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Lonesome Roving Wolves

Mormon Battalion Monument in Presidio Park, San Diego, California.

If a primary purpose of folk music is to give voice to a particular place and its people, how does it function when a particular people have no place? After the assassination of Smith, Mormons headed west. By spring of 1846, they had crossed into Iowa and Nebraska, where about 15,000 became stranded during a bitter winter. They had no clear destination. Many had already died. Appeals for help to the United States government went unheeded. As a last resort, Brigham Young sent an emissary to Washington D.C. Arriving eight days after Congress declared war on Mexico, the emissary urged President James Polk to help by employing the Mormons to develop and defend western routes. Polk suggested instead that the Mormons volunteer 500 men to fight with the U.S. Army. At the urging of Young, 543 men enlisted, most very reluctantly. A little over a dozen also took their families.

That summer, the Mormon Battalion began a yearlong, 1,850 mile trek to the California coast. They marched out of Iowa to the popular folk song “The Girl I Left Behind.” During the march, they sung “Praise to the Man” and other songs of their own making. One such ballad, “Lonesome Roving Wolves,” written by Mormon Battalion member and official musician Levi Hancock, describes the burial of a man who died during the march. It’s sung here by Rosalie Sorrels:

(Lyrics. You can watch Sorrels sing and talk about the ballad as part of a panel discussion here.)

The Mormon Battalion headed south, through Santa Fe and on to San Diego, joining the rest in Utah after the end of the war. Their service was critical to the westward expansion of the United States: during the Mexican-American war the Mormon Battalion helped secure much what is now the American Southwest, prevented John C. Fremont‘s mutinous bid for control of California, and opened up southern wagon routes.

Mormon Battalion survivors’ 50-year reunion, 1896, Utah.

The only religion-based military unit in U.S. history, the Battalion was technically a volunteer army. But based on their recent experience, many Mormons viewed participation as a deal with the devil. In fact, ten years later, the U.S. Army would head towards Utah to fight the Mormons themselves. And, with the U.S. troops camped just outside Utah borders, the Mormons would slaughter almost all members of the Baker-Fancher party, to pretty much universal revilement:

…the massacre at the Mountain Meadows, the unnumbered other crimes, which have been and will yet be committed by this community, are but preliminary gusts of the whirlwind our Government has reaped and is yet to reap for the wind it had sowed in permitting the Mormons ever to gain foothold within our borders. They are an ulcer upon the body politic. An ulcer which it needs more than cutlery to cure. It must have excision, complete and thorough extirpation, before we can ever hope for safety or tranquility.
                                                        — Brevet Major J.H. Carleton’s formal report 
                                                            on the Mountain Meadows Massacre (1859)

As we have seen, Major Carleton was not the first to suggest that the Mormons deserved “extirpation.” “Lonesome Roving Wolves” is therefore not just a chronicle of the loneliness, death, and danger that the Mormons faced as they travelled west. It is also a haunting description of how Mormons were and would continue to be seen in the eyes of others – an isolated but expanding band of dangerous predators that needed to be quelled.

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