Mormonism's Last Colonizer: The Life and Times of William H. Smart
352
Mormonism's Last Colonizer: The Life and Times of William H. Smart
352(1)
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Overview
Winner of the Mormon History Assn Best Biography Award 2009
By the early twentieth century, the era of organized Mormon colonization of the West from a base in Salt Lake City was all but over. One significant region of Utah had not been colonized because it remained in Native American hands—the Uinta Basin, site of a reservation for the Northern Utes. When the federal government decided to open the reservation to white settlement, William H. Smart—a nineteenth-century Mormon traditionalist living in the twentieth century, a polygamist in an era when it was banned, a fervently moral stake president who as a youth had struggled mightily with his own sense of sinfulness, and an entrepreneurial businessman with theocratic, communal instincts—set out to ensure that the Uinta Basin also would be part of the Mormon kingdom.
Included with the biography is a searchable CD containing William H. Smart's extensive journals, a monumental personal record of Mormondom and its transitional period from nineteenth-century cultural isolation into twentieth-century national integration.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780874217223 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Utah State University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/20/2008 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Mormonism's Last Colonizer
The Life and Times of William H. SmartBy William B. Smart
Utah State University Press
Copyright © 2008 Utah State University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-722-3
Chapter One
Growing Up in Franklin
On April 14, 1860, thirteen Mormon families, led by Thomas Sharratt Smart from Provo, Utah, pulled their wagons into a circle on the Muddy (later the Cub) River in the north end of Cache Valley in what they thought was Utah. The settlement they would build there would become Franklin, the first permanent white settlement in Idaho. It would also become the birthplace of William H. Smart, the man known as the father of Mormon settlement in Utah's Uinta Basin and the author of the most voluminous and comprehensive journals documenting that settlement.
The Mormons had long eyed the lush, well-watered Cache Valley as an ideal location, although they knew little or nothing of its history. Forty miles long, twelve wide, the mountain-ringed valley was once the Cache Arm of prehistoric Lake Bonneville. One of the world's most dramatic geologic events occurred at Red Rock Pass, twenty miles northwest of Franklin. There, about 16,000 years ago, the lake breached its northern rim, cutting a chasm through which some 15 million acre-feet of water per second-about three times the average flow of the Amazon River today-roared out into the Snake and Columbia river drainages. When it was over, Lake Bonneville was 350 feet lower, at 5,100 feet. In ensuing millennia it shrank to the 30-foot-deep remnant known as the Great Salt Lake, leaving Cache Valley with the deep, rich soil that attracted settlers.
Ever since John H. Weber led a small party of what would become William Ashley's Rocky Mountain Fur Company into the area in 1824, what he called "Willow Valley" had been known as a favorite Indian hunting ground, teeming with deer, elk, and mountain sheep as well as bears, wolves, coyotes, and lynx-and, of course, beaver. In 1826, the West's second fur trapper-Indian rendezvous was held in the valley, possibly not far from where Franklin would be settled. The following year, Jim Beckwourth wrote: "While digging a cache in the bank [probably of the Cub or Little Bear River], the earth caved in, killing two of our party." The event gave Cache Valley its name.
After the Mormons arrived in Salt Lake Valley in 1847, Brigham Young's great challenge was to find places to settle the 70,000 land-hungry converts who would gather in Zion before the coming of the railroad. Within a decade, he had pushed settlements as far south as the Virgin River and into most of the Utah valleys in between-with outlying colonies in San Bernardino, California, as well as west to Carson Valley, Nevada, and north to the Lemhi River in Idaho.
But Cache Valley was the home of the Northwestern Shoshoni, a proud, well-armed band, nothing like the more poorly equipped Goshutes and Paiutes being pushed aside farther south. Not until the Utah War ended and the U.S. Army stationed troops at Camp Floyd in 1858 was it considered prudent to challenge the Shoshoni. Then, things moved quickly. In 1859, Young appointed Peter Maughan as presiding Mormon bishop in Cache Valley, and settlements sprang up in Wellsville, Mendon, Logan, Smithfield, and Providence that summer.
When Smart and his party arrived at the Muddy the following spring, the Shoshoni chief, Kittemere, received their gifts of beef and grain and welcomed them to the area's land, timber, and water. For a while, relations were friendly, although the Indians' requests-or demands-for food and supplies were a nuisance. But within two years, deteriorating relations led to one of the most horrific slaughters of Indians in frontier history.
By the end of that first summer, some sixty-one families, more than a hundred persons, had arrived at the infant settlement. Most were single men or young married couples, but their leader, Thomas Smart, was different. Born on September 14, 1823, in Shenstone Parish, Staffordshire, England, he was thirty-six years old, with a wife, Ann Hayter, three children by her former husband, and six children of their own.
He was well qualified for his leadership role. He had learned to carry responsibility at a young age in England, customarily arising as early as 3 a.m. to load the produce from his father's farm onto a pony cart and haul it to nearby Lichfield for sale in the morning market. At age seventeen, he became a brickmaker in England and subsequently in France, where he met and married his wife. Crop failures, crowded and unsanitary conditions, long working hours, and the growing social discontent that led to the overthrow of Louis Philippe in the Revolution of 18485 made the prospect of a new life in America attractive to the newlyweds. In 1845, after an eight-week ordeal on a sailing ship that must have been misery for pregnant Ann, they eventually settled in St. Louis, where Thomas worked at brick-making, leather manufacturing, and farming. There, they learned of the Mormon Church from an employee on Thomas's farm and were baptized in 1851.
Like thousands of other converts, they heeded Brigham Young's manifesto to "gather to Zion," and started out on April 8, 1852, with Smart as the captain of a company of twenty families in seventeen wagons. Despite the cholera epidemic then raging on the trail, and rain that made the trek miserable most of the time, they arrived in Salt Lake Valley in September with no loss of life.
After a brief rest, the Smart family was sent to the infant settlement of American Fork, where Thomas helped build the dirt walls of the area's fort and, with Ann and their five children, spent the winter in a wagon and tent. After three years of labor to build a farm there, he was sent to Provo to manage a failing tannery and shoe store, which he brought out of debt in one year. Among other responsibilities there, he served as captain of the guard at Fort Utah (Provo). He sent his teams across the plains several times to bring Mormon converts to the valley, and in 1868 went himself as a teamster. He was a big man, strong and athletic, six feet in height, weighing about two hundred pounds. So when the call came, in 1860, to help lead the Mormon colonization in northern Cache Valley, he was seasoned and ready.
Building a Community
Bishop Peter Maughan appointed Smart captain of the new Franklin settlement, with Samuel R. Parkinson and James Sanderson as assistants. Under their direction, the settlement quickly took shape. At first the settlers lived in their wagon boxes, which were clustered together on the ground for protection, while the undercarriages were used to haul logs from the canyons to the east. Cooking was over campfires. Five days after their arrival, house and farm lots were allocated, the choice determined by a drawing. It snowed as late as May 12, but with the group's cooperative-labor, irrigation ditches were dug, and oats, barley, and wheat were in the ground by first of June. Garden plots soon followed.
The first year's harvest was small, but Samuel Handy's journal recorded that
we tramped out 48 bushels of wheat on August 2nd. William Woodward and James Sanderson took it to Farmington and got it ground into flour. It was then brought back to Franklin and divided among the people of the camps. We were a happy and united people.... The following year, we had gardens on the west side of the fort which were a great benefit to us, potatoes, cabbage, lettuce, onions, cucumbers, peas, mellons, squash and other things were raised, which made our meals more agreeable. We raised good crops that year but did not thresh the grain in the fall of the year. The winter of 1861-62 was very wet; our cellars on the south string of the fort were full of water and our houses were wet nearly every day for a long time. The grain in the stack became wet and it wasn't threshed until March. Many of the people had to eat musty bread until the next season.
June 10, 1860, brought a visit from Brigham Young, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and governor of Utah Territory, in which Franklin was thought to be located (not until surveys in the 1870s was it determined to be in Idaho). Brigham named the infant colony Franklin for Franklin D. Richards, an apostle. With his puckish sense of humor, he renamed the Muddy the Cub River, because it flows into the Bear. He also organized the Franklin Ward of the LDS Church, appointing Preston Thomas as bishop. Thomas Smart was named as a counselor in the bishopric.
Being Mormons, they needed a place to meet, so a bowery big enough to shelter 200 people was built of brush and boughs that first summer. They also needed to dance-the Quadrille, Virginia Reel, Schottische, French Four, and Monkey Musk or polygamy dance. That, too, was done in the bowery, the dirt floor sprinkled with water to pack it firm. Even more important, though, was building their homes and providing security from Indian attacks. As was so often done elsewhere, they combined the two functions.
Brigham Young, the experienced and practical colonizer, had some instructions about that.
I propose to the brethren here, and wish them to take my counsel, to build a good, strong fort. If you have not material for building a wall, you can make a strong stockade by putting pickets into the ground, which will answer a good purpose against Indian attacks. The stockade can be easily repaired by replacing decayed pickets. I wish you to build a stockade large enough for corralling your cattle outside the town. Let your grain also be stacked away from your buildings, and so arranged that if one stack takes fire all of the stacks will not necessarily be destroyed. You are very much exposed here. The settlements in this [Cache] valley are, as it were, a shield to the other settlements. You must, therefore, prepare as speedily as possible to make yourselves secure. You have a beautiful location, and plenty of excellent water.
"Serve the Lord," he concluded, "and try not to find fault with each other. Live so that you will not have any faults to find with yourselves, and never mind the faults of your brethren, for each person has enough of his own to attend to."
The settlers wasted no time. Under Smart's direction, homes were begun along the sides of what would be a rectangular fort sixty by ninety rods (330 by 495 feet), enclosing about ten acres. People began moving into their homes in the fort in August 1860. Entrance doors faced inside, with solid walls facing outside. Floors were of dirt. Roofs were covered with what they called "government shingles"-sod laid over rough planks-that, especially during the wet winter of 1860-61, left their homes as sodden inside as out. An adobe or rock fireplace provided some warmth and a place for cooking. The rough logs were split with a broadax to make door frames and the doors themselves. Inside the enclosure were the community well, the bowery, a two-man sawpit, a corral, and, in the southwest corner, an adobe pit.
Idaho's first school was taught by Hannah Comish, who met that first year with about twenty students in her one-room home on the east side of the fort. By late spring of 1861, a combination schoolhouse-meetinghouse-amusement hall, one large room made of rough-hewn logs, was completed within the fort. Benches were log slabs, flat side up, with legs of maple and birch. The floor was dirt, and straw-spread as protection from the cold, damp earth-was replaced every Saturday so the room would be fresh and clean for Sunday. The roof was sod, far from waterproof, so any substantial rainstorm meant school was out until the storm was over. Attendance averaged around seventy pupils. Thomas Smart, Samuel Parkinson, and William Woodward were the school trustees.
By 1863, when the fort was completed, about sixty families were listed as occupying homes there. Thomas Smart's house was in about the middle of the north side-one of only three homes boasting two rooms. In one of those rooms, on April 6, 1862, the seventh child of Thomas and Ann Hayter Smart took his first breath. They named him William Henry Smart for his two grandfathers, William Smart and Henry Hayter.
Thomas Sharratt Smart left no written record of those early years in Franklin, but his associate in the community's leadership, Samuel Rose Parkinson (later to become his son-in-law), did. In a Franklin Founders' Day celebration in 1911, the eighty-year-old Parkinson described the conditions into which the infant William was born.
The best houses were built of rough logs with dirt floors and dirt roofs. We had no lumber, no window glass, no store locks or hinges, no furniture of any description, except that which we made with our own crude tools. Our food consisted principally of fish and game and roots and a few of the more fortunate indulged in an occasional meal of boiled wheat. We kindled the fires by striking together two pieces of flint, and then neighbors would borrow coals of fire from each other. Matches were seldom seen. The wool from the backs of the sheep was corded, spun and woven into rough cloth for our clothes. When we were short of wool milk sheep were killed and their wool was used. Skins of wild animals were made into clothing. Our wives and daughters became experts at cording and spinning and weaving and dress-making all of our clothes. I had a family of boys and my wife was handy with the needle. We all wore buckskin trousers and shirts and beaver caps and rawhide boots. The girls wore linsey dresses made by their own hands.
The Bear River Massacre
By the time William Henry Smart was born, relations with the Shoshoni had turned ugly. The entire Cache Valley was "swarming with Indians," but the Franklin area was a special place for them, especially in winter. Thick brush and willows along the Bear River provided shelter from blizzards, and hot springs offered relief from the winter's chill. Bands of Shoshoni from a wide area gathered there in summer as well as winter for games, contests, handicrafts, and storytelling.
But with the impact of Mormon settlers in Cache Valley, the Shoshoni were in trouble. Jacob Forney, who had replaced Brigham Young as superintendent of Indian affairs for Utah, wrote of their "naked and starving" condition as the valley filled with settlers and the game in the mountains disappeared. The 1,500 Northwestern Shoshoni had no place to turn, he wrote, and must either "starve or steal." There was no government response to his appeals for help.
Despite the scarcity that plagued any new settlement, the Mormons followed Brigham Young's not-always-practical dictum that "it is cheaper to feed Indians than to fight them." But as the Indians' situation worsened, beggary turned to extortion and thievery, then to stealing or killing livestock. Throughout Cache Valley, raids on cattle and horses forced settlers to guard their stock day and night. By June 1860, they formed a valley-wide militia called the "Minutemen," under the command of Ezra T. Benson. The leader of Cavalry Company A's 5th Ten was Thomas Smart. Tensions increased, and in July 1860, a captured Shoshoni accused of horse-stealing was shot while trying to escape. In retaliation, the Indians killed Ira Merrill and John Reed; Reed, whose grave became the beginnings of the Franklin cemetery, was the father of the first child born in Franklin. Two Indians also died in the gunfight. Only the arrival of the militia the next day averted bloody reprisals.
In 1862, the new superintendent of Indian affairs, James Doty, appealed again for government aid. The Indians, he reported, were "in great numbers, in a starving and destitute condition." No aid came, but he was instructed to negotiate a treaty. With winter approaching, Doty decided to make the attempt the following spring. By then it would be too late.
In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln had sent seven hundred California Volunteers under Colonel Patrick E. Connor to establish Fort Douglas on the foothills above Salt Lake City. Their mission was to protect the overland mail and telegraph-and to keep an eye on Brigham Young and the Mormons. The assignment did not bode well for the Native Americans. On his way to Utah, Connor had already demonstrated his contempt for Indian life by killing four hostages when stolen horses were not promptly returned. His men, disgruntled that they were assigned to chase Indians around the desert instead of seeking glory in the Civil War, were spoiling for a fight. The chance soon came.
On January 5, 1863, a small party of miners coming south for supplies was attacked on the Bear River, a few miles from Franklin. One man was killed, and a judge in Salt Lake City issued a warrant for the arrest of Shoshoni chiefs Bear Hunter, Sanpitch, and Sagwitch. Colonel Connor was asked to provide a military force to "effect the arrest of the guilty Indians." Connor promptly prepared to do so, but advised that "it was not my intent to take any prisoners." He reportedly commanded: "Kill everything. Nits make lice."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mormonism's Last Colonizer by William B. Smart Copyright © 2008 by Utah State University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Illustrations....................viPreface....................vii
Introduction....................1
One Growing Up in Franklin....................7
Two Years of Trial and Torment....................31
Three An Aborted Mission....................56
Four A Repentant Sinner Finds Himself....................75
Five Putting a Shoulder to the Wheel....................89
Six On-the-job Training in Heber Valley....................117
Seven Making Indian Land Mormon Country....................148
Eight The Vernal Years....................179
Nine Civilizing the Reservation Lands....................208
Ten The Fourth-and Final-Stake Presidency....................250
Eleven Struggle and Failure in Leota....................265
Twelve Hard Times....................286
Thirteen The Final Years....................305
Epilogue....................316
Appendix A Thomas Smart's Vision....................320
Appendix B Selected Correspondence from William H. Smart Papers....................322
Bibliography....................334
Index....................340