How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [91]
—NATIONAL ERA, JANUARY 24, 1850
Two hundred and fifty feet below the surface of Lake Mead is the town of Callville, Nevada, founded in 1858 at the behest of Mormon leader Brigham Young. Callville was the high-water mark of Young’s efforts to create a Mormon state. The high-water mark for Callville itself (or, as it turned out, its second highest water mark) was in October 1866, when the first oceangoing steamship arrived at its dock. Its highest-water mark was in 1936, when it was inundated by the Colorado River upon completion of the Hoover Dam. By then, however, it had been abandoned for more than fifty years, despite having played a key role in establishing the present-day boundary between Nevada and Arizona—a boundary far from Utah, the state predominated by Mormons. That distance reflects the scope of Brigham Young’s dream.
Young was a thirty-year-old carpenter and blacksmith when he joined the Mormon Church in 1832. The church itself had only recently been organized by Joseph Smith, who published the Book of Mormon in 1830. Through the energy Young devoted to the church, and his charismatic personality, he rose in its ranks over the next decade, surfacing in the national press in 1842 when the New York Herald mentioned him among the leadership of the Mormons. That article, however, was a report on the nation’s animosity toward Mormons. “The fights and quarrels in Mormon country promise to be much richer than anything that has occurred here since the days of the Revolutionary War,” it began, relating that Missouri “has charged Joe [Smith, founder of the church] with instigating the man who attempted to kill Gov. Boggs.”
The nation’s antagonism emanated from the Mormons’ firm belief in traditional marriage—biblically traditional marriage, which is to say polygamy. But the hostility grew to include other matters. Joseph Smith had prophesied that God would soon bring “a full end of all nations.” In view of the Mormon disregard of state laws prohibiting polygamy, Smith’s proclamation on “the end of nations” got Washington’s attention. Smith sought to mitigate these fears in 1838 by publishing The Political Motto of the Church of Latter-day Saints, which praised the U.S. Constitution as being “founded in the wisdom of Almighty God.” But not everyone believed him. Later that year he was arrested for treason. Lacking sufficient evidence, authorities in Missouri struck a face-saving deal in which Smith was allowed to escape. He relocated in Illinois, but the conflicts followed him and in 1844 he was assassinated.
A leadership crisis ensued. “There has been a feud and division among the Mormons,” South Carolina’s Southern Patriot reported. “When Joe Smith, the head imposter, was killed, there was a struggle for ascendancy. Sidney Rigdon thought that he ought to be next in command.… Emma Smith, the widow, seemed disposed to be the spiritual leader.… Wm. Smith, the brother of Joe, set himself up as Patriarch.… Brigham Young and the Council of Twelve then took upon themselves the spiritual and temporal government of the Mormons.”
Despite the venom in the article, it reported two facts that proved to be significant. It noted that the Brigham Young faction proposed “to remove all the Saints beyond the Rocky Mountains” and that the “mass of the Mormons appear to be disposed to adhere to Young and his party.” Indeed, the majority did opt for the path proposed by Young. The area around the Great Salt Lake had the advantages of being sparsely populated and outside the United States (the Southwest then still belonged to Mexico). Just as the Mormons were resettling, however, the United States won the Mexican War, and Young’s followers found themselves back inside the boundaries of the United States. Less than a year after that, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the west. Suddenly it was rush hour on the Mormon Trail. Before the year was out, California had