The Move South

A legendary part of the Utah War of 1857–58 was the temporary abandonment of their homes by the Mormon people, an action that caught the attention of the world when “Johnston’s Army” marched through the desolate streets of Salt Lake City on 26 June 1858. Pioneer journals and memoirs, as well as popular and academic histories, tell of “the Move South,” but what actually happened, and why, has not been critically analyzed since Arrington looked at the economic dimensions of the move a generation ago.¹ This article is an attempt to do so; it is part of a larger review of the entire Utah War.²

These questions will be considered: Why was the Move South initiated? Why did it continue so long? How did it immediately impact the people involved? What were its consequences?

To seek refuge from danger in flight was no new idea for the Mormons in Utah in 1858. Until July of the previous year, none of them had spent ten years in one location since joining The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Thousands of European converts had fled from “Babylon” since 1847, and the rest of the Saints had experienced one or more of the involuntary retreats within Missouri, from Ohio to Missouri, from Missouri to Illinois, and from Illinois to the Great Basin. Inspired by millennial expectations, they saw the world as their enemy. Now the enemy was again threatening their homes—their Zion.

Defense, delay, and diplomacy were the policies adopted by Brigham Young and his colleagues in the Mormon leadership when the word first came that a United States force of 2,500 men was on its way to Utah Territory with a new territorial governor. Their initial response, “we ask no odds of them,”³ expressed deep faith as well as bravado, but from the outset President Young weighed the odds. Another hegira was always available as an alternative to destruction. Even as he pursued a “scorched earth” policy to take advantage of the late departure of the army and called on John M. Bernhisel and Thomas L. Kane to seek the peaceful settlement that ultimately came, the Mormon prophet-leader warned followers and foes that his people were prepared to take to their wagons once more.

The “Sebastopol policy” took its name from the 1855 Crimean War episode in which the Russians blew up their military stronghold in the Crimea before surrendering it to allied British and French forces. To the adult Mormons in Utah, most of whom had experienced rejection in England either as members or missionaries, the Russian action was an admirable precedent.⁴ The possibility of comparable Mormon action was dramatically set forth in the public meeting that Captain Stewart Van Vliet attended on 13 September 1857. An assistant army quartermaster, Van Vliet was in Salt Lake City in an unsuccessful attempt to arrange provisions and accommodations for the troops en route, and the meeting in the old Tabernacle was arranged to convince him of the peril and folly of the government’s policy. With hyperbolic rhetoric that probably reflected both conviction and calculation, President (and still Territorial Governor) Young declared:

Before I will suffer what I have in times gone by, there shall not be one building, nor one foot of lumber, nor a stick, nor a tree, nor a particle of grass and hay, that will burn, left in reach of our enemies. I am sworn, if driven to extremity, to utterly lay waste, in the name of Israel’s God.⁵

To underscore the people’s commitment, Apostle John Taylor said to the congregation, “All you that are willing to set fire to your property and lay it in ashes, rather than submit to their military rule and oppression, manifest it by raising your hands.” No dissenting votes were cast.⁶

Evidence that the retreat option engaged Brigham Young’s attention during the fall and early winter months is scattered through his sermons and letters and echoed in the journals and preaching of his followers. Then disappointing news and military prospects generated mid-February assignments to several stake leaders to select “some old men and boys” for exploring parties that would seek a haven in the wilderness south and west of the Mormon settlements.⁷ Between March and June, expeditions headed by George W. Bean (Provo) and William H. Dame (Parowan) roamed through an expanse of the Great Basin astraddle the current Utah-Nevada boundary, about two hundred miles north-south and one hundred miles east-west, and even planted crops near present-day Panaca. But the 171 men of the White Mountain Expedition found nothing to match Brigham Young’s impression of “room in that region for 500,000 persons to live scattered about where there is good grass and water.”⁸ By the time the expedition completed its work, the events that gave rise to the Move South had come and gone.

Several factors precipitated the move. The first was that same geographic isolation that brought on the Utah War in the first place. During the winter, communications from Washington, D.C., and the East came by the monthly mail from southern California, weeks behind events and filtered through the hostile public opinion that the Mountain Meadows Massacre and other Utah events had fueled in the towns on the Pacific slope. Reports of President Buchanan’s plans to double the size of the Utah Expedition were augmented by rumors of California volunteers invading from the West.

The second contributor to Mormon uneasiness was the bellicose atmosphere of those wintering near Fort Bridger at Camp Scott and Eckelsville, as reported by Nauvoo Legion spies and non-Mormon teamsters and military deserters who came to Salt Lake City. Albert Sidney Johnston’s troops and Governor-designate Alfred Cumming’s coterie of civil officials were perceived as waiting only for a break in the weather to advance with guns blazing. In January instructions were issued to bishops and stake presidents to raise and equip one thousand soldiers for a year’s campaign, but the effort drew attention to the meager military resources available. Many congregations were being instructed in mid-March “to prepare for removal to the mountains.”⁹

Deteriorating relations with the Indians were another complication. Subjected to inducements and pressures from both sides, the native Americans of northern Utah and southern Idaho were no longer reliable friends, or dependents, of the Mormons. An attack on Fort Limhi (the Salmon River Mission) prompted the dispatch of a military relief expedition from Salt Lake City and the mid-March abandonment of the mission. Federal Indian agents and mountain men sympathetic with the army were believed to be behind this and other depredations.

The hope of undermining the Buchanan war policy by generating public sympathy was another motive for the Sebastopol decision. As one Mormon leader noted at the time,

If we whip out and use up the few troops at Bridger will not the excitement and sympathy which is now raising in our favor in the states, be turned against us. Whereas if we only annoy and impede their progress while we ‘Burn up’ and flee, the folly, and meanness of the President will be more apparrant and he and his measures more unpopular.¹⁰

In view of the fact that reports of heavy Congressional and press criticism of the administration program reached Utah in increasing volume after 21 March 1858, it is arguable that the hope of turning the American people against the President had even more to do with prolonging and justifying the exodus than with launching it.

The immediate cause of action was the prospect that Thomas L. Kane’s peacemaking mission would fail. The eccentric “friend of the Mormons” brought unofficial peace overtures from the Buchanan administration, but his documents and deportment were so ambiguous as to produce some skepticism in Utah and even more at Camp Scott.¹¹ He reached Salt Lake City via Panama, San Francisco, and San Bernardino on 25 February and held a series of only partly reported meetings with President Young and others in the Mormon community. Having secured their reluctant consent to receive Cumming, provided the new governor came without army escort, Kane went to Camp Scott. He was accompanied most of the way by General William H. Kimball and a Nauvoo Legion guard. Between 12 and 19 March he managed to gain only a little of Cumming’s confidence while totally alienating Johnston and the entire army.¹² As a result, his first report to Kimball, who had waited nearby until 17 March, was pessimistic; Kimball reached Salt Lake City with the message about forty-eight hours later.¹³

There is persuasive evidence that these tidings triggered Brigham Young’s decision to implement the Sebastopol policy at once. A day earlier, 18 March, a meeting of Church leaders and Nauvoo Legion officers had discussed the tactical and public relations advantages of retreating if threatened, but according to Hosea Stout, who was there, “no definite measures” were adopted and “the council adjourned till 8th April.”¹⁴ Then on 21 March, without further council meetings—but certainly not without informal deliberations among colleagues who were at hand—President Young turned the regular meeting in the Tabernacle into a special conference that announced, adopted, and began to execute the contingency plans. Four days later, according to Samuel Pitchforth’s diary, George Bean brought this report to Nephi, 150 miles to the south:

President Young has thought it wisdom to evacuate the Territory as far north as Provo, and that 500 families are going forthwith to the white mountains, this sudden move is on account of the news from the armey Col T L Kane went out and came back to the boys. . . . [H]e told them that the soldiers had had fresh supplies and were determined to come. . . . Kane did not returen with the bretheren, so Pres. Young to save the effusion of blood has concluded to mov[e] and let them come in. I understand that the people are to move forthwith.¹⁵

That Sunday “Sebastopol” meeting was a long one, with Brigham Young speaking first and last and Heber C. Kimball, Daniel H. Wells, John Young, and Wilford Woodruff giving reinforcing messages in between. After reminding the congregation that “the Lord has fought our battles,” that “I am your earthly shepherd,” and that “Our enemies are determined to blot us out of existence if they can,” President Young asked, “Should I take a course to waste life?” He then acknowledged the impracticality of fighting for their homes and declared, “I am in favor of leaving them before I am obliged to.” Then he confronted the inevitable question: “Where are you going? To the deserts and the mountains. There is a desert region in this Territory larger than any of the Eastern States, that no white man knows anything about. . . . I am going there where we should have gone six or seven years ago.”¹⁶

President Young announced his intention to begin moving his own families as soon as the snow was off the ground, but he proposed to call five hundred families to go immediately to put in crops. Others might go now if they wished, and everyone north of the Jordan River narrows between Salt Lake Valley and Utah Valley should prepare to go soon. “You may ask whether I am willing to burn up my houses? Yes, and to be the first man that will put a torch to my dwellings I am for letting them come and take ‘Sebastopol.’”

In his second address, the Mormon leader asked whether the congregation wanted him to decide who should go first, those who had already been driven from their homes at least once or those who had not. “You decide,” they shouted. He announced that “those who have never been pioneers shall be pioneers this time,” and he charged the bishops to select about five hundred families that very evening. He closed with a challenge: “Bishops and military officers, take due notice and govern yourselves accordingly; it is clear in the south.”¹⁷

That the evacuation was initially expected to be permanent—or at least extended—is suggested by the instructions that flowed out of Brigham Young’s office in the next two or three days, even though he had said on Sunday, “I would cache window and door frames and casings, etc., and thus save all that we can; we may come back here.” George Bean was asked to report on how many families could be accommodated as soon as he found a place in the western desert “suitable to stop for a season.” President Young wrote to John D. Lee, “It is at presant expected to make Headquarters at Parowan for a time, when we arrive there.”¹⁸

Since the prospects for a peaceful end to the conflict over the territorial governorship improved almost immediately, it is appropriate here to address the question, Why was the Sebastopol policy pursued with such vigor until the end of June? On 28 March General Kimball returned from another meeting with Colonel Kane, bringing word that Cumming had agreed to come to Salt Lake City in spite of General Johnston’s objections. Five days later, the California mail brought news that the Senate had defeated Buchanan’s request for an increase in regular army strength, leading Hosea Stout to write, “the tide of feelings seemed to be turning in our favor.”¹⁹ On 12 April Cumming and Kane arrived, and the amiable new governor met no resistance in taking over his office and establishing a comfortable relationship with his predecessor. Meanwhile the army remained at Camp Scott, and in early June two peace commissioners came from Washington with amnesty terms that were not difficult for the Mormons to accept. Still the exodus continued, and the Sebastopol plan was not abandoned until after Johnston’s army passed through Salt Lake City on 26 June and camped across the Jordan River.

It seems clear that an acute distrust of the army, fed by recurring reports of the climate at Camp Scott, was the primary motivation for the Mormon course. Both Kane and Cumming repeatedly urged that the dislocating relocation be abandoned, assuring Young that the troops would not move until the governor approved their coming. But Brigham Young clung to the hope that somehow the troops could be kept out altogether. Just before Cumming left for Camp Scott on 12 May to bring back his wife and the other federal officials, Young declared: “[I]f the troops were withdrawn from the Territory, the people would stop moving; but . . . ninety-nine out of every hundred of this people would rather live out their lives in the mountains than endure the oppression the Federal Government was now heaping upon them.”²⁰

When it became clear that the establishment of a U.S. Army post in Utah Territory was inevitable, President Young persisted in his course. Perhaps he feared that Cumming would be unable fully to control the military—a concern that subsequent events showed to be well founded. Perhaps he saw Cumming’s and Kane’s reaction to the exodus as support for the hope that a people in flight for conscience’s sake would generate sympathy outside Utah. Perhaps, as Colonel Kane apparently suspected, Brigham Young was afraid of the embarrassment of a possibly premature reversal of policy. Kane wrote privately, “The effect of his changing his position for the third time would have been to discredit entirely his extraordinary pretentions as one receiving Revelation from the Most High.”²¹

That the unpredictable and uncontrollable course of the Utah War had by March 1858 shaken Brigham Young’s confidence he acknowledged in his Tabernacle message: “do not come to my office to ask me whether I am mistaken, for I want to tell you now, perhaps I am.”²² Still, he made adjustments in the overall relocation plan as soon as the odds on its being temporary improved. References to a new Church headquarters in southern Utah disappeared from his correspondence. The tempo of the movement slowed, and few families went farther south than Utah County. The Deseret News never moved beyond Fillmore, and other Church agencies and offices congregated in Provo. When President Young and some of his associates began buying property in Provo, it was presumptive evidence that by 23 April no further movement was anticipated. It probably also showed his uncertainty about how long the Church headquarters might remain in Provo.²³

The Move South was organized on the same principles that had guided the pioneer treks to the Great Basin and the colonizing projects of the previous decade: ecclesiastical leadership and cooperative sharing of resources and tasks. There can be no doubt that Brigham Young was the prime mover, first to last. Isaiah Coombs, who returned from England to join the exodus, wrote, “Israel, in her balmiest days, was never so obedient to Moses as we are to Brigham.”²⁴ A pamphlet containing President Young’s Tabernacle instructions appeared almost immediately and was distributed to local Church leaders; John D. Lee received a copy on 30 March at Washington, Utah, three hundred miles south of Salt Lake City.²⁵ Directions, verbal and by letter, poured from his office, with additional detailed instructions coming from Presiding Bishop Edward Hunter.²⁶ General Daniel H. Wells, Young’s second counselor, directed aspects that involved the Nauvoo Legion; Heber C. Kimball, Young’s first counselor and closest friend, and the other Apostles in Utah participated in decision-making councils and handled important tasks that were assigned to them. At a 24 March meeting of leaders of the Salt Lake and nearby wards, Bishop Hunter gave several instructions; other communities received them by courier before the end of the week. Each congregation (ward or branch) north of Utah Valley was assigned a provisional destination in Utah, Juab, Millard, or Iron counties. For the Fourteenth Ward it was Round Valley (near Fillmore), and for Big Cottonwood Ward it was Beaver Valley. Bishops were advised on how to select and organize the first moving groups. Pointers were given on flouring grain and saving supplies; excess freighting capacity was to be made available for other aspects of the move, including hauling grain on shares. After some indecision about what to do with supplies contributed earlier for the “standing army,” most of them were returned to the donors or their wards to assist the migration.²⁷ To insure that military manpower resources would not be depleted, a thousand men were requisitioned to maintain patrols in Echo Canyon and protect property in the abandoned settlements. The contingents eventually assigned to Great Salt Lake and Weber counties were three hundred each; other areas received the balance. Soldiers were expected to relocate their families, and breaks in military service were permitted so that men could assist in these moves. They were also instructed to try to protect property and crops against animal and human depredations, and to be prepared to apply the torch if President Young gave the word.²⁸

The people of Utah Stake, in Utah Valley, were sent three assignments. The first, to remain prepared to execute the Sebastopol policy, led to much grinding and packing of flour and some other preparations to move. These soon faded from attention, however, under the pressures generated by the other two assignments. The people were asked to provide wagon power for the movement from Salt Lake Valley and to make housing, land, and other help available for as many of the migrants as could be accommodated—for a stay whose duration was by no means clear.

To the communities south of Utah Valley went similar instructions, plus advice to strengthen the White Mountain Mission and to plant extra grain for an expanding population. The most urgent request was for wagons and provisions to assist the exodus. Within two weeks, caravans were moving north from the settlements in Sanpete Valley and from Washington, Harmony, Cedar City, Parowan, and intermediate points along the California Trail. By the time most of this volunteer help reached Salt Lake City, there was little impetus to move people all the way to southern Utah, but they did help to haul some people and goods as far south as Nephi and Fillmore.

The northern communities—Box Elder (Brigham City), Ogden, and the dozen small settlements along the road that linked them to Salt Lake City—were instructed to prepare for a two- or three-stage movement. The northernmost families would move into Ogden; then as housing was vacated in the Salt Lake wards, all would move that far, then go on to destinations farther south. For example, the North Cottonwood Ward (Farmington) was assigned to the Salt Lake Nineteenth Ward, then on to a location to be designated later.²⁹ These transient wards were counseled that during their Salt Lake Valley stopover they should not damage fences or fruit trees, and they should pasture cattle west of the Jordan.³⁰ Few of the northern Utah residents went farther than Utah County, and a small number apparently never left home. The Saints in the Tooele area, southwest of Great Salt Lake, were sent directly to Utah Valley, and Indian unrest provided an additional incentive for them to go.³¹

Because the initial round of instructions to all Church units gives the impression of a movement planned with almost military precision, historical accounts of the Move South have credited the event itself with a greater measure of direction and control than was actually the case.³² The de facto abandonment of the idea of a permanent relocation in some distant refuge was gradual and unattended by a systematic revision of instructions to participants in the move. Consequently, bishops who still attended portions of their congregations did a good deal of improvising as well as independent negotiating with their counterparts in the central Utah communities. As for those who moved independently, what happened to them was more a function of ingenuity, luck, and family ties than of any overarching logistical plan. Still, all were participants in a massive effort, and through the same process of historical mythmaking that would transform the hand-cart tragedies of 1856, the Move South became, for many of the participants, a monumental Church accomplishment as well as a witness of faith.

The exodus began quickly once the Sebastopol policy was adopted. Some bishops went straight from the Tabernacle meeting on 21 March to the task of calling their people together, and by evening the first selections were made for the honor of leading the way. Other wards soon followed suit, designating up to fifty families to be part of the vanguard of five hundred. That all the Saints were not thrilled by the prospect is apparent from Hosea Stout’s experience: “The brethren seemed some what loth to volunteer for which reason I gave my name to go in the first Company although I did not come in that class who were called upon.”³³

Snowy weather hampered preparations the first week, but companies were organized and reckonings of resources were made. The North Cottonwood Ward counted 757 members, 117 of them under four years old. Available to move the 144 families and sustain them in a temporary location were 82 wagons and 133 teams (96 yoke of oxen and 95 horses). Food supplies included 307 cows, 94 “two year old & upwards,” 6,496 bushels of wheat, and 27,517 pounds of flour. It figured out at 260 pounds of flour per person “after deducting one bushel for seed” for each family.³⁴ Not all congregations were so well equipped.

In every ward were individuals who fell into the needy category. A letter that later appeared in the Millennial Star gives the impressions of one faithful woman:

Go where you will, you will see the Saints making cheerful preparations for their departure, and a word of comfort on their lips for their neighbors; notwithstanding which, a keen observer might perceive a tear glistening in the eye of some of the stoutest among us. We have enough to eat, and for that we are thankful. Our clothing is nearly all worn out, and it is not possible to buy any more here. If we had heeded the counsel of Brother Brigham a little sooner, we should now have an abundance of clothing; but we are like children—we have to learn by experience. . . . [F]ortunately for me, I have now no mirror, and therefore, my own appearance does not annoy me much.³⁵

Some of the volunteer drayage capacity from the south was used to move the indigent and insufficiently equipped households. One participating wagoner remembers going several times to the General Tithing Office, “where the brethren in charge gave us a load of people and their belongings, which we brought to Utah County and left in whatever town they wished to stop.”³⁶ To provide for four such families that were going first, the bishop of the Fourteenth Ward asked that the regular 1 April fast day offerings be expanded to represent “a two Days fast so as to help the poor.”³⁷ Women who lacked male help because of military, missionary, or other reasons were a special concern of the bishops; when the hundred men who had been proselyting in Europe reached Utah in May and June, most of them found their families already relocated.

Under the strictest admonition to preserve breadstuffs, the Saints from Brigham City to the Point of the Mountain converted their wheat to flour, boxed and barreled it, and took it south. Andrew Gardner’s Big Cottonwood mill, strategically situated on the State Road south of Salt Lake City, ground an estimated half million pounds of flour, or 250 one-ton wagonloads, during the months the exodus was in progress. The Church Tithing Office granary also shipped about three hundred wagonloads of wheat and flour to Provo, along with a large bin to hold it.³⁸

Relocating the Church headquarters was a task that extended into May. Wilford Woodruff, George A. Smith, and others spent days packing and moving the books, records, and secretarial equipment in the Church offices to temporary locations in Provo.³⁹ The Deseret News prepared to move to Fillmore and then to Parowan. The foundation and cut stones on the temple grounds were buried, along with the heaviest equipment of the public works shops and the window casings from the Tabernacle, in a “serpentine cache” designed to protect them from intruders. But the organ and most of the public-works tools went with the wagonloads of Church property that constituted a substantial part of what moved south.⁴⁰

Brigham Young and other leaders began moving their families south on 1 April. Young had alerted the Provo leadership with a partly facetious letter whose impact can only be surmised:

Dear Brother [Bishop Elias H. Blackburn]—I design to soon begin to move my family, provisions, stoves, musical instruments, and such other articles as may be needed and cannot be saved in caches, as far as Provo, and I would like to have you secure me one or two large halls in your city in which I can shelter my family, and some store rooms for my property. You may wish to know how much room I may need; from ten feet square to half of your city, I am not particular. “How many are you going to move to this place?” you may ask; only a few, all who live in this city. You will understand that we shall need many teams and wagons for this movement, probably not over 2000 at first, and we expect you to assist us in this matter as much as you can consistently, beginning as soon as you can after next Sunday the 29th. As we shall not sow nor plant any more here this season, you will understand the propriety of raising all the potatoes, flax and sugar cane you may be able to.⁴¹

Within the twenty Salt Lake City, seven rural Salt Lake County, and about ten other northern Utah wards and branches that were called upon to move, the nature and extent of coordinated planning and group movement depended upon local leadership and circumstances. Ward records suggest that most congregations went through the organizing phase, after which the degree of cooperation and priesthood supervision in the implementation of plans varied widely. Since no ward has left systematic records for the exodus period, generalizations must be tentative, but it appears that many ceased to function as wards as soon as members began to leave. On the other hand, some congregations went all the way. On 23 April President Young visited the encampments of the Nineteenth, Bountiful, and other wards along the lower Provo River, in an area called “Shanghai.” Centerville Ward went to Spanish Fork, where they “located temporarily on the Indian Reservation.” Big Cottonwood Ward, in southeastern Salt Lake County, decided in March to send an advance party of thirty wagons to locate sites in Beaver Valley, its assigned destination; however, when the general move took place in April most of the ward members settled in the bottomland north of the Provo River, where they remained under a reorganized bishopric until they returned home.⁴²

Since the concept of a permanent move into the western desert was tacitly abandoned—or at least reconverted to the contingency plan that it had been before 21 March, before most of the Mormons actually left their homes—where they actually went became a function of who they were. The LDS General Authorities and their chief aides went to Provo, where heroic efforts were made to accommodate them. People with close kin in the communities south of the evacuation zone had the option of moving in or camping on family lands; some who went farthest south were in this category. Those with migrating ward groups lived like pioneers again, in tents and wagons, until other shelter could be built. Of the large number who moved as individual family units, some found accommodation with the residents of Utah County and points beyond, who were under strong admonition from Brigham Young to extend hospitality; among those who found temporary homes with strangers, Margaret Simmons remembers the Joseph Curtis family of Payson, her hosts at the time her baby sister was born.⁴³ Others stopped on lands made available by local authorities, there to live in wagon boxes, tents, dugouts, wickiups, barns, and log cabins. Polygamous and large monogamous families were often moved serially, with menfolk and rolling stock shuttling back and forth between. Peregrine Sessions took a first load of flour to American Fork on 31 March and moved his family in April, while his mother, Patty Sessions Parry, put in a garden and did several nursing tasks before joining him there on 25 May.⁴⁴ Not all such families found temporary homes in a single location.

The initial instructions to discontinue planting caught the northern Utah Saints already into the planting cycle, and it does not appear that everyone stopped immediately. One of the assignments to men left behind as property guardians was to irrigate growing crops; some of the late departees also tended their neighbors’ fields in the interim, as did some of the temporary Salt Lake City residents who came from communities farther north. Many men with families temporarily in the south also traveled back to their homes to weed gardens, take water turns, and mend fences. This back-and-forth activity is additional evidence that rank-and-file Mormons soon perceived the Move South as a temporary expedient.

Still, most people moved, taking their livestock and as much as possible of their movable property with them. The route of migration was along the single dirt road that linked the Mormon settlements from Brigham City to Nephi. Whether the spring weather was rainy or dry, the trip was no picnic. Wilford Woodruff remarked on the women and children “stuck in the mud between here and Provo.”⁴⁵ A volunteer teamster recorded that snow caught him en route back to Nephi with a Salt Lake family, and “if we had not pulled down a fence to burn we must of Perrished.”⁴⁶ A young woman who made the trek in dry weather later remarked on the aptness of one of the southern Salt Lake County communities taking the name Sandy.⁴⁷ Bishop Edwin D. Woolley’s story illustrates the multiple dimensions of the move. Ward teachers found that in the Thirteenth Ward 145 families, numbering 932 persons, wanted to move quickly, yet twenty-four households lacked wagons. While supervising arrangements for the poor, Woolley also moved his four wives and their families to Provo, where some of the children camped in tents for the duration. He remained in Salt Lake City, looking after a grandmother who was too ill to move, assisting family members who were with the militia, and conducting business in the Church tithing store.⁴⁸

With the emigration went most, but not all, of the business activity in Great Salt Lake Valley. Most of the non-Mormon component had already disappeared when the Gentile merchants left for California or the East in the fall of 1857. Individual craftsmen took their tools with them. Andrew Gardner left Big Cottonwood to set up a sawmill and a gristmill in Spanish Fork, leaving Warren Foote to make flour at the old mill while the traffic lasted. Frederick Kesler dismantled his mill in Box Elder and got it going in Utah County just in time to receive instructions to take it back to Box Elder again. David Candland, who had relocated in American Fork with his families (including a plural wife married in April), was instructed to go back to Salt Lake City in May and reopen the Globe Hotel. With cash and provisions provided by the Church, he entertained such notables as the U.S. peace commissioners and the land agents who came to try to sell real estate in Central America to Brigham Young. Of the Church-owned enterprises, only an inventory-shrunken tithing store remained open to supply the needs of the militia.⁴⁹

U.S. money being virtually unavailable in Utah, goods and services were paid for with Deseret currency, tithing scrip, and barter arrangements. The move, of course, disrupted both the payment of tithes and the machinery for managing it. The Church-sponsored currency, secured in part by livestock, was increased by almost forty thousand dollars during the move, and in spite of some resistance it circulated at par until the people returned and Gentile commerce reappeared.⁵⁰

In the absence of any systematic tabulation of the number of participants in the Move South, contemporary estimates of thirty thousand seem accurate—ten thousand from outside Salt Lake and twenty thousand from the city itself. Given a territorial population in 1860 of only 40,273, and excluding the people who in 1858 lived in central and southern Utah and the militia and nonmovers who remained in the north, Arrington’s recent estimate of thirty-five thousand seems high.⁵¹ Whatever the number, it was an impressive phenomenon to both trekkers and observers, Mormon and Gentile. Up to eight hundred wagons a day were on the road between Salt Lake City and Utah County in April and May. To one observer who saw teams scattered from “the city to San Peel,” it was “like one train.”⁵²

In spite of the trials, most of the migrants maintained confidence in the plan and in the counsel of their leaders. Because of his unique situation, William Staines is a noteworthy example. While entertaining Thomas Kane and later Governor and Mrs. Cumming in his comfortable home (later the Devereaux House), Staines moved his family to Payson and repeatedly expressed willingness to burn house, furniture, and prize-winning orchard if necessary. “I feell as tho I would rather have a Sage Bush for my house and enjoy my religion than be in my good Home and see Israels Daughters defiled which I am afraid some would be if those Troops were in our midst.”⁵³ Such testimonies and such fears abound in the diaries and records of the move.

That some of the migrants were less enthusiastic has already been suggested. According to one historian, many “did not recognize the social significance of the move, and procrastinated in their departure,” and President Young “threatened condign punishment on those who did not comply.” The peace commissioners who traveled to Provo later reported that “at least one-third of the persons who had removed from their homes were compelled to do so.”⁵⁴ This estimate may be high even if social pressure is defined as compulsion.

How many of the Saints elected not to participate is uncertain. Ecclesiastical warnings against grumbling and apostates were numerous enough to suggest problems, as do a few accounts of Nauvoo Legion interceptions of people trying to escape to Camp Scott. How many Church members defected is now impossible to determine; the fifty-six men, thirty-three women, and seventy-one children who accepted Governor Cumming’s 24 April offer of safe conduct to Camp Scott may have included non-Mormons as well as disaffected Saints.⁵⁵ Late in May a Church count found 2,400 people in Salt Lake City, one thousand of whom had moved in from northern Utah. As late as 13 June, when the peace commissioners were meeting with President Young and Governor Cumming, Robert Burton was urging people to leave. So was Bishop Harker of West Jordan, who found some families “very loaffull [loath] to leave.” Arrington estimates that approximately fifteen hundred people remained in the northern settlements when the army came. Some had military assignments to protect or destroy property, some were waiting under Governor Cumming’s protection, some were resisting or procrastinating, and some, like Grandmother Louisa Egbert in Kaysville, were still “awaiting word to come at any time.”⁵⁶

In the spring of 1858, temporary settlements appeared at Lehi (still referred to in some of the accounts as Dry Creek), nearby Alpine (Mountainville), American Fork (Lake City), Pleasant Grove (Battle Creek), Provo, Springville, Mapleton (Hobble Creek), Spanish Fork, Salem (Pondtown), Payson (Peteetneet), Santaquin (Summit Creek), and Nephi (Salt Creek). As the influx of humans and animals overtaxed the camps and pasture lands initially allocated by the local wards, some relocations took place; most of the West Jordan Ward (southwest Salt Lake County) members moved to Pondtown (Salem) and Spanish Fork and then relocated on the shore of Utah Lake between Spanish Fork River and Peteetneet Creek, taking their newly built schoolhouse with them.⁵⁷ Migrants who made it as far as Nephi were offered lots to build or camp on and were urged by Bishop J. G. Bigler: “make your settlement as comfortable as circumstances will allow.”⁵⁸ Individual families who went beyond to such settlements as Fillmore, Parowan, Cedar City, Manti, and Ephraim generally were accommodated in existing structures; their number was not large enough to affect the communities as those in Utah County were impacted.

Births, deaths, marriages, and divorces were not suspended by the exodus.⁵⁹ The northern Utah postmasters even made an effort to forward mail when the whereabouts of addressees were known.⁶⁰ The early transformation of the exodus to a “wait and see” enterprise meant the resumption of many subsistence and market activities. Gardens were planted and some grain was sown in vacant town lots and rural pastures. Some lands were rented and even purchased, but most were made available without charge. A major issue between residents and newcomers was the control of livestock; damage to fences and gardens was a chronic problem that bishops and other Church leaders had to deal with. Pasture lands were overgrazed, and timber cutting depleted stocks of trees in bottomlands and nearby canyons at an unprecedented rate.

Beyond the initial effort by the Presiding Bishopric to assign migrating wards to particular locations, no overall plan for allocating resources and meeting individual hardships appears to have been developed. Although many poor families were helped to equip and provision for the journey, spontaneous sharing and ingenuity took care of special needs thereafter. An assigned wagon moved John Powell’s family to Springville, but when he could find no work there, he walked to Fillmore, borrowed a wagon, and came back to move his family on to the territorial capital.⁶¹ Since most of the participants were away from home only two or three months, no socioeconomic segregation into pockets of poverty or affluence occurred; the standard of living was meager for almost everyone. For the women, homemaking was particularly tedious and taxing; most of them had experienced enough of wagon-box living while crossing the plains.

In varying degrees the temporary residents participated in the activities of the nearest communities. Some found employment in shops, mills, and fields. Some attended the meetings of the local congregations; by the end of May it was necessary to enlarge Provo’s Bowery to accommodate the Sunday crowds. Whether men who had been excused from military service were under orders to drill with accessible Nauvoo Legion units is not clear; Lorenzo Brown trained with the militia in Nephi and was elected a unit captain.⁶²

Millers, blacksmiths, and other craftsmen set up shop in shanties on Provo square and elsewhere in Utah Valley. While some skills were idled by the move, Esaias Edwards took his tools to Provo, rented a waterpower lathe, made spinning wheels, and “did tolerably well.” George W. Brimhall caught and sold Utah Lake fish. Carpenters and other builders had plenty of work, of course. Temporary Church public-works mills and shops were set up in several central and southern Utah locations to grind flour, repair equipment, manufacture war materials, and provide other public services. The public-works program employed several hundred men to build a fourteen-mile toll road up Provo Canyon into Heber Valley; John Cook remembered being paid for his surveying labor with twenty-five acres of land and ten dollars cash.⁶³ The Deseret News published a weekly four-page issue in Fillmore between 5 May and 25 August, featuring Church material and Utah news; the monthly mail from California was its chief source of outside information.

Provo was a beehive and a madhouse during the Move South. The population of today’s Provo-Orem area went from about four thousand to twelve thousand, or possibly even fifteen thousand. As available structures were filled to capacity, many new shelters were built with lumber brought from evacuated towns, and temporary shelters of all kinds lined both banks of Provo River from Utah Lake to the mouth of Provo Canyon. Stake President James C. Snow, energetic and occasionally profane, headed the Saints in Utah County. Bishop Blackburn was the senior bishop, and on him apparently fell the primary responsibility of transforming instructions from Salt Lake City into local actions. The dimensions of that task were suggested in Brigham Young’s 24 March letter, quoted above. On 28 March Bishop Blackburn read the letter in meeting and asked for thirty wagons to start north two days later. The same meeting unanimously passed President Snow’s motion “that the Bishops put all loafers to hard labor.”⁶⁴

As the de facto center of Mormondom, Provo filled up with Church officials and activities. President Young, who officed in the barely finished seminary building and divided his time between Provo and Salt Lake City, was clearly in charge when he was in town. The Church Historian’s Office journal for 22–23 April reports he inspected the thousand-acre Church pasture at the mouth of the Provo River and selected land for a storage yard, where a number of “shanties” were soon constructed, one 150 feet long. He also paid President Snow a thousand dollars for a house and two lots and announced his determination to move his family from Salt Lake the following week because “the people were waiting to see if he would move.” On 30 April he arrived with twenty-two wagons filled with family and goods and “called on Bishop Blackburn to furnish him with four houses, for some family, which he did.”⁶⁵

Heber C. Kimball told a large congregation on 2 May, “We calculate to improve this City. . . . [W]e are coming here to enrich you & not to have you lounging in the Streets. . . . [W]e shall raise good crops this year & next year if we sow it.” At the same meeting Brigham Young indicated he was still uncertain about the future: “What will be the result of this move I cant tell—but leave the event with God. . . . If we leave here to go South you will go with us.”⁶⁶

The Church Historian’s Office staff set up shop in the Provo Music Hall, where the Church records, and probably the Tabernacle organ, were stored. The hundreds of boxes of tithing flour were moved onto the square where the courthouse now stands; they were protected by a “marquee” that was part wood and part tent. Lorin Farr’s is the best-known description of how Provo looked in mid-1858:

Accommodations of the crudest kind were all that Provo could offer. All were crowded into the settlers’ homes who could be, and every assistance given those forced to camp out. Temporary houses were built by the Church on the public square. The north side was full while on the west the buildings ran half-way down. They were built close together like a fort, some of them to store grain in. Brigham occupied several of them. In the center of the block was a large marquee tent for a storehouse. As summer ripened the weather became unbearably hot. The water was bad, as we had to dig holes to get water, and the people began to complain of sickness. The feed had also been eaten off by the cattle, our cows dried up, flies were very bad tormenting our cattle, and it was with great difficulty that we controlled our stock from running off.⁶⁷

Although Governor Cumming was unable to persuade Brigham Young to abandon the Move South, it is probable that his pledges of goodwill, his amiable relations with the Mormon leader, and his movements around the northern part of the territory with Thomas Kane had two effects. They increased the reluctance to move on the part of some who were still in place in May, and they led many of the migrants to think of going home. In early June the First Presidency was credited with intimating “that we should not leave these vallies.”⁶⁸ The arrival of Buchanan’s commissioners in Provo on 16 June, three days after negotiating a peace treaty in Salt Lake City, increased these pressures. Still, Brigham Young’s distrust of the army was sufficiently widely shared that his “wait and see” advice was still followed by almost everyone.

Not until Johnston’s forces, moving in defiance of what Cumming understood was an agreement between himself and the general, passed through Salt Lake City on 26 June and camped west of Jordan River did President Young observe, “The Clouds seem to be breaking away.” “When we git the news good & solid we will go home,” the Mormon leader told the Provo congregation on 27 June, and William C. Dunbar sang the same hymn that he had earlier sung, in a small gesture of defiance, at Young’s meeting with the United States commissioners two weeks earlier:

O Zion! dear Zion! home of the free:
In thy temples we’ll bend,
All thy rights we’ll defend
And our home shall be ever with thee.

The federal troops were still in place near the Jordan Narrows when President Young announced on 30 June that he was33 going home and the Saints were at liberty to follow.⁶⁹

The return was largely an uncoordinated movement of individual households, spanning July and part of August. It was launched without fanfare, but word of mouth soon alerted the camps of the displaced. The first units of the Young family and other leadership households left Provo in carriages on the evening of 30 June, traveling overnight to avoid the heat and worst dust of a summer journey on the State Road. Governor Cumming traveled with them. By early morning on 2 July, the barricades were down from the Lion House and the Church office, and a reporter with the army noted “that the female population of the city had been considerably augmented within twenty-four hours.” Thereafter President Young went into semiseclusion for most of July, his health overtaxed by the strain of recent events.⁷⁰ The shortage of wagons meant that some folks’ return was delayed; some large families came back in installments. Driving his herd of pigs south had so taxed Henry Ballard’s patience that he “loaded them up in the wagon and took them home first.”⁷¹ It appears that several hundred people, like John Powell and miller Archibald Gardner, elected to stay and make a new start in central Utah. Mary Ann Weston Maughan, one of the pioneers of Cache Valley, followed counsel not to go all the way home in 1858; her family wintered in Salt Lake City in a house provided by Bishop Hunter, and the Indians apparently got the fifteen thousand bushels of wheat that had been left in the north.⁷² The return was poignantly described by Martin Luther Ensign, a Brigham City missionary to England who reached Salt Lake just in time to go looking for his family:

I found my Famely at Pacon [Payson] 120 miles from home on the 22nd June all well. In a seller belonging to Robert Snider . . . I found the Girls 3 of them Mother had come North to meet me & mised me She came back and we met in the Seller Orders came from Brigham Young about the first of July to return home & OH what Joyful news all began to make ready . . . started for home on July 4th We met the Army on 6th in the narows of the Jordon River and were Delade for a half day because we could not pass them on the dugway. It was very hot & we Suffered for water for our selves & teems continued our Journey in the Afternoon Arived at our home in Brigham City July 10th 1858 All was desolate, the doors & floors overhead & board fences were, All taken to make Boxes to hold flowr & other things in the move, Meny not expecting to return so all was free to all. . . . God had blessed us while I was gorn.⁷³

An irony of the return, noted many observers, was “the singular spectacle . . . of an army going in one direction and the populace which had fled from it, moving by its side in the opposite direction without fear and in complete amity.”⁷⁴

What were the consequences of the Move South? It did not materially affect the outcome of the Utah War, which changed Utah Territory in several ways. It installed a Gentile governor and ended Mormon control over many of the instrumentalities of territorial government.⁷⁵ It introduced the military presence at Camp Floyd, with substantial economic and moral consequences. It generated an economic boom and serious social problems for Provo and the rest of Utah County. It frustrated Brigham Young’s dream of a self-sufficient, self-contained, and self-governing Mormon commonwealth in the Great Basin.

The Move South generated some favorable newspaper and Congressional comment about the sacrificial solidarity of the Latter-day Saints. Some of the statements were politically motivated, as this from the New York Tribune of 8 May: “The driving of the Mormons from their homes, by military terror, will hardly contribute much to the honor of the country, or to the posthumous reputation of Mr. Buchanan’s presidency.” Most of the sympathy was condescending, as this London Times dispatch of 5 July: “These Western peasants seem to be a nation of heroes, ready to sacrifice everything rather than surrender one of their wives or a letter from Joe Smith’s golden plates.” Since the hegira had no appreciable effect on the Utah policies of the United States government, however, Neff’s judgment, “The master strategy of President-Governor Young had achieved its reward,” must be discounted.⁷⁶

The Move South certainly gave many people opportunity for charitable service, and it probably strengthened the religious commitments of some of the participants, both movers and helpers. However, it is apparent that most of the consequences were negative. The move was costly to participants, whose abandoned homes and fields deteriorated and whose energies were used up in the sheer efforts of relocating and surviving. Scarce capital was expended; Frederick Kesler estimated that moving his mill from Brigham City to Provo and back cost a thousand dollars. The Church public works, relocated in Salt Lake City, never regained their momentum, several ward buildings remained half-finished for many months, and most agricultural and manufacturing plans were disrupted. Construction on the temple was slow getting started again.⁷⁷ Certainly the expenditure of manpower and capital goods was comparable to what went into the Iron Mission and the Brigham Young Express and Carrying Company.

The intangible costs were high. Ward organizations were disrupted. Some wards held no meetings after the moving started, few held together during the move, and some required reorganization of bishoprics after the return. No ward meetings were held in Salt Lake City until late in August 1858, and by instructions from the First Presidency, ward meetings throughout most of Utah were held only on an as-needed basis until late in the year.⁷⁸ The first entry in the Salt Lake Eighth Ward minutes is for 10 October, while only bishop’s courts were recorded in the Fifteenth Ward before 19 December. On 3 October the Fourteenth Ward bishop instructed the home teachers to see that all grain tithing be paid, noting that “four months of our tything is thrown off.”⁷⁹ The old Salt Lake Tabernacle was not put back into use for public religious services until 1859.⁸⁰ The several ward Relief Societies and Sunday Schools that had been organized earlier stopped functioning, and the Relief Society movement did not revive until a decade later.⁸¹ The revivalist enthusiasm generated by the Reformation of 1856–57 was almost totally dissipated, partly by the move and partly by the disillusioning outcome of the Utah War as a whole. Even in remote and relatively unaffected Sanpete Valley, a bishop remarked in July on the pervasive “gloom.” Apostates are lamented in several ward records; Nephi witnessed a number of Mormons traveling to California, and the stress within the community prompted the bishop to urge people not to say bitter things to those “who were going away but have now concluded to stay.” In Beaver many of the people who had been called in from San Bernardino “wished to returen.”⁸² Brigham Young himself experienced a discernible loss of vigor and self-confidence before the war had run its course.⁸³

The Latter-day Saints, leaders and followers, who confronted Johnston’s army in the early months of the Utah War were inured to persecution and hardships by religious convictions and millennial expectations. Their commitments to Kingdom building led almost all of them to respond to the Sebastopol call. But in the end they were disheartened by the outcome of the tragic-comic events of 1857–58. In Arrington’s words, “It was clear that a decade and more of achievement and social independence, in the face of hostile nature and hostile humanity, had ended in poverty and disappointment.”⁸⁴ The homes to which the Mormons returned after the Move South were inescapably “in the world,” although a generation would pass before they and their heirs—leaders and followers—would come to terms with that bitter fact.