Deseret

The State of Deseret was a Mormon political community in what is now Utah. Though its period of official existence was short, from 1849 to 1850, “Deseret” more broadly refers to the Mormon community in Utah in its early decades, after its migration there in 1847 and before the admission of Utah into the Union as a state in 1896.

Officially known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormon Church was founded in 1830 in Fayette, New York, by Joseph Smith, Jr., who that year published the Book of Mormon, which he claimed to have translated from gold plates bestowed by an angel. (The name “Deseret” is said to mean “honey bee” in this book.) Based on the Book of Mormon and private revelations, Smith preached what he considered to be a restored version of Christianity, with a distinctive, highly centralized church structure and a strong emphasis on missionary activity and dedication to the community. The church grew rapidly, attracting converts from England as well as the United States. But the Mormons, or Saints as they called themselves, were repeatedly forced to move because of persecution from neighbors who objected to their unorthodox beliefs, communal economic practices, and bloc voting in public elections, among other sources of contention. The church’s advocacy of polygamy, by which men could have more than one wife, also attracted condemnation, although it did not become an official doctrine until 1852.

In the 1830s the church moved from New York to Ohio to Missouri to Nauvoo, Illinois. In 1844 Smith and his brother Hyrum were assassinated by a mob while being held in prison in Carthage, Illinois, on charges of treason. A schism developed over who should succeed Smith as leader of the church, but the largest group rallied behind Brigham Young, head of the policy-making body called the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

Young sought a safe haven for his church, a Mormon homeland far from “Gentiles” (as his people called nonMormons). He identified it more than a thousand miles west in the Great Basin, an area of the Rocky Mountains then claimed by Mexico, though inhabited at the time only by Native Americans and a few American fur trappers and traders called mountain men. Bordered by the Wasatch Range in the east and the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Range in the west, it was called the Great Basin because waterways drained into it as into an inland sink; it had no outlet to the sea. Full of strange and forbidding scenery, the region was protected from intruders by arid wastelands such as the Mojave Desert, and it contained several saline lakes, including the Great Salt Lake in what is now Utah. Young selected the Great Salt Lake Valley as the Mormons’ destination. This would be the site of the “Gathering,” the spiritually significant bringing together of all the Saints.

In 1846 Young led the first group of Mormon pioneers on the first leg of the journey, from Illinois to Winter Quarters (now Omaha, Nebraska). The following year, on July 24, 1847 (remembered in Utah as Pioneer Day), the epic migration, known as the Mormon trek, was completed when an advance party of about 150 Mormons arrived in Great Salt Lake Valley. Trees were scarce, but the soil was fertile. William Clayton, one of the Mormon pioneers, called it “one of the most beautiful valleys and pleasant places for a home for the Saints which could be found.”

Wasting no time, the pioneers dammed a stream to provide water and planted corn, potatoes, winter wheat, and other crops. Land was parceled out to individual families. A city was planned in plots of 10 acres (four hectares) around Temple Square, a central plot of 40 acres (16 hectares) that would be reserved for a temple. That city received the name Great Salt Lake City, later (in 1868) abbreviated to Salt Lake City. In autumn 1847, Young was elected president and prophet of the Mormon church, officially becoming Smith’s successor.

While the Mormon trek was underway, the United States fought Mexico in the Mexican-American War (1846-48). About 500 Saints, known as the Mormon Battalion, served on the U. S. side, affirming Mormon loyalty to the United States (often questioned by the church’s critics) and laying the ground for a claim to remain in the territory they had occupied. In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war in 1848, the Great Basin passed from Mexican to American sovereignty.

In 1849, expecting that the Mormon homeland would eventually become a state of the Union, Young called a convention to draft a constitution. The constitution that resulted that year formally created the State of Deseret, with Great Salt Lake City as its capital. The constitution provided for a bicameral legislature and supreme court, but in practice the state was a theocracy run by the church hierarchy headed by Young, who, running unopposed, was elected governor of Deseret on March 12, 1849. It was funded by tithing, the Saints’ contribution of 10 percent of their incomes to the church. Among the state’s official acts were the incorporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a charter for Great Salt Lake City, the establishment of what is now the University of Utah, and the founding of a Perpetual Emigrating Fund to lend money for migration expenses to poor Saints who wanted to come to Deseret.

As conceived by Young, Deseret included not only the Great Salt Lake Valley but almost a half-million square miles of territory, including an outlet to the Pacific Ocean in southern Calieornia. It encompassed all of present-day Utah, nearly all of Nevada, most of Arizona, and parts of California, Oregon, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming. To stake the Mormon claim, Young founded settlements at key points throughout this vast region, selecting by name the Saints who would colonize them. The chosen colonists usually complied willingly, though not always gladly. One Mormon girl cried when she learned that her father had been selected, but told a friend, “I should not own him as a father if he would not go when he is called.” In this manner, about 350 settlements were established, including Moab, Utah; Carson Valley and Las Vegas, Nevada; San Bernardino, California; Fort Supply and Fort Bridger, Wyoming; and Lemhi, Idaho.

Deseret petitioned the United States for territorial status, but Congress refused to consider the petition. Anti-Mormon sentiment was still high: President Zachary Taylor called the Mormons “a pack of outlaws” who “had been driven out of two states and were not fit for self-government.” Territorial status did come soon, but on U. S. terms. In September 1850 Congress created the Territory of Utah, rejecting the name Deseret for one derived from the region’s Ute Indians. The territory’s scale, limited principally to Utah and Nevada and later reduced to Utah alone, was much smaller than that proposed for Deseret. However, President Millard Fillmore, who had succeeded Taylor after the latter’s death from cholera that year, allowed Young to continue holding power as territorial governor, and the territorial legislature continued to be dominated by Mormons. Although Deseret officially ceased to exist, the Mormon Church hierarchy was still the most potent authority in Utah. From at least 1862 to 1870 the State of Deseret was clandestinely revived, with a “ghost” government of Deseret, composed of the same Mormons as those in Utah’s territorial government, meeting in secret as a sign of their commitment to Deseret as originally conceived.

In the meantime, the number of Mormons in Utah continued to grow, to about 40,000 by 1859. They included thousands of converts from England and Scandinavia and, from 1856 to 1860, thousands who came hauling handcarts because they were too poor to afford ox-drawn wagons. By 1869, when the opening of the transcontinental railroad made it easier to come to Utah, the territory’s population had reached 80,000.

The early years were hard. In 1848 crickets devoured much of the harvest, with complete disaster averted only by the intervention of cricket-eating seagulls, an event the Mormons took to be a divine miracle. Young’s efforts to establish industries, such as pottery, cloth, lead, and iron, were largely unsuccessful, though the Calieornia gold rush provided a bonanza in 1849-50 as the Saints traded and did business with prospective gold diggers passing through Utah. There were some clashes with Native Americans, including the Walker War of 1853, though relations were relatively good, since the Mormons regarded Native Americans as descendants of Israel. The Ute learned to distinguish between “Mormonee” and “Mericats,” or other Americans.

The Mormons’ biggest problem was continuing animosity from white non-Mormons. The Saints had fled to Utah to escape conflict with Gentiles, but now that Utah was a U. S. territory, that conflict was renewed. Polygamy, which the Mormons began to preach openly in 1852, was considered immoral and barbarous by most Americans. The Mormon tendencies to band together economically and vote in unison were regarded as harmful to free enterprise and free elections. A new Mormon alphabet of 38 letters, which was meant to reform and replace the English alphabet, was viewed by outsiders as a nefarious secret code, while the Mormons’ close relationship with Native Americans raised suspicions of treason.

Amid increasing reports of disloyalty and disregard for American law, President James Buchanan replaced Young with a non-Mormon governor, Alfred Gumming, and sent him along with federal troops to Utah in 1857 to put down what he saw as “substantial rebellion” and restore “the supremacy of the Constitution.” In what was known as the Utah War (1857-58), the Mormons called in their distant colonists and missionaries and massed in their heartland, ready to defend themselves against what they saw as invaders. Mormon raiders destroyed federal property, but no lives were lost in combat. The affair was settled peacefully, with Gumming becoming governor, while Young remained as powerful as before in his capacity as head of the church. The most serious loss of life, the Mountain Meadows massacre of 1857, involved noncombatants: About 140 nonMormon migrants bound for California were massacred by Native Americans and Mormon settlers.

Throughout the remainder of the 19th century, the relationship between the United States and the Mormons in Utah remained one of tension. Utah applications for statehood were refused, largely because of the polygamy issue. Congress passed laws against polygamy that were targeted directly at the Mormons, most notably the Edmunds-Tucker Act, or Anti-Polygamy Act, of 1887, which dissolved the corporation of the church, forbade Mormon participation in government, abolished woman suffrage (which the Utah territorial legislature had granted in 1870, 50 years before women nationwide would receive the vote), and otherwise attempted to end the temporal power of the Mormon Ghurch. The standoff did not end until 1890, when the church formally renounced polygamy. Statehood followed in 1896.

The beehive, a symbol of industriousness and a reminder of the meaning of Deseret, is featured in the State Seal of Utah. The Deseret News, a newspaper founded in 1850, is still in publication.

Further reading: Glaudia Lauper Bushman and Richard Lyman Bushman, Mormons in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Michael S. Durham, Desert Between the Mountains: Mormons, Miners, Padres, Mountain Men, and the Opening of the Great Basin, 17721869 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997); Wallace Stegner, Mormon Country (New York: Duell, Sloan &

Pearce, 1942); Jean Kinney Williams, The Mormons (New York: Franklin Watts, 1996).

—George Ochoa