American History Hit - When the Mormons Rebelled Against America

Episode Date: April 13, 2026

Driven from the United States, the Mormons journeyed West to build a new society in the desert- one that would challenge the political, economic, and moral norms of the nation they had left behind. But when the United States lay claim to the Utah Territory, a tense standoff developed between the two sides...Our guest today is Prof. Peter Coviello, University of Illinois, who studies American literature and queer theory. His book, Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism was published in 2019 and was a finalist for the John Whitmer Historical Association award for best history book.Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Produced by Tomos Delargy. 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. 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. First, it's clouds of dust, thin, far away. Then, on the horizon, a line takes shape.

Wagons, uniforms, cavalry, an army with a mission. The United States is coming. In Salt Lake City, Brigham Young gives the order. No pitched battles, no glorious stand. Scorch the grass, empty the outposts, scatter the herds. This army must march into a void. Better to destroy Zion than to surrender it. This is no rebellion of the standard variety.

More like a noose tightening on these troops, begging the question, whose land is this? Those who came to build a kingdom or the nation they left behind, now marching to claim it as theirs. The Mormon rebellion is about to begin. To help tell us more about this important event, we welcome Professor Peter Covielo of the University of Illinois. His book, Make Yourselves Gods, Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism, was a finalist for the John Whitmer Historical Association Award for Best History Book.

I'm Don Wildman, and this is American History Head. Peter, welcome back. Nice to see you again. Don, it's a pleasure to see you. Thank you for having me. You were last with us in 2003, another world ago. 300 episodes ago. Another world ago. Yeah. Check the archives for episode 86, Mormons and the founding of Salt Lake City,

in which we discussed, Peter and I, the origins and western migrations of those people called Mormons through the 1830s and 40s. Today we dive more into the 1850s after the establishment of Utah as a territory of the United States. All a consequence of the victorious Mexican-American War. Adherence to this highly controversial religion have now set up shop in Utah. That's what we're going to be talking. talking about today. Three years is a long time ago, Peter, I'm a bit rusty. Let's briefly review those origins, shall we? Well, no one's more rusty than I, but we'll try. Yeah, let's do it. We'll be quick about this. 1830, Mormonism is founded by Joseph Smith when he

happens upon the golden plates in western New York State undergoes a spiritual transformation. These plates contain a religious history of this ancient American religion. Take us through that and the bullet points of this subject. very, very quickly. He writes the Book of Mormon in upstate New York and gathers around him a bunch of detractors, but also a lot of followers. Over the course

of the decade, Mormons migrate West. Joseph Smith is intensely charismatic and also intensely theological imaginative. So he writes the book of Mormon, but he keeps writing and keeps thinking and he keeps proselytizing.

And as he does so, the faith gathers to its more adherence and a more vehement kind of detractor. It's really the ultimate Protestant religion in that it's correcting what's wrong with Protestantism, isn't it? Well, I mean, it depends on who you ask, right? They understand themselves as a vigorously counter Protestantism. Oh.

That is to say, like, the whole point of Mormonism, or not the whole point, but a big point of Mormonism is millennia of religion has conspired to get you to believe that God is different from you, that the world is fallen. in fact, this is incorrect. Christianity itself is an apostasy. Why? Because God is a brethren human. And you yourself in the mortal world are living in an unfallen body. And you yourself are speeding toward divinization because God wants everything that's best about human life, embodiment, joy, friendship, love to be eternalized. And to be yours in eternity. So yeah, that's the pitch. You've already left me behind.

I mean, Joseph Smith made a declaration that humans more than following God could become divine themselves, one with him of God. Exactly. That's where the title of your book comes from, right? Yes. Make yourselves gods. Make yourselves gods. I mean, you can see the gorgeousness of the vision.

He is willing to imagine a far more expansively loving kind of God, certainly than any Calvinist. God. God is not only this, not this, like, radically. other occasionally malevolent figure. God is rather a sibling human. Gotcha. A person that you are, God and persons are different in degree, but not in kind. Oh, wow. No wonder. It's controversial. This would really, really ruffle the feathers of a lot of Puritans. This is why the Mormons have to increasingly migrate West, as we covered on our

previous episode. They are being persecuted. They are being pushed away from communities. there in. Terrible things happened to them. The growth of Mormonism led to earlier believers facing this persecution by moving onward. From 1833, the Mormons were repeatedly forced out of towns. They moved

into Illinois, where you are. By 1838, things have become so tense that Governor Lilburn Boggs in that state said, Mormons must now be treated as enemies. They must be exterminated or driven from the state. Boy, it gets intense. And by

1839 they have created an order. Yeah, they have created something called Nalvu. Navu. Navu, it's on the edge of Illinois. Yeah, it's a river town on the edge of Illinois, which is their sort of own town. And that's where like the grandest theological speculation that Smith will produce really happens. It's a scene of like super intense theological foment. It's where Smith comes to the revelation that one of the key components of exaltation of the idea that humans can exalt themselves into gods is polygamy, is plural patriarchal marriage. And there's a lot, a lot, a lot of different ways of reading that. Is it a restoration of Old Testament beliefs? Is it a hyper-patriarchalization of a world that's becoming more industrial and more gender equitable in the 19th century?

Those, you can make those things stick. For me, in my reading of Mormonism, it's really just an essential part of what Smith understands as the theology of Mormonism, that is to say, the world is unfallen. We live in these in unfallen bodies and it's incredibly hard to believe that. You need a discipline of practice. That for him is plural marriage.

Anyway, he has that revelation. They don't publicize it for a while. Not surprisingly because it makes people furious. But of course, already scandal surrounds them. They're accused of many things, but particularly in being accused of like

being perverts. People who's pretend devotions have led them into perversity. And that accusation, of course, allows people like little burned bogs to say, what we should probably do is external. I mean, it's really deep. What does the latter day saint refer to? What is that the name of the movement? States of the world is like we are in a state of revelation in the present tense. That revelation didn't end in the days of the Bible. It exists now. I see. Present tense. God speaks as much in the present tense. Now, of course, like that particular version of counter-Protestant devotion

has other analogs. Like, the Mormons don't have to look around them very far to see what it looks like to be a kind of belief practice, askance that of normative American Protestantism. That's how native peoples were persecuted explicitly as Edens, as people whose backwards counter-protrots and beliefs made them, again, fit. for extermination. So the Mormons feel this like very complex identification with native peoples who appear in the book of Mormon as Lamanites and stuff like that. So it's a super fraught identification because they also want to identify as, you know, white people with all the powers of empire belonging to them as well. So they take all that with them into the West. The whole thing that

we're not going to get into, but it's really about returning to the homeland for this movement, because in their minds there have been previous tribes of, I guess, white Europeans, essentially, have been here before they weren't Europeans. But this is like a very interesting cyclical story that's returning them essentially to a Garden of Eden. And so this makes North America and America that much more special when they consider this. And this was all what was written down on the plates that Joseph Smith creates the Book of Mormon out of. Navu was a very significant settlement. One of the largest cities in Illinois at the time had a militia, the Novo Navu Legion for shadowing what's to come.

A temple, which has been rebuilt even today, a chartered city government. They were very serious about this. But then Joseph Smith is killed in 1844 in a mob scene, right? Yes, he's assassinated in a prison. You can still go Carthage, Illinois. And the Mormons are not wrong. is anticipating where we're going in the 1850s, the Mormons surely cannot be blamed for thinking of themselves as persecuted and as persons that the state and elements of the state are

free to murder. They had executed Joseph Smith. There had been a massacre at Juan's Mill, been the extermination order. So some historians were referred to the Mormon's persecution complex, and I understand where that comes from, but they have some real data to go on in the 19th century, you know? Sure, yeah. The state itself had expressed a great willingness to massacre the Mormons. Right. To the degree that they're even remotely identified with native peoples as fellow exiles

from an imperial America, they also understand what extermination looks like. They also can see their own fates written out in the fate of native peoples. So obviously, there's talk among them of a homeland, and this would be where we're heading when we come back after a break. But before we get there, I just want to underscore the fact that polygamy really is a major issue for Americans at that time. And people still talk about it. You know, it still gives everybody the hebi-jeeb-jeebies. But back then, we're talking about a time of greater religion. and, you know, established religions that really mix up with the politics, just as they do today, of course.

But back then it was a big deal. When the wider U.S. found out of a polygamy in the 1850s, they were horrified. Mormons became a huge debating point in the 1956 presidential election of James Buchanan. Major, major points. So after the break, we'll come back and talk about how those tensions reach their peak in Utah. Welcome back. We're discussing the Mormon religion with Professor Peter. Covielo. So we've established, Peter, some of the Mormon beliefs and why tensions began

growing between them and eventually the federal government. First, the state government of Illinois, of course, was really on them. Events to keep in mind as we get further into Utah, 1847, Brigham Young, who was a lieutenant of Joseph Smith, takes over after Joseph Smith's assassination. And they head west. They go by way of Missouri, of course, like everybody does. Important to keep in mind at this point, 1847, where they will end up, Utah is still part of Mexican territory. The Mexican-American War hasn't been fought yet. That's an 1848-49 kind of time. The land becomes U.S. territory after we win that war, and the Treaty of Hildago gives us that massive amount of land in the West. Congress creates the Utah territory as part of the

compromise of 1850. All right. So that sets the stage for all of what we're about to talk about. Yes. Brought 1850s. Yeah, by this time, as you have completely explained to us, there is good reason why these Mormons should be circling their wagons. And they are very worried about what's coming next. Was Utah in their crosshairs or that area in the crosshairs that far west as they made their migration? Not necessarily. This is the place. They found a place that looked habitable and looked like it could hold the saints, the population of Mormons.

but it was also at what for Brigham Young particularly was at like a saving distance from the eastern United States. And it's increasingly apocalyptic tensions. Of course, we're in the run up to slavery. Yeah. And it also helped to foment the dream of a nation apart from the United States. The fallen and doomed United States, which is, again, it's very easy to read the Book of Mormon as propheson. the fall of the Americans whom the Mormons will call the Gentiles. And it's very easy to think that the native people will have a role in that destruction, too.

Wouldn't it be cool to do a PhD thesis on apocalyptic thinking historically throughout all of American history? Because, boy, that's a big part of the mid-19th century. I mean, you've got the Mormons, you've got the whole South is thinking about themselves as apart from this. And that's a very religious world down there. It's just got to be boiled into the fat of America. is it. Yeah, eschatology is a really, really tempting option at all at all points. Don, I also appreciate that we're having this conversation on whatever day today is April 7th under the tweeted threat of the annihilation of an entire civilization. Like eschatologies don't really go away.

And eschatology is a real, real part of the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon is like strangely the account of a righteous people, the Nephites, who are annihilies. And It's the remaining account of people who backslide and are fallen, and so God sees fit to them being annihilated. The Mormons read out into that a fate of backsliding America. How do they know they're backsliding? Because they've so persecuted us. Because they have so cast out their most righteous people, the Mormons, the saints.

We've been cast out into the West that for us prophesies. And now I just sound like Brigham Young in the 1850s. This prophesies the doom of the nation. I would say that repeatedly. It was named the state of Deseret. Am I getting that pronunciation correct? I believe you are correct. Okay.

And Deseret translates, I guess probably loosely into by honeybee, like those brought by the original Jaredites from Jerusalem. I mentioned before that we've been here before, according to the Mormons. And that was an early tribe. Yeah, the Book of Mormon says these guys, the Jaredites, quite literally after a guy named Jared were here before and they had brought with them honeybees, which had, I guess, propagated and become, you know, spread around the North America. And a symbol of industriousness.

Yes, exactly. Good for them. Productivity and indomitability. Yeah. Right. And little tiny cubicles where they feel very comfortable, I guess. But a little, a year later, Utah becomes a U.S. territory in 1850, as I mentioned, because of the Mexican-American War victory.

At that point, federal oversight in the area begins. That's got to be a, you know, ominous note for the, for the Mormons. Very fraught. Very fraught. Trouble is brewing. The Mormon rebellion that we're really talking about in this is not a war in a traditional sense. It's more of an ongoing standoff over sovereignty, right?

That's, Donna, that's perfectly said. That's exactly right. And, of course, what the Mormons watch is. what they will eventually get once they renounced polygamy at the end of the century, which is the protected if limited sovereignty of statehood. Because of course, statehood grants you all kinds

of sovereign powers, as we know, and the Civil War had litigated in blood what exactly the extent of those sovereign powers were. They don't have that. What they have is a territory, which is much, much more disputed, though, of course, what the Mormons have going for them

is they're many thousands of miles away. East coast, and the outposts of the federal government. And so that allows Brigham to maneuver rather more widely than he would have if he was in, say, Pennsylvania or Ohio. And the detractors of the Mormons call what's being created there a theocratic state or a theodemocracy. The Mormons think that they are practicing what on the East Coast they like to call religious freedom. Of course, there's a lot of contestation over what gets to.

to count as religion than is now. And the Mormons on polygamy and on the way that polygamy made them like they were called all sorts of things in 1930. Mohammedans was a very favorite one. They were always being accused of being secretly Indian, fomenting rebellions with the Indians, right? So they understand themselves to be in possession of religious freedom. Right.

And I understand polygamy to be a part of that religious freedom. The federal government does not understand. stand it that way. These are some of the interior tensions that are really roiling across the 1850s, which is, as you say, already a semi-apocalyptic time because of the fight about slavery that is brewing and becoming more and more apocalyptic. U.S. President James E. Cannon sends federal troops over to Utah to install a new government. He does. He sends almost one third of the entire army is sent out there. This is a very important an impressive issue. Which is an amazing, like, that very, I remember when I was reading that, I was like,

I don't know, 2,500, 3,000 troops or something like that, but like that's like a third of the standing army goes to Utah. And what Buchanan will say in Washington, D.C., is that Brigham Young is in open rebellion against the United States of America. And Brigham Young will say, Buchanan is fighting a war of extermination. Yeah. And Watts of War of Extermination. And in a certain way, Both of them are correct. They're both of them pretty near on to write. So it looks very much like that's going to happen. The Mountain Meadows massacre happens, which inflames things gravely.

Yeah. In anticipation of this arrival, the Mormons prepare for defense. Their evacuation of Mormon settlements. They kind of practice a scorched earth policy of burning out grassy areas. So there's nowhere for these horses to graze. They will target U.S. supply lines. And as mentioned before, there's no major pitched battles here. It's just kind of an ongoing practice of let's starve these guys out so they'll turn around and go home. There is heavy-duty

bloodshed in one event. It's called the Mountain Meadows, Maxeter 1857. Members of a Mormon militia known as the Navu Legion and local participants kill dozens of emigrants passing through Utah. This is a really hairy thing, isn't it? Tremendously so. Tremendously so. And there's much contestation in the historiography, did Young, Sejic, certainly, the rhetoric and discourse around the area was definitely coming from Young, and it was definitely bloody and intent. Whether or not he authorized the actual attack on all of the emigrants is a different question. He will not be tried, but a different Mormon will be. They are in league with some piutes in the area. They clumsily attempt to blame it on the piutes. Oh, we didn't kill.

These immigrants, it was an Indian massacre that's exposed in the next year. So, of course, the Mormons think of immigrants as passageways for the state to get at them. And so they mistrust them violently. And when they murder these people, the state is like, okay, these are now. This is a party of people in bloody rebellion. Yeah. There was a great series on this, sort of mini-series last year on, I think it was Netflix, where it's called American Prime Evil.

I mean, they at least cast this in an insanely violent tone. It was really heavy duty. And that's, I mean, again, you say it just right. There's an eschatological edge to the period. And Brigham is not shy about saying the federal agents who've come here and maligned our civilization should have been hung in the streets. He just says things like that, you know what I mean? Right. And so Buchanan is not exactly wrong.

On the other hand, he did send a third of the federal army out, presumably, to destroy a religious sect in the West. Right. For erotic practices that they didn't really believe in in back east. Yeah. At least 120 people are killed in this situation. A cover-up was attempted trying to shift the blame to Native Americans nearby. It has the effect of damaging the Mormon moral standing even further, right? This does no good for their reputation in America.

Kind of, though. I think that's right, though it is also the case that polygamy was such a violation. Yeah, and polygamy was such a ready-to-hand way to dismiss any Mormon claim to dignity, sovereignty, peace, anything you wanted. And to do it as what happened in the 19th century frantically in like frantically racializing terms. They're Mohammedan. They're Indian-like. The followers are slave-like and their sycophancy to ecclesiastical leaders. So the Mormons are always being produced as dubiously white people.

Like there's a great line in a Jack London story where the, you know, somebody says it's well, can't get those are white. Oh, they ain't white. They're Mormons. And that's a real. Of course, in the 19th century, the Mormons are again not wrong to hear in that. the possibility of having become expendable life. They are not ignorant of what the federal government does to racialized life to black populations, native populations.

So they're not really wrong. Yeah. This kind of wraps up in mid-1858. The U.S. Army ends up marching unopposed through to Salt Lake City and into it. It ends relatively quickly with a negotiated piece. This was due, of course, because there was a lot of. going on back east. I mean, you know, there was a lot happening. This is, this is, becomes a minor problem compared to what's boiling up real fast. That's very right. Yeah, Buchanan is facing a

lot of pressure at home to bring this crisis to an end. In the end, the whole affair, sending the army out, the whole bloodshed, everything was called Buchanan's blunder in the, in the press. He looks real bad. Buchanan was no, you know, he wasn't doing too well in many regards as a resident, but this was certainly stain on his character. I want to circle back because we're about to talk about Brigham Young, you know, officially becoming the governor of Utah at this point. Tell me about this man. Who was Brigham Young? And why did he step into the role? Yes. Well, Brigham Young, in a certain way that I will both say and then invite you to mistrust slightly, Brigham Young provides this excellent contrast to Joseph Smith, who was

heologically minded, intensely charismatic, oratorically gifted, and a graphomaniac. He just wrote and wrote and wrote with tremendous down-home eloquence, like a kind of, there's a, there's a Whitmanian aspect to Joseph. That's not Brigham Young. Brigham Young is an organizer. Right. And he is called by many historians the great colonizer of the West. He is going to be the great systematizer. So where Joseph Smith has left behind this intense cosmology that's kind of under codified, he is going to turn it into a structure of leadership in which he sits at the top and he distributes authority carefully. And that makes him very shrewd. It's easy to think of him. I find in my own writing, I have to resist the urge, which I don't fully resist, to think of him as kind of a villain in as much

as the theology of Mormonism is ungovernably multiple before Joseph Smith is murdered. Polygamy is just for men. But is it just for men? Well, the women in the female relief society had some other idea. And then Brigham systematizes. He patriarchizes an already patriarchal culture. He bans African American priesthood. He identifies with the racial state even as he disidentifies from the United States as such. He just thinks the Mormons deserve an imperial investiture. So he's that sort of complicated figure. He believes that the United States is doomed. He's also incredibly pragmatic and he wants to protect Native people is that what you mentioned before about the Mormons fleeing Salt Lake. When people wonder why there are so

many Mormon settlements out west, going all the way down to Mexico, all the way up the coast, out to the west. It's in part because he thought the federal government is not going to slaughter all of us if we're scattered, not just in Salt Lake, but in these outposts everywhere. That's a response to this sense of incursion and the sense of vulnerability. That marks the landscape today. Right. You know? Well, remember that the army comes in order to support the idea that they're going to install their

own governor. The fight is for the Mormons to be led by their own. And that is what is negotiated, because Brigham Young becomes the new governor of Utah. I guess it gets named later on. The territory. Yeah, the territory of Utah. Buchanan pardons the Mormons for their rebellion after they accept this U.S. federal authority. The leader of the Navajo, sort of the caper on the story is a guy named John Lee in his fate. He's the leader of the Navu Legion. John Lee is the only one charged with murder after that Mountain Meadows massacre and was executed years later. Yep. 77, I think, many years later, like 20 years.

Even Brigham Young has given this guy up. The time has come when they will try John D. Lee and not the Mormon church, and that's what we have always wanted. So at that point, they have really secured their place in this place they call Deseret, but is going to be renamed Utah. And after this break coming up, we will come back and talk about after the rebellion concludes how Mormonism in Utah eventually settles into American life. Okay, we're back discussing the Mormons.

After the violence of the rebellion ends, we're in still pre-Civil War, really, aren't we, Peter? Which I imagine has really changed the whole calculus of this situation. 1861, when that begins, a lot that had to do with Utah, in effect, gets eclipsed by what's happening back east. I think that's right, though what will be of real consequence for the Mormons, one way, only one way to think about the Civil War is as a clarifying contest over the extent and meaning of state sovereignty as opposed to federal sovereignty. And of course, federal sovereignty wins, extremely wins, with an enormous and unproductive body count. So on the one hand, the Mormons survive triumphantly. They survived the federal incursion of 1857, 1858, and they returned

to Salt Lake with a kind of triumphal look at us. On the other hand, what happens between 1866 and 1888 and 1890, a constant, constant, constant legal undermining of the conditions of existence of the Mormons, which is say a series of acts, one after another, after another after another, that criminalize polygamy that essentially make practicing the religion, practicing particularly seditious and make all but impossible the continued existence of the Mormons. Yeah. Well, it's-inside the federal fold. It's legislated by no less than Congress, several different acts.

Repeatedly. Yeah. The moral anti-bigamy act passed in 1862 by Congress, outlawed plural marriage in all U.S. territories. Also limited church property ownership. It kind of weakly enforced during the American Civil War. Then comes the Edmunds Act. Act in 1882, that's just 20 years later, which officially disenfranchises polygamous,

made unlawful cohabitation a crime, which was easier to prosecute than polygamy. Polygamists had no voting. If you were going to be a polygamous, you'd have no voting. You could not hold office. You could not be in a jury. Sounds pretty good to me. Three, Edmonds is the third one, is the Edmonds Tucker Act 18, five years later, 1887, Dissolves the LDS Church as a legal entity imposes federal control over Utah institutions.

That had to be the big one, right? Yeah, and that's, so the Mormons are populace and they have allies back east, and they indeed have lobbyists and stuff like that. And there's a great, I forgot in the man's name, but there's a, their lobbyist in D.C. says something like, you know, I've been doing this a long time and I've never seen anything like it. Back when, when there were states in the South determined to hold. onto slavery, there were many thousands of people willing to support them. Indeed, at the north, there are many thousands of people to support them. You are a body of three or four thousand people and the 50 millions of the United States have decided. Polygamy will be

exterminated. And the word he uses is exterminated. And what he doesn't have to say is, and if it's not, you will be. Wow. Of course, incredible decimation of Native peoples in the West. Once again, I will say, the pretext for a lot of that decimation was not land theft. It was religion and a religion that deranged people sexually. The native peoples, they didn't live in coupled households. They didn't have houses. They needed to be disciplined into that. This is how the native ill-fittedness for American life was again and again spoken, which of course had great resonances for the Mormons and the Mormons and the Mormons polygamousness. Interesting. They knew what extermination looked like. Yeah. It was very near them. And so this is the context in which at the end of the century, they, they end up renouncing polygamy as a condition to gain statehood.

And with it, the protections and sovereignty that come with statehood. Yeah. The screws had been tightened 1887. Oh, so much. Yeah. By 1890, the LDS Church's president. Now, understand, three years later, is the Edmonds Tucker Act, 1887, which prior to this I'd never heard of.

That really does the legal job of disincorporating this church, seizing church assets, imposing federal control over territorial institutions, including schools and elections. I mean, big time, they come down with the hammer. It's in 1890 that the LDS church kind of relents, and their president, Wilford Woodruff, issues a manifester that officially ended plural marriages. So if you ever wonder, well, what happened to that? of me. That was such a big deal in the 1800s for the Mormons. This is what happened. The federal government came down hard. The federal government threatened to murder everyone. That had a pretty

normalizing effect. I'll read you a little passage in a letter, Woodruff Wright, which is for me incredibly revealing. He writes this letter in 1889 to a friend of his name William Eckin. He says, we are now politically speaking the dependent or ward of the United States. But in a state capacity, we should be freed from such dependency and would possess the powers and independence of a sovereign state. A dependent or ward, what's striking to me about that is that is exactly,

as you know, that is exactly the language with which the state described the relation of native tribes through the federal government. They were wards. Wow. And this is 1889. This is the time of wounded knee, man.

Like Woodruff is not wrong to think that while we are a dependent or ward of the state, we are fit to be murdered. Interesting. We know what that looks like. So those are the stakes. Yeah.

Those are the stakes of renouncing polygamy, which is, of course, an enormous, hugely disruptive act. You've been told for however many years, how many decades, that this is an essential part of the theology of your religion, which you've been willing to stick your life on. Interesting. And then it's renounced in the course of the 1890s. I'm going to ask you a last question here about legacy, but before we answer this, I, I, I just want to emphasize what is such an interesting piece of learning for myself, I hope, for listeners as well, that the real unique aspect of the story, the theme of this is that the Mormons really related to Native American tribes so much because, of course, their history, that which is written in the golden plates, puts them here as essentially Native tribes. They're just coming back to where their previous civilization was in their mythology would be the word for me, but I guess their book of Mormon, you know, States.

Their scripture. Yeah, they're scripture. Yeah. A fantastic, and this is one of the things that I try to write about in my book. There's an environmental historian named Jared Farmer, I think, writes very well, an intensely fraught identification with native people. Yeah. Whose lands they, the Mormons, feel they are entitled to, who they will attempt to colonize and bio-phalanthropies,

one would say, but whom they also understand to be fellow refugees. from an imperial America. But an imperial America that they also want to be a part of because they want to be imperialists. It makes for a fantastically fraught set of relations that stretches across the whole of the 19th century, the whole of the 19th century.

Have they been uniquely good in their relations with Native tribes within? No. I mean, they had been better than the federal government, but of course that's a tremendously low bar. Yeah. You know, they were one of the major players in the West. Of course, in the West at the time, there's a lot of warfare between different

tribes, equestrian tribes like the Apaches and the Utes have the upper hand. Particularly they are a route for slave trading. The Mormons are opposed to slave trading. That makes the Paiutes an ally of theirs. But ally is a strong word. The Paiutes are trying to survive. There are a lot of talk about the ghost dance. Remember the ghost dance in the 1880s? The federal government will repeatedly say the Mormons are behind all. The Mormons. Because it has an eschatological and redemptive

end and they think that the Mormons are secret throughout the 19th century the federal government can say the Mormons are secretly in league with the native people to murder the Americans. And in some ways they were. But again, in ways they were totally willing to also murder native people

themselves to take land themselves. It's hard to over-describe the fraughtness of Mormon native relation in the West in the 19th century. Utah becomes a state in 18, 96, and that's late. You know, when you consider that California became one in 1850, so almost 40 years earlier, there's a difference between that.

But that's because of all these things that had to be legislated and worked out and nailed down before we're going to give you the state that you're insisting on having. Before you do that, we're going to have to integrate you into the American way of life, which they do. How does the legacy of this rebellion, and now we have completely defined it as, an ongoing, many-faceted aspect of things. The idea of their desert kingdom, how does that all square now? That's a great question.

In certain ways, the first thing I'll say is I'm ill-equipped to answer it because my scholarly address to the Mormons ends at literally the moment they renounced polygamy. That's part of the Mormon trajectory that I'm most interesting, though, I think you can see from the Mormon side, it's not entirely unfair to say what has. had been a vigorously counter-protestantism, something that understood itself as improving what they would read as the apostasy of American Christianity becomes, in essence, another subset of American Christianity, another kind of belief that seems more tolerable, that is better able to sit at the table of American para-Christianities, which it simply had not

been before renouncing polygamy. That, of course, makes the Mormons a different kind of player on the national stage. And it's a kind of a, if you're me, it's a striking transformation, like a people who really were willing to stake their lives on their opposition to the imperial United States become like avatars of good citizenship. And Harold Bloom will call them the American religion. Yeah, huge patriotism. You know, if there's ever a place, I think, as patriotic, it's the state of Utah. all. You know, it's the Mormons. The irony is unbelievable. And what's also sort of puzzling is that the Mormons sort of stop living as though they live inside sacred time, but rather they treat

the 19th century itself, the moment from 1830 to 1890, as their sacred history. But what that does, there are many effects of that. So there's lots of celebrations about the sacred history of Mormons, but it installs statehood and national belonging as a kind of telos. Yeah, right. And all that you and I have been talking about today was, well, that was really not inevitable. And in many respects, it wasn't desired. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's almost like that was there.

Yeah. Every religion has its, it's a schism, you know, the division within it. Yeah. And then the reunification of it, it seems like that's inevitable for all religions. For Mormonism, it's with the country itself, right? That's the schism. And then when they reunite, it's a different kind of practice altogether. And of course, there are a lot of Mormons who do not accept the renunciation of Plygamy.

They think it is for cheap and worldly expedience. And that's where the F-LDS Fundamentalist Mormon Church comes from. And there's plenty of segments in Still Polygamous West, who understand themselves precisely as fundamentalists, as not having ceded the ground of what to them was essential to the theology, to the theology, to the lived theology of Mormonism, which was given up in their view for the, you know, the cheap and expedient reason of statehood. Yes. Which for Woodruff was like, well, that's going to save our lives.

Well, yeah, exactly. It's going to keep us from being annihilated. Nice to not have the federal government after you every day of your life. Yeah, it's nice to not have a third of the federal government ringing your city. Although those fundamentals don't have an opinion on the, you know, federal forces coming in any given day. Yeah. It's interesting. The ironies rebound and rebound and rebound across the 20th century. Sure. Though others are better able to speak of that than I.

It's been a joy to talk to you. Peter Covellio is a professor of history at the University of Illinois, and we have been discussing his book, Make Yourselves, Gods, Mormons, and the unfinished business of American secularism. What a fascinating book that is to get. Peter, is there a website that we should be looking at, ways to keep track of you? I am the head of the English department at UIC in Chicago, and you can look. If you put in my name in Chicago, you'll find more than enough about me there. There'll be a line outside your office, Peter. Thank you. What a pleasure. I appreciate it 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. So grateful for your support.