Establishing Zion
Establishing Zion: The Mormon Church in the American West, 1847-1869
Eugene E. Campbell
Unlike previous writers, for whom early Utah was an enlightened, genteel New England society displaced by religious persecution, Eugene Campbell describes a rugged people at the frontier of the nineteenth-century American West. Like other immigrants, Mormon pioneers fought Indians—sometimes taking scalps—battled mountain men, and supported vigilante justice. Responding to what he believed was harassment from federal judges, Brigham Young wrote to Utah’s representative in Washington, D.C., “Tell Mr. Franklin Pierce that the people of the territory have a way—it may be a very peculiar way but an honest one—of sending their infernal, dirty, sneaking, rotten-hearted, pot-house politicians out of the territory, and if he should come himself it would be all the same.”
In the late 1850s, United States president James Buchanan sent 2,000 troops to the desert territory to subdue the reportedly rebellious Mormons. Angry Utahns responded by waging guerrilla warfare and adopting a scorched-earth policy. After the military campaign, Mormon settlers continued to assert their independence in other ways—by refusing to associate with Gentile outsiders, by fixing wholesale and retail prices, and by capitalizing on the homogenous, regimented structure of their community to import half a million immigrants to the new zion.
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Eugene E. Campbell was a professor of history at Brigham Young University until his death in 1986. He was the co-author of three works—Fort Bridger: Island in the Wilderness, Fort Supply: Brigham Young’s Green River Experiment, and Hugh B. Brown: His Life and Thought—and the co-editor of Utah’s History, contributor to The New Mormon History: Revisionist Essays on the Past, as well as author of the foreword to The Essential Brigham Young. He was a founding member and early president of the Mormon History Association.
