Then nobody could tell clearly what the facts were. But now there are available documents from archives then kept secret, which bring the facts into the light. First of all, England took many times $138,000 in wealth from our Far West, every year from 1818 on. These secret documents show us now that certain "gentleman sports," who wandered over our Far West in the days of the Cassi and Webster debates, were, in fact, officers of the Britsh army and navy. Instead of hunting wild game, they were hunting sites for forts and lines of march for British arms. They even show us that war parleys were held in London to which Peter Skene Ogden had been summoned from the Oregon country because of his ability to tell the war chiefs all about the Far West and its passes and rivers, from the pass just east of Ogden' s Hole, Utah, over to the passes through the Blue Mountains into the valley of the Columbia. A search for the commencement of this British sense that Amer- ica was going to fight for Oregon, leads us right back to that era in which Daniel Webster was able to find the British profits in Far Western furs amounted only to $138,000. And strangely enough, the movements which led to a threat of war between the whites of the Anglo Saxon families 'started in a grand maneuver to force a peace between white men and red men of the vast Snake River plains. THE GREAT FAR WESTERN PEACE CONGRESS ON THE BEAR The story of this first Far Western peace congress belongs in the history of Joseph Smith and his people. With all we know today, for instance, of the Indians the "Mormon" settlers had to deal with, who would think that in 1819 they could gather at Soda Springs', Idaho, in such enormous force that it would require a whole day for a horseman to ride around their camp? And who would expect that instead of being mere roving marauders, in small bands, these Indians had such a sense of family relationship that tribe after tribe could arrive for this great peace conclave and find a space just large enough for it reserved beside its most closely allied tribe? In our last installment we traced the building of Fort Nez Perce, on the Columbia, as a sort of Gibraltar of the West, to serve as a British base for the invasion of America's Inland Empire. We traced the expedition of Donald McKenzie from Fort Nez Perce to our Bear Lake and back again with a cavalcade of fur-laden horses a whole mile long, — a hundred horses being laden with rich furs. We now come to consider the last move of this bold Scot in our

630 IMPROVEMENT ERA Far West, and the last move of any Britisher in which some Yankee or Virginian was not matching him for domination. McKenzie, the 312-pound Scot, came back to the waters of Bear River in 1819 for hisi second expedition. Being a clansman himself, he had no difficulty in coming to terms with Indian chieftains, especially with Pee-eye-em, the Snake chief around whose body Mc- Kenzie's waistcoat was fourteen inches too small to permit of its being buttoned up. These two giants, Indian and white, called the Bear River Peace Conclave of 1819. It was a Fall gathering and lasted for a full week. Since it gives us a basic view of the relationship, one to another, of the tribes Brigham Young had to deal with in the era of pioneer settlement, McKenzie's story of this peace conclave, as he told it to his friend, Alexander Ross, is here repeated as being worthy of permanent record: "In that part of the country where our friends had taken up their winter quarters, the buffalo were very numerous; thousands covered the plains. In this land of profusion the Indians likewise pitched their winter camp. The novelties of the presence of the whites, and the news of peace, soon collected an immense crowd together, — so that before the end of the month there were, according to their statements, ten thousand souls in camp. This immense body covered a space of ground of more than seven miles in length, on both sides of the river; and it was somewhat curious, as well as interesting, to see such an assemblage of rude savages observe such order. "The Shirry-dikas (Shoshones) at one end, the Bannocks at the other, formed as it were, the suburbs. But in this immense camp, our people were a little surprised to see, on each side of the Shirry-dikas, or main camp, nearly a mile of vacant ground between them and their neighbors, the War-are-ree-kas and Bannocks. "The mysterious point was soon cleared up; for as the other Indians came in, they encamped by the side of the Shirry-dikas, till at last the whole vacant space was filled up; the same took place among the War-are-ree- kas (Pah-utes of Nevada) and the Bannocks; each clan swelled its own camp; so that every great division was in a manner separate. "The whole of this assemblage of camps was governed by the voice of two great chiefs, Pee-eye-em and Ama-qui-em, who were brothers and both fine looking, middle-aged men; the former was six feet two inches high, the latter above six feet. "McKenzie himself, the stoutest of the whites, was a corpulent, heavy man, weighing 312 pounds; yet he was nothing to be compared, either in size or weight, to one of the Indian chiefs. "As soon as all the natives were assembled together, McKenzie made known his views as to establishing a permanent peace between them and their enemies on the northern frontier. Besides Pee-eye-em and Ama-qui- em, there were fifty-four other dignitaries at the council board. * * * "All seemed to hail the peace. That great sachem, Pee-eye-em, rose up, and was the first to speak. 'We never go to war with the Nez Perce, or any other tribe in that quarter. These,' said he, pointing to the War-are-ree-kas and the Bannock camps, 'are the people who wage war and plunder the whites when in their power. For us to run after and punish the Bannocks every time they do evil would be endless. It would be just as easy for us to hunt out and kill all the foxes in the country as to hunt out and punish every Bannock that does mischief. They are like the mosquitoes, — not strong, but they can torment. "The Black Feet and the Piegans (Sioux) are our only enemies. A

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST 631 peace with them would be more desirable to us than a peace with the Nez Perce." ( ( And thus the speaking went. It is interesting to get a glimpse thus into the inside of the warring mountain Indian's mind as the whites first appeared among them. Those west-of-the-Rockies Indians welcomed the whites in this manner because the east-of-the-Rockies Indians had guns, and the Shoshones had already learned that the bow was a futile weapon against the flintlock. Peace with the whites might bring traders with guns — there was the philosophy of the open hand and the unstrung bow. It was what prepared Utah country for its settlers, and held back the Indian's war club until Brigham Young had well established his people at Salt Lake, Ogden and Logan; Then, perhaps, many of these same Indians that met with Mc- Kenzie, in this great peace conclave of 1819, made their last war stand against "Mormon" settlers, in a final battle, and surrendered to soldiers from Fort Douglas, Utah, in their Bear River winter camp. ' Their movements as tribesmen before they had been tamed into Agency Indians, or ruined by white man's whiskey, show a splendid mastery of the technique of life in the wilds. It is worth observing because it was entirely native in origin and genius. A whole week was used up in talking of peace. There were 54 intermountain war chiefs to be consulted and given a hearing. This legislative assembly was so organized that eath chief spoke according to his achieved place in the world — his public standing and his war prowess. As the Bannocks lived to be special friends of Utah pioneers, it is interesting to note that they were the weak and minor tribe — most ruthlessly hunted by stronger neighbors, and most in need of white man's aid. No Bannock chief stood in this great legislative conclave. They were relegated to the camp's outer fringe. Only when the fifty-four chiefs were ready to announce decisions were cringing Bannocks brought in to stand and tremble as these decisions were announced with the fearful authority of Ama-qui-em and the powerful oratory of the bold Amaket-sa. "The poor Bannocks/' records McKenzie, "stood trembling and silent like criminals, but the moment Ama-qui-em sat down they all called out in the Shoshone language, 'Hakana tabeboo, hakana tabeboo, we are friends of the whites.' Indian camps, in the wild days, never rested for long in one place, save among those tribes that planted corn and camped through the harvest season. Indians met at given points' — struck at some white group and dispersed, — for the small hunting party was the best unit to provision your Indian as your huntsman among the whites. A whole week of peace talk reduced this Bear River Con- clave to a state of tribal restlessness. They now rushed forward with beaver garments which were their own winter coverings, being used as such only by the Desert Indians of Utah and Nevada.

63 2 IMPROVEMENT ERA McKenzie was a thrifty Scot for he explains some of those profits, that Daniel Webster later became curious about, in these terms: "The most indifferent speculator could not help staring as the Indians brought large garments of four and five beaver skins each, and sold them for a knife or an awl; and other articles of fur in proportion. "It was so with the Columbia River Indians, at first, but they soon learned the mystery of trade to their own interest. * * * Horses were purchased for an axe each; our people might have loaded up a seventy-four gun ship with provisions bought with buttons and rings. It is truly characteristic of Indian trading to see these people dispose of articles of real value so cheaply, at least in the estimation of the whites, while mere trifles in our thought were esteemed highly by them. When any of our people, through mere curiosity, wished to purcbase an Indian head dress of feathers, or a necklace of birds' claws, or a little red earth or ochre out of their mystical medicine bags, the price was enormous. But a beaver skin worth five shillings in the Englisb market might have been purchased for a brass finger ring scarcely worth a farthing. They could not conceive what our people wanted witb their old garments. 'Have not the whites,' asked a chief one day, 'much better garments than ours?' Axes, knives, ammunition, beads, buttons and rings were the articles most in demand. * * * They had scarcely an article among them to show that they had ever mixed with civilized man, although it is well known that they had of late years occasionally seen the whites. "Trade was soon over and Ama-qui-em mounted one of his horses and rode 'round the camp, which in itself was almost the work of a day. He now and then made a halt to harrangue the Indians, and tell them to prepare to raise the camp. "The Shirry-dikas decamped in a body. The Bannocks began to hold up their head and speak after the Shirry-dikas had gone. At the end of a couple of weeks they all went off but not without stealing three of our hunter's best horses and some beaver traps. So much for the peace." Our staunch Anglo-Saxons considered their Indian friends shabby thieves. They did not know that the Indian had developed no sense of private property and that horse-stealing ranked with match-borrow- ing and step-ladder-borrowing among the whites. Horse thieves among them were the tribal heroes — he who could filch the best horse, getting the greatest honor. It was the favorite Indian out-door sport and that whites felt mortally insulted at such thefts, and went to war to the death over them, is? basically the real reason why Indian life has vanished wherever the Anglo-Saxon has made his stand. The Indian invited you to come and get it back — not slaughter him. Taking your horse was to him proof of a sort of cleverness, as if he were playing a hand at cards and wanted to prove he could do it skillfully. From this meeting the whites retreated, perhaps to Ogden's Hole — back up in the mountains east of Ogden City. These Scots were canny about revealing geographic knowledge, so we can only guess at their movements. McKenzie left a record of that winter camp, how- ever, that explains much of the success of those Scot trappers. They obtained horses that had trained themselves to dig through deep snow for grass. A camp even with two or three feet of snow above the grass would mean nothing to these mountain "cayuses." They "beat down the crust, scraped away the snow with their fore-feet, and fed

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST 633 on the dry and withered grass at the bottom. After passing the night in this way, they are saddled, bridled and ridden by the hunters each day. They are hardy and vigorous animals, always in good condition." It was unfortunate that the Utah pioneers had not learned the trick of utilizing these cayuses from the Grande Ronde and other west-of-the-Rockies valleys, for the tragedy of many a winter story of pioneering begins with the starving of the pioneer's horse because of deep snow. Johnston's army leaders saw their entire horse equip- ment starve to death in just such a mountain valley on Green River, as McKenzie's horses thrived in a little farther west and thirty-seven years earlier. SIR GEORGE SIMPSON, GOVERNOR OF THE HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY With this peace conclave of 1819, a winter's fur-hunting expedi- tion after it, and another winter's hunt in the season of 1820-21, we bid goodbye to the first of Utah's Scottish wealth hunters, and we see the last of the Northwest Company which he represented. This company was a survival of the old French regime in Canada. The French and Indian war had ended its control of eastern Canada and the Hudson's Bay Company. Its ruined leaders had organized as private merchants of Montreal and had explored a path to our Uintah wealth. Now it had proved there was wealth to be had "out west" and England was no longer willing to see this wealth garnered by Montreal merchants. It had, much closer to the British court, a company of its own of which its own favorite Prince Rupert was the head. This company was known as "The Company of Gentleman Adventurers of Eng- land Trading into Hudson's Bay." It proceeded to absorb the North- west Company, and thus to bring into the Far West a character with whose later conduct both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young had much to do. This new adventurer was Sir George Simpson, Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, with headquarters at Albany Fort, Hudson's Bay, and outposts on every Far Western river of size. As he took hold, our bold Scot, McKenzie, let go. But it was no shabby load of .wealth McKenzie drew with him on his last two excursions homeward from Bear Lake to Fort Nez Perce. Alexander Ross, who was waiting them at the British Gibraltar of the West, laconically records their enormous success in this manner: "Various had been the reports brought to us by the Indians as to the fate of our friends in the Snake country, and as the time of their expected arrival drew near, the more anxious, of course, we became. One day a cloud of dust arose in the direction in which they were expected, and by the aid of a spy glass we perceived from four to five hundred horses, escorted by as many riders, advancing at a slow pace in p line more than two miles in length, resembling rather a caravan of pilgrims than a trapping party. It was our friends accompanied by a band of Cayuse Indians. Soon after, McKenzie, in his leather jacket, accompanied by two of their chiefs, arrived at the fort. Nothing couid exceed the joy manifested by all parties;

6 34 IMPROVEMENT ERA and the success attending the expedition surpassed our most sanguine ex- pectations. * * * They brought in over one hundred fifty horses loaded down with beaver." Ross records that on July 10, 1821, McKenzie returned again from his final trip to the Uintahs, "with a still larger return of beaver," which made the Snake country "the center of all eyes" interested in the fur trade, both in Canada and overseas in London as well. BRITISH DESCRIPTIONS OF THE FAR WEST Thus the story started that made it in Joseph Smith's day a question of whether America was to win Oregon without a war. In America this fine story was lost on our American frontier where it was appraised as the "yarns of foolish trappers." But in England where the money returns made the British court rich, it was appraised in a very different manner. Their magazines printed detailed stories of the American Far West long before America had an aroused interest. These stories, as sent forward by men of McKenzie's party, contained all the details of Indians that had no canoes, although they did a prodigious amount of fishing in the Snake and Bear Rivers, of the Soda Springs that boiled up from the ground, some "so hot that meat could be boiled in them," of sulphur rivers bubbling out of the bases of mountains, of rivers that sprang up from the ground and disappeared again in some other sandy sink, of land that rumbled like the roar of underground streams, of tobacco plants that the Snake Indians claimed was the original tobacco of all the American continent, of iron, copper and coal outcroppings their trappers encountered on the fur trail. THE LAST DAYS OF MCKENZIE McKenzie, of course, belongs in Utah's history. His friend. Ross, tells us that "when not asleep, he was always on foot, stroll- ing backwards and forwards, full of plans and projects: so peculiar was this pedestrian habit that he went by the name of Perpetual Motion." He made his last trip across the Rockies in the summer of 1822, and reported to Sir George Simpson, the new Governor, at York Factory, on Hudson's Bay. He was immediately made chief advisor of Sir George, ,and second in rank in the Hudson's Bay Companv management. For ten years he advised as to British policy this- way, for Sir George Simpson had the ear of the British crown and the heads of its army and navy, and twenty 'years later could bring them to the verge of an American war. After ten years at York Factory McKenzie did what many who followed him finally did — turned American. He bought a little farm and retired to it at Mayville, near Lake Erie in New York state- He lived there in retirement for many years. Meanwhile, when England was being so accurately advised, the only American who sensed America's enormous loss in wealth was

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST 635 John Jacob Astor. He had been driven out of that country in 1813 and just at the time McKenzie became a special British advisor, Astor sent Ramsay Crooks, — the same Ramsay Crooks who had been of the party which first told America of our Bear River and of the South Pass,— to Washington as a lobbyist. Crooks there took up the work of arousing America, which Joseph Smith welded into a National issue between 1840 and 1844. Alexander Ross was to take up the work of prosecuting the British hunt for Uintah wealth, in 1823, and William H. Ashley of St. Louis was to take up the American search for the same wealth, in this same year of 1823. How these parties met, fought, and stirred political issues, will be the next chapter in the unfolding of our theme. Chicago, III. Mother's Call Come to my warm heart, son o' mine, Be a child again, on my knee; 'Tis lonely tonight in the shadowy light With no one to watch with me. Somewhere out there in the noisy world You are seeking fortune and fame — / That's fine, my child, but don't be beguiled From thoughts of the old hearth's flame. There's a lingering light on the hills tonight And I hear the children sing; Oh, I want my lad when the World is glad With the music of the Spring — So come to my warm heart, son o' mine, Come to love's waiting wing. Raymond, Canada. FRANK C. STEELE. The Backward Glance We heed not our transit through time and space, As life glides swiftly on ; But the backward glance at the close of day Will tell how far we've gone. For distance in life is not told in miles, Time not measured in years; But in words and in deeds each must review, As sunset of life he nears. In the eve of life, as the shadows fall, Our backward glance will tell The distance traversed and the time we've lived By time spent illy or well. Our place of starting on life's traveled stage, Progress in life's next sphere, And our ultimate goal will all depend On how we traveled here. Ogden, Utah J. S. BlNGHAM