Mountain Meadows and the Mormon Question
A Religious Refuge Inside an Expanding Empire
When Brigham Young led the Mormons into the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, he intended to build Deseret — a self-governing religious community far enough from the United States to escape persecution. Within a year the Mexican-American War had brought the same valley inside US territory. The story of the Mormon question between 1847 and 1896 is the story of how Washington reluctantly accepted, then forced, this religious community to become a regular American state.
The Mormons were founded by Joseph Smith in upstate New York in 1830. After persecution and Smith’s murder in Illinois in 1844, Brigham Young led the surviving community to the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, then part of Mexico. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo placed it inside the United States.
The Utah War, 1857–58
By the mid-1850s federal officials sent to Utah were complaining that Brigham Young’s theocracy had no respect for outside law. Polygamy — the Mormon practice of plural marriage — had been publicly admitted in 1852 and outraged Eastern opinion. President James Buchanan responded in 1857 by sending an army of 2,500 federal troops under Albert Sidney Johnston to install a non-Mormon governor and assert federal authority. Mormon militia harassed the supply trains, burning forts and stampeding cattle but avoiding direct battle. The standoff — later called the Utah War — ended in 1858 with Young accepting a federal governor while remaining the community’s real leader.
The Mountain Meadows Massacre, September 1857
In the middle of this paranoid summer, on 11 September 1857, around 50 men from a southern Utah Mormon militia, joined by some local Paiute men they had recruited, attacked the Baker-Fancher wagon train — a party of around 140 emigrants from Arkansas heading for California. After a five-day siege, the militia approached the wagon train under a flag of truce, promising safe escort. They then turned on the unarmed party and killed about 120 men, women and older children. Only seventeen children, all under seven, were spared.
The motives were a tangle: war hysteria over the approaching federal army, suspicions that the Arkansas party was somehow connected to the murder of the Mormon apostle Parley P. Pratt in Arkansas four months earlier, plain greed for the wagon train’s livestock and goods, and the encouragement of local Mormon militia leader John D. Lee. After the killings the militiamen swore a written oath of secrecy, and the southern Utah leadership tried to blame the entire massacre on Paiute warriors alone — a cover-up that held for almost twenty years and shielded most of the Mormon militia from prosecution.
Federal investigators reopened the case after the Civil War. John D. Lee was tried twice; his second trial, in 1876, ended in conviction and his execution by firing squad at the massacre site itself in March 1877. Lee was the only person ever executed for the killings, and many at the time and since have argued he was made the scapegoat for a wider Mormon militia leadership. Brigham Young died in August 1877, five months after Lee’s execution; his exact role in ordering or authorising the killings remains contested by historians today.
Federal Anti-Polygamy Laws
Mormon-federal relations stayed tense for decades after the war. Congress targeted polygamy with three escalating laws. The 1862 Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act made plural marriage illegal in US territories but went largely unenforced because of the Civil War. The 1882 Edmunds Act made polygamy a felony, disqualified polygamists from voting and holding office, and removed Mormon control of Utah’s electoral machinery. Tensions peaked when the 1887 Edmunds-Tucker Act dissolved the Latter-day Saint Church as a legal corporation and confiscated much of its property.
Faced with this assault on the Church’s survival, Mormon president Wilford Woodruff issued the 1890 Manifesto ending the Church’s official sanction of new plural marriages. With polygamy formally renounced, Congress agreed to admit Utah as the 45th state in January 1896, almost half a century after Brigham Young first reached the valley.
The Mormon question matters because it shows the United States wrestling with religious diversity inside its expanding empire. Federal policy treated plural marriage as a threat to the family and to the rule of law — the same federal state that crushed the Confederacy and corralled Native nations onto reservations also forced the Mormons to abandon a defining religious practice as the price of full citizenship. Different historians frame this story differently: some see federal action as a defence of constitutional law and women’s welfare, while others see it as religious coercion and the suppression of an alternative American community.
The federal-Mormon settlement was forced by three escalating laws: the 1862 Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, the 1882 Edmunds Act and the 1887 Edmunds-Tucker Act. The 1890 Mormon Manifesto ended the Church’s sanction of new plural marriages, opening the path to Utah statehood in 1896.