The Year of Decision 1846, page 44
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When the money paid to the Mormon Battalion as commutation of clothing reached Israel on the Missouri River, Brigham Young wrote to his soldiers that it was “a peculiar manifestation of the kind providence of our Heavenly Father at this time.” It would buy food for the winter and equipment for the Exodus. But the prophet found that the Battalion had privately forwarded part of their bonus to their families. This impeded the socialization of Israel’s wealth. He secretly dispatched John D. Lee, his son by adoption in the mystical Temple relationships, to intercept the Battalion at or near Santa Fe. Brother John would collect the Battalion pay and turn it over to Brigham for consecration unto the Lord. Private generosity, the prophet thought, signified that some of the Battalion had not hearkened to counsel, and they would get into trouble.
They already had. Passing in apprehension down the western fringe of Missouri, the land of their enemies, they arrived at Fort Leavenworth on August 1 and were outfitted for the march down the Santa Fe trail. But they were still in the midst of the enemy. The War Department was beginning to understand the size of the proposed conquest of the West and had ordered reinforcements for Kearny and Doniphan. Missouri had raised another regiment of mounted volunteers and here it was at Fort Leavenworth, under command of Sterling Price. Price was a politician (lately in the House) with a voice as beautiful as Owl Russell’s — and he had commanded the Missouri jail where the prophet Joseph Smith had been imprisoned. These troops, the Second Missouri, were to prove rowdier and less controllable than Doniphan’s — or Price was less gifted at leadership — but they were just as chary of the Mormons as the Mormons were of them. The Saints could not understand that, however, a band of mostly unwilling conscripts far from Israel, still in the shadow of persecution, and commanded by their prophet to serve the nation which for years they had been commanded to despise. They were frankly afraid of the Pukes. They remained afraid of them till they had put Santa Fe behind them and taken the trail to California.
They spent their time at Leavenworth drilling, performing the ceremonies of the Church, and inhaling rumors. The greater part of Price’s regiment took the trail ahead of them (some detachments were behind them), and on August 13 the Battalion was ordered out. They marched without Lieutenant Colonel Allen, their commander, who had fallen ill at the fort, and in a few days they learned that he had died. Already there had been evidence that the Lord was displeased with them, for a good many had been taken sick and an old woman and her husband, traveling in the family of an officer, had died. It had been necessary to convene them as Saints and preach to them. A violent storm was evidence of Jehovah’s anger, and they were bidden to “obey the word of the Lord and the counsel of His servants.” The high priests laid their hands on the sick, anointing them with the sacred unguents, and then resumed their function as soldiers in the hope that the Lord would bless the work. But some of the brethren were buying whiskey from the sutlers at six dollars a gallon.
The death of Allen seemed a catastrophe. They had liked him, or now thought they had. He had been kind to them, had sanctioned the establishment of their families on the Indian lands, and had not interfered with their rites. Moreover, the prophet had acknowledged him as commander of the expedition, which deputized him in the authority of the priesthood, the succession of which was broken by his death. The prime source of the trouble his successors experienced was the fact that they held commissions only from James K. Polk, not from Brigham Young.
Now the Battalion was alone in the wilderness and counsel was far away. A very troubled soldiery tried to solve the problem by oracle. The Battalion knew in its heart that the priesthood should lead, but the officers, who were lower in the sacred hierarchy than some of their command, took thought of worldly things. They sent word to Polk in Washington — and the War Department ordered Captain Jacob Thompson from Jefferson Barracks to take command, but he never caught up with them. They also notified Brigham Young, who was too far away. When Allen died the commandant at Fort Leavenworth sent Lieutenant Andrew J. Smith of the First Dragoons to, in the words of the Saints, “tender his services to lead the Battalion to Santa Fe,” with the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel.
As captain of Company A, Jefferson Hunt was senior among the officers of the Lord, and Lieutenant Dykes had been consecrated adjutant. Hunt was a sagacious man and a good soldier, who later was to become one of the best frontiersmen in Zion’s deserts. With Dykes he prevailed against the judgment of the priesthood, who were for keeping U. S. officers out of the Lord’s military forces. They pointed out the principal threat that Price, just a few days ahead, might try to bring the brethren under his command, if the new commander was not received — and Price was a Puke and an enemy. Furthermore, if the brethren did not accept government leadership, they might have trouble getting rations — and even, Hunt pointed out, pay. That settled it and after a formal negotiation with the new commander, Hunt telling Smith exactly the terms on which they would recognize him, the priesthood yielded to the secular arm. For a moment Smith seemed to justify their abdication, for he requisitioned from Price twelve days’ rations which, Hunt was convinced, the Pukes would not otherwise have given up.
Most of the Battalion, however, felt that this yielding to authority was a kind of betrayal. They kicked openly and rebelled secretly, generating the aggrieved and righteous obstinacy which the Mormons have always known how to put to the best use. When Brigham Young learned what had happened, he was furious. They had had a chance to escape Gentile control, and they had muffed it. They might have conducted their affairs according to the Lord’s leading — and the prophet’s orders. They might have ended their year’s service at Bent’s Fort, and Brigham began to convince himself that they were not obligated to go farther than that. (As a matter of fact, the Battalion did not go near Bent’s Fort. At the Arkansas crossing Smith took it down the shorter, thirstier route to Santa Fe, the Cimarron branch of the trail. Price’s Second Missouri also took this route.) At Bent’s Fort, of course, they would have been in a position to assist the Exodus next spring, compared to which their contract to conquer California amounted to nothing. Young sent a rebuke southward with Lee. But he saw also that he now had an alibi; so he used it. If any of the Battalion should suffer hardship or disease, if the holy union suits should fail to protect them from Mexican bullets, let them not cite the prophet’s promise. They had disobeyed counsel: be the punishment on their heads.
They began hungry, and in fact were not often to be well fed till they got to Santa Fe. Mr. Polk’s expeditionary forces were always in advance of their commissaries, though the War Department had by now organized a prodigious freightage. The garrison at Santa Fe was not to be satisfactorily supplied till the late spring of ’47, and the Mormons, Kearny, and Doniphan were never to get supplies in satisfactory quantities. The Saints blamed their half-rations on their commander, who was a Gentile and therefore must be conspiring against the children of God. He joined the enormous corps of specters who, in Mormon belief, have inflicted malign cruelties on the chosen. From the beginning up to now all Mormons have always been able to discover a plot to bankrupt, harry, and kill them in the most innocent conversation or facial expression of the most complete nobodies. Theirs is the world’s most hair-trigger martyr complex. The events that first begot it were real enough, God knows, but its survival in our time gives the archeologist a kind of living fossil to marvel at. The peaceful towns of Utah are, in Mormon fantasy, likely to erupt at any moment with the gunfire of Gentiles sworn to put God’s people to death. The Saints cannot understand the complete indifference of the world to the forms and content of their religion: the inability is perhaps a compensation for that religion’s essential dullness.
So there was martyrdom in every order that Lieutenant Smith gave, and the Saints made their daily march in a fever of suspicion and mulish antagonism, employing Israel’s talent for insubordination against him and against their own officers, who, they thought, were toadying to him when they wanted his orders obeyed. Nothing on the record shows that Andrew Jackson Smith was anything but a good man trying to do a hard job in difficult circumstances. He was a first-rate man, a first-rate soldier. His Civil War service was brilliant. He had four years of hard and various action, rose to command a corps, and once defeated Nathan Bedford Forrest — which, it will be recalled, few others ever contrived to do.
But remember that the Mormons were lately from a genuine persecution and that they suffered a daily apprehension of the Missourians ahead of them on the trail. Alone in the desert, far from the warm security of a dictator’s will, they naturally cherished the mania of persecution. The snare of the fowler, the digged pit of the enemy, was forever at their feet. But even if Smith had been able to understand this communal neurosis, he would have found his job no easier. He was a West Pointer and had had eight years’ service with the army’s crack regiment, the regiment of Stephen Watts Kearny and Philip St. George Cooke. Orders were to be obeyed, not referred to a priesthood for interpretation in the light of gospel and debated according to private inspiration. Military duties were to be performed as they arose, and he but vaguely understood the offense when they sometimes interfered with ordinances and ceremonies related to the eternal glories. He took this to be a detachment of the United States Army, and did not understand that it marched under a canopy of revelation, that prophetic dreams and signs from Heaven took priority over the regulations of the high command. He did not understand that he himself was without claim to their obedience, a man outside the law, one of the tribe marked for destruction — as John D. Lee called him, “a poor wolfish tyranicle Gentile who was a second Nero.” He was Nero when he told them to close ranks, mend their pace, or pitch their tents in a place which he thought proper. So daily and hourly he butted into either the voluble argument or the mute refusal to obey orders of a secret society of very righteous men. They had no drill, no sense of military function, no knowledge of how to march — and when he tried to teach them, elders, priests, high priests, Seventies, and men gifted in the interpretation of the holy languages of Heaven invoked either prophecy or the writings of the martyred Joseph to put him in the wrong.
Moreover, he was marching not only soldiers but some daughters in Israel as well. Seven large families and a miscellany of gaffers had been sent on to Pueblo when the Battalion turned south at the crossing of the Arkansas. About twenty-five women remained. Army regulations permitted the enlistment of four laundresses per company. In peacetime frontier garrisons this euphemism looked to the comfort of single men in barracks. But the regulation had enabled some of the officers to bring their wives — and their wives’ mothers — and a few of the enlisted men had contrived to do likewise. The comfort, whims, and prudery of these females had to be considered on the march, and the unhappily wifeless had an additional envy and regret. Clearly the War Department ought to have considered the sacrament of celestial marriage and, like the Mexican Army, permitted soldiers the assuagements of the marital couch.
Furthermore, prayer, counsel, and confession of sins had not amended all the impiety of the Battalion: they continued to get sick. In fact they got sicker, especially with mumps, as they traveled the desert trail in violent heat, drank bad water, and neglected their hygiene. The few wagons and ambulances filled with the disabled. And Gentile tyranny had put a murderer in a position of power. This was Assistant Surgeon George W. Sanderson, christened “Captain Death” by the Battalion and so known in Mormon history ever since. In fact, Mormon history has always treated the march of the Battalion (when not treating it as a desperate adventure which saved the United States) as primarily an episode in attempted poisoning. Sanderson appears to have been a good doctor as doctors went in that, the darkest age of American medicine, and Edwin Bryant, whose judgment was excellent, spoke of his scientific attainments with great respect. But he had no faculty of command or persuasion. With considerable justice, he felt that the Saints were sabotaging the expedition, and he interpreted most of their illnesses as malingering. His prescriptions were the familiar ones of army medicine: give him a CC pill or paint him with iodine and mark him duty. And he had no leverage for obedience except a military one. The Saints found themselves assailed with a profanity such as they had heard only from the mouths of Pukes. Whereas, they well knew, God had reserved cursing as a prerogative of the faithful.
In the light of science, they were right to refuse Sanderson’s calomel. But the light they refused it in was the doctrine of healing oils and the laying-on of hands. Sickness was a jurisdiction of the priesthood, medicine was precisely the mortal error which Mary Baker Eddy was later to make of it, and the elders would “minister” to their flock. Army regulations made no allowance for such exorcisms, however, and Sanderson, bawling his oaths, made them line up and swallow calomel by the spoonful. When they spat it out, Lieutenant Smith had no recourse but to call them insubordinate and to assess penalties — which was further evidence that the Gentiles were conspiring against them. Those who recovered had been cured by the priesthood; those who died, mostly the grandsires but a few enlisted men, had clearly been murdered.
This fear of murder and this holy resentment of tyranny chiefly occupy the journals that have survived. One gets from them, besides, only the daily sense of miracle; the rest is Sanderson or his conspiring master, Smith. The countryside went all but unnoticed and they took strangeness in their stride. (Though Private Bliss notes a proof of the Book of Mormon when they pass through Pecos pueblo, the ruins of an “old Nephite city.”) But, considering how many of them should never have been enlisted, how many were frail, how many elderly — they made a pretty good march of it.
Before the middle of September they caught up with most of Price’s Second Missouri, thus demonstrating, as Kearny’s infantry had done, the superiority of footmen to horse soldiers on such a march. They were, however, on the verge of mutiny, and before long John D. Lee arrived from the prophet, with his faithful friend Pace and his fellow avenger Howard Egan. They learned with pleasure that Young would uphold them in rebellion, and they filled Lee’s ears with their intolerable injuries. (They had acquired a new fear, that the wives and grandams might not be allowed to go on with them from Santa Fe.) Lee gave them counsel and then, as representative of God’s representative, rebuked Smith, their commander, bidding him mend his intolerable ways. Lee was a Seventy (just below the high priesthood in the organization) and he was also one of the Sons of Dan, one of the prophet’s Gestapo. In both capacities he informed Lieutenant Smith and Dr. Sanderson that if they did not “cease to oppress my brethren” he would cut their throats. The lieutenant had to take it, but that night Jefferson Hunt, who was scandalized and better informed about the power of the United States, told Lee that he would order him under guard if he did not stop counseling mutiny. Lee saved that up to report to Brigham, Hunt’s future in the Church was damaged, and Howard Egan was diligent to steal Sanderson’s two skinny mules when he started home. (Somehow that theft shocked Lee.)
Still wearing his shoulder straps, however, Smith kept them going. Beyond Las Vegas, he separated the healthy from the sick and the halt, and hurried them ahead. The rest had to march ignominiously in and out of the company of the Missourians. The advance got to Santa Fe on October 9, the rest three days later. No mutiny. But some of Price’s command were there ahead of them.
An old friend of the Mormons was in command of the town, Colonel Doniphan. Private Hess at once appealed to him not to violate the sanctity of marriage by sending the private’s wife home. The saintly Doniphan at last agreed, though even Adjutant Dykes was disgusted by the plea, and permitted Hess to accompany his wife to the Pueblo. However, the Battalion’s malingering was going to end abruptly now, for it came under a different kind of officer. Kearny, en route to California, had called on his best captain to command the Mormons and had advanced him to a lieutenant colonelcy. From now on the Battalion would take orders from Philip St. George Cooke. Also it would obey them.
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No Battalion diarist reports visions, dreams, or signs in the heavens on September 17. But on that day the valorous wolf-hunters of Illinois finished their job at Nauvoo.
Less than a thousand Saints were left in the City of Joseph. All spring and summer the families had been crossing the Mississippi and taking to the trail, as fast as they could sell their property at five cents on the dollar and buy outfits. Class lines established themselves: the wealthiest and those highest in the priesthood went first, others followed in the order of salability of their real estate. By July so few remained that the mobbers felt secure. They began to fill the little newspapers with threats and indignation again. They rode by night and sometimes even by day, little gangs of armed thugs brave enough to raid outlying farms and kill a widow’s chickens under her very eyes. They had deputies arrest Saints under all the old accusations. Here and there they shot someone who didn’t have his friends with him. Finally they decided that it was safe to hold the wolf hunt.
No reason. Governor Ford says they were afraid that Mormon votes might turn the Congressional election again. Such Mormons as dared to exercise the franchise did in fact vote Democratic in August, in understandable if unjustified gratitude to James K. Polk. But August was over and, besides, there were not enough of them for any politician to fear.
