Despite the colorful issues involved, the book literarily is an uphill pull: Baskin's lengthy quotations from Whitney's overwritten books that inflate a simple declaratory sentence into a paragraph are tedious, while his own stuff, basically a legal brief with reproductions of lengthy court transcripts, letters, and Tabernacle sermons, is equally taxing. Through it all, though, one gets an uparalleled feel for the high seriousness of both rivals and the hammer-and-tongs way in which they made their case. They make the occasional sniping across the fence one sees in Utah today seem small stuff indeed.

During his lengthy career in Utah, Baskin occupied a number of positions from which he could do some real damage to the Mormon hierarchy: lawyer, district attorney, mayor of Salt Lake City, founder of the Liberal Party, and eventually chief justice of the Utah Supreme Court. His political involvements included drafting the Cullom bill of 1869 that, while it was sabotaged in the Senate after passing the House, became the basis of several subsequent laws that combated polygamy and eroded the political power of the priesthood. Also he lobbied successfully for the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 that created the economic sanctions that finally rendered polygamy untenable.

As a prosecutor Baskin secured the conviction of John D. Lee as perpetrator of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, though to his frustration it took place before an all-Mormon jury that allowed the Mormon Church to point to the conviction as justice done so as to forestall any further trials of other participants. By far the longest chapter of the book examines the massacre, in which Baskin anticipates modern historiography by laying the responsibility on the Mormon culture of blood atonement and strict obedience to authority, against apologists like Whitney, who minimize Mormon involvement and blame the hapless emigrants themselves for provoking the Indians, who did the killing rather than the Mormons.

Through it all, particularly in his "Reply" to Whitney, Baskin carefully parries Whitney's characterization of him as anti-Mormon. To the contrary, Baskin maintains that his legal and political activities were attempts to help the rank and file Mormon, whom he saw as victimized by polygamy and theocracy. Utahans will be happier, he argues, if the moral norms of the larger American culture and constitutional rule of law are extended to the territory, and he correctly saw that the big prize of Utah statehood gave him enough leverage to force those changes.

Signature Books is to be thanked for bringing this valuable volume back into print as part of their "Signature Mormon Classics" series. It maps out an important stretch of the road by which Utah made the astonishing change from defiant Mormon theocracy to the most conservatively patriotic of the Red States. No less astonishing is the preternaturally prolific Brigham D. Madsen who penned the lengthy and invaluable foreword at what he calls the "youthful" age of ninety-one!