Fort Limhi

The Mormon Adventure in Oregon Territory 1855–1858By David L. Bigler

THE ARTHUR H. CLARK COMPANY

Copyright © 2003 David L. Bigler
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-569-4

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................................................................................................11Editorial Procedures.......................................................................................................................................13Foreword...................................................................................................................................................15Introduction...............................................................................................................................................211. Sound an Alarm..........................................................................................................................................292. To the Remnants of Jacob................................................................................................................................473. A Piece of Ground for a Preacher........................................................................................................................714. Of Grasshoppers and Reformation.........................................................................................................................955. A Gathering Place for Israel............................................................................................................................1156. Gov. Brigham ... Coming on..............................................................................................................................1357. One of Nature's Ladies..................................................................................................................................1618. The Mormon Rebellion....................................................................................................................................1759. The Devil Is At Work Among the Lamanites................................................................................................................19710. The Hills Were Black with Indians......................................................................................................................21911. Ten Men and Four Gallons of Whiskey....................................................................................................................23912. A Time to Every Purpose................................................................................................................................25913. From a Camp of U.S. Troops.............................................................................................................................28114. Conspiracy or Coincidence?.............................................................................................................................299Epilogue...................................................................................................................................................315Appendix A: A Comprehensive List of Missionaries, Family Members, and Hired Hands Who Served at Fort Limhi from May 1855 to April 1858.....................329Appendix B: Members of Brigham Young's Company to Fort Limhi in April-May 1857, as Recorded by James W. Cummings, Clerk of the Camp........................331Appendix C: A Report of Brigham Young's Expedition to Oregon Territory.....................................................................................335Bibliography...............................................................................................................................................343Index......................................................................................................................................................352

Chapter One

Sound an Alarm

At once, I saw that something had transpired which occasioned a stir in the community, and soon learned that news had been received of a massacre of the Saints at Salmon River. —Thomas L. Kane

Two men, exhausted and drawn from six days and nights of winter travel, led their worn-out horses into Barnard's Fort, a Mormon outpost on Malad River, some four miles south of the northern border of Utah Territory and five miles north of today's Plymouth. It was Saturday, 6 March 1858, and their need for fresh mounts overrode their own fatigue and hunger. Baldwin Watts and Ezra Barnard had arrived at the northern outskirts of the settlements of Utah bearing an urgent alarm that had to be carried to Great Salt Lake City immediately.

Theirs had been a desperate journey. On 28 February the two missionaries to the Indians of Oregon at Fort Limhi, four hundred miles to the north, had mounted the only two good horses remaining after a sudden and fatal attack on the small settlement. They quietly had slipped out of the stockade at night to begin their long ride to Salt Lake City bearing an urgent cry for help. While the settlers in the besieged fort feared every moment to hear the darkness torn by gunfire, the riders had stolen past the Indian camps along the river and slapped leather for Mormon settlements far to the south, closely pursued during the first hundred miles of their journey. For the last forty-eight hours of the six-day, late-winter dash they had no food and only one able horse between them.

Stitched into Barnard's coat lining by one of the women at Fort Limhi was a dispatch to Brigham Young from Thomas S. Smith, the grizzled president of the Salmon River colony in Oregon Territory. It described a fateful turn of events.

Attack on Fort Limhi

Virtually without warning, on the morning of 25 February 1858 some 250 Bannock and Shoshone warriors attacked the northernmost Mormon outpost and Indian mission. Fort Limhi was located just west of present Lemhi Pass over the Continental Divide, crossed fifty years before by Lewis and Clark. It was about nineteen miles southeast of today's Salmon, Idaho, on the east fork of Salmon River, now Lemhi River, near the birthplace of the Shoshone woman, Sacagawea, who had accompanied Lewis and Clark.

The Indians surprised the missionaries who were working in widely separated locations, killing two and wounding five in scattered fighting before the heavily outnumbered defenders retreated to the safety of their log stockade. Among those injured was their forty-year-old leader, Smith himself, fortunately just grazed on the arm by a burst of fire that shot off his hat and cut his suspenders.

The attackers seized the target of their incursion: almost the entire mission herd, numbering well over two hundred cattle, thirty or more horses, and other animals. But this loss, serious enough, paled alongside a heavier blow delivered to Mormon plans for their very survival in the American West. Great Salt Lake and the surrounding settlements were facing the imminent arrival of the United States Army, and Brigham Young had publicly resolved to treat "every army and every armed company that attempts to come here as a mob." Unexpectedly eliminated by the Indian raid was this vital halfway base of supply and refitting in a projected movement of the faith north from Salt Lake over the Rocky Mountains to the headwaters of the Missouri River, then northwest to the Bitterroot Valley and, if necessary, into Canada.

Since any chance to make this move rested on the goodwill of the region's native inhabitants, the report that many of the Indian attackers themselves were members of the millennial faith, baptized by Mormon Indian missionaries over the previous three years, was especially alarming. In a revealing test of influence, "gentile" mountain men, a group who had been troublesome for Mormons in the past, had apparently talked their Indian friends out of their new religion and into a raid on the mission herd. The outcome was a cruel setback at a critical hour, but as with similar catastrophes in the church's short history, there was rarely time for lamentation.

Immediate action was needed against the peril that threatened nearly seventy Mormon settlers on the Salmon River, many of them women and children, cut off and facing possible death in the wilderness. When the two messengers had escaped south, the settlers were stiffening their courage and defenses for a last stand, hammering their scythes into spears at the blacksmith shop. The men still able to resist were outnumbered by as many as ten to one. But just eight days later, on 8 March, these odds began to shift as their brethren far to the south prepared to enter the contest.

"An Armed Mercenary Mob"

The mild south wind that began to blow moisture from communal "big fields" at Mormon settlements on the western slope of the Wasatch Mountains on Monday, 8 March 1858, warned of changes in the weather, a break in a string of mild days. The eleventh spring since the Mormons had arrived in the valley of the Great Salt Lake was about to open. But for the first time the settlers looked to their fields without a sense of hope for the future.

By that March day, their thoughts bore a blanket of late winter reflection that had smothered the instinctive anticipation farmers felt at the coming of a new growing season. Withered, too, was the emotional conflagration ignited by the great spiritual revival known as the Reformation in 1856 and 1857 that was to prepare God's people for an inevitable confrontation with the American republic. Gone as well was the boastful defiance of the year before. Out of sight, if not out of mind, on the other side of the Wasatch Range near Fort Bridger, was the reason for apprehension. And it had a familiar threatening look.

In its twenty-seven year history, the controversial millennial movement known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly called Mormons, had aroused violent opposition from its neighbors in New York, Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. Early forms of democracy on the American frontier had proved incapable of protecting believers who moved as one in all things, according to the dictates of heaven through a modern prophet. The young religion's enemies had taken many forms: sheriffs' posses, judges, state militias, and angry rabble best described as mobs in the true sense of the word. Now, at last, came soldiers of the United States, sent by an American president.

A small but highly motivated American army stood poised on the Great Basin theocracy's eastern border like a frozen sword, waiting for spring to open the trail to Salt Lake Valley and allow a frontal assault on the Mormon stronghold. President James Buchanan had ordered the military force to Utah the year before. Its purpose was to escort a new governor to replace Brigham Young, leader of both the LDS church and the civil government in the territory, and assert federal authority in a territory considered to be in a state of rebellion. As if to confirm the president's opinion, Young had branded the U.S. Army expedition "an armed mercenary mob" and mobilized his faith's military arm, the Nauvoo Legion, ostensibly known as the territorial militia, to repel the "threatened invasion." American military commanders recognized that the president had launched the Utah Expedition so late in the season as to court disaster, and fast-moving mounted companies of the Legion had burned the expedition's supply wagons on Big Sandy and Green rivers while other Legion forces had fortified Echo Canyon. Fortune smiled on the Mormon forces when an early winter stopped the Army's advance toward Salt Lake Valley at James Bridger's trading post.

Now the 2,500 officers and men of the Army of Utah under the Second U.S. Cavalry's Col. Albert S. Johnston stamped the ground on Blacks Fork to keep their feet warm and waited impatiently for spring to open the trail to Salt Lake Valley. They looked anxiously to the east for much-needed supplies and reinforcements. And in the nation's capital, an aroused American government at last moved to support its embarrassed and isolated expedition in present southwestern Wyoming, sent to put down promptly an attempt by one of its territories to establish its independence from the United States.

By late winter the temper of the nation also provided good reason for Mormon leaders at Great Salt Lake City to at last face up realistically to the deadly seriousness of a confrontation wrought by millennial expectations and imagined fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. Silent on this day was the inflammatory rhetoric of the 1856 Reformation and the emotional voices that a few months before had called for the hosts of Israel to dispatch the so-called "mob" of armed "gentiles." If forced to fight, Brigham Young had then told his people, they would do so "in the strength of Israel's God" when "one will chase a thousand, and two will put ten thousand to flight." "Good God!" Apostle Heber C. Kimball had said, "I have wives enough to whip out the United States."

But in the event such predictions of victory failed, authorities of the religious movement meant no longer to suffer rule by corrupt carpetbaggers sent by a government that had refused to protect their constitutional rights and religious freedom in years past. With time and the season now favoring their enemies, they made plans to abandon the Great Basin settlements in which their people had built their homes and farms over the past decade. Nor would this be the first time they had packed up and left cherished homes rather than coexist with institutions built by man or unfriendly neighbors. As they had done in 1846 when leaving the City of Nauvoo on the Mississippi River, Mormon leaders screened their possible exodus behind a curtain of rumors and false clues that implied the direction of their latest migration would be to the south. They planned instead to go the other way—north to the headwaters of the Missouri River, Bitterroot Valley, and perhaps beyond.

Meanwhile, on 8 March the shifting wind from the south and serious faces in Brigham Young's Lion House were not the only omens of change for the Kingdom of God in western America. That day, thirty-five-year-old Thomas L. Kane, the son of a prominent Philadelphia judge and benefactor of the Mormons during the Nauvoo exodus, prepared to leave Utah's capital and go to the U.S. Army's winter encampment on Blacks Fork. Two weeks before, the self-appointed peacemaker had reached Great Salt Lake over the Spanish Trail from Los Angeles. On arrival he urged Brigham Young to authorize him to offer food to the hungry American soldiers in the mountains as an olive branch. But he now prepared to ride north the next morning to seek peace talks with federal officers at Camp Scott with nothing to show for his efforts, despite the warm reception the Mormon leaders had given to an old friend.

This is how it was on Monday, 8 March 1858—mild and windy in the Great Basin, a day that opened like others before it, yet one stirring with unforeseen events that would shape the future. For it was on this day that shocking news came like an icy blast from out of the north, ending the immediate dream of a sovereign Mormon state in western America and putting on hold its envisioned march to universal dominion.

The Alarm Sounds

The rolling drumbeat early on 9 March 1858 snapped heads up in fields, hills, and nearby canyons. The local militia's traditional alert from the main gate of the adobe wall around the settlement of Lehi at the north end of Utah Valley notified men of the town to put aside their plows and hammers and prepare for war. After weeks of uncertainty the call to action was almost welcome. An express from Legion headquarters at Great Salt Lake City had arrived shortly before at the fort on Dry Creek. It carried shocking, unexpected news and military orders "from Fort Limhi on Salmon River ... Indains [sic] he[a]ded by some mountaineers ... attacted the bretheren ... killed 2 also wounded 5 ... stole most of their cattle."

The steady drum roll from the gate sounded an unintentional salute to the men of Lehi's mounted company. Horsemen from the settlement had won their standing in action against War Chief Walkara's Indian band in 1853 and 1854 and battling Chief Tintic's proud Utah warriors almost on the outskirts of their town in 1856. Lehi's cavalrymen had upheld their reputation in 1857 in action against the U.S. Army, patrolling the ramparts of the Mormon kingdom until late December. Not by accident did the commander of the Nauvoo Legion, Lt. Gen. Daniel H. Wells, order these tested veterans to join with other Mormon forces being called up for this emergency mission. In any Indian fight the Lehi command could be counted on to give strong support to the two additional companies called out from Weber and Davis counties north of the capital.

One of the least likely to be impressed by the one-sided and potentially futile opposition at Fort Limhi was David Evans, the fifty-three-year-old bishop of Lehi. Evans was an early convert to the Latter-day Saints, a veteran of Zion's Camp in Missouri some two decades earlier who had served as commander of the Mormon forces that were massacred at Haun's Mill. His experience fighting enemies there and later in Illinois served him well in his role as bishop of the settlement. This high calling in the Mormon theocracy encompassed the offices of mayor, representative to the territorial legislature, probate judge, and district commander of the Nauvoo Legion. In keeping with his authority was David Evans's appearance. The bishop's bulldog face, wide-open eyes, set jaw, and flat nose announced a servant of God incapable of suffering slackers or human tabernacles that housed apostate spirits. And while the years had gently loosened his waistline, advancing age had only hardened a mind and will that were unbending to start with.

And in the end, one thing was certain. Whenever Bishop Evans ordered out the mounted company from his settlement, the response was always the same: everyone who could go, went. At the same time, in sending the men of Lehi on a hazardous late winter round trip of some eight hundred miles, there was no need for Evans to whip a few laggards with his practiced tongue. Almost every man well enough to saddle and stay on his horse was ready to go.

As the Lehi company prepared to ride, the express carrying the news about Fort Limhi continued south on the muddy wagon road that loosely connected the Mormon settlements in Utah Valley. The cry for help brought by Watts and Barnard from the besieged fort far to the north was spreading through the small settlements of Utah, dampening even further the hopes of a people facing invasion and war.

Army of Israel to the Rescue

Placed in command of the expedition to Salmon River was Andrew Cunningham, a forty-one-year-old Virginian who had been appointed only two days before as colonel in the newly created Standing Army of Israel. (Patterned after the Continental Army, this full-time military force was organized in 1858 to defend the right to autonomous rule and supported by subscription of the people.) Andrew Cunningham in earlier months had taken a leading role in the cause of his faith. The preceding January, he and four others had signed "An Address from the people of Great Salt Lake City" to Congress. This rehearsal of Mormon grievances since the 1830 founding of their church concluded, "we will no longer wear your cursed yoke of unconstitutional requirements." Of the United States, the address said: "The young Hercules has found an adder in his path, his once manly frame is feeble and emaciated ..."

Even more significant had been the colonel's assignment in the autumn of 1857 to establish relief stations northward along the projected route of the Mormon exodus, should all else fail. Shortly after directing the faithful in outlying settlements in Carson Valley and San Bernardino to sell their property and return to Utah, Brigham Young had ordered a company of fifty to build a new settlement near present Blackfoot, Idaho, not far from the intersection of the trail to Fort Limhi and the Oregon Trail. That fall Mormons abandoning Carson Valley told westbound emigrants they were heading for the Salmon River to found a settlement "extending north into the Russian possessions."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Fort Limhiby David L. Bigler Copyright © 2003 by David L. Bigler. Excerpted by permission of THE ARTHUR H. CLARK COMPANY. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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