[R-G] The Brink of War [via Portside]

[Hunter Gray]

NOTE BY HUNTER:

Thanks much, Steve, for passing this along.

 I had noted this good Portside posting when it came -- but had, because of 
some personal challenges, deferred reading that grouping of its posts. [I 
usually read them very early on.]  I am passing this along for obvious 
reasons to our three lists that have followed the FLDS / Texas  situation 
with some consistency.

Essentially, it's a quite good article -- and I am glad that it draws on the 
scholarship of LDS church historians who have always struck me as quite 
astute.  I add only a few thoughts.  It's been well established that the 
upper echelon of LDS leadership including Brigham Young, neither initiated 
nor sanctioned the Mountain Meadows Massacre [of the party of Gentiles from 
Arkansas]  or had any advance knowledge of it. This has been underscored 
many times, including quite recently, by reputable scholars of all sorts --  
though not always by "popular" writers.

 This obviously tragic situation, the outgrowth of then unremitting and 
general national hostility toward Mormons and their Salt Lake Zion. was a 
locally based affair.  The very honorable Jacob Hamblin, known as the 
"Mormon Leatherstocking," who devoted his entire life toward building 
peaceful relations between the Mormons and the Indian nations of that vast 
region -- and who was eminently successful in his endeavors -- had no prior 
hint of the sanguinary Mountain Meadows affair.

In the end, the primary blame was placed by Federal authorities -- wrongly 
in the opinion of some -- on the shoulders of a key LDS leader, John Doyle 
Lee.  Lee had removed to Northern Arizona following the massacre but, years 
later, upon his return to Utah, was charged with having organized it, and 
was executed by a U.S. Army firing squad.  He had been excommunicated by the 
Church; but decades later, about 50 years ago, that was formally lifted and 
he was reinstated.  A great/great grandson of his was one of my closest 
friends in Flagstaff.

A major factor in the  early history of Mormon Utah was the discovery, by 
Gentiles, of gold, silver, lead, and truly vast deposits of copper in the 
Oquiirh Mountains near and southwest of Salt Lake.  Primarily agricultural, 
and often in the communalistic sense, the Mormons were wary of mining and 
its corporate backing.  This was a major factor in the shrill and 
sanctimonious anti-Mormonism which came to be generated ostensibly by the 
"polygamy issue."  In epoch after epoch, the metal mining companies have 
obviously always known what "witch" to burn to serve their economic 
purposes.

Efforts were made in this southeastern region of Idaho to prevent incoming 
Mormon settlers from voting -- for some years after the 20th Century began. 
Some anti-Mormonism is still found hereabouts -- and certainly in many other 
parts of the country.

The LDS church, today, has obviously undergone some considerable 
acculturation vis-a-vis the "national culture."  It does retain its faithful 
loyalty to its basic doctrines and its unique  and appealing identity.

The fundamentalist Mormons, of course, have essentially remained quite 
unacculturated -- and, obviously, very very traditional.

And, of course [as I've said countless time by now!], that's their right.

Best, H


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steven McNichols"
To: "'Hunter Gray'" <hunterbadbear at hunterbear.org>
Sent: Sunday, June 01, 2008 11:16 PM
Subject: FW: The Brink Of War


Hunter: Have you seen this? Steve

Steven F. McNichols
268 Bush Street, #3602
San Francisco, CA 94104-3503


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-portside at LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG
[mailto:owner-portside at LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG] On Behalf Of
moderator at PORTSIDE.ORG
Sent: Sunday, June 01, 2008 3:15 PM
To: PORTSIDE at LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG
Subject: The Brink Of War

The Brink Of War
By David Roberts
Smithsonian Magazine
June 2008
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/brink-of-war.html

One hundred fifty years ago, the U.S. Army marched into Utah prepared to
battle Brigham Young and his Mormon militia

On July 24, 1847, a wagon rolled out of a canyon and gave Brigham Young,
president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, his first
glimpse of the Great Salt Lake Valley. That swath of wilderness would become
the new Zion for the Mormons, a church roughly 35,000 strong at the time.
"If the people of the United States will let us alone for ten years," Young
would recall saying that day, "we will ask no odds of them."
Ten years to the day later, when the church's membership had grown to about
55,000, Young delivered alarming
news: President James Buchanan had ordered federal troops to march on the
Utah Territory.

By then, Brigham Young had been governor of the territory for seven years,
and he had run it as a theocracy, giving church doctrines precedence in
civil affairs. The federal troops were escorting a non-Mormon Indian agent
named Alfred E. Cumming to replace Young as governor and enforce federal
law. In their long search for a place to settle, Mormons had endured
disastrous confrontations with secular authorities. But this was the first
time they faced the prospect of fighting the U.S. Army.

On June 26, 1858, one hundred fifty years ago this month, a U.S. Army
expeditionary force marched through Salt Lake City-at the denouement of the
so-called Utah War. But there was no war, at least not in the sense of
armies pitched in battle; negotiators settled it before U.S. troops and Utah
militiamen faced off. On June 19, the New York Herald summarized the
non-engagement:
"Killed, none; wounded, none; fooled, everybody."

In retrospect, such glibness seems out of place. The Utah War culminated a
decade of rising hostility between Mormons and the federal government over
issues ranging from governance and land ownership to plural marriage and
Indian affairs, during which both Mormons and non- Mormons endured violence
and privation. The tension was reflected in the fledgling Republican Party's
1856 presidential platform, which included a pledge to eradicate the "twin
relics of barbarism-polygamy and slavery." To look back at this episode now
is to see the nation at the brink of civil war in 1857 and 1858-only to pull
back.

"The Utah War was catastrophic for those who suffered or died during it, and
it was catalytic in advancing Utah along the slow but eventual path to
statehood," says Richard E. Turley Jr., assistant church historian and
recorder of the LDS Church.

Allan Kent Powell, managing editor of the Utah Historical Quarterly, notes
that Abraham Lincoln warned, in 1858, that "a house divided against itself
cannot stand," referring to the United States and slavery. "The same comment
could have been applied to Utah," says Powell. "Just as the nation had to
deal with the issue of slavery to ensure its continuation, so did the
Territory of Utah have to come to an understanding and acceptance of its
relationship with the rest of the nation."

The nation was unable to put off its reckoning over slavery. But the
resolution of the Utah War bought the LDS Church time, during which it
evolved as a faith- renouncing polygamy in 1890, for example, to smooth the
way to Utah statehood-to become the largest home-grown religion in American
history, now numbering nearly 13 million members, including such prominent
Americans as Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, Senate majority leader Harry Reid
of Nevada and hotelier J. W. Marriott Jr. At the same time, anti-Mormon bias
persists. Last December, in an effort to make voters more comfortable with
his Mormon faith, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, then a
Republican presidential contender, declared like the Catholic John F.
Kennedy before him: "I am an American running for president. I do not define
my candidacy by my religion." In a Gallup Poll taken after Romney's speech,
17 percent of respondents said they would never vote for a Mormon. Roughly
the same percentage answered similarly when Romney's father, Michigan
Governor George Romney, ran for president in 1968.

Even now, issues rooted in the era of the Utah War linger. Last September,
when the LDS Church formally expressed regret for the massacre of some 120
unarmed members of a wagon train passing through Utah on September 11, 1857,
the Salt Lake Tribune published a letter comparing the events to the
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. A raid this past April by state
authorities on a fundamentalist Mormon compound in Texas returned the
subject of polygamy to the headlines (though the sect involved broke from
the LDS Church more than 70 years ago).

"In the late 1850s, Mormons believed that the world would end within their
lifetimes," says historian David Bigler, author of Forgotten Kingdom: The
Mormon Theocracy in the American West, 1847-1896. In addition, he says,
"they believed the forefathers who wrote the American Constitution had been
inspired by God to establish a place where His kingdom would be restored to
power. The Mormons believed their own kingdom would ultimately have dominion
over all the United States." At the same time, the American nation was
pursuing a "manifest destiny" to extend its domain westward all the way to
the Pacific. The continent was not large enough to accommodate both beliefs.

The conflict had been building almost from the moment Joseph Smith, a
religious seeker, founded his church in Palmyra, New York, in 1830. Where
other Christian churches had strayed, Smith preached, the LDS Church would
restore the faith as conceived by Jesus Christ, whose return was imminent.
The next year, Smith moved with about 75 congregants to Ohio and sent an
advance party to Missouri to establish what they believed would be a new
Zion.

In the agrarian democracy Americans were building, both land and votes
mattered. Non-Mormons felt threatened by the Mormons' practices of settling
in concentrated numbers and voting as a bloc. The Missouri Mormons were
forced to relocate twice in the mid-1830s. In Ohio, an anti-Mormon mob
tarred and feathered Smith in 1832, and he left the state in 1838 after
civil lawsuits and a charge of bank fraud followed the failure of a bank he
had founded. By the time he arrived in Missouri that January, non-Mormons
were assaulting Mormons and raiding their settlements; a secret Mormon group
called the Sons of Dan, or Danites, responded in kind. That August, Missouri
Governor Lilburn Boggs issued an order to his state militia directing that
the Mormons "be exterminated or driven from the State for the public peace."
Two months later, 17 Mormons were killed in a vigilante action at a
settlement called Haun's Mill.

The Mormons moved next to Illinois, founding the town of Nauvoo there in
1840 under a charter that gave the city council (which Smith controlled)
authority over local courts and militia. This settlement grew to about
15,000 people, making it the biggest population center in the state. But in
1844, authorities jailed Smith in the town of Carthage after he destroyed a
Nauvoo newspaper that had alleged he was mismanaging the town and had more
than one wife. At that point, Smith's polygamy was acknowledged only to the
LDS Church's senior leaders. In a raid on the jail, an anti-Mormon mob shot
the church founder to death. He was 38.

"Few episodes in American religious history parallel the barbarism of the
anti-Mormon persecutions," historian Fawn Brodie wrote in her 1945 biography
of Smith. At the same time, she added, the early Mormons' relationships with
outsiders were characterized by "self- righteousness" and an "unwillingness
to mingle with the world." To non-Mormons in Illinois, Brodie wrote, "the
Nauvoo theocracy was a malignant tyranny that was spreading as swiftly and
dangerously as a Mississippi flood." Amid continuing harassment in Illinois,
the Mormons prepared to leave.

After Smith's death, the LDS Church's ruling council, the Quorum of the
Twelve Apostles, took control of church affairs. The lead apostle, Brigham
Young, a carpenter from Vermont and an early convert to Mormonism,
eventually succeeded Smith. In February 1846, he led the beginnings of an
exodus of some 12,000 Mormons from Illinois, determined to establish their
faith beyond the reach of American laws and resentment.
Brigham Young biographer Leonard J. Arrington has written that Young and
other church leaders knew about the Great Salt Lake Valley from trappers'
journals, explorers' reports and interviews with travelers familiar with the
region.

At the time, most of what would become the American Southwest belonged to
Mexico, but Young believed that that nation's hold on its northern frontier
was so tenuous that the Mormons could settle there free from interference.
In the spring of 1847, he led an advance party of 147 from an encampment in
Nebraska to the Great Salt Lake Valley, arriving that July. Over the next
two decades, some 70,000 Mormons would follow; the grueling journey would be
one of the defining experiences of the LDS Church.

In February 1848, Mexico sealed its defeat in the Mexican-American War by
signing the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ceding to the United States what is
now California, Nevada, Utah, Texas and parts of Arizona, New Mexico,
Colorado and Wyoming. Just six months after arriving in their new Zion, the
Mormons found themselves back under the authority of the United States.

To preserve self-rule, church leaders quickly sought official status,
petitioning Congress in 1849 first for territorial status, then for
statehood. The land they sought was vast, running from the Rockies to the
Sierra Nevada and from the new border with Mexico all the way to present-day
Oregon. Congress, guided in part by the struggle between forces opposing and
condoning slavery, designated a Utah Territory, but not before reducing the
area to present-day Utah, Nevada, western Colorado and southwestern Wyoming.

Territorial status gave the federal government greater authority over Utah
affairs than statehood would have.
But President Millard Fillmore inadvertently set the stage for a clash with
his choice for the new territory's chief executive. In 1850, acting partly
in response to lobbying from a lawyer named Thomas L. Kane, a non-Mormon who
had advised Mormon leaders in previous ordeals, Fillmore named Brigham Young
governor of the new Utah Territory.

Young ran the Utah Territory much as Smith had run Nauvoo, and conflicts
between religious and secular authorities soon re-emerged. The Mormon
leaders were suspicious of both the character and intent of federal
appointees, such as a judge who was found to have abandoned his wife and
children in Illinois and brought a prostitute to Utah. And over the next
seven years, a succession of federal officers-judges, Indian agents,
surveyors-came to the territory only to find that the governor would
circumvent or reverse their decisions.

Young "has been so much in the habit of exercising his will which is supreme
here, that no one will dare oppose anything he may say or do," Indian agent
Jacob Holeman wrote to his superior in Washington, D.C. in 1851-in effect
going over Young's head (Young was also the territory's superintendent of
Indian affairs). Surveyor General David Burr reported that Young told him
federal surveyors "shall not be suffered to trespass" on Mormon lands.
Through the mid-1850s, federal appointees returned East frustrated or
intimidated or both, and some of them wrote books or articles about their
travails. Anti-Mormon sentiment spread, inflamed particularly by reports of
polygamy.

By then, the practice of plural marriage had expanded beyond Joseph Smith's
inner circle, and word of it had been passed by non-Mormon emigrants passing
through Utah, where the evidence was in plain view. "During the first few
years after their arrival in Utah," writes Young biographer M. R. Werner,
"the fact that the Mormons practiced polygamy was an open secret."

The Mormons' embrace of plural marriage was based on a revelation that Smith
said he had received. (It was written down in 1843, but most historians
agree that Smith had begun taking multiple wives earlier.) With the example
of polygamous biblical patriarchs such as Abraham and Jacob in mind, Smith
concluded that "the possession of more than one wife was not only
permissible, but actually necessary for complete salvation," Werner writes.
Brigham Young, who took his first plural wife in 1842, after 18 years of
monogamy, maintained that he had been a reluctant convert: "I was not
desirous of shrinking from any duty, nor of failing in the least to do as I
was commanded," he wrote in a reminiscence that would be collected in the
church compendium Journal of Discourses, "but it was the first time in my
life that I had desired the grave." (By the time he died, at age 76 in 1877,
he had taken 55 wives but shared no "earthly life" with 30 of them,
according to Arrington.) For years Young and other church leaders had
dismissed allegations of plural marriages as calumnies circulated by
enemies, but by the early 1850s, such denials were no longer plausible.

On August 29, 1852, at a general conference of Mormons in Salt Lake City,
the church leadership publicly acknowledged plural marriage for the first
time. Orson Pratt, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, delivered
a lengthy discourse, inviting the members to "look upon Abraham's blessings
as your own, for the Lord blessed him with a promise of seed as numerous as
the sand upon the seashore." After Pratt finished, Young read aloud Smith's
revelation on plural marriage.

The disclosure was widely reported outside the church, and the effect was to
quash any hopes the Utah Territory might have had for statehood under
Young's leadership.
And conflicts between Young's roles as governor of the territory and
president of the church would only become more complicated.

In April 1855, at the Mormons' spring conference, Young called on some 160
men to abandon home, farm and family and head into the wilderness
surrounding the Utah settlements to establish missions among the Native
Americans there.

In Mormon cosmology, Indians were the descendants of a fallen ancient
patriarch, and church officials said they were undertaking the missions to
convert tribes on their borders to their faith and to improve their welfare.
But Garland Hurt, recently arrived in Utah as an Indian agent, was
suspicious. In a confidential letter to the head of the Bureau of Indian
Affairs in Washington, he wrote that the missions were actually intended to
teach the Indians to distinguish between "Mormons" and "Americans"-a
distinction, he added, that would be "prejudicial to the interests of the
latter." The few historians who have studied these three missions disagree
over their purpose. But irrespective of Young's intentions, correspondence
to and from the missionaries, held in LDS archives, reflects rising tension
between Mormons and the non-Mormon world.

The first of the missionaries left Salt Lake City in May 1855. One band of
men rode more than 350 miles north, into what is now Idaho-beyond Young's
legal jurisdiction. Another headed 400 miles southwest-again, beyond Utah's
boundaries-to the site of present-day Las Vegas, in the New Mexico
Territory. A third pushed 200 miles southeast, to what is now Moab, Utah.

In August, Young wrote to the Las Vegas missionaries, working among Paiutes,
to congratulate them on the "prosperity and the success which has thus far
attended your efforts" and to exhort them to start baptizing the Indians and
to "[g]ain their confidence, love and esteem and make them feel by your acts
that we are their real friends." In all, the missions would report baptizing
scores of Indians. (What the Indians made of the ritual was not recorded.)

In an October 1, 1855, letter to a friend, John Steele, an interpreter at
the Las Vegas mission, suggested another motive. "If the Lord blesses us as
he has done,"
he wrote, "we can have one thousand brave warriors on hand in a short time
to help to quell any eruption that might take place in the principalities."
(In 1857, the Utah militia, under Young's command, would number about
4,000.)

The following summer, Young counseled secrecy to another church leader, John
Taylor, president of the New York City-based Eastern States Mission (and,
eventually, Young's successor as president of the church). "[M] issionaries
to the Indians and their success is a subject avoided in our discourses and
not published in the 'News,'" he wrote on June 30, 1856, to Taylor, who was
also editing The Mormon, a newspaper widely read by Eastern Mormons.
"Wherever any thing comes to hand no matter from what source it would be
well to carefully look it over and draw your pen through all such as you
might deem it wisdom not to publish."

But by 1857, non-Mormon newspapers from New York to California had begun
reporting that the Mormons were seeking the Indians' allegiance in case of a
clash with the United States. Some accounts were based on briefings from
officials who had returned to Washington; others, based on gossip, tended
toward a more alarmist tone. For example, on April 20, 1857, the National
Intelligencer, a Washington newspaper, put the number of the Mormons'
Indian allies at 300,000, even though the total Indian population of the
Utah Territory appears to have been 20,000 at most. Young would characterize
press coverage generally as "a prolonged howl of base slander."

Ultimately, none of the missions lasted. The southeast mission collapsed
within four months after a skirmish with Utes; the Las Vegas mission
followed, having shifted its focus from conversion to an abortive attempt at
mining lead. The northern mission, called Fort Limhi, operated among the
Bannock, Shoshone and others until March 1858.

By the time Young led his senior aides on an expedition there in April 1857,
almost every federal official had left Utah. In Washington, a new president
faced his first crisis.

James Buchanan, a Democrat, had defeated the Republicans' John Frémont and
the Know-Nothings' Millard Fillmore in the 1856 election. He assumed the
presidency in March 1857 preoccupied with the fight over whether Kansas
would enter the Union as a free or slave state.
But within weeks, reports from those who had fled Utah and strident
petitions from the territorial legislature for greater influence over the
appointment of federal officials turned his attention farther west.

Brigham Young's term as territorial governor had expired in 1854; he had
served on an interim basis since.
Buchanan, with his cabinet likening the Utah petitions to a declaration of
war, decided to replace Young with Alfred Cumming, a former mayor of
Augusta, Georgia, who was serving as an Indian-affairs superintendent based
in St. Louis. He ordered troops to accompany the new governor west and to
enforce federal rule in Utah-but, for reasons that are not clear, he did not
notify Young that he was being replaced.

Young found out in July 1857, a month that brought a series of shocks to the
Mormons. The Deseret News reported that Apostle Parley Pratt had been killed
in Arkansas by the estranged husband of a woman Pratt had taken as his 12th
wife. Rumors circulated that federal troops were advancing, prompting
Apostle Heber C.
Kimball to declare, "I will fight until there is not a drop of blood in my
veins. Good God! I have wives enough to whip out the United States." Mormons
traveling from the Kansas-Missouri frontier brought word that federal troops
were, in fact, headed for Utah, leading to Young's announcement on the tenth
anniversary of his arrival in the Great Salt Lake Valley.

It was in this heated atmosphere that, six weeks later, a California-bound
wagon train that included 140 non- Mormon emigrants, most of them from
Arkansas, made camp in a lush valley known as Mountain Meadows, about 40
miles beyond the Mormon settlement of Cedar City. Just before breakfast,
according to an account by historian Will Bagley in Blood of the Prophets:
Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows, a child among the
emigrants fell, struck by a bullet. As a party of men with painted faces
attacked, the emigrants circled their wagons.

After a five-day siege, a white man bearing a white flag approached the
emigrants. Mormons, he told them, had interceded with the attackers and
would guarantee the emigrants safe passage out of Mountain Meadows if the
Arkansans would turn over their guns. The emigrants accepted the offer.

The wounded and the women and children were led away first, followed by the
men, each guarded by an armed Mormon. After half an hour, the guards' leader
gave the order to halt. Every man in the Arkansas party was shot from
point-blank range, according to eyewitness accounts cited by Bagley. The
women and older children fell to bullets, knives and arrows. Only 17
individuals-all of them children under the age of 7-were spared.

For decades afterward, Mormon leaders blamed Paiute Indians for the
massacre. Paiutes took part in the initial attack and, to a lesser degree,
the massacre, but research by Bagley, Juanita Brooks and other historians
has established that Mormons were culpable.
Last September, on the 150th anniversary of the event, Mormon Apostle Henry
B. Eyring, speaking for the church, formally acknowledged that Mormons in
southern Utah had organized and carried out the massacre. "What was done
here long ago by members of our Church represents a terrible and inexcusable
departure from Christian teaching and conduct," Eyring said. A "separate
expression of regret," he continued, "is owed to the Paiute people who have
unjustly borne for too long the principal blame for what occurred during the
massacre."

In September 1857, Cumming and about 1,500 federal troops were about a month
from reaching Fort Bridger, 100 miles northeast of Salt Lake City. Young,
desperately needing time to prepare an evacuation of the city, mobilized the
Utah militia to delay the Army. Over several weeks, militiamen raided the
troops' supplies, burned the grass to deny forage to the soldiers' horses,
cattle and mules, even burned Fort Bridger. November snowstorms intervened.
Snowbound and lacking supplies, the troops' commander, Col. Albert Sidney
Johnston, decided to spend the winter at what was left of the fort. The
Mormons, he declared, have "placed themselves in rebellion against the
Union, and entertain the insane design of establishing a form of government
thoroughly despotic, and utterly repugnant to our institutions."

As the spring thaw began in 1858, Johnston prepared to receive
reinforcements that would bring his force to almost 5,000-a third of the
entire U.S. Army. At the same time, Young initiated what has become known as
the Move South, an exodus of some 30,000 people from settlements in northern
Utah. Before leaving Salt Lake City, Mormons buried the foundation of their
temple, their most sacred building, and planted wheat to camouflage it from
the invaders' eyes. A few men remained behind, ready to put houses and barns
and orchards to the torch to keep them out of the soldiers'
hands. The Mormons, it seemed, would be exterminated or once again driven
from their land.

That they were neither is due largely to the intervention of their advocate
Thomas Kane. Over the winter of 1857-58, Kane had set out for Utah to try to
mediate what was being called "the Mormon crisis."
Although his fellow Pennsylvanian President Buchanan did not provide
official backing, neither did he discourage Kane's efforts. Kane arrived in
Salt Lake City in February 1858. By April, in exchange for peace, he had
secured Young's agreement to give way to the new governor. Many in the
public, given Buchanan's failure to notify Young and the Army's delayed
arrival in Utah, began to perceive the Utah expedition as an expensive
blunder undertaken just as a financial panic had roiled the nation's
economy. Buchanan, seeing a chance to end his embarrassment quickly, sent a
peace commission west with the offer of a pardon for Utah citizens who would
submit to federal laws. Young accepted the offer that June.

That same month, Johnston and his troops marched through the deserted
streets of Salt Lake City-then kept marching 40 miles south to establish
Camp Floyd, in present-day Fairfield, Utah. With the Army no longer a
threat, the Mormons returned to their homes and began a long and fitful
accommodation to secular rule under a series of non-Mormon governors.
Federal laws against polygamy targeted Mormon property and power through the
1870s and '80s; Wilford Woodruff, the LDS Church's fourth president, issued
a formal renunciation of plural marriage in 1890.

"The United States government used polygamy as a wrecking ball to destroy
the old theocracy," says historian Bigler. "By 1890, Mormons were hanging on
by their fingernails. But when Wilford Woodruff delivered his manifesto
repudiating polygamy, he went further: he said that from now on, Mormons
would obey the law of the land." Statehood for Utah followed in 1896.Their
dreams of dominion over, the Mormons began to enter the American fold.

David Roberts is the author of the forthcoming Devil's
Gate: Brigham Young and the Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy.


HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis
Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´
and Ohkwari'

Check out our Hunterbear website Directory http://hunterbear.org/directory.htm
[The site is dedicated to our one-half Bobcat, Cloudy Gray:
http://hunterbear.org/cloudy_gray.htm

See Personal Narrative:  http://hunterbear.org/narrative.htm
And see Outlaw Trail:  The Native as Organizer: http://hunterbear.org/outlaw_trail1.htm

In our Gray Hole, the ghosts often dance in the junipers and sage, on the game trails, 
in the tributary canyons with the thick red maples, and on the high windy ridges -- and 
they dance from within the very essence of our own inner being. They do this especially 
when the bright night moon shines down on the clean white snow that covers the valley 
and its surroundings.  Then it is as bright as day -- but in an always soft and mysterious 
and remembering way.