American History Hit - The Mormon Founding of Salt Lake City

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

What drew the Latter Day Saints to Utah? Was anyone living there before the arrival of Brigham Young? And how did the city develop?Max Perry Mueller joins Don today to discuss Salt Lake City. Max is an associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He writes more about this topic in 'Wakara’s America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West'.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast.History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. With nearly 1,200 miles and more than three months of prairies, river crossings, deserts, and towering mountains behind them, a long wagon train of Mormons emerges finally into a welcoming valley.

Streams flow down from the surrounding highlands into a vast basin, where the great Salt Lake is collected, shimmering in the distance. The leader of the group, a man named Brigham Young, is sick and exhausted. He has helped to an upright position by a companion, and according to later accounts, recognizes the valley from his earlier vision. This is the right place, he says, drive on. But this is no empty, promised land. The valley lies within a region long used by the Ute, Shoshone, and Ghashut peoples, part of their homelands and central to their survival.

The Mormons may consider this place to be their refuge, but they are also newcomers in someone else's territory. And it's only the beginning. Today, 148 people and 72 wagons, with so many more to follow. Hi, everyone. Welcome to American History Hit. Don Wildman here. Glad to be with you.

This popular version of the founding of Salt Lake City, based on a 19th century religious vision, is a powerful and cinematic story for sure. But how much of that vision is true? What really drew these seekers to this place? And would they find it there? and who has been left out of the story? For this telling, I am joined by scholar and historian Max Perry Mueller of the University of Nebraska, the Cornhuskers.

He is author of the award-winning race and the making of the Mormon people and Wakara's America. Max Perry Mueller, glad to have you here. Yes, well, it's a pleasure to meet you, and thanks for this invitation to talk about such a fascinating and dynamic place as Salt Lake City. You are joining us from Lincoln, Nebraska, where you work at the university there, but we're talking today about Utah and specifically, as you say, Salt Lake City. It's been a while since I was there last. I went skiing in the mountains around it with that great view of the Great Lock in Salt Lake. My ward, what a vision. Absolutely. Yeah, that's what draws a lot of people. It certainly draws me to Salt Lake. I joke that my true religion is, I'm in religious studies in history, but my true religion is skiing, and I study things in Utah to have an excuse to go skiing. I always say that. archives go bad if I don't visit them in February. When the normally, normally, and we'll talk about this, you mean, you know, normally the

ski season is in high tilt, but that is certainly part of the dynamic changing place that is Salt Lake City. Well, I mean, it's worth mentioning only because when you stand up there on those mountains, ready to go down that slope, you are looking at kind of what these people were so excited about. I mean, this unbelievable panorama that is there before you is breathtaking, truly. It is. And the Latter-day Saints, as they like to be called, not the Mormons.

It always depends on the prophet who's leading in Temple Square, whether or not Mormon is in vogue or not, right? Mormon, the word Mormon started out as kind of an epitaph, really, forced upon the Latter-day Saints. They're back to, you know, really insisting on their Latter-day Saintness. Interesting. We'll use the Mormon colloquial may or may not matter to your listeners and viewers, but I've never been, nor has any of my My family been a member of the dominant religion of the place, but I do speak in some ways, Mormon. I have a longstanding deep relationship to the place of Salt Lake City and Utah and to the Mormon people.

Latter-day Saints, it is. I was raised to Quaker, which was an epithetan back in the day, but we, we, friends and Quakers are the same thing. How much is that story of the Latter-day Saints an element of Salt Lake City today? I mean, this is a big cosmopolitan city we're talking about today. Sure. Yeah. I mean, it's absolutely part of the lure, the mythology, right? I study myths. I study origin stories.

I mean, that's what I really, I'm interested in what people remember and say about themselves to place themselves in a place and in history. That's really what I'm interested in. So absolutely, it's part of the identity of the place, right? There are two national holidays in Salt Lake in July, right, the 4th of July, which is a very big deal for Latter-day Saints. They're certainly, and Utah certainly, you know, see themselves and always have as part of the American experience. But of course, there's Pioneer Day, which you're, which you were referencing, July 24th, that kind of famous, sometimes some might say infamous day when Brigham and the Vanguard company entered the Salt Lake Valley out of Emigration Canyon and declared this is a place where they'd find refuge and build their kingdom on the high desert plateau. But today, you know, for visitors like yourself and others who fly into Salt Lake City, they'll be surprised to see this huge metropolis unfold below them, especially along the mountains, these gorgeous mountains, of course, that ring or in some ways, you know, provide the backdrop. These huge skyscrapers that it seems like every time I visit and I visit frequently, there's a new 20, 30 story skyscraper going up.

A discerting eye can pick out at the top of the, you know, the city or the northernmost point of the city, Temple Square with its particular architecture and the temple there. But that kind of has been dwarfed by the skyscrapers in a lot of ways. And I think that's kind of a fitting metaphor for what's happening to Salt Lake City, not necessarily Utah, but Salt Lake City itself, right? When people hear the word Salt Lake City, they think Mormon. But today it's one of the most dynamic cosmopolitan. booming cities, but that tension between newcomers and those who have been in the city a long time,

lived there a long time, that's really part of the story. It's really a story, a city of tensions between newcomers and those have been on here a long time, but also the environment and the growth, right? It's a city constrained by mountains and that salt lake, really by mountains and water. Quick review on the history of Latter-day Saints. A church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it's officially called, founded by Joseph Smith in 1830. We've done episodes in the past in detail on this history, which folks can listen to. Yeah, it comes from back east, specifically western New York, where Joseph Smith was reported to have found a series of golden plates telling the history of an ancient people descended from the Israelites and their destiny

in North America. What followed was a start and stop migration across the continent with considerable violence and persecution along the way. Eventually under Brigham Young, but they start, of course, with Joseph Smith. Take us from there and how they end up to the point that we have introduced already finding their way to Utah. So yeah, Joseph Smith, the founder and prophet was assassinated in one of the cities that the Latter-day Saints built along the way, as you say, kind of the east-to-western migration in Navu, Illinois, was assassinated. His brother, along with his brother, Hiram, the older brother, who was really the kind of second in command.

So that assassination left a huge hole in the leadership. It was a leadership fight. And most of the Latter-day Saints followed Brigham West. Some stayed behind, including Joseph Smith's direct relations, and formed a different group of the kind of the Mormon movement. But most of them left, eventually were actually forced to leave, Illinois, almost by gunpoint, and forced to leave, eventually stopping not too far. far away from where I live in winter quarters along the banks in the Missouri River, where they

stationed and made their plans. They weren't sure where they were going to go. Brigham had scouts in California, in Texas, and we heard about this great place in the Great Basin that had not yet been immigrants had not yet penetrated. Europeans had, Euro-Americans had not yet penetrated. Partly because of the great water, the great bounty they heard about and of the great resources, but also hope to connect themselves with the ancient Israelites that you mentioned in then contemporary form, they believed in Native Americans. They hoped to, they were pushed West, we like to say, by persecution, and polled West by their mandate to covenant with Native Americans, whom they believe were descendants of these lost tribes of Israel. And so that's how they ended up

in what is now Utah. The indigenous aspect of this is so much. part of your work, right? That's what you are known for in the books that you've written. Yes, absolutely. So, you know, one of the key figures that Brigham Young encounters, in fact, I argue in my latest book, Walker's America, the most powerful man of the southwest was this youth leader named Wakara, anglicized as Walker. And he was a, in the 1840s, he was known by the newspapers really internationally, but even in the English-speaking world, as the greatest horse thief. He was a legend, a living legend, as a greatest horse thief. He and his people stole horses by the thousands annually from California and would bring them along

the old Spanish trail to sell in places like Santa Fe, Tauce, etc. He was also the greatest enslaver of native peoples. Along the way, he would enslave other native peoples, especially the piutes, whom he'd sell along that most important overland corridor, the old Spanish trail. He was also a great mapmaker himself and cartographer, all the explorers that you have heard about, but especially John C. Fremont encountered Wau, and Waucairah actually charged John C. Fremont a toll to cross his lands. But because he knew the West, the Southwest better than anyone, every mountain pass, every stream, he helped John C. Fremont design the maps that John C. Fremont would later bring back to D.C., Washington, D.C. and were printed by the U.S. government that the Latter-day Saints themselves used

to get themselves to Utah. So already, Waccaro is having a huge influence on just attracting the Latter-Dy Saints to Utah. I want to ask you about the Brigham Young vision. How much of that is apocryphal and how much did he write about this? How did he know this place existed? Yeah, I mean, I think, so he first describes what becomes kind of canonized as like, this is the place you know, that God has set aside, set apart. And he talks about in the 1850s, other people who witnessed the events, especially some of his fellow apostles,

described what he saw kind of secondhand. But we don't have contemporaneous notes of the day in 1847, July 1847, of him making that vision. We do have, though, again, Wakera and his influence on where the center stake of Zion would be, right? The center of this new Mormon kingdom in the Great Basin. They hoped, Brigham Young hoped to go further south on the Wasatch Front. The Wasatch Front is this, I think it's about 80 miles of this beautiful, ragged mountains, often capped with snow that dominates when you fly in,

you get to see these great mountains. It's not like Denver where the city is kind of set back from the mountains. The mountains are right there, and that's part of the attraction. Well, at the far end of that front, that area, is now Provo. And really, in some ways, that is the center of Mormondom, because that's where BYU is, Brigham University. It's a much more Mormon town now than Salt Lake City is in a lot of ways. But they hope to go there because of Utah Lake. Utah Lake is one of the great big freshwater lakes in the Great Basin. I think it's the third largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. So they were hoping to go there because of all the fish because of all the fields around it, because of all the plentiful landscape and

environment that they hope to exploit to build their settlement. But just as they were about to enter into what is now Utah, they stopped at Jim Bridgers, a Jim Bridgers outpost in what is now Southern Wyoming. And Jim Bridger talked to Brigham and crew, and he said, Jim Bridger said, if you go down to Utah Lake, what I call Timponogus Lake, named after the people who really it's their homeland, the Utes and Waukara in particular will run you out. They might kill you. And so they change their mind. They say, we're not going to go that far south. We're going to set up shop in this in between land in what is now Salt Lake, the Salt Lake Valley, between the Shishoni homeland and the Ute territory. So Waukeira, more than God, more than Brigham, helps decide

where the center stake of Salt Lake would be. Because they're just, as you described, a hundred or so people. And Waccara commanded hundreds, if not thousands of warriors that could, if you wanted, wipe them out. Now, he makes different, Waukehra makes very, very different decisions because he's a very savvy businessman in terms of this relationship with Brigham Young. But I think that's really important in that kind of mythology to point out that Waccara helps decide where the center stake is. And the Mormons, as you've already mentioned, I just want to underscore this, believe that they have a covenant with the lost tribe of Israel, which are named the Lamanites. And they believe this to be the Native Americans in that area, I guess all over, right, in the

continent? It's very confusing. I should say, very dynamic. It changes. What the Latter-day Saints believe the Lamanite identity is changes over time. Yes. In the 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, it was Native peoples, right? Part of the problem, if I may back up a little bit, is what what a very old problem in the early 19th century recall the bible including the heat what we in religious studies called a Hebrew Bible but a lot of folks call the old testament is history it's not mythology it's history so the Bible itself describes after Noah the flood with Noah Noah's sons he has three sons japheth ham and shem japh his offspring populate Europe ham populates Africa Chem populates the Near East and Asia, right?

But the known world doesn't include the Americas. So who are these people? Has been a longstanding question in, you know, history, right? Where do they come from? Are they even human, right? So a lot of people have tried to figure out who they were. The Pope, Pope Leo III and the early 16th century did say they're human, and you can't just enslave them and kill them off,

as a lot of the conquistadors were doing. But to whom did they belong? to, right? Who was their daddy, to put a fine point on it, was a real question. And Joseph wasn't alone on this, but the Book of Mormon solves that problem. It establishes a lineage back to what is now what we see as think of as the lost tribes of Israel, right? This kind of offshoot group left before the Babylonian conquest, according to the Book of Mormon, fled again, a story of kind of refuge, seeking refuge in the wilderness, left and went to the new world, had some fights in between themselves. The Nephites were the record keepers. The Lamanites become kind of the bad guys,

cursed with dark skin, and they end up killing off all the Nephites. And then the Lamanites, the Native Americans, forget their true parentage. They forget the faith of their forefathers. And so the Mormon see themselves as bringing the book, that book, the Book of Mormon, back to the Lamanites to restore them to their knowledge of their forefathers. Right. That's they see their mission to do. But Joseph Saul is a really important problem. Where do the Native Americans come from? But yeah, so that changes. The Latin States don't have a lot of success converting Native Americans. They have their most success in the Pacific Islands. And so as the Mormons move west in their missionary work, they're looking for Lamanites. And one of the ways you know you're a

a laymanite in some ways is that the latter days believe that you accept the Mormon gospel. And so there are places in in the Pacific Islands in Hawaii. One of their campuses, BYUu, Hawaii is in Hawaii. So there are Lamanites even west of North America, according to Latter-day Saints. Well, this is going to be a very ironic history, isn't it? You know, because there probably isn't a known to be a wider religion than the Latter-day Saints in America these days. I mean, that's the traditional thing. I'm not saying that's a, I'm making a terrible generalization, but that's the understanding. That's the understanding. And certainly not mixed with the Native American tribes, which is the idea, I suppose, right, at first. That was the mandate, both in the book of Mormon

and in Joseph Smith's revelations, that the Gentiles, kind of white Europeans, would come and covenant with the Lamanites, and together they'd build New Jerusalem to await Christ's return, that it would be this metis to use kind of M, you know, a particular American language, a mixed community, an integrated community. And because the Lamanites, right, were the more direct descendants of the covenant, the original kind of Abrahamic covenant. Now, Joseph later discovers that in themselves, the Latter-day Saints have Israelite blood, but that's really a different complicated stories. They must have confronted this already as they crossed the continent, all those, you know, 50 years or so, right?

Absolutely. They had not a lot of luck. The first mission, if we know anything about Latter-day Saints, right? Many people, they know about Salt Lake City. They might remember that stuff about polygamy, which the church in Salt Lake no longer practices and condones, but they also know about missionary work, right? The Book of Mormon Musical is a story about Mormon missionaries. It's a send-up of the Mormon missionary culture, right? But the first official mission was to Native Americans.

along the Kansas, Missouri border. That's where they went in 1838, or late 1830, 1831, the first one. So this was root. The search for converts among Native peoples, among as the book of Mormon describes, Lamanites, was the key part aspect of the Mormon identity. And it remained so today.

Different periods, different leaders, emphasize that connection. But yes, absolutely, it was key to the Mormon mandate, divine mandate. Your book, Walcarra's America, discusses a very prominent figure that has been lost in history for a lot of Americans. His name is Walcarra. Tell us he's a youth leader living and operating in this area called the Great Basin, essentially, who was both feared and respected by native and non-native peoples. Tell me about Wakara and the importance of his legend and his real work.

Yes. So as I was mentioning before, you know, Walkura, in the 1840s, I argue, was the most of the most of the most dominant figure of what it becomes the American Southwest. He's the greatest purveyor of horses. He goes with his cavalry of intertribal and often interracial warriors to what is then Mexico, Mexican California, and targets the rancheros over there and steals horses by the hundreds seasonally and brings them west along the old Spanish trail to sell in Santa Fe and Taos and other places along the trail. Horses are essential, right? Horspower literally powers the expansion of the American Southwest.

Along the way, he's also enslaving piutes, who are his Numic language kin, the Paiutes, the Shoshone, the command, she all belong to a shared kin network of a numic language. But he enslaves the Paiutes, the pedestrian payutes. They don't have the horse. They live in an area that is much more harsh

where they don't have water, grass, so they can't sustain horses. So the equestrian enslaves, the pedestrian, which happens across the world, I mean, this is what happens. If one people gets the horse, the next door neighbors better get the horse or they're going to get taken over. This is a history that's as long as, you know, as horsemanship and domestication. Okay, so he enslaves the payutes and he sells them also along the old Spanish trail.

Let's turn our focus. We've been looking from kind of east to west. We can flip our focus as I do in the book. This is my attempt in the book. What does the world look like from Walker's perspective when the latter day saints come, right? And from his perspective, he sees this small kind of rag tag bunch of people who make really not so great buildings. They make these buildings that are not sophisticated. And he says, ah, another people I can sell my horses to and my slaves do.

Another market. Right. And hey, listen, we have dominated my people, the Utes, in particular my band at Timponogas, have dominated this space and run out pretenders to the land for centuries, right? other people have set their sights on this place. It is one of them, it was and still is, one of the most rich, burdened places, especially around Utah Lake, which is his homeland, his bases. They're really fish people, right? They managed fish. They ate and managed fish. The other U-Bans called them the fish eaters. And Utah Lake was home to the greatest fishery in the

Great Basin. And my argument is that they not only benefited from it, but they understood, as they understood how to live in harmony with the fish. So, Waukeira sees these newcomers coming and says, ha, I'm going to partner with them, right? I'm going to establish relationships with them. And he does. He has a very productive, at least initial relationship with Brigham Young. He himself, we mentioned Pioneer Day. He's at the first official Pioneer Day celebration in 1849. As a guest, as a favorite guest, oh, Brigham Young, he celebrated as, you know, they finally found their Lamanite. That fall, Waukehara, 1849, leads the Mormons to set up their first outposts, settlements outside the Salt Lake Valley. He brings them to different places and helps them set up

shop. So he's a founder of a lot of these towns, especially a town called Monty and Ephraim. He brings them himself. Now, he's also using the Mormons to displace his rivals. This land wasn't his to give away. It was his rivals. And so he was like, oh, I'll bring these new. newcomers there and they'll displace my rivals and I'll be able to expand my territory and expand my nodes of trade, right? New people I can sell horses to, slaves do. He also becomes baptized Latter-day Saint. He dips himself. Well, he doesn't dip himself. He's baptized and he brings other, his followers. He always has about 100 to 250 people around him, right? His kind of his posse, his crew, right? his followers. So he leads them into the baptismal waters. He becomes a priesthood holder,

probably the first priesthood holder. The Latter-day Saints are a lay priesthood. They don't have an official kind of priestly class. All males are priesthood holders. But he becomes the first Lamanite, Native American priesthood holder. And boy, are the Mormons excited. They are so excited. We talked about race a little bit, right? Native Americans, the Lamanites in the Book of Mormon, are cursed with dark skin because they don't follow the rules. When Waukara is baptized, and we do have direct contemporaneous notes, a witness to the baptism says he went in with tawny skin, he comes out. One settler says, as white as me. So the baptism itself is transforming of his place in kind of Mormon do and whiteness. He's bleached by baptism. He's bleached by baptism. He's restored really to the original race, which is whiteness. Does he really buy into this, or is this part of his strategy? Yes, terrific question. He, yes. So the Mormons think, oh, he's now our guy. We can control him. He's saying, no, we have to think of native spirituality as additive, not replacing. So, hey, I'll join your church. It doesn't mean that I'm going to get rid of my own sacred understandings. I'll just add to it. So he sees it as a, yes, as a strategy. We don't know. We don't have any writings from Waukera. We don't know if you really believed in the, in the, new theology. There are some secondary accounts that he kind of understood how to talk like a

Mormon and talked about receiving visions himself, that he was a prophet. But I'll quote my dear friend Lynn Fisher, Lynn Fisher, who has written a lot about Native conversion. It's an affiliation, not a conversion. He affiliates with the Mormons in this work. He doesn't, it doesn't replace his kind of indigenous worldview. I mean, we should emphasize how vast this man's enterprises are. I mean, this guy is working through the entire American Southwest at a time when this is a very changing place. You know, the Mexican-American War has ended in, what, 1849, is it? Yeah, in 1848, it actually, John C. Fremont leads, you know, he goes from, he becomes the general. I argue also that the Mexican-American War was made easier for the Americans by Wauquera.

All his horse raiding softened Mexico for that annexation, right? It wasn't much of a battle in Southern California, in part because they were so disrupted by Waukeara's horse rating, ironically. The same happens with the Comanchee in Texas, right? The Texas annexation, because of the Comanchee raids is made easier, right? Because the Comanche had disrupted the Mexican-Mexican communities. So a similar pattern. There was a general desire, as I understand it, among indigenous communities to get the Spanish out of there. and this other alternative looked pretty good at the time.

Little bit they know, but it was what they wanted. Back to Salt Lake City and how that is set up. Drop us into about the 1860s. You have already mentioned how extraordinary this landscape is. You've got the Wasatch Mountains and this huge inland lake, which is all salt water, by the way. You can't really use that salt lake at all. I mean, even today, it's starting to diminish,

but it's a huge lake, biggest in the Western Hemisphere, all useless water. how do they decide and then set up any kind of settlement there when the water isn't even able to be used? Well, the water in the salt lake isn't necessarily potable directly. But all the water, what is the salt lake? The salt lake is an inland sea, right? It's a vast inland sea. The Great Basin, every drop of water that falls between the Wasatch front and basically the, I'm not sure which mountain range I think in California, I'll have to remember.

But basically any drop of water that falls in the Great Basin from the Wasatch Front, basically almost to the coast of California, doesn't run to the sea. It runs inland and collects in the Salt Lake. So there's lots of water coming in, right? Lots of streams, lots of distributaries. The Jordan River, which flows from Utah Lake up to the Great Salt Lake, is full of fresh water. So they make their settlement believing that they can use all this water to become farmers, ranchers, right? They struggled at first, just backing up slightly, if I may. They struggle at first because they're not native to this place.

They don't understand how it works. They believe that they could just simply transfer how they do agriculture from the northeast to the Great Basin. It doesn't work that way. So their crops struggle at first, right? They have huge die-offs and the would-be farmers, the Latterty Saints, become fish eaters like like Guaccarus, Timponogas. and they, realizing they need calories, they go and overfish the Utah League and very quickly. And they fight with Wacera. Really, that was a big fight with Wacera.

The Latter-day Saints eventually go to war with Wacquera over. They say they're going over his slave practice, which actually they take over. They're happy to adopt native children, but they end up purchasing them, raising them as their own, sometimes marrying them as plural wives. but really the fight with Waukera eventually will be over control of Utah Lake and especially the fisheries. And so they overfish. You mentioned 1860s. By then already, they're overfishing. They're destroying this great fishery.

By then their crops have kind of settled. They figure out how to use the land. But very quickly, they're using too much water. They're destroying the fish. All their irrigation ditches and irrigation is destroying the land. And so already we have a huge environmental impact. on the region that we see the results of today, right? But most directly, it affected the fishery and the native peoples, right?

Yes. And the area becomes much more desertification sets in, in part because they've channeled all the tributaries for their own convenience into certain channels they can more easily draw water from. And so they've already changed the landscape so much that the desert is actually creeping in to this very verdant place where it wasn't before. And all the while, more and more of these people are coming. I mean, that first migration is followed by others. And time passes and that population grows.

Tens of thousands have made that journey before the arrival of the, even the railroad. Then things really start to happen. The wagon trains really even continue into the 20th century. All this building is done with a lot of enslaved labor, right? I mean, Native Americans who are sold to them by other Native Americans. Certainly some of it. Certainly some of it was done by enslaved labor. I argue in some ways that slavery absolutely was a major, an indigenous slavery was absolutely a major source of labor. But it was also a tool mostly to remove Native peoples from the land. Right. They bought Native children, especially Native girls, to remove the future mothers who would produce more Native people. Right. So I argue that war, conflicts, various conflicts, killed the Native girls, to remove the future mothers who would produce more Native people. Right. So I argue that war, conflicts, various conflicts, killed the Native girls. men and slavery remove the future mom killed the women, right? And in fact, Parley P. Pratt, one of the great apostles, beloved apostles, says as much that, you know, kill the men, enslave the women. I'm paraphrasing. But that's the policy. So they don't rely necessarily, certainly native peoples are used for, you know, the build up settlements. But mostly it's a tool to remove native peoples from the land. They have plenty of labor.

They have lots of, as you mentioned, lots and lots of people coming in. And then the railroad arrives in 1869, right? Just north of the Salt Lake at Promotary Summit, it's where the wedding of the rails happened, that famous event in 1869. And then, yes, the railroad comes. We're bringing more migrants, but also new people, right? Different, not just Mormons. Greeks eventually Chinese, Japanese, come to Salt Lake.

Other people are drawn to this majestic. place very early on, right? And I mentioned from the beginning, it's a, it's a place of great tension between those who have been there a long time and newcomers, right? And a tension between the desire to grow and the limitations of that growth based on geography and water. And that story that was at the heart of Waukehr and the Mormons, that tension is the same today with newcomers coming to Salt Lake and very different kind of newcomers coming. And, and the, and the Latter-day Saints, that tension, but also the tension between growth, right, progress, and the limitations of geography and water.

Right. The temple site is completed. Their temple is completed and dedicated in 1893, but it has been getting built all the way along throughout that latter after the 19th century. That's a huge moment, I imagine. That's that they have truly arrived when this magnificent temple is finally opened. Absolutely, right? The 1890s is a watershed decade.

in 1890, that's when then-President Woodruff announces the end of polygamy, which is not a revelation. It's more of a political statement, right? We're going to end. We're no longer going to practice polygamy, although many scholars have shown that polygamy, even within the official church, continues into the 20th century. They did that to win statehood, right? They understood that to become a state, and the Mormons wanted to be, you know, those in the newcomers to Utah, Brigham want to be a state from the get-go because they understood that statehood would provide them

more sovereignty than being a territory governed by the federal government. So they wanted statehood from the beginning. But they finally get state that, yes, the temple is complete with great fanfare. Many, many dignitaries from around the world are invited, right? Salt Lake moves from being an isolated place, right? A place where because of the Mormon persecution, the Latter-day Saints, the Mormons wanted to keep kind of an arm's length from other Americans, from other people, to a world, they want to, they want to make Temple Square and Salt Lake a World Gathering Place for non-Mormons, but also for, of course, Latter-day Saints to come and visit Temple Square and move to Salt Lake still. So yes, 1893 and then 1896, statehood is finally achieved. But they only could get statehood

if they promised to abandon polygamy. Theologically, have they given up on the idea of the Lamanites? I mean, is Joseph Smith's vision of these people becoming part of them? Is that gone at some point? It continues in the 20th century. So the Indian placement program, which was the idea run by the church that, yes, in much of the 20th century, it continues, right? Instead of enslaving, and of course, the Latter-day Saints didn't think of themselves enslaving, these people. They say, they call it adoption, right? Brigham Young said, buy up all the Lamanite children as fast as you can to make them your children. Now, myself and other scholars have shown that how these native children were treated wasn't necessarily like fellow members of the family. Often, there was a mixed bag there. But in the 20th century,

the Lamanite effort continues. And what the church did was they, through some coercion, through some kind of promises, and also participation by Native peoples, would bring native children off the reservation and place them in Mormon homes where they went to school. during the school year. And then in the summertime, they would go home. Again, that was to help assimilate Native peoples into the Mormon culture, into American culture, but also break up that connection to the reservation, right? And that continued, really part of the Indian placement program continued even into the 1980s. Today, you know, most Latter-day Saints, if you go to a meeting house on a Sunday, aren't going to talk about Lamanites. I'm sure they hear about them. They

know about them from the Book of Mormon. They're not thinking about these issues. Today, if you go and ask one of the member, you know, the forum of the 70 or one of the official leaders in the church, they will kind of hem and haem and halle about some of them will like, well, are native people's Lamanites? Part of the reason is because genetics has shown that there isn't a Israelite connection between native peoples and peoples of the Near East, Palestine and Israel. That has been kind of a problem. But in some ways, the Lamanite identity is taken up, has been taken up by Native Americans, Latter-day Saints. And so a lot of some Native American Mormons, Native American Latourty Saints, take that as a badge of honor, call themselves Lamanites, understanding that it's

kind of like, you know, they're kind of flipping, understanding it as kind of a derisive category, but one that is also partly celebrated, and they're kind of claiming the identity. And they're the ones leading to complicated kind of understanding of what it means to be a Lamanite. So in some ways, it's the native peoples also, you know, Pacific Islander people who claim the layman identity, who are defining the boundaries and what it means to be a laymanite in the church today. Does your book, On Wakara, is he emblematic of this relationship in any way? Yes, in that the church and the church leaders think that when a conversion happens, when a relationship is established, a covenant is established between the Latter of Saints

and a native person or Native peoples, the Native peoples will kind of get rid of all of their kind of older understandings of their identities and their indigenous ways of life and they'll just adopt Mormonism wholesale. That's not how Native peoples do it. They adopt parts of the most, I'm overgeneralizing here, but Native Americans, like all people, take parts of this new or this new tradition of which they become a part and keep other parts of their older tradition, right? They figure out their relationship. often we don't hear from those people. We only hear from the church leaders who have kind of long as defined that relationship. But, you know, a new generation led by some of my colleagues like

Gilles Boxer and Farina King, they're Native Americans who are also members of the church or have a relationship with the church. And they are complicating this history in deep and important ways and also setting the boundaries of what it means to be a laymanite today. So like I try to do in my book on Waukera, I try to listen to the historical people from the past, but also the descendants of these people, right? I work a lot with,

in the book, throughout the book, Waccarra's direct descendants, some of whom are Latter-day Saints, most of whom are not, and I listen to them. I also listened to and worked with the descendants of the people Waukehara enslaved

to understand their relationship, how they understood slavery. Right? So my argument is that, even though we are talking today about this history to white dudes, I think we also need to be very careful and center the voices of both the native peoples from the past and also their descendants today. So that's the work I try to do.

Max, tell me about the circumstances around the death of Wakara, 1855. Yes, in 1855, Wakara dies. Quite suddenly, you know, he wasn't a young man, probably in his at the time, mid-40s, but quite suddenly, you know, most likely it was some kind of environmental poison or, you know, bacteria or a virus that killed him. But his people certainly believed that he was poisoned. And Brigham and others had used poison against Native people. So it's not beyond the realm of possibility. In fact, we have a letter that Brigham writes during their height of their conflict to Walkera saying,

I'm sending you some tobacco as a peace gesture. And if you don't trust it, have one of your prisoners smoke it. implying that if you think it's poisoned, you can have one of your prisoners smoke it, implying that it could be poisoned, right? So, you know, there's some circum-circumstantial evidence for that ending. But, you know, it's shocked, shocked the Latter-day Saints, this burial. But in a lot of ways, and I've rethought kind of what he's doing there, it was larger than a lot of burials like this, Ute burials, Comanche burials. But it wasn't out of it was, perhaps the largest, but it wasn't completely uncommon. It was not uncommon to have horses, even to be buried with your stuff.

If you're a big, important leader, like you mentioned, like a pharaoh, even wives, etc. Wakera understood at 1855 that the world he had created, that is both indigenous and American, right, both settler and native, is disappearing. And I believe what he's trying to do is preserve that world in microcosm so one day it could be restored. Now, of course, killing wives, killing children, killing horses. This is not acceptable in our worldview. I could even say it's not acceptable even then. But that, I think, is what he's attempting to do.

I see. After the Civil War, right, American government, the federal government, set their sights on finishing the war of conquest of the West and driving out Indians, Indians, right? Removing Indians finally as a threat to the expansion. And the war happened on at least two fronts, killing live Indians and collecting crania, the skulls of dead Indians, to bring back to Washington, to find, to study them, to find them inferior, to justify the killing.

So they're measuring the skulls to find that they're smaller than Anglo-European skulls. And therefore incapable of holding and participating in government, holding intellect, that will allow them to participate in the American Republic. Wow, this is early eugenics. Exactly eugenics. This is phrenology. I mean, this is all bunk. There's no connection between the size of a brain and intelligence. But this is what they were doing. And Waukera's grave site was robbed to collect the crania. And it very much certainly bothered, upset the folks, the Utes and Paiutes who were around in that area. And it wasn't the only time that burial site has been desecrated. Unfortunately, it's been desecrated, desecrated, and desecrated over several, you know, know, many times, because it wasn't just Waukeira's burial there. It really was a cemetery. And I'm very careful in the book to not to name where it is because I don't want to invite other people to go sea collecting. Unfortunately, the latest forest fire destroyed the burial

site. Again, another environmental catastrophe wrought by settler environmental destruction. Bad forest management. Bad forest management. And so even the last desecration, happened, again, I mentioned the Forest Service here by a man and archaeologist charged with protecting the grave sites. He removed grave goods from that site in the 1980s. And so, right, that story of removal. I argue that the reason why Waukera and other Native peoples are removed from the land is because it helps to justify removing them and removing, you know, removing dead Indians from the land, it helps justify removing live Indians from the land, right? Where we bury our people, right, is where we tout our homeland.

And I argue, Guacara was not only removed from the history books, but also from the land to make way for this history. Boy, there's a PhD thesis, isn't it? You know, how cemeteries have been used to claim lands. I want to ask you this last question. First of all, the book is amazing, and it's a very important book to read. and even looking into the book, I learned so much, certainly about Mormonism and this history, but even elsewhere, the broader thinking about the West. I want to invite you to consider

this. The book, Race and the Making of the Mormon People is the other volume that you've written. It's quite a can of worms to open here at the end of this episode. I wonder if you might comment on the ironic reputation of the Mormons as such a white religion. I mean, it's not alone in that regard. There are many of these things. But it is ironic that they should end up with that public view or that look, right? Absolutely. I think of Mitt Romney and his presidential candidate, right? He was two in some ways. I described in other writings that Mitt Romney, you know, of the uncanny valley, right? He looks too good in some ways. Too perfect. My colleague Paul Reeve at the University of Utah in his great work on whiteness and Mormonism, right, describes how Mormons went from not white enough to too white

in his arguments. I'm glad I'm not alone in saying that. Yes. Oh, absolutely not. Absolutely. not, right? This is the reputation. Let me just point out some stats that we've already established. Right from the beginning, the Latter-day Saints see themselves as a multiracial experiment, mandate, right? Not only, mostly to the Native Americans, they're less interested explicitly in black people, but their theology, which was this, what I call universal whiteness, which was, if you join the church, non-white people can overcome their non-whiteness, their curses that they wear on their skin to become white, which really means human, fully human, right? That's the promise. And so there were some early black people that joined the church with that promise. I write about Jane Manning James,

the great Mormon pioneer and matriarch, a black woman who lived with Joseph in Navu, followed Brigham West, was part of the 1849 or 47 class, right? She was there. until 1908. So there were some black people. But because of racial politics of the of the nation, but also Mormons what develops as this Mormonism's antipathy antagonism towards blackness, right, exclude black people until 1978 from full membership. And that's a whole different, quite a different story. But it's about it's about curses. It's about curses. And who can join this, you know, restored family. But today, after, starting after 1978, and today, Mormonism internationally is probably majority non-white,

right? Really? The biggest growth areas are in Mexico, South America, Africa, right? And a lot of white, a lot of white, as we've seen recently in some great reporting from the Salt Lake Tribune and others, a lot of white women are leaving the church. So you have this kind of longstanding members who might trace their heritage back to, the pioneers we've been discussing, the pioneer Mormons who came to Utah, they're leaving the church, partly because of the sexual agendered politics,

partly because of the conservative politics, partly because of the church's stance on LGBTQI people, the constrictions. But other people outside of the U.S. are attracted to the faith. And they're also moving to Utah. You see a lot of, you know, non-white Samoan or African Mormons who have come to Utah often for school, for missionary work, and eventually end up staying.

So it comes by that reputation as a white religion, honestly. They had a, the church had an explicit racial restriction on a full membership of black people in particular until 1978, right? Full stop. Brigham Young and a lot of prophets believe that black people were cursed and would be cursed until the, almost the end of time. And they said so explicitly. The church is now trying to reckon with that history, right?

And doing it sometimes successfully, sometimes less so. But like I said before, the growth areas really is outside of kind of the West, in the United States, especially when I see the West, I mean like Europe and the United States, and really in kind of the global South. That's where the growth is. But that's where growth of Christianity is writ large among the global South. Fascinating. I told you, a can of worms there.

Max Perry Mueller authored the award-winning book, which we've just discussed, Race and the Making of the Mormon People, along with Wakara's America. He hails from the University of Nebraska, where he's an associate professor of religious studies in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies. Thank you so much, Max. I hope we'll come back again soon. It was nice to meet you. I would love to. I'd love to talk about the next book, which is I'm working on right now. It's, again, race and making a Mormon people. Waukehra was a big figure in that book, but I looked at how the Mormons saw him, right? They used him to kind of define laymanite identity. I Wau-Wakara's America, flipped that around to show how does Waukehara understand this relationship? in this next book, which I call More,

comma, America. So more America. It's a series of 25 different kind of founders of the United States. So every decade, I look at a different kind of founder, arguing that the founding of the United States didn't happen just in 1776 in Philadelphia with wigged white men, but happens. It's a continual process, especially by people like Waukeira. He's my figure for the 1840s, who, for,

various reasons, the federal government, the American culture, haven't created a place for. So I study women, native peoples, Jewish peoples, who found institutions, found literary societies, literary cultures, and so each decade, I'd highlight one person. When is that book being released? In 2008, with Harper Collins. It's already been sold to Harper Collins. So more America. Future episode. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays,

all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great. But you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman.

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