<<<Back to page 3

“This is the Place”: Zion

According to Mormon lore, after the Mormons were expelled from Illinois, Brigham Young had a vision of a desert landscape in which they would build a new state. When Mormon wagon trains exited the mountains outside Salt Lake City in 1847, he proclaimed it to be the place. It was a place the Mormons intended to defend, referring to themselves and the land positioned together there as “Zion” – a physical and spiritual grounding of the righteous.

The Compromise of 1850

At the time, the land was not yet part of the United States. Three years later, the area was incorporated through an act of Congress known as The Compromise of 1850, a deal which defused a four-year battle between the free and slave states over the land acquired during the Mexican-American War.  While the compromise temporarily reduced conflict between the north and south, it escalated tension between the Mormons and the government.

Over the next several years, arguments grew over individual land claims and the practice of polygamy. At the same time, tensions escalated with Native Americans, who were rapidly being displaced by the growing Mormon population. Gold Rush emigrants put added pressure on scarce resources. All these tensions sometimes erupted into violence committed by Mormons, and some Mormons began to speak against the church. Once again concerned about survival, Brigham Young and other leaders began delivering fiery sermons, using violent language to warn against opposition to the church – from without or from within.

Fearing a Mormon rebellion, in the summer of 1857 President James Buchanan ordered 2,500 U.S. troops to Utah. Fueled by past experiences, Young and others believed this army would drive them out of Zion, or “exterminate” them. In response, claiming that they were about to be “invaded by a hostile force,” they called on Mormons throughout Utah to “resort to the great first law of self-preservation.” Young then declared martial law, remobilized the Nauvoo Legion, and ordered that no resources be given or sold to emigrants passing through Utah Territory.

The violent rhetoric of the moment was also captured in song, as seen in “Up, Awake, Ye Defenders of Zion,” a ballad by Charlie Penrose that remains part of the Mormon hymnal today. It reads in part:

Up, awake, ye defenders of Zion!
The foe’s at the door of your homes;
Let each heart be the heart of a lion,
Unyielding and proud as he roams.

Remember the trials of Missouri;
Forget not the courage of Nauvoo.
When the enemy host is before you,
Stand firm and be faithful and true.

Tho, assisted by legions infernal,
The plundering foemen advance,
With a host from the regions eternal
We’ll scatter their troops at a glance.

Soon the kingdom will be independent;
In wonder the nations will view
Our Zion in glory resplendent;
Then let us be faithful and true.

It was into this charged atmosphere that the Baker-Fancher wagon train arrived, trying to acquire provisions in Utah before the final leg of their trip to California. By fall, they had made their way to a meadow camp in Southern Utah. At that time, there were more than 1,500 U.S. troops at the Utah border, with more on the way. Mormon militiamen were ready. In the rising tension, it was reported that one of the Baker-Fanchers was somehow related to the mob that murdered Joseph Smith, and that some were threatening to join the approaching federal troops. Tension boiled over, and the attack against the emigrants was planned. As I explored in the previous post, the rest is history — contested, heavily negotiated history.

Coda

The Mountain Meadow Massacre is part of the story of America’s Old West, a place and time in which government was inconsistent, ineffective, oppressive, or absent. Fueled by fiery religious rhetoric, concerns about a pending civil war between north and south, and the belief that Americans were destined for unprecedented greatness, people grabbed power and claimed authority whenever and wherever they could. The result was waves of violence that engulfed those who were seen as marginal to this expansive American progress, or as its enemy.

One final illustration of how folk songs of this period negotiated with authority and vice versa: In 1927, the Mormon Church undertook a series of measures to remove from official literature any suggestion that members should seek revenge against the United States for the murders of Joseph Smith. As part of this process, they changed a single phrase in “Praise to the Man” as follows:

Praise to his mem’ry, he died as a martyr;
Honored and blest be his ever great name!
Long shall his blood, which was shed by assassins,
Stain Illinois Plead unto heav’n while the earth lauds his fame.

Although this initiative had no formal name, a few years later people began to refer to it as the “Mormon Good Neighbor” policy, a reference to Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy which advocated non-interference in Latin America. The era of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy ended in 1945 in the lead up to the Cold War, however, when the United States felt compelled to protect the western hemisphere from encroaching communist influence.