Penguin History of the United States of America (44 page)

His task was formidable, and probably he alone of all Mormons could ever have accomplished it. For all his gifts, Smith had also something of the knowing rogue about him: he could smile even at polygamy. The earthier Young had no sense of humour, great executive ability and an indomitable will. Now he had to organize the journey of 16,000 or so Saints to some refuge in the Far West where they would be safe from the citizens of the United States for long enough to build up an unassailable position. The cost in money would be enormous: could he raise the funds? The religious costs might be higher: could he maintain the faith and discipline of the people on the long journey?

This business of finding ‘the White Horse of safety’ of which Smith had spoken in prophecy might not have been possible but for a great widening of prospects which had come about in the previous half-century. American settlers had begun to cross the Mississippi into Spanish Louisiana (the territory between the great river and the crest of the Rockies) even before the end of the eighteenth century, as we saw in the story of Daniel Boone; the process had been hugely accelerated when, in 1803, Napoleon Bonaparte first cozened the Spanish out of Louisiana and then sold it to the United States for $11.5 million – a useful sum for his war-chest – and for $3.75 million with which to settle the claims of private U S citizens against France. The Louisiana Purchase was one of the most important episodes in American history. It not only eliminated the French from the imperial competition, it roughly doubled the size of the trans-Appalachian American empire and correspondingly enhanced its prospects. It began to seem certain that the United States would one day stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and President Jefferson immediately sent out an expedition led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the new domain and find, if they could, a good route to the Pacific. Lewis and Clark had succeeded magnificently, ending their transcontinental journey by sailing down the Columbia river to the sea; and they soon had many followers. By 1845 the West had been pretty thoroughly explored. It had been criss-crossed by hundreds of mountain men – the last generation of old-style fur-trappers and traders –
and military missions. It was known that the valley of the Columbia in Oregon territory was a good place for farm settlements, and there were already the makings of the Oregon Trail to lead pioneers there. Explorations were going ahead to open a practicable route to California, which was also very promising country. But for that very reason the Mormons could not go to either region: too many other migrants would press in before them and beside them; and, although California was still legally Mexican territory, and the British claimed Oregon, it would probably not be long before the United States took both.

Yet there was a place, and, thanks to earlier explorations, Brigham Young had heard of it. What he wanted would probably be found in the Great Basin, just across the continental Divide, where, travellers reported, there were high barren mountains and a great salt lake; also good farming land and fertile valleys full of timber – none of which was yet claimed.

A cold going they had of it: just the wrong time of the year for prairie travel. On the eastern rivers the late winter was the most usual season for pioneers’ departure. It meant that they got to the new settlement in time to get the ground cleared and seeded at the earliest possible moment. On the banks of the Ohio and its tributaries it was common in March to see a big raft floating down the waters, a cow or two forward, a haystack amidships, and, aft, a family trying to lead a normal life. The Mormons were to have a different experience. They had no choice: as soon as the news got about that they were really leaving, the Gentiles hurried to make sure that they did not change their minds, using methods that had already been perfected for dislodging the Cherokees from their ancestral lands (indeed the Mormons too were driven to take a Trail of Tears, though it led to a happier destination). A favourite device was to force a family to leave its house, carrying what it could in the way of furniture and belongings, and then set fire to the building while the owners watched, standing miserable in the snow. It was clear that it would be unsafe to linger; so on 4 February 1846 the first emigrants began to cross the Mississippi. It was very cold, but the huge river, between three-quarters of a mile and a mile-and-a-half wide at the Nauvoo bend,
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though full of floating ice, was not yet frozen over, and several of the Mormons’ craft capsized in the water, all passengers drowning. A day or two later the Mississippi froze completely, so the crossing was safer; but frost and blizzard made conditions for travel quite appalling. Nevertheless the Saints moved on westward through Iowa, at a snail’s pace. In March the snow ceased, but they were not much better off, for the rains came, fearful spring torrents, turning the ground into ‘shoe-mouth deep’ mud, slowing progress to a minimum, sometimes to no more than a mile a day. In the steady downpour it was often impossible to get food cooked or keep clothes and bedding dry. When at last summer came the people
and the oxen drawing their covered wagons were plagued by black clouds of mosquitoes, and some were killed by the bites of rattlesnakes. Preparations for the journey had gone on for more than a year; but few of the Saints had really understood what such a journey required of them. At times Brigham Young was almost at his wits’ end for money to support them even as far as the river Missouri; cattle and babies, children and the elderly began to die. The starving time of Utah occurred when its settlers were still nineteen months and a thousand miles away.

The survival of these new Pilgrims must finally be explained by the fact that their heroic virtues outweighed their vices. Many were idle, backsliding, quarrelsome or just plain silly, but most found in themselves the qualities necessary for survival. At bottom they were honest plain Americans; brave, patient and practical; stiffened and disciplined by their apocalyptic faith. Little things helped them: there was an English brass band among the converts, to whose music they danced in the evenings, after prayer, at every stopping-place (weather permitting). And as Bernard De Voto shrewdly remarks, every pioneer train was a village on wheels;
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the villagers had the usual consolations of the frontier to keep them sane. When the women had done with their sewing, patching and cooking, and with trying to teach their children the alphabet, they could gather for gossip; when the men rested from driving the herds and the wagons and from the endless round of maintenance that prairie schooners required, they could enjoy a game of cards or dominoes, or a practical joke (once, towards the end of the long trek, Brigham Young gave them a fearful dressing-down for enjoying them too much). Both sexes liked the dancing, the prayers and the priests’ harangues. These things seem paltry enough, but they strengthened the spirit to endure.

All the same, they would never have come through but for the great gifts of their Prophet.
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For one thing, they were desperately poor. They had managed to escape from Nauvoo with a surprisingly large number of horses, mules, sheep and 30,000 head of cattle, but the Illinois mob had forced them to sell most of their property at minimal prices; sometimes there had been no buyers at all, even for a good house or a flock of sheep. Yet it was usually reckoned that a pioneer outfit, one adequate to carry a family from Independence to Oregon or California, cost at least 500 dollars. Until the passage of the Homestead Act in 1862, which in effect made the public lands free for the taking, money would also be needed to buy a farm on arrival, and even after that it might be some time before they could support themselves in the new country. Further supplies must be brought along against that contingency, or at least some good specie dollars. The Mormons, even the best-off among them, and after a year’s preparation, and allowing
for the fact that they would not have to pay for the land they proposed to settle, were quite without resources on the necessary scale. So Young set about fund-raising. He encouraged the men to hire themselves out at any odd jobs as the wagon-train passed through the scantily settled Iowa prairie (i 846 was the year Iowa won its statehood). He put Mormon communities everywhere – Ohio, Mississippi, England – under contribution. He exploited the needs of the United States government: while the Mormons were on the march another war broke out, this time with Mexico (by this means the Americans meant to make sure of Texas, recently annexed from Mexico, and the whole of the Pacific West), and Young was happy to supply 500 indifferent soldiers to serve the country’s need. The Mormon battalion won no military glory, but the money paid it for wages and expenses was impounded by the Prophet and kept the emigration alive.

Forward planning was essential. Young soon accepted the fact that the Saints would not get to the Great Basin in 1846. It would be as much as he could do to get them from the Mississippi to the Missouri. So his advance party was set to establishing a transit camp, Winter Quarters, near the site of the present city of Omaha, Nebraska, on the western bank of the Missouri. It was really a town, carefully laid out according to the Mormon passion for town-planning, with streets, mills, wells. The houses were not much – mostly mere huts; but they were better than nothing, though the mortality rate during the winter of 1846 – 7 continued to be appalling. Most important of all, fields were dug, tilled and sown: the Mormons from now on would have an independent and sure food-supply. Young saw to it that tillage was also undertaken, on a smaller scale, at the string of lesser camps that he planted across Iowa, though their prime purpose was to provide rest and repair facilities for the rearguard. (The last of the Saints did not get away from Nauvoo until September 1846, and they were the most destitute party of the lot, for the Gentiles grew ever bolder and more violent as the number of Mormons in Illinois dwindled.) Beyond all this it was necessary to learn all one could about the road to the Salt Lake and about conditions on its shores.

That Young did not fail or falter in doing all this, as well as governing the whole Church of the Latter-Day Saints throughout the world and organizing the necessary lobbying at Washington, is proof enough of his abilities.

The 1847 journey was much easier than that of the year before. After they left Winter Quarters they soon reached the river Platte, where they joined the Oregon Trail pioneered by more ordinary emigrants. The Trail went along the south bank; the Saints kept to the north, to avoid contamination from their fellow-adventurers. They had been able to wait until April and May before beginning their journey: that was the right time for crossing the Great Plains, when the grass was growing again for the cattle to eat. Indeed, Mormon discipline and training meant that they could now show the Gentiles a thing or two. Those unenlightened souls were fiercely individualistic,
questioning all orders, or rather suggestions, of the wagon-train captain and constantly delaying themselves to indulge in another favourite occupation of the village on wheels, politics. (They had left state and federal elections behind them, but they were still Whigs and Democrats: so they organized elections of their own.) There was no such nonsense in Brigham Young’s flock. He had it well in hand, so it made excellent time; though like all pioneer parties it had to struggle against many difficulties, of which perhaps the white alkaline dust of the Wyoming desert was the worst. It damaged eyes, sometimes to blindness, corroded the skin, smothered the lungs and was a sure sign of bad water to poison men and beasts. Yet the advance party won through, crossed the Divide by South Pass (the Rockies equivalent of the Cumberland Gap: beyond it you drink from streams which flow to the Pacific) and reached the Salt Lake in July 1847. The main party ofthatyear’s migration got there in August. By winter, 1848, Brigham Young was settled in Salt Lake City, which was rapidly taking shape, with 5,000 Saints around him. And more were coming. For the next thirty years Deseret (as they named what the United States called Utah – the word is supposed to mean ‘land of the honeybee’) filled up steadily with Mormons, summoned by their Prophet from all quarters, especially England and Wales.

The country could never have prospered but for Young’s last great innovation. It was obvious to all that the Great Basin could only yield crops if it was extensively irrigated.
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Young’s inspiration was to see how this might be arranged in Mormon fashion. Clearly the old law of riparian rights, by which the water of a stream or river belonged to the owners of the banks, would not do: such was the reckless, self-serving individualism of the American nineteenth-century temperament that it was quite certain that such rights, if conceded, even to Saints, would be abused. So Young laid it down firmly that ‘there shall be no private ownership of the streams that come out of the canyons, nor the timber that grows on the hills. These belong to the people: all the people.’ The system he adopted was not unlike that of the Spanish, first rulers of an empire in the West, or the ancient Egyptians. Water, it was laid down, would be allotted for their use, like land, by the community’s officials, who had to swear oaths to do so fairly. To construct and maintain irrigation ditches, the Mormon families were organized by their bishops into groups, the men of which were required to contribute their labour, in proportion to the amount of land they wanted to water; when the system was ready, water was allotted in proportion to the amount of labour contributed. The use of timber was regulated on the same principles, and strict discipline enforced its conservation.

This arrangement worked excellently, and in modified form continues in the Mormon West to this day. It set an example which other Americans would have done well to heed: instead of which they persisted in the ruinous individualistic scramble until the coming of the New Deal. This was, in fact, the most successful co-operative experiment ever undertaken in the United States. It is impressive for many reasons, not least that it was managed with next to nothing in the way of outside capital. ‘We shall need no commerce with the nations,’ said Brigham Young. ‘I am determined to cut every thread of this kind and live free and independent, untrammelled by any of their detestable customs and practices.’ And when Brigham Young was determined on a thing, it happened.