Penguin History of the United States of America (45 page)

He was in many ways an unattractive character. He had an instinct for power, for the surest means of getting it, wielding it and cutting down rivals with it. Smith communed with God and His angels, but Young was more concerned with economic advantage, especially in his later years. He was also bloodthirsty in a peculiar, vicarious way. He often preached sermons that were naked incitements to violence; he was capable of dropping hints, much subtler than Henry IIs, when he wanted someone put out of the way. The result was a long series of murders, which he sometimes deplored, but could not talk about without a sort of gloating. Unpleasant; yet it must be allowed that even in Deseret the Mormons continued to suffer from the ferocious aggression of their fellow-Americans, and if Young defended his society in part by violence, so did many other nineteenth-century frontier communities, whether in mining camps or cattle towns like Dodge City. And the community which the heroic labours of Young and his followers built was unique. It was an achievement to compel respect.

The rules laid down by Smith and revised by Young stood the test of time and use. There was always Young’s absolute authority to fall back on if Saints grew restless; for the rest of the time there were the common principles of social organization in the church to rely on. Joseph Smith had decreed an in-gathering of Saints, so the population of Deseret grew steadily: from 11,000 in 1850 to 87,000 in 1870. The Mormon village was as compact as the first Puritan villages in New England, which not only ensured that the church officials would be able to enforce their regulations, but also made possible the most efficient and egalitarian use of the common lands. The principle of stewardship on behalf of the Kingdom of God, a fundamental Mormon tenet, made the practice of co-operation easy; and the pursuit of prosperity was sanctioned by the duty of the Saints to redeem the earth from the primordial curse brought on it by Adam’s fall, and so to use it as to make it fruitful, like Eden, for man’s use. The emphasis on plain living (not only alcohol but also tea and coffee are forbidden indulgences) made sure that every spare penny was reinvested.

It was a unique system, bordering on socialism, but still it was less un-American than, superficially, it seemed. The pioneers who were pressing westward to Oregon and California differed from the Saints in their
individualism, but shared the belief that a better life could be found toward the setting sun: they too were looking for a white horse and self-sufficiency. Above all, the fundamental commitment to equality which was so essential a mark of nineteenth-century America was manifest among the Mormons. It was subordinate equality, enforced by authority; it was certainly not complete economic equality (Brigham Young believed in the parable of the talents) but the same might be said of the United States itself. As the irrigation regulations show, every Mormon was expected to contribute his labour to society, and every Mormon could claim a stake in return: land, security, prosperity. Nor were even the two most objectionable features of life at Salt Lake City without parallels. Brigham Young’s power as Prophet, Seer, Revelator, Trustee-in-Trust and, for four years, Governor of Utah Territory (appointed by President Fillmore) and the informal power he wielded over executive, legislature and judiciary resembled that of a big city boss, or of Huey Long in Louisiana in the 1930s. Even his use of violence, of which the most disgraceful episode was the Mountain Meadows massacre of 1857, when a party of Mormons commanded by one of Young’s closest henchmen slaughtered 120 Gentile men, women and children, can be likened to massacres of the Indians (the Sand Creek massacre occurred only seven years later). And to Americans in the 1850s polygamy was important, once the sexual titillation of it had been allowed for, because it raised exactly the same questions about states’ rights, individual rights and that instrument which so delicately combined the two, the US Constitution, as did slavery. Did not the philosophy of equal individual rights entitle the federal government to intervene to protect women and slaves alike? The new Republican party thought that it did, and in its 1856 platform denounced slavery and polygamy together as ‘twin relics of barbarism’. Or did the philosophy of states’ rights bar the government from meddling in state matters? That was the view of the South, which hoped to win the support of the Mormons for its own ‘peculiar institution’ if it showed itself ready to accept theirs. Brigham Young saw which side his bread was buttered. He welcomed Stephen Douglas’s doctrine of popular sovereignty
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and made no secret of his opinion that slavery was just what the Negro deserved.
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Deseret was neutral in the Civil War, since although it was part of the North a Southern victory would probably have cleared the way to a successful secession by the Mormons. The anti-polygamy case strikingly resembled the anti-slavery one: polygamy, it was said, was anti-Christian, it destroyed family life, it made its victims degraded and unhappy, it encouraged the worst propensities in males, it was economically antiquated and it threatened to impede the glorious progress of the great American nation by dissolving the Union. Abraham Lincoln might as well have said of polygamy what he did of slavery, that if it was not wrong, nothing was wrong. There was even
an impending crisis which led in 1857 to a miniature civil war, when an army expeditionary force was sent against Salt Lake City. Young, a much wiser man than Jefferson Davis (and in a much weaker military position), prudently defused the crisis by peaceful submission, which left him master of the situation; but the difference in outcome scarcely weakens the force of the overall similarities.

Opinions differ as to just how many polygamists there were among the Mormons. It is at least clear that, like the Southern slave-holders, they were in a minority, and not a large one; but they dominated their people. And Brigham Young knew very well that polygamy effectively cut off the Mormons from their countrymen, thereby rendering them all the more dependent on each other and on him. What does not seem to have concerned him was the corrupting effect it had on the position of Mormon women, even those who were not plurally married. They were fully as devout and brave as the men, and did as much to build up Deseret; in return they were reduced, in the eyes of their menfolk and even their own, to the status of chattels. They were deemed to be naturally inferior, as blacks were by their masters. Their function in life was to be household drudges. Poor farmers found it cheaper to marry several wives, who would get no wages, than to hire male labourers. Young, who did not believe in intellectual aspirations for anyone (there were no books in his houses and he was always at feud with the best educated of the Mormon leaders, Orson Pratt), saw nothing wrong with such a state of affairs. He preferred, however, to stress the spiritual advantages that plural marriage brought. A man with more than three wives was certain to enter the highest heaven (he himself, as a prophet with seventy wives, was going to rule that heaven, or part of it); a wife of such a man would also be sure of heaven, and if she had children, to multiply the Saints on earth, would be given an honourable place there. In exchange for this promise, Mormon women gave away their self-respect and their hope of love. In a way it was a worse bargain than slavery itself.

It seems that even women who accepted or defended polygamy did not on the whole thrive in these conditions. The consolation is that the system did not last long. Victory in the Civil War immeasurably strengthened the federal government, legally as well as materially, and the coming of the transcontinental railroad in the years immediately after the war not only brought Gentiles in large numbers to Utah but made it possible to pour in troops in large numbers at the slightest sign of trouble. And the federal government was implacably anti-polygamist. So the choice before the Saints was again to be submission or flight. Young succeeded in postponing the moment of choice, but after his death it was laid down: abandon polygamy or suffer the consequences. In 1890 the church repudiated the practice; six years later Utah at last became a state of the Union. The struggle to preserve plural marriage had very nearly wrecked the church, and had come near to destroying its wealth; but at least Mormon women could now enjoy the rights which their sisters elsewhere had already begun
to win for themselves; though still, in remote country places, polygamy persists.

The verdict on Brigham Young must in the end be ambiguous. He did great good, and great evil. He was a quintessential figure of the frontier West. His career illuminates its most heroic phase. Its final act may be studied through the career of a simpler, better man.

William Frederick Cody was born on the Iowa bank of the Mississippi on 26 February 1846, a hundred miles or so north of the place where the Mormons were crossing from Nauvoo. His father was a pioneer from Ohio who in 1852 moved with his family to Missouri. Frontier violence there had taken a new turn, getting caught up in the rapidly developing conflict between the free and slave states. Isaac Cody was a Free Soiler, opposed to any new westward extension of slavery. As such he was stabbed, and eventually harried to death in 1857, leaving his eleven-year-old son to be the family’s breadwinner. Young Will was precociously ready for the job. He could already ride and shoot competently; in the years to come, as he grew, so did his skills. He was a child of the West, haunted by the legend of the great mountain men, Kit Carson and Jim Bridger; by tales of Indians and wagon-trains. He was never to lose this boyish enthusiasm: it was to be the secret of his immense success. Inevitably, he was drawn along the Plains trails.

His career was never so heroic as a mountain man’s, but it had adventure enough for any lesser mortal and well represents various phases of Western history.
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He was a trapper. He went prospecting for gold in Colorado when he was thirteen. He was a rider for the pony express which relayed messages right across the continent (until it was killed by the electric telegraph) when he was fourteen. He spent the Civil War in Kansas, fighting at first as a Jayhawker, that is, as one of the Union raiders who gave tit-for-tat to the Bullwhackers, Confederate raiders from Missouri. Neither force had a good reputation and it was as well for young Cody that in 1864, after his mother’s death, he enlisted as a scout with the Ninth Kansas Cavalry, seeing action in Tennessee, Mississippi and Missouri. After the war he married (it was a tempestuous and in the end an unhappy union). He tried to maintain his family by working as a stage-coach driver and (unsuccessfully) as a hotel-keeper; then he took service as a scout for the US army, which was beginning its long struggle to tame the Plains Indians. The railroads came to the West, and Cody found new employment as a buffalo hunter, slaughtering the huge beasts for the rail workers to eat. He had a horse called Brigham (after the Prophet) which he bought from a Ute Indian; together they performed prodigies. Cody would herd a number of buffalo to a point conveniently near the workers’ camp, then, galloping alongside on Brigham,
would bring them down as quickly and economically as possible: he is reported to have regularly killed eleven buffalo with twelve bullets as they stampeded. It was better than a circus to watch. In the seventeen months that he worked for the railroads he killed 4,280 buffalo, and thus earned the sobriquet ‘Buffalo Bill’ under which he became immortal.

He worked as the chief army scout for a few years more. He served during the Sitting Bull campaign in 1876, and immediately after the Battle of the Little Big Horn won a duel with an Indian called Yellow Hand. ‘First scalp for Custer!’ he cried, brandishing the dead chief’s war-bonnet before fitting action to words. In spite of this bloodthirsty episode Buffalo Bill’s attitude to the Indians was always intelligent and (in peacetime) friendly. The Indians liked him, and he defended them against calumny: ‘The defeat of Custer was not a massacre. The Indians were being pursued by skilled fighters with orders to kill. For centuries they had been hounded from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back again. They had their wives and little ones to protect and they were fighting for their existence.’ Perhaps he was the more sympathetic because, as the famous rhyme indicates, he was losing his world as surely as the Sioux were losing theirs:

Across the plains where once there roamed
The Indian and the Scout
The Swede with alcoholic breath
Sets rows of cabbage out.

The army would not need him much longer. The farming frontier was spreading steadily across the plains, while the mining frontier annexed the hills (it was a gold rush in the Black Hills of South Dakota which had touched off the Sitting Bull war). The railroad and the telegraph were stretching across the land, cutting up the great buffalo range; and the buffalo themselves were being slaughtered with staggering thoroughness, not for food or even for sport, but to destroy the basis of the Indian way of life. Soon the Indians would be forced onto reservations, and the last few buffalo would be preserved in zoos, while cows and sheep usurped their pasture and cowboys drove the longhorns on the trails from Texas to the railheads at Abilene or Kansas City, whence they could be shipped to the stockyards at Chicago for slaughter. The life had its own high romance, and its own hard-working, underpaid reality; but it was not the life for Buffalo Bill.

News of his prowess as a hunter and warrior had reached the East some years before. There, urban Americans were entranced by the same magic of the West as had allured young Will Cody. They devoured cheap novels about cowboys and Indians, many of which featured Buffalo Bill as the hero. Rich men found their way by the transcontinental railroad to the West, where their hero in person taught them how to hunt buffalo so long as any were left. Crude melodramas about Bill began to be staged. On a visit to the East, Cody saw one of these shows and saw also that he could
make a lot of money by appearing in them himself, as himself. So with a few Western cronies he toured the cities for several years in a preposterous farrago called
Scouts of the Plains
, in which he slaughtered hundreds of Indians with every bullet, while simultaneously courting, as a tender swain, a tender-hearted lassie. He was vastly successful everywhere, but when his sister saw the play he rebuffed her congratulations: ‘Oh Nellie, don’t say anything about it. If heaven will forgive me this foolishness, I promise to quit it for ever when this season is over.’