The Salt Lake Tribune, Martin Naparsteck
"I could not have believed that in the 19th century, in enlightened christian [sic] America, a community of people would be found so utterly depraved and wicked," Jotham Goodell, a Presbyterian minister, wrote about the Mormons with whom he and his family had spent the winter of 1850-51.

Goodell clearly had an unpleasant stay in Utah, and his views, published in nine letters that appeared in The Oregonian, a Portland newspaper, in April, May, and June of the following year, reflect his animosity.

As lopsided as A Winter with the Mormons is, it provides insighte and specific examples that help explain a well-known phenomenon: many non-Mormons passing through Utah in the mid- and late nineteenth century felt enmity toward Mormons. For anyone who has read more favorable accounts of nineteenth-century Mormons in Utah, A Winter with the Mormons will provide a useful alternate perspective. (Those who have read only negative accounts should read more widely.)

Goodell, who was taking his family to Oregon, decided to stay in Utah, near present-day Ogden, rather than risk traveling in the winter. He and other travelers at his campsite, some headed for California, were dependent on trade with Mormons for food and supplies. Goodell wrote in one letter that "the price of flour, as regulated by the high council, was at the time $10 per hundred pounds, when sold to Mormons, but $25 when sold to the gentiles." Goodell tried to negotiate a good price for flour with one person, but a woman called out, "That man is a gentile, you know that Brigham [Young] says we must not sell flour to the gentiles for less than $25 a hundred." Complaints about unfair business practices are among the most frequent complaints in the letters.

Another is about Mormon justice. Goodell, in one story, tells about a Mormon stealing some of his wheat, so he went to him and asked that the wheat be returned. The Mormon agreed, but then charged Goodell with stealing the wheat. A trial was held and the jury decided that there was "No cause of action," so the charges against Goodell were dismissed. In most jurisdictions that would mean the accused would not have to pay anything, but the Mormon judge said Goodell had to pay the court costs. Not being found guilty cost Goodell $75.

Goodell also objected to censorship of the mail. Goodell wrote, "No letter deposited in the post office, by either gentiles or Mormons, ever left the valley without its contents being known! If it contained nothing prejudicial to the Mormons, it was suffered to fulfil its mission, but if it did, it was destroyed."

Still another complaint repeated with several examples was Brigham Young's threats against non-Mormons. In Goodell's ninth and final letter, he reprints a letter from Thomas McF. Patton, who would later be elected to the Oregon House of Representatives. Patton reported on a speech he heard Brigham Young give: "Young then and there said, among other things, that the 'gentiles' were now coming into the Lord's valley, and that if they said anything derogatory of [the Mormons] or their religion, it was better to behead them at once."

Mormons also imposed taxes on gentiles passing through Utah, Goodell writes. The tax was two percent of the assessed value of the travelers' property, including livestock, wagons, and other possessions. The travelers were told that if they did not pay the tax, their property would be confiscated. Goodell wrote, "This tax was not only unjust but cruel to the last extreme. We were traveling the vast desert ... We had been compelled by distress to stop ... during the winter months. This [tax] was an item of expense in the journey which few had made provisions for. Many of the emigrants had already expended their last cent, and were now living on coarse bread, without meat or vegetables."

Goodell also wrote that Mormons incited Indians to attack non-Mormons, that Mormons used a lot of profanity ("by far the most profane people I ever met with"), that "there is a strong probability at least, that United States'[s] citizens, while passing through Brigham's territory have been assassinated," and about the willingness of Mormon women to agree to be in a polygamist marriage ("Callous indeed must be that female heart, who can see without emotion, a stranger enthroned in her husbands's affections."). A Winter with the Mormons is strong stuff, certain to annoy, even infuriate, devoted members of the church, and to provide fodder for those who already don't like the church. For the rest, it's a mesmerizing rendition of one important perspective on early Utah history.

Journal of Mormon History, Ronald O. Barney
A "most deluded people," an "ungodly people," a "den of infamy . . . utterly depraved and wicked," wallowing in the "mysteries of [their] abomination" (26-28) is the report Oregonians read about the Latter-day Saints from the pen of Jotham Goodell after he spent the winter of 1850-51 in Utah. Eight more letters similarly characterizing Brigham Young and his followers, all published between April and June 1852 in Portland, Oregon's The Oregonian, fulfilled Goodell's vow that if he were ever to escape the Mormons' grip he would "expose the corruption of that people" (28). David L. Bigler's recent edition of Goodell's letters makes available this previously obscure commentary on Utah and the Mormons soon after their establishment in the Great Basin.

Jotham Goodell, born in 1809, was a Massachusetts native wliose ancestors arrived in America in 1634. Very well-educated for the time at Dartmouth College and Andover Theological School, Goodell embraced the Christian ministry, becoming a Presbyterian clergyman coincident to his marriage. His national heritage and religious zeal combined to energize his mission of Christianizing America in Calvinistic orthodoxy. He ministered initially in Upper Canada before settling in Ohio. A published critic of Alexander Campbell's assault upon mainstream Protestantism, Goodell's training and belief fostered his impatience at what he considered heterodox religious aberrations. In 1850 at age forty-one, he, his wife, and seven of their ten children departed from Ohio with Oregon as their destination. Bigler hypothesizes that popular notions of Oregon's economic opportunity probably inspired the move. Their journey westward consumed over a quarter of the year. Rather than risk his family's safety in mountain snowstorms, Goodell decided to winter in Salt Lake City along with several thousand other travelers, many on their way to the California gold fields. Their chosen winter quarters was Lorin Farr's young settlement, some forty miles north of Salt Lake City, now part of Ogden.

A number of those who stayed among the Mormons en route to Oregon and California, beginning with the Gold Rush in 1849, left written records describing their visits among the Mormons. Generally their accounts were favorable toward the Saints, their way of life, and their hospitality, despite religious and social differences. Bigler argues, however, that most accounts lauding the Mormons were written by those whose time among the Saints was brief while those compelled to endure a lengthier tenure in Utah had a more negative experience. Not deluded by the Mormons' superficial hospitality, Bigler continues, "The longer some remained ... the more their attitudes turned against their Mormon hosts" (13).

To describe the Goodells' experience that winter in Farr's little hamlet at the mouth of Ogden Canyon as negative is an understatement. Initially, Goodell claims, "we were treated with much civility" (35). But the "sky of Mormon civility soon became overcast with lowering clouds" (38). Goodell's complaints focused primarily upon the Mormons' theocratic corruption and manipulation, polluting the American ideal: "The Jesuits of the 16th century were not more deceitful and cunning than are the leaders of the Mormons," he charged (38). Among other egregious behaviors, Bigler states, the Mormon leaders' flagrant abuse through "arbitrary court actions, disloyalty to the United States, denial of free speech, lack of political freedom, control of markets, and discriminatory taxation" stirred Goodell's hostility toward the Saints (15). Before the winter ended, Goodell, with about one hundred other disgruntled overlanders, moved north to the scantily populated site of present-day Willard, Utah, "to place as much distance between themselves and their Mormon neighbors as they could" (15).

Goodell's conflict with Utah's settlers began soon after his arrival in September 1850 at Farr's settlement during the immediate aftermath of the accidental slaying of Terikee, a Shoshone chief, by local resident Urban Stewart. In retaliation, the Indians had killed another local settler named Campbell. The scandalized Goodell claimed that the Mormons neglected Campbell's remains, appropriated his worldly goods, and callously left his survivors to mourn without comfort. It was "at this point," he wrote, "that my eyes began to be torn open to the abominations of that people" (42). Thereafter, apparently, Goodell's five-month tenure among the Saints was one outrage after another: harassment, threats, and confiscation of his wealth. Nothing was too low for the Mormon "cut-throats" (107). Especially aggravating was the "tax" extorted from him just as his company prepared their getaway from the Saints' clutch. Fearing the clandestine attentions of the "blood-thirsty Danites" (27), Goodell shuddered but complied to effect his escape from Brigham Young's treachery. Fleeced by the Saints, his party "wept forjoy" (126) in April 1851 when they reached the Snake River Valley en route to Oregon, having "scaled the mountain walls of our prison" (125).

Central to determining the value of this collection of letters is the question of Goodell's credibility in appraising Mormonism. Is his recital of Mormon abuse just another anti-Mormon diatribe? Or does corroborating evidence support Bigler's argument that Goodell's report is actually representative of the majority of those who spent more than a week or two among the Mormons? Bigler, clearly an advocate of Goodell's contentions, supplements the letters with three corroborative appendices which comprise almost a third of the text. Two of the them are the brief printed testimonies of Major William Singer in the St. Louis Intelligencer, 7 August 1851, and Asa Cyrus Call in the Sacramento Daily Union, 28 June 1851. The third and lengthiest is a fifty-four-page reproduction of U. S. President Millard Fillmore's weighty Executive Document No. 25, Message from the President of the United States (1852). The prevailing sentiment of this document reflects the reports of three federally appointed territorial officers, Justices Lemuel G. Brandebury and Perry E. Brocchus, and Broughton D. Harris, territorial secretary, who, after witnessing first-hand the Mormon resistance to anything federal fled Utah together in September 1851. While it is unlikely that Fillmore's report reached Goodell's hands before he penned his letters to The Oregonian, the primary charge of the erstwhile officials--the un-Americanism of the Mormons--parallels Goodells charges. (The president's message to Congress also includes letters to President Fillmore from Brigham Young and John M. Bernhisel, territorial delegate to Congress, and a memorial from the Legislative Assembly of Utah Territory to the president of the United States, all of whom tried to impress upon the American president Mormon allegiance to the United States.)

Goodell's eyewitness voice denouncing Mormonism as being antithetical to his countrymen's republican ideals must be given credence. Goodcll, trained in nineteenth-century American mores, qualifies as an honest man, candidly reporting his experience. Questioning, for example, the reasoning of a Mormon resident of Weber County who approved a petition from the legislature setting boundaries for Ogden City, the man replied, "Brigham has sent the form of the petition, counseling us to sign it, and that is all that concerns us" (56), shocking Goodell's democratic sympathies. His letters typify the chronic polarity between Mormon singularity and American pluralism. But eyewitness deprecation formed only part of Goodell's report.

Portions of his letters, describing circumstances of which he was not an eyewitness, perpetuate the tale-bearing and vitriolic baggage characteristic of other nineteenth-century anti-Mormon writers who wrote outside their experience, reliant upon the ubiquitous rumors of Mormondom's horrors. To substantiate his claim of emigrants being "murdered in cold blood," he emphatically declared that an overlander, recognized by Mormons as being a former Missouri mobocrat, was dispatched by the Saints when Brigham Young said, "[M]ark that man!" "[I]t was enough," Goodell claimed, "he never passed the Weber!" (79; emphasis Goodell's).

While Bigler's edition of Jotham Goodell's testimony aids our understanding of Mormon relations with non-Latter-day Saints, Bigler fails to acknowledge that many other "outsiders" living in Utah in the 1850s avoided Goodell's troubles, largely by adopting a different attitude.¹ Despite Goodell's claim of neutrality toward the Mormons upon entering Utah, his religious fervor obviously shaped his encounter with the Saints. Bigler could have cited, for instance, the account of William Bell, an agent for Salt Lake City merchants Livingston, Kinkead & Co., who left Utah in 1857 having lived among the Mormons since 1849. Interviewed by a New York Herald reporter, Bell indeed describes troubled Mormon/Gentile relations in Utah but attributes them primarily to the suspicion and judgmentalness of hypercritical visitors like Goodell:

The troubles between the Gentiles and the Mormons have sprung from meddling, unnecessarily and unwisely, on the part of the former. Many had come to Utah with the idea that the new faith and "peculiar institution" [polygamy] were matters which everybody had a right to criticise, talk about, joke about, ridicule and oppose, and such have invariably got themselves into trouble; but others who have gone there, and who have regarded Mormonism and polygamy as matters pertaining to the Mormons, and attended to their own affairs, have lived in peace and been respected by the community. That a prejudice exists against Gentiles in general is very certain, but it has no practical results, if they mind their own business (New York Herald, 23 February 1858, reprinted in the Deserel News, 12 May 1858).

In short, Bigler's portrayal of Jotham Goodell's experience in Utah in 1850-51 contributes to our understanding of the time, the place, and the people (especially Goodell himself), but it does not qualify for the bellwether status that he claims for it.

RONALD O. BARNEY (frontporch_barney@hotmail.com) is Senior Archivist in the Church Archives, Family and Church History Department, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City.

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NOTES:

1. For example, two noted non-Mormon observers who exceeded a week or two in Utah wrote about their experience without Goodell's vitriolic invective, despite their differences with Brigham Young and the Saints (J. W. Gunnison, The Mormons or Latter-day Saints, in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake: A History of Their Rise and Progress, Peculiar Doctrines, Present Condition, and Prospects Derived from Personal Observation during a Residence among Them [Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1852], 30-34, 64-67, 73-75, 140-43, 160-61, 164-65; and William Chandless, A Visit to Salt Lake; Being a Journey Across the Plains and a Residence in the Mormon Settlement's at Utah [London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1857; AML reprint, 1971], 35, 54-55, 141, 175, 178, 181, 188-89, 192-96, 230-31, 265). Other visitors found the Latter-day Saint climate more to their liking than what they left behind or future prospects. One overlander bound for California riches in 1849 was Albert K. Thurber who, while resting among the Mormons for several months, converted the faith when he "was satisfied in regard to the Kingdom of God and the duty of honest men toward the Kingdom" (A. K. Thurber, "Journal and Diary of Albert King Thurber," in Treasures of Pioneer History, compiled by Kate B. Carter, 6 vols. [Salt Lake City: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1954], 3:272. For a broader overview of this time, see Craig S. Smith, "The Curious Meet the Mormons: Images from Travel Narratives, 1850s and 1860s," Journal of Mormon History 24, no. 2 (Fall 1998): 155-81; Edwina Jo Snow, "British Travelers View the Saints, 1847-1877," BYU Studies 31, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 63-81.