The point of view informing this book is that the history of Salt Lake City is "painfully rich and diverse." By that I mean several things. First of all, Salt Lake City is no ordinary place. As historian Dale L. Morgan observed in an essay written fifty years ago, it has always been a city "with a hard-gutted individuality and a contradictory charm." For folk singer, storyteller, labor activist, and political radical Bruce "Utah" Phillips, writing in the liner notes of his compact disc, The Telling Takes Me Home, Salt Lake City has "a separate culture and a unique historical background which continues to affect the lives of its citizens in quite unusual ways. The twenty years I spent there had me pretty well convinced that Utah was typical of the rest of the country, which, I later discovered, it is not. When the Tourist and Publicity Department advertises in national magazines the delights of a visit to ?The Different World of Utah,' believe me, they are not just playing with words."

By "painfully rich and diverse," I mean also that the city's history is extraordinarily interesting. For the teenage daughter of friends of mine returning to Utah in 1985 after living in New York City for five years, Salt Lake City felt like the television situation-comedy of the 1950s, Leave It To Beaver, by which she meant something like "bland and one-dimensional." Though there is that about Salt Lake, there is much more, and there always has been. For me, film-maker Trent Harris's characterization of Salt Lake City as "a whacked out kind of place" comes nearer the mark. "The subtext in this town is amazing," he says. "This is my favorite place in the world." On the surface placidity and complacency seem to reign, but upon probing deeper, one finds "many different kinds of people cheerfully laying dynamite in the hidden cracks." In an April 19, 1999, review in The New Yorker magazine of the movie SLC Punk, Anthony Lane says, "The title's clunky, although it does contain useful information; until now, I had no idea there were any punks in Salt Lake City."

Third, Salt Lake City s history is complicated and ambiguous, full of paradox and irresolution. It is the story, not just of one people, but of many peoples—many voices, experiences, points of view, traditions, values, and ways of life—and of their complex interplay. Salt Lake has always been a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-racial city, and its past has belonged not to just one group, but to many. This may be the most significant aspect of the city's history, but it has not always been understood, and perhaps the single most important task historians can undertake is to make that point and explore its dimensions and implications. After all, the ancestors of contemporary Native Americans began living here at least 11,000 years ago. Since then many others have come, including Mormons, seeking to build their Kingdom of God on Earth: African-American fur trappers, slaves, and soldiers; Catholic Italian laborers; Hispanic railroad section hands and farm workers; and peoples from Southeast Asia and the islands of the South Pacific. The first female state senator in the United States, Martha Hughes Cannon, was elected in Salt Lake City in 1896, and the nation's second Jewish governor, Simon Bamberger, was elected twenty years later. In the early twentieth century, Utahns voted more than a hundred socialists into office throughout the state, and the Utah State Federation of Labor was one of five state federations to officially endorse the Socialist Party of America, advising its members in 1911 to "aid in the propaganda of Socialism that we may hasten the day when the emancipation of the working class from the bonds of wage slavery shall be proclaimed in America and throughout the world." During the Great Depression of the 1930s, when Utah's unemployment rate was the nation's fourth highest at 36 percent, the Communist Party staged protest marches, rallies, and hunger strikes involving thousands of people. In the late 1940s, Fletcher Henderson, a nationally known bandleader and colleague of Duke Ellington, operated a jazz club in North Salt Lake. In 1948 the Radio City Lounge, reputedly the oldest gay bar west of the Mississippi, opened in Salt Lake City and remains under the same ownership and in the same location today. Christian Anarchist Ammon Hennacy, who served time in federal prison during World War I for his pacificism and in the 1920s and 1930s worked in New York City with Dorothy Day on her Catholic Worker newspaper, came to Salt Lake in 1960 and conducted his "one man revolution" until his death a decade later. During the 1960s a vibrant counter-culture emerged, and in the mid-1990s the request of students at East High School to form a club for gays, lesbians, and their straight friends, both polarized the community and gained national attention.

In the last generation or so, historians of the Utah experience have expanded their view and broadened the scope of their inquiry, producing a more nuanced account of the past than ever before. Even so, much of Utahs complexity remains relatively unknown or is too often not taken into account nor its implications explored. Many voices and stories are still missing, and it remains too easy to see Utah history as essentially the account of one people with all others secondary and marginal, peripheral to the main story. A growing number of forces and groups work to perpetuate what might be called "The Official Story." Self-destructive myths and stereotypes about Utah's past, often cultivated, both consciously and unconsciously, by the rich, the powerful, and the privileged, abound. It continues to be easy to have one kind of history and difficult to have another. Plato's words resonate: "Those who hold the power also tell the stories."

What I also mean by characterizing Salt Lake City's history as "painfully rich and diverse" is that it is not just the peaceful story of progress, if indeed it is the story of progress at all, not merely the epic tale of a brave people trying to demonstrate what the human spirit, liberated from prejudice, ignorance, and oppressive authority, could do in a remote area of the United States. Salt Lake City has emerged from the crucible of conflict—conflict based on a number of factors, including race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. This means that in order to understand its history we must go beyond merely acknowledging the presence and contributions of diverse groups and points of view, as important as that is, and examine the relationships that have existed among them, in particular among dominant and subdominant groups, the relatively powerful and the relatively less powerful, the privileged and less privileged. Though this involves many "hard to hear" stories, the goal is not to shift from "feel good" to "feel bad" history, but to comprehend more accurately the nature of the society to which we belong, the history of the groups and traditions with which we interact, and the meaning of the ideas and experiences we encounter. Failing to do so binds us—locking us into unfruitful patterns of the past and denying the possibilities of the future.

A book like this rests on the specialized research and insights of many scholars. I would particularly like to acknowledge my obligation to Thomas G. Alexander, James B. Allen, Leonard J. Arrington, Tom Carter, Ann Chambers, Howard A. Christy, Ruth Fincher, Lawrence Foster, Peter Goss, Robert Gottlieb, Dolores Hayden, Jane M. Jacobs, Leslie O. Kelen, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Kathryn L. MacKay, Helen Zeese Papanikolas, John A. Peterson, Charles Sellers, Jan Shipps, John Sillito, Linda Sillitoe, Eileen Hallet Stone, and Peter Wiley.

I am grateful to the staffs of the Utah State Historical Society Library, the LDS Church Historical Department, and Special Collections at the University of Utah's Marriott Library for assistance in obtaining photographs and other material.

Davis Bitton kindly read an earlier version of the manuscript and offered valuable suggestions.

Nancy D. McCormick selected most of the photographs for an earlier version of this history and wrote most of the captions, and did so with considerable knowledge, skill, and insight.

John R. Sillito and Linda Sillitoe are long-time friends and collaborators. I am grateful for their friendship and support, and I admire their work, their strength, and their courage.

Lisa has challenged me to think and rethink. She has provided insight, inspiration and support, light, liveliness, and love.

Mormons intended that Salt Lake City be a community devoted to God and organized to carrying out his will. They sought to create a self-sufficient, cooperative, egalitarian, and authoritarian society, one dedicated, as Christopher Lasch says, "not to individual enrichment but to the collective well-being of the flock." Though they never completely achieved their goal, for the first twenty years or so they came close, accomplishing, as Leonard J. Arrington points out, impressive feats of planning and development without generating the inequalities associated elsewhere with industrial progress and without even developing a money economy. Through the 1850s and 1860s, Salt Lake City was a closely woven fabric with only a few broken threads. Until the 1870s, the city's population was more than 90 percent Mormon, and the Mormon church dominated every aspect of life. It directed the physical movements of its people, managed economic affairs, controlled politics, and exercised a decisive influence over marriage and family relations. As Dale Morgan says, the hand of the Mormon church was "ever active and ever present." Utah filmmaker Trent Harris says all of this in a somewhat different way. For him, Salt Lake City "was settled by a seriously radical bunch of people. They practiced polygamy, they had their own form of money, they had their own alphabet, they had their own army. They followed an early form of communism called the United Order. ... This place was wild."

From its beginnings the Mormon church had an extensive proselyting program in both the United States and other countries, and church leaders add new members not to live scattered around the world but instead to "gather" together in Zion where, as Richard L. Bushman says, "divine intelligence would illuminate their lives and make them into saints," and they would find refuge from the apocalyptic destruction that would precede the return of Christ. During Salt Lake's first generation, and for many years afterward, Mormon leaders brought thousands of converts to the city, drawing them from the eastern United States and Europe and then redistributing them throughout the west. "Come to the place of gathering," the church's First Presidency urged in 1852, "even in flocks, as doves fly to their windows before a storm." Salt Lake City became that gathering place, as Nauvoo, Illinois, had before it.

During the nineteenth century, more than 100,000 Mormon converts from other countries arrived in Salt Lake City. Though some remained, most settled in other parts of the state. Of the 100,000, more than 50,000 were from the British Isles and another 30,000 from Scandinavia. Most of the others came from Canada and western Europe, mainly Germany and Switzerland. Of those from the British Isles, the vast majority were from England, with fewer from Wales and Scotland and only a handful from Ireland. Most of the Scandinavian immigrants came from Denmark and southern Sweden.

Though they were from all walks of life, they fell mainly into three groups: farmers; artisans and craftsmen; and unskilled laborers. Mormon leaders often encouraged the immigration of people with certain skills deemed necessary at a particular time to help build the Kingdom. Thus in 1849 missionaries to the British Isles were instructed to search out "blowers, moulders and all kinds of furnace operators to immediately immigrate to the valley without delay," and in 1852 church leaders specifically asked for iron workers, porters, woolen workers, comb makers, millers, and coal miners, saying, "These are to immigrate immediately in preference to anyone else."

Most converts came, not as individuals, but as members of family groups, and they came under church sponsorship and supervision. A Perpetual Emigrating Fund provided loans to those who needed them. Liverpool, England, was the central embarkation point where converts awaited space on chartered ships. Once on board, each group had a leader who supervised every detail of their lives, from the assignment of sleeping quarters and the preparation of meals to the direction of social activities and the conduct of religious services. When immigrants reached the United States, agents of the church met them and arranged for the overland journey to Utah, providing them with teams and wagons, instructions in overland travel, and often an experienced Mormon guide. Until the early 1850s, a relief train met each company half way to Salt Lake. After that outfitting posts were established in Wyoming.

New arrivals in the city commonly camped for a few days on either Union Square, the present site of West High School, or Emigration Square, later the site of the City and County Building. The arrival of an immigrant train was often a festive event. Church authorities assigned city residents from various countries to greet their countrymen and women. Tents were set up in advance. Brass bands played. Flags waved. Children sang hymns. Brigham Young or other church leaders welcomed them. Medical aid was available to those who needed it. Food was provided. According to an 1864 Deseret News account, "Immediately on the arrival of the train, the bretheren [sic] and sisters came forward with soup, beef, potatoes, pies, tea, sugar, and coffee to supply the wants of those who had just come in from their long and tedious journey cross the plains." One effect of this kind of reception was to confirm the sense of gathering for both new arrivals and old residents, demonstrating to every faiithful Mormon that Zion was growing and soon would be delivered from its enemies.

During the years that it served as a camping ground for newly arriving Mormon immigrants, the land surrounding the present City and County Building was also a temporary camp ground for overland travellers passing through Salt Lake on their way to the west coast. During the summer of 1862, for example, according to the Deseret News, "Emigration Square has presented an animated moving tableau during the past week. Trains coming and going, emigrants moving in and moving out, in large numbers, have presented a miniature of a little world with ever-changing faces and objects." Soon the square would serve other purposes. Beginning in the 1870s, it was one of the city's main athletic grounds. The primary sport was baseball, but there were also cricket, lacrosse, track and field meets, and special events, including a "Grand English and Cornish Wrestling Tournament" in July 1884. It was also Salt Lake's circus grounds beginning in 1869 when circuses began coming regularly to Utah, sometimes two or three a season, including "Montgomery's Mammoth Circus, Menagerie, and Travelling World's Fair" in 1874 and "W. W. Cole's Great Concorporation of Circus, Menagerie, Aquarium, and Congress of Living Wonders" in 1880. The square was also the location of many 4th of July celebrations until construction of the City and County Building began in 1891.

Immigrants who arrived in Salt Lake City in the fall of the year were often placed into various LDS wards for "wintering," each bishop specifying the number of families his ward could take care of and the particular skills the ward needed in its new members. Once settled, people were subject to a variety of callings from church leaders. They might be asked to help build a new meetinghouse or public building, send a wagon and supplies to aid new immigrants, fill a church position, or serve a proselyting mission. They might also be "called" to colonize a new part of Utah as, even before Salt Lake City was firmly established, Mormons began systematic exploration and colonization of the surrounding area. In order to build a commonwealth to guarantee them permanent security, they intended to settle everywhere they could as quickly as possible, and Salt Lake became the center for launching vigorous expansion into every inhabitable region of present-day Utah, as well as parts of Nevada, Arizona, Oregon, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Idaho, and California. In the first ten years, nearly 100 cities and towns were founded, and, by the end of the nineteenth century, more than 500.

"Calls" to colonize were direct and personal. Brigham Young either took people aside or announced at general conference, held twice yearly, the names of those who were requested to sell their belongings and take their families to settle a pre-selected area, according to God's direction. As Dale Morgan said, "This group from Denmark should go to the Sanpete Valley, where they would feel at home in the considerable Scandinavian colony already established there. These Swiss would go to the Rio Virgin Valley, where they too would feel at home. This brother should go to Fillmore, where good blacksmiths were much needed now. This sister should go to St. George, where her knowledge of cotton growing perhaps could find a field of abundant usefulness."

People might be called several times during their lives. They might have helped to make the desert blossom in one part of Zion, but if their services were needed to build the Kingdom elsewhere, Brigham Young did not hesitate to call them again, and, since the calls came from God, they were viewed as a religious duty and a test of faith, and most people accepted them, whatever the sacrifice, though, according to one observer, "Not all such calls were joyfully received." John D. Lee recalled that "I was called upon by Pres. B. Young to accompany Bro. G. A. Smith to Iron County. I replied that I was willing to help build up Zion in any way that the Lord asked. But to go to Iron County was revolting to my feelings and if I could do as much good by paying $2000 I would sooner do that than go. Pres. Young said that to make a settlement in Southern Utah was one of the most important things to be done and Brother Smith wants you to go with him, and so do I. I consented, leaving house uncovered and my business unsettled." Writing in his diary of his call in 1861 to help settle St. George, John Pulsipher said, "This news was very unexpected to me for I had a good home, well satisfied, and had plenty to do. But when the Apostle George A. Smith told me I was selected to go, I saw the importance of the mission to sustain Israel in the Mountains. ... We go with joy, leaving our happy home, which had cost about four years of hard work and just getting a farm into cultivation that would produce enough in one year to last us half a dozen.

For Mormons the colonization of Utah was a great success. By 1860 they numbered more than 40,000 and had founded more than 100 towns in fifteen counties in virtually every part of the territory. For Native Americans, however, it was another story. Mormon success came at their expense. For them it was a disaster, and they felt the impact immediately. As Kathryn L. MacKay and Larry Cesspooch observe, "The intruders carried childhood diseases, such as measles, whooping cough, and smallpox, which came to kill ninety percent of the peoples of the Americas—who had no immunities to these microbes. During the first winter the Mormon settlers spent in Nuche country, measles spread quickly among the Nuche who visited them. The Mormons buried thirty-six Nuche in one grave alone." According to Howard Christy, "The Indians, especially the Utes, declined rapidly as a result of extreme poverty brought on by usurpation of their lands, selective extermination, disease, and starvation." In 1860 one resident of Sanpete County reported that "the aborigines in this part of the Territory seem to be wasting away very fast, and the band ... has dwindled down to a mere handful of warriors," while Sanpete Indians themselves estimated that half of their children died in infancy and only one-fourth reached adulthood. In his important study, Utah's Black Hawk War, John A. Peterson estimates that by 1865, less than twenty years after the Mormon settlement of Utah began, "the Indians of Utah were probably outnumbered at a ratio of at least ten to one." According to the 1900 U. S. Census, the Native American population of Utah was 2,623—a decline of at least 90 percent during the preceding fifty years since white settlement of Utah began.

It could hardly have been otherwise. According to John A. Peterson, Brigham Young's policy was "to establish settlements on all rivers and streams throughout a tremendously large area and, by thus gaining control of important water resources in a semiarid region, he hoped to keep gentiles out and establish a huge empire where his people could practice their religion in peace. Unfortunately for the Indians, however, the very spots where Young placed settlements, often rich alluvial plains where rivers exited canyons, were the most productive components of the ecosystems upon which they depended for subsistence." As David Madsen points out, "All of Utah's towns sit on archaeological sites. This means that almost every town in Utah today is in a place where Indian people were living when the new settlers came." And, correspondingly, almost every present-day Utah town is a site from which Native Americans were displaced.

When Mormons first arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, both Utes and Shoshonis claimed it, but neither held it securely, and Mormons were thus able to begin their first settlement with little impact on Native Americans and little opposition from them. Once Mormons began expanding beyond the Salt Lake Valley, however, that changed. Their move south into Utah Valley in 1849 put them into the midst of the single most important Northern Ute settlement, a major trade crossroads, and an annual gathering place for all of the Ute bands for 200 miles to the east and south. Displaced from their lands, Utes fought back. Brigham Young countered with an iron fist, ordering a "selective extermination campaign" against Utah Valley Indians. As Linda Sillitoe says, it was "an eerie echo of a Missouri governor's extermination order against Mormons." The men were all to be killed, while the women and children would be spared if they "behaved" themselves. In February 1850 a militia force rode from Salt Lake and laid siege to a group of about seventy Utes led by Old Elk and Stick-in-Head. After two days of fighting, the Indians retreated. Some of them fled up Rock Canyon, where most of them died of wounds, exposure, or their old enemy, measles. The main group travelled south and, with their families, surrendered to the militia.

The next morning twenty-nine Ute men were killed in a confrontation on the ice at the south end of Utah Lake, and the remaining women and children were taken prisoner. The best estimates are that only thirteen of the seventy or eighty male Utes who had engaged in the Utah Valley battle survived. One Ute warrior, An-kar-tewets, and several dozen women and children were temporarily confined at Fort Utah until the following spring when they were taken to Salt Lake City to learn the "arts of civilization." According to John A. Peterson, "Some of them soon died, however, only intensifying native torment.

Within months, most of the survivors had slipped away one by one to carry their bitterness to their people." The extermination policy continued for another year, when, as Peterson says, "a final and gruesome indignity occurred." Dr. James Blake, a non-Mormon army surgeon who was in Utah with Captain Howard Stansbury's expedition, commissioned several Mormons to return to the battlefields to decapitate the corpses that still lay frozen in the snow. Abner Blackburn wrote an account of the affair: "A few days after the last battle with the Indians, a government surgeon wanted James Or and me to take a sley [and] cross over on the ice and secure the Indians['] heads, for he wanted to send them to Washington to a medical institution. [We] hired a sley [and] crost over the ice. The weather was bitter cold. The surgeon to[o]k out his box of instruments and comenced. It took him a quarter of an hour to cut off one head. The sun was getting low and [it was] frezing cold. Jim and me took the job in our own hands. We were not going to wait on the surgeon[']s slow motion. Jerked our knives out and had them all off in a few minutes. They were frozen and come off easy in our fassion. The surgeon stood back and watched us finish the job." According to Peterson, forty or fifty heads "were boxed up and taken to the fort, where they were openly viewed as curiosities by the settlers. Before the grisly contents of the boxes could be delivered to the doctor in Salt Lake City, however, ?the weather turned warm' and ?the indian heads smelt loud' and turned ?green with rot."

The situation was essentially repeated wherever Mormons expanded, in the process turning Indian lands into townsites, grazing fields, farm land, and graveyards, and Utah during the 1850s and l860s might be characterized as a "dark and bloody ground." The major conflicts were the Walker War of 1853-54, the Tintic War of 1856, the Black Hawk War of 1865-72, which took place mainly in Sanpete and Sevier counties and revolved around Indian subsistence raiding to avoid starvation, and the Battle of Bear River, also known as the Bear River Massacre, where, on a cold January day in 1863, Colonel Patrick Connor's U. S. Army force attacked and destroyed a Shoshoni village and killed over 240 men, women, and children—more than died in any other single white/Indian confrontation in the United States in the last half of the nineteenth century.

For Native Americans in Utah, the result by the late nineteenth century, as Mormon leader Jacob Hamblin said in 1880, was that "the watering places are all occupied by the white man. The grass that produc[es] mutch seed is all et out. The sunflowere seed is destroyed in fact thare is nothing for them to depend upon but beg or starve." Sowiette was the head chief of the Northern Utes. His name meant "Man that Picks Fish from the Water," but by 1865 he was telling whites that it meant "Nearly Starved." The history of the white/Indian experience in Utah, in other words, was much the same as it was elsewhere in the United States. Like other Americans, Mormons were so confident of their own way of life that they felt comfortable in imposing it on others. Several points Jill Lepore makes about the Puritan settlers of New England apply to early Mormon settlers of Utah as well: they paid little attention to the reasons Indians had for fighting back, and one of the most disheartening experiences for them following their arrival in Utah was that Indians did not immediately recognize their presumed superiority. Like the Puritans who declared Massachusetts legally a vacuum, even though thousands of Algonquians, Abnakis, Wampanoags, and Pawtuckets lived there, Mormon settlers were intruders who encroached on Native American lands. Indians, once they realized the extent and impact of the white presence, resisted. Conflict ensued, and Native Americans were ultimately defeated. In part the story was one of "contact, conflict, and conquest." As Eugene E. Campbell says, "On the frontier Mormons acted much like other Americans in the east and south: they occupied Indian land, killed resisters, and called upon the federal government to remove Indians to another part of the region."

The last half of the nineteenth century, then, was a time of dramatic change in the lives of Utah's Native Americans. Much of the world they inhabited changed before their eyes as they encountered a people who arrived with a formula for civilizing them and who felt they had a perfect right to invade their land because they saw Indians as savage, primitive, backward people and, as such, obstacles to progress who would either become civilized by adopting Mormon ways or die. According to Apostle John Taylor, who would become the church's third president, when Mormons came to Utah, they settled "among the red savages of the forest. We had no fields to go to and no houses built; when we went there it was a desert—a howling wilderness, and the natives with which we were surrounded were as savage as the country itself." Given such attitudes, faced with an unending flood of people to their lands, and under the onslaught of war and disease, Native American numbers dwindled. Their old ways of life were destroyed, new ways were imposed, and their lands passed into non-Indian hands. One people's expansion entailed another's dispossession. Extending one way of life meant destroying another.

The full story is a complex one, and historians are just beginning to tell it. It is central to Utah's history, however, and not merely a subplot in a larger epic, marginal to the main story—though it is often thought of in that way, with the actions and experiences of Native Americans receiving minimal attention. Yet, as John A. Peterson suggests, writing specifically about the Black Hawk War, Black Hawk (Antonga), Mountain, Sanpitch, Tamaritz, Tabby, Kanosh, and Sowiette influenced the flow of events in early Utah as profoundly as did Brigham Young, Daniel H. Wells, and Patrick E. Connor, and are as deserving of our attention. It is a story in which Native Americans were not merely passive victims, but agents in their own behalf, responding in the range of ways available to them. They made their own history, though, as with all people, and as Karl Marx pointed out, they did so under circumstances not of their own choosing. As Patricia Nelson Limerick says, rather than only victims, it is more helpful for historians to see Native Americans as actors in a complex world of narrowing circumstances and then to ask certain questions: What were the challenges facing them as other people moved onto their land? What did they try to do to get the best they could out of a bad bargain? What strategies did they adopt and why? What were the results? Those who lived through, and participated in, the changes saw things in their own way. Their views were sometimes different from those of white Americans at the time and from what white Americans today might expect them to be. They varied according to time, circumstance, tribe, place, gender, and individual experiences and character, but taken together their views give us an idea of what it meant to live on the other side of the frontier and be subject to "civilization."

During Salt Lake City's first generation, Mormons clearly exhibited an extraordinary willingness to do whatever church leaders directed. In addition to the process of immigration and colonization, that willingness was clearly evident in one of the most dramatic episodes in Salt Lake City's history, the Utah War. On July 24, 1857, while celebrating the tenth anniversary of the city's founding, Brigham Young received word that president of the United States James Buchanan had ordered the largest peacetime army in the nation's history to put down what he took to be a Mormon "rebellion" in Utah and replace Young with a non-Mormon governor. Eventually a peaceful compromise was reached, but not before Mormon leaders had mobilized their people in far-reaching ways. Church leaders called all missionaries back to Utah; directed settlers in outlying areas to leave their houses and move to the central valleys of Utah; and sent a force of men eastward to delay the approaching army by raiding its supply trains, driving off its livestock, and burning the grass before it. Finally, while peace negotiations were still in progress, Brigham Young ordered the "Move South," directing that the entire northern part of the state, including Salt Lake City, be abandoned. Everyone living north of Utah Valley was to retreat to one of several areas in southern Utah. Whether or not they returned would depend on what the army did.

The Move South began in March 1858 and took about two months to complete. According to one report, an average of 600 wagons passed through Salt Lake City each day during the first two weeks of May. In all, 30,000 people joined the rush, packing their belongings, loading their wagons, and leaving dried straw and kindling in the doorways of their houses. According to Brigham Young, "There shall not be one building, nor one foot of lumber, nor a stick, nor a tree, nor a particle of grass and hay that will burn, left in reach of our enemies." When the army marched through Salt Lake on June 26, 1858, the city was almost entirely deserted. Only a few men were left, with orders to "fire" the city in case the army went back on its pledge not to occupy it. According to one officer, "every man, woman, and child had, under the direction of the prophet departed—fled! ... It was substantially a city of the dead, and might have been depopulated by a pest or famine."

The Utah War ended without bloodshed. President Buchanan granted Mormons a "free and full pardon." No troops occupied Utah towns, but instead established Camp Floyd, forty miles to the southwest of Salt Lake, and on June 30 Brigham Young declared, "All who wish to return to their homes in Great Salt Lake City are at liberty to do so."

The Mormon church took the lead in economic as well as political affairs in Salt Lake City, organizing the economy so that all activities contributed to the goal of building the Kingdom. Church leaders saw to it that every business or industry established was one that the community needed and that would work in the interest of the whole, not just of private individuals. As J. Kenneth Davies says, the goal was "the establishment of a self-sufficient, highly diversified, centrally directed economy separate from that of the nation ... not based on private ownership and direction but on a combination of private, state, and Church ownership—with Church direction. The distribution of the goods produced was to be more or less on the basis of equality and need. ... Profits, if any, were to be used to build up the Kingdom, not to enhance personal worth. ... There was to be no accommodation to the economic system of the world." Thus, four months after arriving in the valley, church authorities appointed a committee "to regulate the price of grinding and all things worthy of note." In 1849 the prices mill owners charged were made "subject to the order of the bishops." Beginning in 1859 church leaders discouraged the importation of "luxury" goods, including tea, coffee, tobacco, and liquor, and encouraged local production of all items. "We can produce them or do without them," Brigham Young said. As part of the effort toward self-sufficiency, a program of industrial development was undertaken. In Salt Lake City the Deseret Pottery Factory was established, paper mills were set up to produce paper for the Deseret News, a sugar factory was begun, after which the Sugarhouse area took its name, and a cotton factory and a woolen mill were established. An effort was even made to produce silk. In 1864 the church fixed prices of agricultural products to prevent Mormon farmers from undercutting each other when they sold to mining and military camps, and in 1866 church leaders called for a boycott of non-Mormon merchants. Two years later it formed Zion's Cooperative Mercantile Institution (ZCMI) as a way of lowering prices and driving non-Mormons out of business.

Salt Lake City also had an extensive public works program. Organized in 1850, with Daniel H. Wells as superintendent, it was established to construct public and church buildings and to initiate enterprises not profitable for private individuals to undertake. Its headquarters, on the northeast corner of the temple block, contained carpenter, paint, stonecutting, and blacksmith shops. An adobe yard was nearby, and a lime kiln was established at the mouth of one of the nearby canyons. Within a few years, a machine shop, foundry, and nail factory were also in operation.

The public works program usually employed between 200 and 500 people and on occasion more than 1,000. A wide variety of projects was undertaken, including construction of the Council House, completed in 1855 on the southwest corner of Main and South Temple streets and used for a variety of purposes, such as Mormon church services and sessions of the territorial legislature; the Old Tabernacle, 1851; the Endowment House, 1855; a public bath house near the northern limits of the city on the site where the city- owned Wasatch Springs later was and the Children's Museum now is; the General Tithing Office and Bishop's Storehouse, site of what is now the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, formerly the Hotel Utah; the Salt Lake Theatre; a store for Livingston and Kinkead, the first merchants in Salt Lake; a wall around the temple block and the beginning of a wall around the entire city; an official residence for Brigham Young; private houses for other church leaders; and several schoolhouses.

The Mormon church dominated political affairs in Salt Lake City during its first generation even more than it did economic matters. As one observer said, what existed was "the politics of unanimity." Until 1870 neither local nor national political parties existed in Utah. Only one set of candidates appeared on the ballot. Church authorities had often selected them, and no candidates were elected in Salt Lake without church approval until 1890 when, for the first time in the city's history, non-Mormons were elected as mayor and city councilmen. Voting was limited to "yes" or "no." The "marked ballot" system was used—each ballot was numbered and the number was recorded in the registry next to the voter's name. A Deseret News editorial on January 29, 1878, while denying that marked ballots had been used to identify or ostracize those who voted against church candidates, went on to say that "while no one should be injured in consequence of his breaking loose from his associates and joining with those who oppose them, it cannot be expected that the dissenter will receive as much cordial friendship, countenance and support from his former fellow-partisans as those who remain in accord with them." in effect, the electoral process was seen as the equivalent of the Mormon church practice of regularly "sustaining" its general authorities. Brigham Young made this clear in 1847, saying, "It is the right of the Twelve to nominate the officers and the people to receive them." The theory behind such political practices was that civil government was an arm of the church with specific functions to perform, and the rights of voters were limited to consent. As Parley P. Pratt said in 1844, before Mormons arrived in Utah, "The voice of the people is rather a sanction, a strength, and support to that which God chooses. They do not confer the authority in the first place, nor can they take it away." George A. Smith said he supported a political system in which "the voice of the people consent to the voice of God." Opposition was a tool of the devil that would destroy orderly government. Political parties brought discord, self-interest, and corruption.

During Salt Lake City's early years, the Mormon church directed not only immigration and colonization, as well as economic, political, and social affairs, but through its advocacy of plural marriage, or polygamy, as the ideal marital arrangement it also influenced the most intimate of personal relationships. ("Polygamy" is an umbrella term, embracing both "polygyny"—one husband with multiple wives—and "polyandry"—one wife with multiple husbands. Mormons practiced polygyny, but most people then and since have referred to it as polygamy.) The practice outraged nineteenth-century Americans, and criticism was widespread and intense. Virtually everyone was opposed to it. As Patricia Nelson Limerick says, "The idea of one man in possession of more than one woman would strike most non-Mormon Americans as deviant, licentious, and very interesting—a shocking matter of sexual excess."

Government officials, politicians of both major political parties, private citizens, journalists, ministers, women's groups, and people scattered across the political, social, and religious spectrum denounced it as an immoral and corrupt institution. In 1856 the newly formed Republican Party described black slavery and polygamy as "the twin relics of barbarism" and promised to abolish each of them. Utah had both, and after the Civil War when the first relic had been destroyed, at least officially, attacks on Mormon polygamy intensified, and it came to be characterized as a menace to everything Americans held sacred. Much of the criticism was lurid and sensational, written by journalists out to produce stories that would sell, but many critics were sincere reformers seeking to expose what they regarded as a great moral evil. Whether sincere or opportunistic, however, the thrust of the criticism was that polygamy was an oppressive and dehumanizing system that both victimized women and posed a grave threat to American society. It was based on neither romantic love nor tender sentiment, but on lust. Under it women were treated as sexual objects subject to a man's bidding. Moreover, they were physically exploited, just as African-American slaves had been. One motive for taking a plural wife, it was asserted, was to reduce one's own workload. Each time a man married, he was, in effect, hiring another laborer to work for him. Plural wives were thus seen as essentially slaves, and the parallel was explicitly drawn between black slaves in the South and Mormon women. But, it was argued, unlike blacks, Mormon women were complicit in their own enslavement because they could have chosen not to enter into plural marriages. Thus, as Sarah Barringer Gordon points out, for anti-polygamists of all kinds, polygamy was dangerous because it was fundamentally at odds with liberty—a clear illustration that freedom to choose could be negated by wrong choices.

Mormons responded to these criticisms in a number of ways, pointing out that Old Testament prophets practiced polygamy; that a man could love more than one woman just as he could love more than one child; that polygamy allowed women who might not otherwise marry the chance to be wives and mothers; that it led to a reduction in prostitution and other forms of immorality; and that it meant fewer divorces. This latter claim was undercut by the fact that in 1852, the Utah territorial legislature passed the most permissive divorce statute in the country, allowing a judge to grant a divorce "when it shall be made to appear to the satisfaction and conviction of the court, that the parties cannot live in peace and union together, and that their welfare requires a separation." As Sarah Barringer Gordon says, "Indeed, divorce was more common among nineteenth-century Mormons in Utah than among residents of other jurisdictions in the United States. ... the rate of divorce in Utah was extraordinarily high." In 1870 Utah had the second highest divorce rate in the United States at one divorce for every 185 marriages, while the national average was one divorce per 664 marriages. In 1880 Utah's divorce rate was the tenth highest in the country and twice the national average.

Whatever else they said, however, Mormons' essential point in defending polygamy was that it was a commandment from God. It was not just something they had chosen to do, but something God, in a revelation to Joseph Smith recorded in July 1843, had ordered them to practice (though it was not publicly acknowledged until August 1852), and for that reason, Mormons had little doubt as to its future. According to Brigham Young in 1852, polygamy "will sail over and ride triumphantly above all the prejudice and priestcraft of the day; it will be fostered and believed in by the more intelligent portions of the world, as one of the best doctrines ever proclaimed to any people."

Among polygamy's strongest defenders were Mormon women. As Patricia Nelson Limerick says, "From time to time, Mormon women held meetings to declare their loyalty to the institution of polygamy. At one such meeting, ?for nearly three hours one speaker after another defended polygamy, all believing it to be an important doctrine, given by God to aid in redeeming a sinful world from a condition of sin and pollution to one of holiness and purity." According to Sarah D. Rich, "Many may think it very strange that I would consent for my dear husband, whom I loved as I did my own life, and lived with him for many years, to take more wives. This I could not have done if I had not believed it to be right in the sight of God, and believed it to be one principle of His gospel once again restored to earth, that those holding the priesthood of heaven might by obeying this order attain to a higher glory in the eternal world." In 1884 Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, a daughter of Mormon apostle Heber C. Kimball, and a plural wife first of Joseph Smith and later of Apostle Horace K. Whitney, published a pamphlet entitled Why We Practice Plural Marriage. Polygamy, she said, had allowed her to be a mother, and she extolled the rewards of motherhood. She also attacked the sinfulness of the world, in particular birth control, adultery, and prostitution, saying that polygamy was a way to avoid such evils, and she maintained that the sacrifice polygamy required had made her a better person. Even so, polygamy was clearly difficult for her, as it was for others, and it seems fair to say that, in general, Mormon women did not so much embrace, as put up with, it. As Whitney frankly admitted, she accepted polygamy because, though "I am afraid of no man, I feared to rebel against the Almighty."

Contemporary Americans widely assumed that all Mormons married on a grand scale. Some did. Brigham Young, for example, had what one historian termed an "overabundance" of more than fifty wives, and he fathered fifty-seven children. His counsellor in the First Presidency, Heber C. Kimball, married forty-five women and was the father of sixty-five children. John D. Lee was husband to eighteen wives, and Orson Pratt, who delivered the first public address on plural marriage, to ten, They were exceptions, however. The best estimates are that at the peak in the late nineteenth century, between 20 and 30 percent of Mormon families were polygamous, while for the period as a whole, 10 percent of families were polygamous, 5 percent of married men had more than one wife, and 12 percent of married women were plural wives. The majority of Mormon polygamists, perhaps two-thirds, had only two wives, and only one in twenty had more than four.

Though polygamy was a minority practice, it nonetheless was of great consequence. While oniy a small percentage of rank-and-file Mormons practiced polygamy, virtually all church leaders did, from general authorities down to bishops' counselors. In addition, oniy church leaders could authorize and perform plural marriages. Usually a man did not simply decide to take an additional wife. His church superiors asked him to; he was expected to agree; and church leaders often refused to ordain men to church callings unless they practiced polygamy, or agreed to, while plural wives had a greater chance of holding church positions than those who were not. Finally, because Mormons saw polygamy as the ideal marriage system and an essential part of their faith, and because it clashed so directly with prevailing moral assumptions in the United States and aroused such intense criticism, it served as a device for measuring loyalty to the church. Adopting it was, in effect, a declaration of an overriding commitment to Mormonism, while rejecting it, even in theory, was equivalent to rejecting Zion.

What all of this amounts to is that, during its first generation, Salt Lake was no ordinary city. Its most striking characteristic was the degree of unity and cohesion. The emphasis was on the life of the community as opposed to private satisfactions. Almost a closed society, it offered a life orderly and harmonious for the believer, but difficult for the skeptic. The city's singularity can be overstated. Even so, its single-mindedness, unity of purpose, and willingness to submerge individualism for the good of society were found in few other places.