Strange People in a Strange Land | Howard Roberts Lamar, The Far Southwest, 1846-1912: A Territorial History

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Howard R. Lamar, professor of history at Yale University and author of Dakota Territory, 1861-1899: A Study of Frontier Politics (1956), has extended his investigations to the Far Southwest and produced a scholarly, highly readable, and interesting account of that frontier region. Four territories are considered: New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. He describes how American government and institutions, such as the two-party system, trial by jury, and free schools, came to be established in a region where different races and cultures in varying degrees of development existed from 1846 to 1912. Despite the differences in the four territories, Lamar notes that many physical and economic problems were of common concern. Indeed the author suggests that because of the close relationship between local and national development, the history of the American frontier was not as free, individualistic, or haphazard as has been asserted. 

The four chapters dealing with Utah make exceedingly interesting reading. In general there is little to quibble about, for Lamar is fair and objective, giving both praise and criticism. As he describes it, for twenty years after the Utah War, a determined struggle occurred between federal officers and the Church. A long dispute over the court system in Utah was followed by a bitter fight between Brigham Young and General Patrick Edward Conner, commander of the federal troops stationed in the territory during the Civil War. A third struggle over the powers of the governor flared periodically into a major crisis. In this period, Congress passed a few laws to strengthen the federal officers in Utah and abolish polygamy, and then in the 1880’s began a massive attack on Church leaders, on the civil rights of the rank and file, and on the institution of polygamy. By then, only the defeated Southerners could point to as long a history of federal intereference in the local life of a community and as deliberate a political and social reconstruction of an entire territory. 

According to Lamar, the Utah experience was the most turbulent and unusual to occur in the history of the American territorial system, for nowhere else had the federal government ever faced the problem of turning a desert frontier theocracy into a standard democratic American state. To the outside world the practice of polygamy came to be the symbol of the so-called Mormon rebellion, and it was naively thought that if this institution could be abolished, all other things would right themselves. But this simplistic view ignored the fact that during their decades of isolation in the Great Basin, the Saints had created a distinct religious society and economy. The frictions that made headlines were caused by a conflict of social orders and of cultures, not by a conflict over polygamy alone. The growing crisis between 1850 and 1890, as Lamar sees it, involved not just who should rule at home, but what form home rule and local institutions should have. By rejecting parts of the common law, public schools, a secular two-party system, federal land policy, and the primacy of civil courts, Utah had violated even the permissive territorial system so fundamentally that Congress felt compelled to act. 

Lamar considers Brigham Young a great frontiersman, not only because he successfully led a people to a new and forbidding land, but because he was also a pioneer in the same sense as Sir Thomas Dale and John Rolfe, who came to grips with the realities of colonial Jamestown and the problems of establishing an unfamiliar economy in a new environment. Young also sustained a community of Saints and a total society, much as John Bradford of Plymouth and John Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay did. He made the desert bloom and guaranteed that Utah would be predominantly Mormon. But such praise does not prevent Lamar from holding Brigham Young responsible for many of the Saints’ difficulties in their relations with Washington and the Gentiles. He charges that Young’s resistance to the fundamental American beliefs in secular courts, the two-party system, public schools, a weak militia, separation of Church and State, and monogamous marriage, and his defense of the community concept of property, brought the wrath of the nation upon Utah.

In an age dominated by the memory of sectional rebellion and a war to preserve democracy and the Union, Congress could hardly be expected to sympathize with another extreme form of states’ rights and another peculiar, domestic institution. Unfortunately for the Mormons, the Republicans in Congress never forgot the parallel between an independent Mormon Utah, which condoned the practice of polygamy, and the confederacy which defended slavery. They even used methods learned in the Civil War and Reconstruction to force conformity on Utah. General Connor’s presence in Utah was military occupation, thinly disguised. The scores of anti-polygamy and anti-Mormon bills depended heavily on Reconstruction measures as precedents. Disfranchisement, loyalty oaths, confiscation of property, and threat of imprisonment were as familiar to Mormons as they were to high-ranking Confederates. The passions and concerns of the hour which shaped policy in Washington affected events in Utah. 

Lamar believes that in the evolving, continually expanding nation, one part always seemed to be out of step with the others, a condition that has helped to give American politics a permanent geographic or regional orientation. In his estimation, Brigham Young in his western setting was one of the most successful rebels against accepted American religious social and political traditions in the nineteenth century. With Archbishop Lamy of New Mexico, he stands as one of the few great and complex men to play a cultural role in the American occupation of the Southwest. Partly because of these men, two religiously-oriented Southwestern subcultures exist today within the borders of a standardized and secularized America. 

Utah was not to remain wholly isolated. With considerable apprehension, the state after 1896 threw off its traditional Democratic inclinations to vote for big business and Republicanism. After fifty years the Mormons had entered the mainstream of American life once more. But the sense of painful alienation and persecution which accompanied reentry remains a group experience unique in American history.

The Far Southwest, 1846-1912: A Territorial History. By Howard Roberts Lamar. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966. xiii, 560 pp. $10.00.