Establishing the Kingdom Along the Little Colorado | Charles S. Peterson, Take up Your Mission: Mormon Colonizing Along the Little Colorado River, 1870–1900

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Charles Peterson is a man of history who, like a sociologist, examines the changing aspirations and problems of the Mormons who lived along the Little Colorado during the latter part of the nineteenth century. I review his book as a sociologist with what may be called a hobby interest in the frontier experiences of the Latter-day Saints. Take Up Your Mission fills many gaps and corners in the picture I already had of the Utah “Dixie” settlement and its spill-over into Nevada. The book concentrates on the later extension of the settlement into Arizona. 

A gratuitous explanation may be useful. In July 1908 I was on my way from Salt Lake to the West Coast, where I hoped to work my way on a ship to Panama to get a job on the canal under construction there. A week before I had worked in the harvest fields of Kansas. I was put off at the Nevada-Utah line and by early evening arrived at a green spot called Clover Valley, where I was taken in and so made at home that I never asked pay for the few days of work I did there. A job was found for me at the Terry Ranch on the Utah side of the border. 

During the following winter I was alone at the ranch much of the time. I used most of that time reading several volumes of Church history and other books as well as Church journals. The following spring I returned to Clover Valley to work for the venerable “Grandpa” Lyman L. Woods, who had been called to take pos session of that valley and its water sometime around 1865. Although in poor health, he would not leave to obtain medical care. He had never been released from his mission and he feared he might die while absent. 

Grandpa too had many Church books and my reading continued. He had not read much but he was a matchless narrator as he had been a fearless guide and colonizer. I joined the Mormon Church during the next winter. 

Several years later came an opportunity to teach in the Church academy at St. Johns, Arizona, where I met many families with kin in Dixie (Southern Utah) and some of the old timers who had been called to that mission. They had endured the hardships, the prejudice of gentile neighbors and the pursuit of the marshals hunting down polygamists. They were now of the Arizona community. Most of those names I meet again in this book. 

It has often disturbed me that so few Mormons I have known have more than a limited acquaintance with their own history. That holds too for most missionaries I have met in Canada and Europe as well as in the United States. Asking them about the Intermountain settlement, one is likely to hear not much more than the story of the handcart companies crossing the plains, or some story about one’s own great-grandmother or great-grandfather. Those not of Arizona have little knowledge of the Little Colorado settlement, perhaps the greatest ordeal in the Mormon settlement of the West. 

Peterson’s book is valuable for the solid information it contains from diaries, letters, church records and public records. It is obvious that he has invested years in searching these materials. Especially important are the frontier journals and diaries, which the Church encouraged the first settlers to keep. There were hundreds of these and many have been preserved. The keeping of such personal records was not, I think, characteristic of other frontier settlements. 

Mormon leaders, even early in the 1850s, visualized a southward extension of the “Kingdom,” perhaps to Mexico and beyond. Scouting parties had been sent into the Arizona region even before the Dixie settlement was launched. They were missionaries to the Indians. These explorations, Peterson reminds us, had much to do with maintaining peaceful relations with the Indians. There were very few Indian-Mormon confrontations in this area. The movement of colonists into Arizona began in the mid-i87os. 

Expansionism was the motivation for the southward thrust, but it was accompanied by another ideal, identified by Peterson as separatism. Separatism meant the tight Mormon community, gentiles excluded (or, when necessary, tolerated). At one time, longer in Arizona than elsewhere, it meant the United Order of communal living, the community being one total family of cooperating individual families. For a time it also meant Mormon industries—a sugar mill, an iron smelter, a textile mill, wineries—all under the auspices of local Church authority guided by the high authorities. It meant Zion’s own mercantile system, of which there were branch stores in every community, designed to keep gentiles out. 

Peterson sees the compact community as a natural consequence of the Mormon type of irrigation agriculture, each family having its own garden and buildings in the village and its farm outside it. Separatism served well, holding people fast to their faith and their goals, maintaining loyalty to authority, however hard the times or resistant the natural environment. Separatism meant continuing order and purpose; without it, especially in Arizona, the colonists would not have held their individualistic urges in check and settlement would have failed. 

As the Little Colorado settlements were able to take root, as they came to identify themselves with the wider community, as they felt themselves more accepted than formerly, the idea of separatism slowly relaxed. The earlier effort to maintain a tight separatism had been difficult to maintain and, due to human fallibility at local levels, had not always been equitably administered; the marvel is that there was so little of such bad faith. The balance between the levels of authority, as seen in the story of this settlement, had been such that extreme abuses of stewardship were held in check. 

If the Church failed to meet expectations, this was often because it lacked the means or it was contending with other threats. As must be expected, there were many mistakes among leaders from the top down. But the organization during those times was able to backtrack. They were more the mistakes of acting in the face of limited information, information which could not be had before some action had been taken, a characteristic of all pioneering. 

The settlement of the Little Colorado, in addition to its severity, was remote from Church guidance. Indeed, the managing ability of the organization was as much tested as the settlers themselves. I take the liberty of quoting from the opening paragraph of Peterson’s final chapter: 

Rarely have human lives been more engulfed by a single institution. At birth, at death, on each special occasion, in the routine of Sabbath days, and in the rhythm of daily life the church stood predominant. It was foremost in the fact of the Little Colorado. .. . Its force drew eyes across the territorial border to Salt Lake City. It made the primary decisions of life. It provided hope in the future and lent meaning to the present. It buoyed heavy hearts, and its failure to fill the full measure of expectation brought despair. It con tested the elements and challenged other social forces. It built dams, laid railroads, founded villages and established schools. 

Peterson keeps attention on what people did and how and when they did it. He has put on the line much that is new, avoiding praise, blame and sentiment. One quotation that captures the essence of the hardships and the faith of these pioneer Mormons is a sentence from a letter by Lucy Hannah White Flake, commeriting on the wind: “It has damaged the crops and covered them with sand, filled up the ditches and made it very unpleasant, but our Heavenly Father must know what this wind is for.”

Take up Your Mission: Mormon Colonizing Along the Little Colorado River, 1870-igoo. By Charles S. Peterson. Tucson, Arizona: Arizona University Press, 1973. 309 pp. $9.50.