Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 384: Mormonism Part V - King of Beaver Island

Episode Date: September 28, 2019

On this, the fifth part of our series on Mormonism, we cover the polygamy-filled years under the leadership of Brigham Young, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people due to mass murder and negligence, as well as the founding of Salt Lake City.

Hey, what's up, everyone? How you doing? Be sure to tune in on October 7th for a special episode about the upcoming movie, Zombieland, Double Tap. On the episode, we interviewed the director, Ruben Fleischer, and get details behind the new film. Don't forget to catch Zombieland, Double Tap, in theaters October 18th. There's no place to escape to. This is the last time. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? You know, there's a lot of people that say, oh, bring them. You made yourself your own university.

You got to be a pretty smart guy. You know, and I do agree. I am a smart guy because you know, it's an axiom. I always live by. Some people say, bring them young. I say, keep them young. Alright, welcome to the last podcast. On the left, everyone. I am Ben Kissel. Hang it out with Marcus Parks. Hi, Ben. Hi, Marcus. Oh, it's so good to be back in the United States. It's great to be back in the States. And of course, we got Henry Zabrowski over there in Los Angeles. You know, if a girl dies, she stays the same age.

That's very scary, Brigham. It's very scary. It is scary. I'm in charge of the science department. You are, huh? Okay, well, nothing can go wrong at that point. Good Lord, I'd rather trust the doctor from the thing than bring him young to be in charge of the science department. I'm trying to keep the children safe from the travesties of being 16 years old. Being old and gross and passed over like a spinster because just imagining touching the leathery skin of a 20-year-old girl. Alright, well, there you go. That's a little insight into what today's episode is going to be. This is where the crime comes in, specifically when it comes to our tale of Mormonism, which now we are on to part five. So when we last left Mormonism, Joseph Smith, the founder of arguably the world's most successful new religion,

had just been assassinated by an angry mob while under lock and key for destroying a printing press that had published an unflattering story about Smith's polygamous proclivities. Okay, but here it is. How much more scary is it if it was a happy mob? If it's just a bunch of smiling people. Hello, Joseph Smith. We're here to kill you now, and everybody's got big smiles painted on protest signs. I mean, that would be incredible. Yeah, that's horrifying. And so, now that Mormonism's first leader was dead, someone had to step up to lead the Mormons to wherever their next destination was going to be,

because it was becoming obvious that time was about to run out for the Mormon settlement of Nauvoo. Now, you might think the position of leader would be hereditary, as every member of Joseph Smith's immediate family were converted Mormons. But, Joseph's brother Hyrum had been killed right alongside Joseph, and Joseph's other brother, Don Carlos, was dead as well. I tell you what, when you go to heaven, there is mambo number five. There is also mambo six through thirteen. Aye, aye, aye. How I love to begin heaven. I love a good Lou Bega reference. I'll tell you guys, in Germany, in Berlin, me and Carolina visited the studio where mambo number five was recorded.

No kidding. Little-known fact, Lou Bega German. A lot of people didn't know that. Of course, they also recorded, like, Lust for Life and Lowe and Heroes There. I thought you were about to say we went to Lou Bega's grave. I think he's alive. Jesus Christ. And as far as Joseph's wife went, Emma and her son Joseph III left the church completely after an appropriate time of mourning and formed a splinter group of decidedly anti-polygamous Mormons, and Emma eventually married a non-Mormon.

But the only person in the Smith family who truly made a run for the crown was Joseph's brother William. But William had never been particularly popular with the Mormon people due to his overly abrasive personality. Hi, guys. It's me, William Smith. You want to see my collection of leather vests? You guys want to see my collection of cloud shoes? I stole them from a cloud hospital, guys. You know, you got a lot of good ideas, but there's just... Yeah. Yeah. I'm the world's loudest rapper.

Yeah. I'm the world's loudest rapper. I'm the world's loudest rapper. I'll take one of those vests, actually. Well, as such, William was no match for the man who had essentially founded and built Neveau. That man's name was Brigham Young. But before we get into the bloody reign of Brigham, let's acknowledge our source for this episode, Brigham Young Pioneer Prophet by John G. Turner.

This book is an unflinching look at the life of the terrible man who took Mormonism to the next level, using tactics that honestly had a lot more in common with Jim Jones than Joseph Smith's analog of L. Ron Hubbard. As we're going to see, Brigham Young's a man of the people. He's a simple man. He is a man. He could fix your crock pot. He could put his dick in a hole in the crock pot if you wanted to. Brigham Young was one of those guys. He's a very much pull yourself up by the bootstraps kind of individual who likes things straight and simple and dumb. When was the last time someone actually had bootstraps?

I mean, Doc Martins. But you have to be skankin'. That's what you're pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. But Brigham Young also, did you watch that thing I sent you of the Brigham Young talking directly to the audience? It's like an old museum documentary. I was not able to watch it, no. Brigham Young is going like, there's a lot of people who disagree with the way I do things. But I tell you what, there's a lot of people who also could get themselves a smack.

He is very, very old school. Very intense. For some reason, bloody rain of Brigham just sounds like a really cloudy day and then it pours from the heavens pine tar. Now, Brigham Young joined Mormonism in 1832, back when Mormonism was still in its infancy. Young hadn't rushed to join Joseph Smith upon reading the Book of Mormon, but it rather spent a year ruminating its contents, trying to figure out if it appealed to, as Brigham Young put it, his common sense. He literally was one of those guys who had the book. He'd read it and just go, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm. We'll have to see about that. So he had some kind of New York accent. He came from the sky.

Let me put on my thinking cap. Yeah. It's a screw top. So he's ruminating on horseshit to make himself smarter, but also dumber. Yeah. Oh, yes. But the thing about Brigham Young was that he, like Joseph Smith, had a bit of a witchy family history. Although Brigham didn't come from right hand path magicians like Joseph Smith did, his family history was still steeped in the supernatural.

According to family lore, Brigham's great-grandfather, a Puritan named Ebenezer Goddard, had been wickedly cursed by a neighbor named Nat Smith over a property dispute. I love that so much. Like for, like nowadays you just pump your shotgun at your neighbor. You know I'm serious, but I love the idea of just cursing someone. You can still do it, Kessel. Yeah? You do understand what we learned from Santa Muerte.

Yes. You can do it. But no one comes back to you trifold unless you constantly are giving back to Santa Muerte. Yeah, that's the thing with Saint Death. She wants so much. Well, because of the curse, the family's milk spoiled far sooner than it should have, which is a pretty common curse thing. Papers from Goddard's desk disappeared and were found in a well completely dry

and the family witnessed a vision in their oven fire of their impance clothes burning in the flame. They also received a VHS tape that said seven days. What is this contraption? I unleashed the snakes from inside this what I assumed to be some kind of pliable wood. And I tell you what, the little Chinese girl I was inside show was friendly. Fairly though. That's the thing. If Brigham Young got the curse from the ring, he would have just molested it.

And then all of a sudden she's like, can I get back into the TV please? Can I just go back to the well because this is actually worse than what I was going to do to you. You got me in the middle of a drink just imagining just going with Ringu and just like, where in the doll did he touch you, Ringu? And she's like, Apparently though, the curse was broken by a hard session of family prayer. But this story was passed down as fact to Brigham Young, which for Brigham made the supernatural presence of God and the devil concrete realities here on earth.

That's important, especially to their future, is a very practical understanding of God and the devil. It's why folk magic and all of these things were kind of directly embedded into this village lifestyle, because you really had this belief that you had an ongoing conversation with whatever is past the veil that would help you or hinder you if you're not doing things correct. So Brigham Young, once you kind of get in that world of like, God's a guy you can know, you're just like five steps from Mormonism. Well, Brigham was also raised as a strict methodist to the point where he didn't even hear music until the age of 11. Damn.

And even when that sweet moment came, his father beat him senseless for listening. His father beat him for hearing music. Our ears are open holes. It's not like you have to fold your ears open to his. It's like, it just hits your eardrums, but Brigham Young was never the same. The way he described it was like, when I first heard a violin, my first thought was, is that a snake singing? But then I knew, I knew I too could dance.

What is, why, because I grew up evangelical. And the one thing about the evangelicals, they sing horribly, but they sing loud. Oh yeah. Why did they hate music? I'll never understand this whole notion that music is bad. Is it just because it gets your toes tapping? Shit man, I was a methodist for like two years. I still couldn't tell you, but I know there was no music in the church.

That is sad. From what I've seen, it's about anything you're supposed to want to go to heaven. So anything that is pleasurable, connected to your corporal life is bad. Because that proves that you could have any sort of joy or release in this timeframe. You're supposed to be shooting for the top. They were also very, very, very strict. Sounds like it, yeah. Well as far as schooling went, despite having a whole college named in his honor,

Young never spent a single day in a classroom because he spent all of his formative years working on his family's rock farm, just like Joseph Smith had. Sad. What all this added up to was a man who was hard-bitten, gruff, and stubborn. But it also gave Young the resilient spirit necessary to be the leader that a weird frontier religion needed to survive, even if Brigham Young was an awful person. It's almost like you had to be an awful person. Yeah, right.

But the thing about Brigham Young is that even though he ended up being the man to take the Mormons to Utah, he resisted leadership positions in the church for years, and it took a direct command from Joseph to make Young accept polygamy. But once Joseph convinced Young to accept these roles, Brigham went whole hog. And I think this says something very important about Brigham. I think he knew that there was a darkness waiting in his soul, and Joseph Smith ended up being Brigham's devil. It's very interesting because Brigham Young was Joseph Smith's bodyguard.

That was kind of what he had worked his way up to because he was a member of the apostles. Once Joseph Smith had started really delegating who was important to his inner world, Brigham Young kind of became a guy that could be known for the fact that he had a leather strap that if you had problems, he'd spank you with this fucking strap. It's like a full-grown man. Like, this is like him spanking a full-grown man in a field with the strap. You're like, this is what God wants. Brigham, you'd better be careful if you spank him too hard.

It could make the sound of a drum, which is technically music. And now you're singing, sir. No, I'm not slapping my own head. No, I'm hearing birds. I should kill every bird because even they're talking and singing. But this is amazing that he took to polygamy so hardcore because as you all mentioned on the last episode, he said he would rather be in the casket.

He would rather be dead than have sex with a bunch of women. Well, Young knew he had authoritarian tendencies and he knew that more often than not, his answer to a problem was violence. So he resisted leadership roles and he also knew of his sexual appetites. So he resisted polygamy as well. Brigham Young, I love this take because he did know his authoritarian tendencies. He did sort of understand that intrinsically about himself. But also Brigham Young was he's not smart, he's cunning.

He knew that he could step back and watch because I think that it's not a coincidence that whenever the major shit went down around Joseph Smith, Brigham Young was either on mission, going and pulling in people. He was always separate. The polygamy he waited. So I think there's a part of it is that he kind of knew there'll be a time for me. There's going to be a time for me. Joseph Smith is an inspirational figure and he's sweet and he's pure and he's the true prophet.

But I'm the guy that's going to have to do all the hard work when it comes down to it and they're all going to be very thankful for a man like me when it's my time. So unlike most cult leaders, he was self-aware. I think he was extremely self-aware. Interesting. It's like Henry said, we've mentioned Brigham Young twice this entire series because Brigham Young was never there when the shit went down. He was an important figure but he was up to this point more of a,

now I wouldn't call him a goon. He's kind of like a goon. Kind of like a goon but he's more of a background figure. Like he's just making shit happen. He's not doing the sexy work, in other words. He's doing the hard shit. Yeah, not like Joseph Smith. Oh yeah, all these Mormon men doing all that sexy work.

No, we'll eventually get to the violence that was born from Young's leadership. But after Young accepted polygamy back when Joseph Smith was still alive, Young almost immediately married a new arrival in Nauvoo who was only 17 years old. And then there was the story with the English girl Martha Brotherton in Joseph Smith's store that we talked about in the last episode where Young cornered the teenager and told her that they could consummate the marriage that night and her parents would never need to know. Especially if we do it in a, um, colloquially we call it the dookie maker.

Really? Because that keeps you a virgin forever. I don't know if you've read that revelation. It's near the back of one of the thicker books. Yeah, well how was Freshman's seminar at Notre Dame? It was interesting. I learned if we do it in the dookie maker, I can be a virgin for life. By the time of Joseph Smith's death, Brigham Young had four plural wives.

By the time Brigham himself died 30 some odd years later, he had 53 wives. Yeah, you got to get them wives. I got wives in every single area code. He doesn't work because it doesn't rhyme, but it's true. It's a lot of wives. And although Young had originally resisted leadership roles, he had been the driving force of the English conversion efforts that brought thousands to America. Plus he'd served on the High Council for years by the time Joseph was killed.

So when it came time for a new leader, Young stepped up without hesitation because he tasted power and found that it was absolutely intoxicating. But it seems like Brigham Young either didn't hear or outright ignored one of Joseph Smith's last private communications. Because remember, Smith proclaimed polygamy to be the curse that would eventually undo the Mormon religion. That's only because he just came. We're talking about this last time.

He finally emptied it out and he was like, wow, I've made a mistake. And of course Joseph Smith, one of his last revelations was two in the pink. One in the stink. And it seems as if Mr. Young did not take that into account. And there were some in the church who figured Joseph Smith's murder was the perfect time to do away with polygamy completely. But Brigham Young was not one of those people and the church splintered because of it. See, the top two contenders to lead the church through the next phase of its existence

were Brigham Young and Sidney Rigdon. Rigdon wanted to take the church in a more reasonable direction, while Young wanted to double down on polygamy and weird rituals. In other words, Sidney figured that if the Mormons were not perceived as outlying weirdos then people would stop trying to murder them. While Brigham Young rightly followed Joseph Smith's lead and thinking that it was precisely the weirdness that kept the Mormons together. Absolutely, because it's a secret keeping mechanism that's been happening since the beginning of time.

The secret schools. You need to have rituals and initiations that only select members can get to so that you can feel like there's an inner club that you want to be a part of. It's like us with the sky miles. I think I did this last time. But this story starts to get, for me, very, very intense because we're going to see the flip. Brigham Young is going to be sort of like what David Miskovich did with Scientology. Brigham Young is going to understand that we're moving this forward.

And a way we have to do is constantly restore the religion again, which we'll see next episode when we cover the story that's inside the book Under the Banner of Heaven, where that group is the same violence of this idea of we have to restore the original, original Mormon church. And every single time you guys want to change it and make things reasonable, what we have to do is actually take it even farther back. Yeah, right. And I would also assume by going with the stranger outlook with the rituals and all those things, all those things,

it ensures that you're going to have enemies. You're going to have opponents. You're going to have people who are like, this group is very strange. And without that group, then Mormonism has no power at all. And so Brigham Young began a purge. He first excommunicated Sidney Rigdon after Rigdon named Joseph Smith a fallen prophet because the whole polygamy thing. Then Joseph's brother William was excommunicated for taking part in unsanctioned plural marriages. Yeah, I married this big pillow I made. It looks like, Ray, are you calling me from the Evangelion?

Yeah, so is that problem? I married a fire hydrant earlier today. Is that bad? Excommunicated? Excommunicated. Wow, so Joseph Smith is now Gerald Ford in the eyes of Rigdon. He's fallen all over the place. Very classic old joke. You don't like that joke? Oh, is that not up to snuff? You're writing for fucking Mad Magazine in 1970. I have a phone call. It was coming from Saturday Night Live from 1976.

The last contender to the crown was James Strang, who claimed he was in possession of a letter from Joseph Smith that named Strang as his successor, adding that Joseph's last command was to take everyone to Wisconsin or somewhere thereabouts. Yeah. But after Strang started claiming revelations of his own, Brigham branded Strang a heretic and excommunicated him as well. But quite a few Mormons had believed Strang's story. So when young forced out Strang, he and thousands of disgruntled Mormons went to Michigan

and settled on an archipelago on Lake Michigan. Archipelago. I looked it up. No, it's an archipelago. What the hell is an archipelago? Archipelago is the new resort that Donald Trump will open once he loses his reelection in Alaska. God damn it. Is it archipelago? It is archipelago. Oh yeah, you're from Florida. You know that shit.

What the hell is an archipelago? It's a group of islands. Okay, let's just call it that. Well, once Strang got there, he proclaimed himself King of Beaver Island. Hell yeah. He held that title until 1976 until Arnold Rigetti actually claimed King of Beaver Island at a resort off of the Turnpike in Newark, New Jersey. No kidding. Wow. And from that day, the T-shirts Big Johnson were created and everybody had fun with golf puns about testicles.

And for a time, Strang was successful. He even rose in the ranks of political power, serving one term in the Michigan House of Representatives. So they literally, was it King of Beaver Island that was on the ballot? Yeah, buddy. And this is my best friend. He's the Duke of Beaver Island. Yeah, I shouldn't have pushed him. We're not trying to let him talk a lot. He's here for flavor. He's bringing in the Southern vote. That's about right. But just like Joseph Smith, Strang took his authority too far. He had one follower flogged for adultery and he excommunicated another for getting drunk. And soon afterward, these ex-followers formed a conspiracy with two others who were also unsatisfied with Strang's rule. But these four men followed Strang to a dock at the harbor of St. James and shot him in the back three times and pistol whipped him afterward for good measure.

Three weeks later, the King of Beaver Island died from his wounds. Wow, the Abraham Lincoln of cult leaders. The King of Beaver Island is gone. It's like Game of Bones. But the Strangites were only one splinter group that formed after Smith's assassination. There were also the Rigdonites, who followed Sidney Rigdon, the Josephites, who followed Emma and Joseph III, and of course, the Brighamites, who eventually won the crown. But in the immediate aftermath of Joseph Smith's murder, the Brighamites were in no way safe. The Illinois Governor, Thomas Ford, who would possibly allow the assassination of Joseph Smith, told the Mormons that they were on their own. But the only thing Ford did do was travel to Nauvoo to calm down the anti-Mormons who were spoiling to finish the job they'd started with the murder of Joseph Smith.

But since Brigham Young had heavily armed both himself and the Nauvoo Legion, Ford revoked the Nauvoo town charter. Well, you remember, the Nauvoo Legion was not supposed to exist anymore. The Nauvoo Legion was just like they were not supposed to have a militia, and so he had to keep everything on the down low, which is as we're going to go further and further the next episode. These little secret societies are very important to Mormonism. And so the Nauvoo Legion became something else quite like the Danites were, which was super secret, like holding, like, planners that are just, like, rifles. You know what I mean? It's like, you know, bouquets of flowers that have whips in them. Like, stuff like that to hide it, but they all were very much hiding in plain sight because they knew they had to be flashin' pieces to be safe. So sticking with another 1970s reference, my next reference will be in the 1980s, I promise.

The governor was sort of like the Dean Warmer from Animal House. He revokes the charter, and next thing you know, Bluto's out there trying to get a whole bunch of girlfriends. They are on double secret probation. Yes. But even... Remember that movie? Yes. This is the part of the podcast where I say, remember that?

Yeah. Yeah. Remember that with Ben Kessel? That's a new good show. Wait, is this you going, remember that one? Remember Clear Pepsi? You can see right through it. Remember that? But even though Ford didn't actively seek the deaths of the Mormon people, he also knew that having Mormons in your state

inevitably led to violence. So he petitioned President James K. Polk to lend him a militia so he could give the Mormons a light little poke to get the fuck out of there. And that inspired the Mormon Girl series later on for them to all receive a light little poke in a series of documentary films. No, as stubborn as Brigham Young could be. He wasn't stupid. The brutal massacre at Hans Mill was still a fresh memory, and Brigham's own brother had witnessed militia men blow off the top of a young boy's head during that slaughter. So Young sent scouts west over the American border to find a place for the Mormons to permanently settle. But while the decision on where to go was being made, mob violence against the Mormons in Niveau continued. Mormon homes were burned, Mormon men were whipped in the streets, and Young never went anywhere without a sick shooter, lest he be challenged and murdered on the spot for being Mormonism's new leader.

And he loved every fucking minute of it. There is a thing here, because this violence is what's gonna fucking chase them out of Niveau. But Brigham Young technically was the right guy at the time because he loved to fight. Joseph Smith didn't, really. Like, he liked to lead, and he loved being a king of his own little world. But Brigham Young became a fucking folksy general. Yeah. Right. All right. Well, if you are getting whipped in the street, again, flip it and reverse it.

Drop, trow, get hard, and let him know you're happy. Yeah, yeah, baby, yes. Bake me daddy, you're my new daddy, baby. I'm your baby. But still, Brigham Young never slowed down on what freaked people out about the Mormons most. Polygamy. Yes. Between 1844 and 1846, Young married 33 women and consummated at least a few as the year 1845

gave him three different children from three different wives. Eventually, Brigham Young's offspring would number, give a guess. 33 wives? 33 wives, guess how many kids he had. Okay, let's figure that each have, let's say three kids. I'm going to go 99. You overshadowed a little bit. Okay.

56. Yeah, dude. That's a lot of cum. I mean, it is. Honestly, that is a lot. But now, was each ceremony the exact same? Yes. Okay, because I was thinking that would be very difficult if your wife 29 and you're like,

I want a better wedding than wife 28. And then it's like, you've got to go up and up. Next thing you know, you're on Mars for wedding 33. Yeah, it's like we're doing a scuba wedding. I am just like, listen, do we need to charge your plates? Do we have to have a candle for each table? Can't we just do some sort of like a candle centerpiece? I'm just, I am not envious of this at all.

What a nightmare. But again, polygamy keeps people honest within the Mormon world because it's a big secret we all have to keep. But you remember though, Marcus, you saw how reasonable Pringam Young was because he said everyone, it became a marriage spree throughout all of the world of Mormonism. So everybody's getting married to everybody. But he said, I turned down a man who wanted to marry a 12-year-old because that's just not right. They have to make it to 13 because that's the unlucky number. Oh my God.

He's a plain roulette. And even though Pringam knew the Mormons' days in Niveau were numbered, he never stopped building the temple that Joseph had started. And that temple still stands in Niveau today. You can go visit it if you want. It's now a chick boy. No, it's very sacred still to Mormonism and it is there. And we've had several listeners send us pictures of it and it is beautiful looking.

Yeah, okay, all right. See, as I said, Pringam Young learned from Joseph Smith that the thing that was going to hold the remaining Mormons together was the rituals. And considering how every other splinter group who abandoned the rituals died off, Young was absolutely correct. Young even introduced rituals of his own that Joseph Smith had partly crafted before he died, such as the law of adoption ritual. In this, a man was sealed to another man in a father-son relationship to replace lost family connections that one may have suffered as a result of converting to Mormonism. Like butt to butt, how'd they do this, like human centipede?

How do you seal a man to another man? Sealing is that their word for, like they don't say marriages, they say ceilings. So it's not like that movie stuck on you or whatever the hell that was. No, no, no, no. But if you can pass a piece of gum from one butthole to the next, he becomes your father forever. Really? How'd you chew this gum so well? It's a thing I learned as a young pioneer lad.

It was a trick to get Native Americans to leave us alone. And Young established this ritual by saying that he had spoken with Joseph Smith in a dream. And in that dream, Smith had given him all the specifics to finish the ritual that Smith had started. Yes, Brigham. You have to be a daddy to everybody. That's what I was saying. Be a daddy. It's easy to do. You put a head on the shoulder, you're a daddy. Boom, boom, boom. No more daddies. No more old daddies, only new daddies.

Wow. Interestingly though, this ritual was scuffled in 1894 because being adopted by high-ranking elders in the church became nothing more than a status symbol. Oh. And it usually caused jealousy and conflict between adopted sons and biological sons. Okay. It's also a cult mechanism of replacing your family. The whole thing is to create a network in which you don't need outsiders.

We have everything that you need here. You have a new daddy. Mommies don't matter. Not in Brigham Young's Mormonism. There is no mommies in this world that anybody gives a shit about. It's all daddies. Because again, the priesthood is handed down from dude to dude to dude. So it's like, not only if you have the Aaronic priesthood and then the Melchizedek priesthood,

you're also like new son to new daddy that is Brigham Young who is the new prophet. So you are like bound and sealed into all the power structures of the religion. I'm just surprised at one point these 33 women didn't all come together and tear Brigham Young apart in his bed like the conclusion of the film Maniac. With all of the corpses, with all of the ghosts of the women that he murdered as they kill him and tear him. It's a great conclusion to that by the way. I love that movie Maniac. Great movie.

Well Young believed that this ritual, the law of adoption ritual, was vital in binding his people to the religion and to Brigham Young as a leader. And in 1846, Young sealed himself to 38 young men before the exodus to the west began. And cleverly, Governor Ford figured out a way to jumpstart that exodus much earlier than it really needed to start. 18 months after the murder of Joseph Smith and just after the temple in Nauvoo was completed, Thomas Ford told Brigham Young that the federal government was coming to arrest Young on counterfeiting charges. It was a lie. What?

No. No. No. But Governor Ford was getting tired of the Mormons dragging their feet and he was only using this as a peaceable solution to get these people the fuck out of his state so he could stop dealing with constant mob violence. He was coming up on two years of dealing with this shit. And honestly, it was a pretty smart move. It was totally bad.

No one died as a result of this and the Mormons just moved on. Alright. You just got to get them out of there because it's this fucking cancer that's growing inside your bullshit. You are watching this, it's just the thing you have to constantly deal with and also at the time, the country is just really beginning to fall apart. Yeah. Because we're now getting closer, what is it, 15 years? There about. Is it 67?

Yeah. Before the Civil War? About 15 years or so, yeah. Okay. The problem was though, the Mormons still didn't have an exact location picked out. All Brigham Young had was a vague notion about Upper California, which back then encompassed modern day Northern California, Nevada, Arizona, and of course, Utah. That's a lot of land. That's a lot of California.

All the Mormons really knew is that they would most likely have to cross the Rocky Mountains at some point, which was naturally going to be an arduous and possibly deadly journey for quite a few of them. But Brigham Young had learned a thing or two from Joseph Smith about manipulating people. Young told the Mormons that a lack of unity and obedience amongst the people was what had killed Joseph Smith. And if the people strayed again, their actions would likely kill Brigham Young as well. So Brigham literally lined up his 33 wives, like the mean woman from Troops of Beverly Hills. Remember the Troops of Beverly Hills, great film. And she'd be like, another 1980s, I think maybe almost 70s.

I said I was going to get to the 80s, and he's just like, listen, my 33 wives, some of you won't be coming out of this alive. But god damn it, we're going to go on, keep on going, and we're going to make it to Upper California. And what did we learn though about women in pioneer times? They live. Yeah. They're the ones that live. After the Donner party, they fucking survive because I think breasts give nutrients back to them. Is that true?

Let me ask you, female listeners, if you can make your own milk and you're on a pioneer, does that mean you never starved to death? Because you could suck out of your own titties because you're making your own food? But they're the factory though. So if they're starving, then there's no milk. No. I don't know. No, you're both wrong. I think I'm more right than Henry.

How am I wrong? There's a simple scientific explanation for it. Oh my god. Okay, tell us about lactation Marcus. What about lactation? It's about being able to store fat. Women's bodies are made to store fat. Wow.

Okay. Wow. It is a child rearing thing. Like it is absolutely a child rearing thing. You said it. That's why. God, we are extra juvenile today. But that's a big reason why women can survive in the frontier times and why they survived starvation in the Donner party much longer than the Mended.

It's a biological thing. Judging by two thirds of this podcast, men can also store fat. It is also a hearty thing. I mean, one time me and Caroline had got lost in the mountains of upstate New York once and without her, I may have died. Yep, thank you. No, they're the stronger gender. Yes, she kept us going the entire time. Thank you.

Now, the United States was already well on their way to acquiring the Mexican territory of California by the time of the Mormon exodus, having already acquired Oregon from Great Britain that same year. And President Polk actually figured that the Mormons would be a good advanced team for the Oregon territory. So Young lent the government a force of Mormons who made up the Mormon Battalion, which is still the only U.S. military unit to ever exist based solely on religion. Yeah, if you try to make a Satanist Battalion, it would just be a bunch of guys all just walking in different directions and going to whatever is the closest Spencer's to whatever skull they have up for Halloween decorations. It's nice to be in the Halloween season. The Brigham Young did not want to do this, but he erroneously believed that President Polk had 3,000 Missouri militiamen just over the border ready to wipe out the last of the Mormons if Brigham Young refused to contribute men. But Polk was actually somewhat pro-Mormon because the Mormons had helped them get elected. So Young's assumption had no basis in reality.

But this was only the beginning of a paranoid streak in Brigham Young that would eventually lead to a massacre in Utah. But think about this. The U.S. government told you, hey, okay, you can go. We're going to give a group of you guys. It's going to be a whole group of you guys that are now an official army of the U.S. fucking military. You all can go. And so Brigham Young is going to get a surprising amount of power here. He's allowed to just go and explore.

I mean, like they have no clue what the hell is going to happen to him out there. But he is getting first dibs on new American territory. This is an old dream of Joseph Smith's, too, that Brigham Young is also making real. Of creating a separate Mormon, an entire either hopefully country. At this point, they're going to slow play it and say, yeah, we'll help you investigate your new territory and help you map out your new states. We'll see what happens when we finally decide to sit down because we know for a fact you're just about to try to fucking kill my ass. So while the Mormon battalion was exploring the Pacific coast, Brigham Young and the rest of the Mormons temporarily settled in Nebraska on a site that eventually came to be known as winter quarters. Here, Brigham's paranoid streak turned violent for the first time.

He began punishing and expelling, quote unquote, sinners because he hoped to arrive at the Mormons' permanent home with a purified church. This meant that brutal floggings became the norm at winter quarters. On one occasion, he ordered the caning of several teenage boys for, quote, acting inappropriate towards ladies, although no specifics were given as to what actually transpired. This reminds me of that PSA for drug use with the kid. This is a 90s reference where the kid is lying in bed and the father finds the joy. And then he looks at his father and he's like, I learned it from watching you, dad! I learned it from watching you, dad! Like the audacity of Brigham Young to be like, you guys are treating women inappropriately. Wife 27, go scold them! Oh, Brigham Young's hypocrisy knows no bounds.

This is my stool wife, okay? And you're not going to take my stool wife from me because my boot wife, she literally wraps her way around my feet and I walk on top of it. This is important duties of a wife. Now, first, Young denied even knowing that the punishment had taken place, but he soon turned a full about face and told the parents of the punished boys that they were lucky that Brigham didn't kill him. Wow. But Brigham Young wasn't doing this because he had the utmost respect for women. Young, in fact, believed that women were vastly inferior to men. And this is a direct quote from Brigham Young. A woman is the dirtiest creature dirtier than man.

Man are honest. If a woman won't lie, she is a miracle. Now, let me grab my chewing tobacco from my asshole or what I call my, my, my, my man purse. Well, when it came down to sinners, there was a kind of a loose definition of sinners because the big thing was, is that Brigham Young was also incredibly racist. And so on the trail, like as they were going, he wouldn't even allow people to fraternize with anybody browner than somebody from, than a Utah. You know what I mean? So they were very, very, he was deeply, deeply like, so that was one of the, if he saw you fraternizing with a black person, you get beat. You saw you speaking with a woman, you get beat. If he saw you being lazy, that was another thing too.

It's because the whole thing was to inspire this much like again, go back, go back, we'll talk to Jim Jones kind of thing. You keep people tired, you keep people scared, you keep people working. He had them purposefully underfed because in order for them to get across the fucking Rocky Mountains, he says, well, we can make it on this little amount of supplies. So people were starving, they were literally pushing fucking huge wagon wheel carts over Rocky Desert just to get across to where they needed a position to where the Rocky Mountains were. That it's like, he started understanding that these are the kind of things you keep people, you keep people on a very short leash. When I worked at Burger King, I'm fairly certain that the female manager was a great descendant to bring him young because she was extremely racist. She would say, wash instead of wash. And then if she would say, if you're leaning, you should be cleaning.

And then I really wanted to murder her, but I think she's still a manager at Burger King in Wisconsin. That's how you hold your power. And young wouldn't hear of anyone having a differing opinion. He doubled down in winter quarters on his obedience policy saying that dissenters would be sent to Missouri where quote, their heads shall be severed from their tabernacles. Tabernacles, another word for body. And their stems shall be removed from their water balloons. I hear you.

But Brigham Young also believed in mixing a little sweet with the sour because young made sure that the Mormons had plenty of parties just so long as those parties followed all of Brigham Young's roles. And here's one extremely surprising thing that I learned about Mormons over the course of researching the series. Mormons are fantastic dancers. What? And this tradition began in the days of Brigham Young. It is a huge part of their heritage. And to this day, the Brigham Young University dance program is among the best in the country. And Mormons absolutely dominate competitive dance competitions.

What kind of dance are we talking? Are they popping and locking? Are they doing swing? Are they doing river dance? Back in those days, it was square dancing. And Brigham Young did not allow people to touch each other, at least body to body. They could touch hands. But in recent years, the BYU program has loosened on those roles and they are allowed to touch each other.

But the BYU dance program is huge. It's a gigantic thing. Yeah, that's good. That's a good thing. It's like a lot of jazz dance. Yeah. Okay. Jazz dance and that kind of thing.

No, no, no, no, no. Jazz dance is kind of what you'd see if you were like... I only know a little about it because my niece did competitive dancing. So it's a lot of the like... Wearing halter tops for some reason infuriates me. Stop dressing them like fly girls from in living color. That'd be great. Remember J.Lo?

She was on that. Now, remember that. She's doing the Super Bowl show this year. Isn't that something? Isn't it something? Yes, it is. Isn't it exciting? I can't wait to turn it.

So in 1847, Brigham Young and 150 Mormon pioneers left winter quarters and headed west with the express purpose of finding a permanent home for the Latter-day Saints. And in June of 1847, the group ran into two famous mountain men, Moses Harris and Jim Bridger. Now, both of these guys gave conflicting advice on an exact place to settle, but both agreed that the perfect place for the Mormons was Utah. Yeah, guys, you're gonna love Utah. Utah is as flat as a new bride and as pointy as a new husband.

But didn't they also, didn't one of them, didn't they tell them stories of the Donner Party? I believe they remembered they met somebody that had seen the survivors of the Donner Party. Damn. This was the summer after the Donner Party. Oh my God, okay. The Donner Party was like the winter of 1846, 1847. This was the following June.

Damn, okay. And there was a Mormon guy that had kind of scouted out to California. He'd gone all the way through. And on his way back, he had met some of the survivors of the Donner Party and he came back to the Mormons and be like, why don't you guys be careful? Be careful, indeed. Go south, go south.

Jeez, go to Florida. Come on. Now there isn't really any big secret or revelation surrounding the decision to settle near the Great Salt Lake. The best reason for settling there was because nobody else wanted it and the Mormons believed they could live there in peace. But there were more subtle, cult-specific reasons for settling there as well. Reasons that hold quite a few parallels to the decision Jim Jones made

to move the people's temple to Guyana. First of all, Utah was totally isolated, meaning that once you arrived, there was no easy or safe way to leave. Second, Brigham Young knew that life in the Salt Lake Valley was going to be exceedingly difficult, which he knew would bind his people together even further. Jim Jones did the same shit with going and settling in the jungle. He knew that people going out there and tearing down trees

and all these huts he knew that would bind them together because it was hard work. Furthermore, if life is hard and you have to work every moment of the day just to survive, then you don't have the time or energy to think about how shitty your life really is, which keeps you complacent, if not utterly miserable. Right. And if you already have a Christian streak, you believe you deserve it. Yeah.

And that's what he's constantly, there's the theological side too, where being like, this is suffering for the pleasures of heaven. You're here to build this thing. You're going to take fucking salt desert, and we're going to create a mecca for Mormonism in the center of it. And it'll be your doing. And won't you feel proud? Won't you feel proud once you die when you're 57?

Because all you've done is break apart rocks with your hands. You're in the last fucking 30 years of your life, or you could have just been sitting on the park fucking playing harmonica. Well, when we went to Salt Lake, they did a pretty good job. It's a very pretty city. That's the insane thing, is that they fucking did it. Yeah, very pretty. They pulled it off.

Salt Lake City is a beautiful town. It's fully functioning. It is? I mean, yeah. I like Salt Lake City. Sure. It's very beautiful. But the thing was, Brigham Young almost didn't survive the trip.

When the Mormons arrived on the site that eventually became Salt Lake City, Young was barely conscious because he was recovering from a bad case of Colorado tick fever. I'll tell you what, you bring me that tick and not get me my strap. I'm going to spank that tick and it understands what it's done to me. Just cut to the tick getting rock hard, been like, yes, daddy. Yeah, new daddy, new daddy. But amazingly, that was the worst that had happened.

The expedition had been a huge success because Young had taken 150 people 1,000 miles without any deaths. Wow. It had been three years since Joseph Smith had been assassinated and Brigham Young had finally brought the Mormon people to the place they still call home to this day, Salt Lake City. And by the next fall, the original number of 150 pioneers would swell to 4,000. Damn.

But from the beginning, Young strove for autonomy from the United States. He immediately declared that no officer of the United States would ever dictate to him in this valley or else he would hang them on a jibbit as a warning to others. I got a whole pile of jibbit. I got a bunch of jibbit. I got a whole pile of jibbit waiting for heads to dawn upon them like ornaments on a Christmas tree.

Oh, no. Which I'm also not allowing because they're gay. Whoa. And the kingdom of the Mormons grew rapidly. Within 10 years, there were over 100 smaller settlements between Utah Lake and Ogden. All of them populated almost exclusively by Mormons. And Brigham Young wasted no time in realizing Joseph Smith's dream

of a functioning theocracy. He governed the church and, by extension, all of the Mormon settlements like an Israelite judge presiding over criminal cases and settling marriage disputes. Which is, again, filling out the original idea behind Joseph Smith, which is that because he said it will treat things like Solomon, where the king is heavily involved in all civic matters. Where you go, like he goes, yes, he sets theocracy fucking policy,

but also if you have a domestic dispute, you bring it to him. He settles it. He decides who marries who. He is very deeply entrenched in every layer of their society, much like, oh, he's Saddam Hussein, or one of those people who'd put pictures of themselves up everywhere you go. So you're constantly reminded of who's your fucking boss. This whole thing with King Solomon being a great king,

his big idea was to chop the baby in half. That's all he did was like, who's the mom? Oh, you guys are both moms, chop it in half, and we'll see. And then it's like, obviously, the woman who was like, no, the other woman can have it, then he's like, you're the mother. He's like, Maury Povich. It was a clever idea. I guess.

But if you're a woman and you have to go settle all of your disputes with a known sexist like Brigham Young, you kind of know you're screwed. Yeah. Well, Brigham Young also had a fucking filthy mouth, both in public and private. Obsessed with shit. He was like fucking, was it Jim Leahy from Trailer Park Boys? Wait, what?

Everything was a shit metaphor. Really? Yeah. Concerning the bills the Mormons were racking up, Brigham said, quote, Shit on church debts. And I did. Shit on church debt. Oh, god, he talks like fucking Slim Pickens.

He really does. But at the same time, Young also ordered canings when his people swore. Because Young, if anything, was a fantastic hypocrite. OK. And that's his worst crime, because there's nothing worse than being a hypocrite. Yeah. There's a few things worse than being a hypocrite. But Young was also overly confident, claiming that he was the only man in the valley

who understood the duty of armor. He knew more than anyone about farming and blacksmithing. He knew more about merchandising than anyone alive. Really? It's merchandising. Merchandising. Merchandising, huh? And he had all this knowledge because he had dreamt it into reality.

Oh. But Young's further dreams of a Mormon nation started to disappear in 1848 after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Oh, god, Marcus, you've literally, this is from social studies. I just had, like, my eyes just crossed. I was thinking about trying to understand this guy. Trying to remember it. This is obviously a question I got wrong on a test in fucking high school.

I actually wanted to quiz Ben. What is the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo? Guadalupe Hidalgo, she wanted to wear pants. And they said, no, no, no. And then they made a treaty that said she could wear jorts. This is great. People quote us in their college dissertation. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, for those of you who didn't pay attention in high school history. Honestly, I do not know the answer to this. Half of the modern-day United States used to belong to Mexico. And after the Mexican-American War, we were given almost everything from Texas to California. Oh, that's the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. So when did pants come into play? Yeah, telling me I'm a fucking idiot, Mr. Burton. Yeah, all right.

Like, saying I won't make it in this fucking life, Mr. Burton, said specifically, you can't just joke around for a living. Yes. You fucking... No, if Marcus... Sadly, he's passed on, which is actually very sad. If Marcus and I went to high school together, I'd be like, hey, Marcus, can you just move over a little bit to the left

and put your paper to the right? You know, just so I can, like, you know, just see if I'm correct. It's not a big deal. No, it'd be fun, because then it turns out, like, you got some joints for tonight, right? And you would say... I have got some joints? Yeah. Yeah, of course, a party, man.

See, I bring to good times after we both get to pass the test. Exactly. Then we celebrate. Yeah, no, no, no. It is a quid pro quo, my friends. But the inevitable conflict between the United States and the Mormons was still years away. And Young was quickly establishing a bloody authoritarian rule in Salt Lake City, all based on the doctrine of blood atonement.

To give you a quick refresher on the doctrine and how Brigham Young used it to justify murder, the blood atonement doctrine said that apostates, anti-Mormons, and thieves could only be saved by ending their life on Earth, which would give them a chance at redemption before they had the opportunity to sin even more. So it's state-sanctioned suicide? No. Is that what he's calling for? It is murder.

State-sanctioned murder. They're going to kill them. It's religion-sanctioned murder. It's pre-emptive, saving a person's life. The way it could be interpreted is that if you look at people that you believe are on a bad road, if you see them, you can, as a sign of God's love, murder them as a way to release them from what they will then stumble into, more and more sins that will make them further and further away from the goal of getting to heaven.

But isn't killing someone a sin? Not if you're doing it for the blood atonement, Kissel. If they do it, it's legal. It's like being president, because they're all a priest. Because also remember, true, right? But that's a bit. But also, each man in the Mormon church at this time is a priest of the church. So they are given intrinsically these higher-up powers that say, well, when I act on this,

like what we talked about with ISIS, I think just privately, if I act upon this in the name of the Mormon church, I'm already a Mormon priest. So that means it's legal. That means it's totally fucking legit. The human mind is a powerful thing. And this doctrine came into play in 1849 when a young man named Ira West was brought in front of the High Council for fraud. Now Brigham Young's initial reaction to the evidence was to order a public execution,

namely a beheading. Now officially Brigham Young backed down and Ira West received a judgment of a $100 fine in excommunication. But even after the judgment, talk of beheading Ira West persisted in High Council meanings. Now it could be that the Mormons just let it go, but future behavior suggests otherwise. See, discussion of Ira West's possible execution abruptly stopped in High Council meetings. And Ira West disappeared from history immediately thereafter. It is also possible that it was the Mormon people who killed Ira West rather than the

establishment, evoking blood atonement young publicly hinted that maybe someone would be doing Ira a favor if they murdered him before he had a chance to continue his sinful ways. Yeah, it's very interesting to see how this policy would become so firmly entrenched. And Brigham Young's now, especially this time period, he's going to fucking come back to this again and again and again. This is his favorite atonement. Yeah. And Brigham Young was very good at just putting it out into the world.

He just put it out in the world. And then when it came back, when an actual murder came back, he's like, I didn't do anything. I'm just saying. I'm just saying. I'm just talking. I'm just saying things. I'm just talking. But he is putting this out, this blood atonement thing.

He's putting it out into the world over and over and over again, telling the Mormons, this is okay. Right. To a group of people he has beaten pure obedience into. Yes. So he has already done the legwork to create a little army that he can then just kind of hint shit at. And then everybody's so up their own asses to make sure they can anticipate Brigham Young's

deeds, to make sure that he's happy and make sure that the religion and all the aspects of the religion are fulfilled, that they just jump to it. Yeah. And this almost casual talk of murder when it came to apostates and anti-Mormons was also brought up in the journals of other high ranking Mormons, such as Quorum of 12 member Arrasta Snow. These guys were talking about it in their journals. They were talking about it privately, were like, this thing is true.

This thing is good. And this thing is righteous. And these were just for petty crimes. The Mormons were, if not then, definitely later murdering people for crimes no more serious than theft, because the blood atonement doctrine allowed them to do so. At the same time, Brigham Young was settling into the life of an established polygamist. By 1850, Young had 20 children and he built a long row of log cabins for his 12 favorite wives.

Really? Yeah. Oh yeah. This is a fun little apartment complex. I'm certain there's no sign of real housewives of Salt Lake City happening inside of those little log cabins. It must have been a strange competition there to get in one of those log cabins. But some of Brigham Young's other wives ended up despising him.

One Augusta Adams sarcastically referred to him as Lord Brigham, his Excellency, Mr. Proxy and Alien. For Brigham's part, Young just ignored the wives who didn't like him and eventually seven of them would dissolve their marriages. One former wife, Anne Eliza Young, wrote an expose called Wife Number 19, in which she claimed that the Danites that we spoke of in the last episode regularly murdered dissenters and church enemies. And from what I've read, the Danites are still functioning within Mormonism and that

it's not, no one speaks of it, but it is, there is a group of people that are essentially like a Mormon secret police that go and handle these things. Brigham Young understood that he needed to have a main army. He needed to have his militia. And then, I mean, this is very far in saying it, but then he had to have his SS. He had to have his fucking group of secret police. He needed to have a group of people that would do the dirty work that he just can't really come out and say for you to do because he can't come back to the prophet because if

it does, what that means is that we're setting up all these kind of paper trails for if somebody wants to come around and fuck with me at some point, legally, they'd be able to. So basically, Brigham Young is Tanya Harding, just suggesting to Jeff Galooly and his goon buddy that maybe Nancy Kerrigan should be taken out. And then when it happens, Tanya's just like, I just said it, I can't believe that actually happened. And I can already hear the reactions because Dayknights, it is a very controversial topic within the Mormon world, especially in modern Mormonism because they do not like talking

about that being an actual function of the church. Wait, you need to tell me. And they publicly disavow it. The Mormons don't like to talk about their secret police? Yeah. They don't like to talk about their secret police. They really don't. They don't, huh?

Weird. Well, the Dayknights is something that a lot of Mormons say is just rumor. They say that a lot of it was just created by people like Analyze a Young. And there was another guy who actually wrote, a guy who was supposedly a henchman of Brigham Young, a Dayknight henchman, that he wrote like a whole memoir that was a bestseller back in the day. But modern Mormons, and a lot of Mormons say like, oh, well, that's just Huey. And if you can't believe a modern Mormon, who can you believe?

Well, polygamy was set to become a big part of the new government, although Young had not yet publicly supported it. See, the Mormons wanted to form their own state, which they called Deseret, named after the Mormon word for honeybee. And President Millard Fillmore. I love that guy. He is so funny with his little comic strips. Did he die fast?

No. Which is the one that died in 30 days? That was Harrison. Yeah. 19 days, I think, because he gave a speech in the rain, like a brave boy, but he didn't realize that medicine is real. Yeah. Well, when the Mormons wanted to form their own state, or at least their own territory,

President Millard Fillmore surprisingly just said, whatever, just do what you want. I don't care. And he appointed Brigham Young as governor. What? He made him entirely in charge of the North Upper California territory. They let him just have it, because essentially, he's like, all right, well, you guys will maybe figure out some bullshit, like, because we haven't set up all of this stuff. And Brigham Young's like, yeah, wait, you see how many toilets I put in?

You'd be surprised where they go to. My bedroom. So President Millard Fillmore. Millard Fillmore. Millard Fillmore is the editorial cartoon. Which is, by the way, horrible. But so, Millard? Millard?

Millard. He just made him governor. Yeah, he just made him. He made no vote. He's just like, whatever, yeah, do it. I don't care. Wow. But it came with a catch.

Since the Mormons were now a part of the government, Millard Fillmore sent a federal employee named Allman Babbit to oversee the establishment of the new territory. And Young immediately disliked Babbit for what Young called his quote, fancy tastes and petty fogging. Okay, what is a petty foggy? He just washed with soap. It's just the action of being petty. But petty fogging is the, yes, it's very fun work.

Whatever. Really though, what Brigham Young disliked the most was that he was now a part of a bureaucracy. He now had to answer to people. He's no longer a king. Yes. And Babbit was calling the Mormons out for some of their shoddy clerical work when it came to free and fair elections.

To this, Young said quote, and this is a direct quote. Okay. I would rather stand here and cut throats and suffer lawsuits and technicalities. If you interfere with any of my dictation in the elections, it will be the last. You are shitting in my dish, and I will lick it out, and you too, buddy. You didn't add buddy at the end, but honestly, it works though. You are shitting in my dish, and I will lick it out. This is like straight up out of an Adam Sandler script where he's like, I eat pieces of shit

like you for breakfast. You eat pieces of shit for breakfast. This starts to sound like it's, what's his name from? There will be blood. No, Daniel. Yeah. Plainfield. Yeah, Daniel Plainfield.

Yeah. Wait, he is, he, he's a plain speaking man, dog meat. You know, I've never, honestly, we are plain speaking men, and I have never once been like, I'll lick shit out of a dish, if you keep on shitting in my dish. Shit in my dish, mix and shit. I eat the shit I brought from home, and you're bringing some strange man shit into my shit dish. I'll eat it too.

That's just a warning of how hungry I am when it comes to a shit lunch. Do we have any actual evidence to bring a man truly was a scat man? You know, we don't have, we don't have like pictures of him yoming up on some duke. Okay. Yeah, none of, for him like underneath a glass table, but I did see him, he did write one of his journals, B-Bada-Bada-Bada-Bada-Bada-Bada-Bada. Well eventually though, Brigham Young's forceful personality won out as it would dozens of times in the coming decades, and Babbit sided with the Mormons.

Others in the government though saw how dangerous Brigham Young actually was, and they left the state convinced that he should be removed from power. This partly had to do with the fact that in 1852, the Mormon church finally went public with polygamy. In August of that year, Brigham Young admitted being a polygamist in the Deseret News, which is the same paper that later broke the Skimwalker Ranch story. Cool. Well, what Young said was that he had more wives than one, and he was not ashamed to

have it known. He argued that the Mormons had every right to be polygamists because it was not only a religious freedom issue, but a territorial issue as well. States writes, he went on to argue that if Congress did not have the ability to legislate which states could have slaves, then Congress could therefore not legislate which states could practice polygamy, and speaking of slavery, Young had no problem whatsoever in legalizing it in the territory. So Brigham Young literally was like, well, if you can own slaves, then why can't I own

women slaves? You see? Yeah. It's like the same thing. Marriage is like slavery. If you think about it. That's how he equivocated. That's how he rationalized polygamy.

Well, he rationalized it. It's more like you can't legislate slavery, so you can't tell people what to do with other human beings, and you can't tell me what to do in my marriage. In fact, it was Young's virulent racism in particular that kept black people from attaining significant rank in the church until 1978. He loudly and openly declared his support for slavery, and was quoted as saying that if a white person mis-edinated with a black person, the only way the white could achieve salvation was an old-fashioned beheading.

But you know, BYU actually is a great dance program, and that's what we should be talking about right now. It's a great dance program. Back to dance. Back to dance. Yeah. In fact, in 1866, a group of Mormon men murdered a Mormon former slave named Thomas Coleman just for courting a white woman.

Jesus. They slit his throat from ear to ear so deeply they almost decapitated him, and sliced open his right breast as well, which mimics the penalties we talked about in the last episode when discussing temple rituals. But what the argument really came down to, when it came to polygamy and states' rights and all that, was that Brigham Young didn't really even believe that he was a part of the United States. He still believed that the Mormons were a sovereign nation.

Oh yeah, that was the goal, that was the goal altogether. The goal was to go and make sure we're completely isolated, because in the end, you're gonna have to come and get us anyway. If you want to bring us back in the fold, you're gonna have to fucking send people. I mean, Henry mentioned ISIS before, and I know that Mormons are not ISIS, but this is a caliphate. Yeah, and honestly, Brigham Young had the population to back it up. By the end of 1852, there were 20,000 Mormons living in Salt Lake City in the surrounding

settlements. And they even had their own currency, and Young was not afraid to order death and destruction in the name of his people. Even though early Mormon doctrine held that Native Americans were worthy of conversion, because remember, Native Americans can turn white if they really want. If they hold your breath long enough and breathe really hard through your ears. You can even turn blue. But even though Mormon doctrine said, yes, you should convert Native Americans, Young

had no problem in casually killing them. On one occasion, he ordered the murder of a large number of Utes after he became friendly with a rival Ute chief. And this casual attitude towards the murder of the Utes trickled down to the Mormon rank and file. Outside of modern-day Provo, a group of settlers murdered a Ute after they claimed he stole a shirt. Jesus.

Then, afterwards, cut open his stomach, filled it with rocks, and sunk him to the bottom of the Provo River. This provoked a small war with the Ute people, and Young declared every Ute man fair game for murder, although the women and children would be spared if, in Young's words, they behaved themselves, implying that if they didn't, you could kill them too. And the Mormons heeded Young's word. In February of 1850, a group of Mormon militiamen disarmed and murdered a group of Utes and chased down the ones who tried to run and murdered them as well.

The Mormons even decapitated the corpses and sent the heads to Washington for medical research. And the Mormons killed the Utes in indirect ways as well. They cleaned out Utah's natural resources, which caused starvation, and they spread deadly disease all over the territory. Which is how we always seem to fully beat down. The Native Americans is our weird English diseases. Yeah, and of course the way we just trample over their lands with things like a Keystone

Pipeline which still happens to this day. Oh yeah, it never ends. Finally though, Brigham declared peace with the Utes, while also petitioning the government to create a Ute Reservation. And that Reservation would eventually become the site of dozens of skim walker sightings throughout the next century. Interesting, I love how all these things come together, I love history. But Brigham Young, again, what this does is, yes he made peace, but this slowly dehumanizes

the Gentile, anybody who is not a Mormon. It slowly but surely shows that Mormon lives are worth more than anybody else's life. So it sets a precedent and eventually leads to what we will cover at the end of this episode. But that's not to say that Brigham Young had forgotten about the actual religion of Mormonism, although it seems like polygamy was really becoming the focus here. In 1853, the Mormons did break ground on the great temple of Salt Lake City. Took them decades to build the damn thing, but eventually they did. But at the same time, Young also built a new residence for what wives could still stand

to be in the same room as the Lion of the Lord. That's what the Mormons call Brigham Young. Good Lord. The house was cool looking. Yeah. Because the house, because he had his house, he had the one where he stayed by himself, which was, I guess, the Nag Free Zone, and then he'd go over to his other house, the main Lion House, which had this big lion statue on the top of it that was kind of dope looking.

All right. Very albundy of him. Now, surprisingly, Brigham Young was quite liberal when granting divorces when they were requested by women, although that may have had more to do with him wanting to get rid of excess wives than it did with any sort of progressive view towards female agency. Whatever it is. Yeah, I don't think I'd ever accuse him of being very progressive. I just think it just whatever helps him.

Yeah. So he's just like, yeah, yeah, get the fucking divorce, yeah, get the hell out of here. But then you can just replace it with a new wife in a second. Yeah. I mean, you could argue that a dookie fetish is progressive in its own way. But although men were almost always rewarded custody of children, Young looked down on men who requested divorces. He said, quote, and again, this is another direct quote.

When a man married a wife, he took her for better or for worse. And if she's shit in bed and laid in it until noon, he must bear it. Mr. Young is going to say, sir, you should grow to love it because sometimes some wives aren't as fun as some wives that will shit just wholly and consensually, a little funny little pillow, a duke underneath them, and they're just rolling it like it's a bunch of chocolate frosting that you get from a graveyard. I love the smell of a freshly shit-covered wife. I'm a devout follower still, sir.

Just let her fart on you. I mean it. I mean it, inoculate yourself to the smells of her buttocks. So eventually you see you love them and it's just, it's a her love language for you. And that went on to become the great documentary, Fartcake. But what Brigham had very little problem with was granting marriages to men who wanted to marry what were essentially children. Young approved the marriages of 14-year-old girls without hesitation, but 13-year-olds

that gave him a little pause. See? A little pause. He did. See? He's nice. Now he did approve the marriage of one 13-year-old but gave this caveat. Go ahead but leave children to grow.

That's more disgusting than all the shit, dawg. Leave children. So he recognized. So that means he recognized that that is a child. And then he's just like, but yes, you may marry her and for, oh, okay. Listen, I understand you want to marry her, but let her inflate a little bit. And also after we covered the six-year-old story, the Natalia Grace story and side stories this week.

I have, how many emails have we got if people have been like, you know, six-year-olds can get pubic hair. I know some of you will talk about that on side stories, it's good Lord. The only time Brigham Young flatly denied a request like this was when a 73-year-old man requested a marriage with three girls aged 12 to 13. Now the thing is, you're 73. This is just gross. Now if you were maybe 45.

Yeah, sure. That's fine. I mean, you're growing with these wives. Why would he dookie on the side of my mouth because I ain't a lot about that story. However, it must be said that even amongst the Mormons at this time, polygamy was relatively rare. Usually it was only the men in leadership positions who were allowed to do it while the rank and file had to remain satisfied with singular marriage.

Well, it had a mystical connotation as well. What we learned a little bit about the hermetic side of Mormonism is that you're building an army of wives for your afterlife and it's also mimicking the celestial marriage of the planets slash human beings where the original things that came out of the Kabbalah nothingness God, that marriage and then consummation of that marriage created worlds. So it's that where Joseph Smith was way more ensconced than the actual mysticism where Brigham Young was all about like you get this special thing because you're one of my inside guys.

Okay. Strangely though, polygamy was becoming a political football in Washington, D.C. Remember the Civil War was only about a decade away at this point and polygamy was being used as an example of what darkness could come with territorial sovereignty. Interesting. On the pro-slavery side, you now had senators who were forced to defend polygamy because if the pro-slavers agreed that polygamy should be outlawed, then the pro-abolitionist side could catch them in a clever gotcha.

See, if we're going to be on the wrong side of history, we should be on the wrong side of like all history. You know what we should be doing a lot more of is, um, ah, God, wash him with piss. I mean, I mean, no one should be able to tell you not to do it, but it's just, and it's sterile. And if you've been drinking a lot of creek water, sometimes it doesn't smell as much like this. I learned from an episode of this television show, France, that actually piss can heal

you if you get bit by a jellyfish. But really, none of this seemed to bother Brigham Young all that much. He was much too busy moving on to the next phase of a successful cult leader, relieving his followers of their money and property. Now that his followers were suitably isolated, he reinstated the previously failed principle of consecration, which requested church members to give any wealth and property they didn't quote unquote need to the church. So that wealth might be redistributed.

Now, of course, very little money made its way to the needier Mormons. And this was not mandatory's less than half the church participated, but the Mormons still gave enough where Brigham Young lived in high comfort for the rest of his days. He became a fancy boy. What do you mean, Marcus? I thought that money was given to the church. It wasn't built for infrastructure. It wasn't done.

I mean, they didn't put up street lights. They didn't make bigger baptism baths for everybody to get in to really do it in an express kind of way. You may have made bigger baths, actually. See that? Oh, the opera glasses that Brigham Young bought. Oh, the carriage, fully ensconced in leather that Brigham Young rode around in. And that's a private jet by today's standards.

During one move from Salt Lake City to Provo, Brigham Young was said to own several tons of clothing and furniture, as well as a harp and two trombones. The thing is, when you love dookie, it gets on your shirt, gets on your jeans, and you can't wash it out, so you need a new pair of jeans, you need a new shirt. Which is why I'm switching to an all-brown, monochromatic sort of high-fashion choice. He became Elton John. Yeah. Oh, my God.

Eventually, Young was worth the modern-day equivalent of millions. Jesus, as his people are starving, being broke, working their asses off to build his church. They are working really hard. But he also, because he spent so many years thinning the herd, I think that what he actually did was breed a community that believed that all of these things were proper and just. So he actually, he kind of funneled it. Like he did a thing where the more you take out the strains of DNA that are going to be people that are going to question the absolutist authority of Brigham Young, that you make

it so they actually are happy toiling and building a community for God. Because they believe that they are the only ones who have direct access to God. I know my church loved the sentence in the Bible, in the Bible, the meek will inherit the earth. Which is not true. And also, I'll never forget my mother. When I was about 25, she said, she called me and she said, Ben, I think money might really matter.

It's like, yeah, we live in a capitalist society, it is God. Well, the thing is that Brigham Young was not the only one getting rich off of this. I mean, there were a lot of Mormons that were making a lot of money out there in Salt Lake City. Because, you know, Brigham Young was still, he was trying to build a society. He was trying to build, it was not just about him, it was also about legacy. He was trying to build a successful country. He was like Biggie Smalls giving ends to his friends, you know, he was trying to start

a whole enterprise, so you gotta have some people that are happy. Yeah. But, Brigham Young's greed also resulted in a massive amount of death. See, there were still thousands of European immigrants coming to Salt Lake City. And there were no railroads just yet to easily bring all these guys out west. That was post-Civil War. So Brigham figured that the most cost-effective way to bring these people to Utah, just make them walk and, in order for them to bring all their shit with them, make them pull hand

carts that they have to make themselves across thousands of miles of American frontier. No matter what time of year. I mean, that was when the first IC was created with the person who had the first IC truck. Remember those? I remember those. Oh yeah. But Marcus, you understand, they got to at least buy the hand cart making IKEA-like setup from the Mormons first, though.

Yeah. So that's important. They did provide these things that you had to build yourself, and he did put out this whole series of, like, he pitched it, or he'd be like, you can make it across a thousand miles, all you need to do, if you can really push it up to 20 to 30 miles a day, you can make it so easily, like, he, they had a whole kind of program where they'd meet you at the first leg of the trip and be like. They meet you in Missouri.

Yeah, yeah. I'd be like, here you go. Go out there, buddy. You're going to love it. Actually, beautiful mountains, beautiful views, nothing most incredible trails. You're going to love your entire trip to Salt Lake City, and then all of a sudden they get them out there, and then they are fucked. Yeah.

You imagine trying to put together an IKEA cart with 33 wives looking at you like you're a fucking moron. Yeah, I mean, these hand carts, they were just made of wood. There was no iron involved. Because iron was just a little bit more expensive, even though iron was the thing that they needed to pull these carts across the, in half of the fucking country, walking across half of the country. Oh yeah.

It was a 30 mile a day journey that lasted 60 days on average. And these were mostly city folk from England. They had no knowledge whatsoever on how to survive on the American frontier. No, I can't tell if his cart is rickety or if it's my bones. Either way, I'm tired as hell. Now many of them did make it, but one expedition in particular resulted in dozens of deaths. Just like the Donner Party, this expedition left too late in the year, and they didn't make it to Salt Lake City before winter hit.

Many died from starvation, and others just dropped dead on the trail while still pulling their carts. It got so cold out on the plains that flesh began freezing and falling from the bones of the settlers. And although there was no known cannibalism, this expedition, which is now known as the Hand Cart Tragedy, had a death count that dwarfed that of the Donner Party. Out of the 600 converted Mormons that set out from Missouri, 150 died before rescue wagons met them with more supplies, and all of these people died, trusting that the Mormons

who met them in Missouri knew what they were doing. But as far as Brigham was concerned, none of this was his fault. Oh really? Oh yeah, weird. Isn't that strange? He said, quote, My skirts are clear of their blood. Few have suffered severely, though some had their feet and hands more or less frosted.

More. The answer, and why with the layer of it, is more frosted. At one point they had nose frost on their hands, and then they have a bunch of it. People aren't upset about being cold, but have you tried being hot? Lie from your clay. Lie from your clay. Now like Joseph Smith, Brigham Young never partook in the more extreme violence himself, as far as I can tell.

But unlike Joseph Smith, Young relished in ordering violence, and blood atonement was becoming a deeply held belief of the Mormon people. In October of 1856, a group of Mormons castrated a Welsh immigrant named Thomas Lewis after he'd almost killed a Mormon with a shovel. But it wasn't the attempted murder that got him castrated. The local Mormon bishop was competing with Thomas Lewis for the affections of a young woman, and that bishop had ordered the castration while Thomas Lewis was being transported from one jail to another.

So Lewis was dragged out of the wagon, a blanket was put over his head, and they cut out his testicles, leaving him to bleed and suffer before someone found him four days later. Yeah, they took me nuts, they took me porky nuts. Sir, what was that about, noots? They took your noots? The Mormons took me porky noots. Oh yes, as I look down I see they took your nuts.

Oh man, that just makes me miss Welsh cakes. Oh yeah. A man getting castrated, but he was from Wales. I know that part. What's another word for balls? Nuts. Uncle Buck. Well, soon after that, Brigham Young explicitly ordered the murder of two horse thieves, saying

they were likely to spread false rumors about the Mormons in California, although those men did end up escaping. Building on this proclamation, another bishop decided that murder would be the best solution for a former Mormon who was supposedly planning on skipping town because of unpaid debts to other Mormons. And these fucking Mormons should even be talking about unpaid debts, that's all they've done is take a bunch of money and never pay it back ever and they try to make up their own fucking cash.

They don't even do it. And he wasn't going to be killed because he's defected from the church, he would be killed for skipping. No, according to the blood atonement, this man, what? Very good. And it was good. Sometimes I just feel myself becoming Paul Scheer from Letterman and I don't know. I'm not sure if it's good or not.

They murdered him for skipping. For skipping. I'll go back to playing music now, thank you. According to the blood atonement, this man was an apostate, which by extension meant that he was fair game for murder. And before this particular incident was said and done, that man and two of his associates were dead. Now you'd think that all this rampant vigilante murder would be what attracted the attention

of the U.S. government, but what really pissed off Washington was nothing more exotic than political appointments. What? Again? What? The U.S. government doesn't react to something that everything's obviously a problem, but as soon as it fucks with their jurisdiction, it seems like they get really, really mad about it.

Weird. Hey buddy, 12 people have died from vaping, okay? And if we don't clear the streets of these chunky clouds today, every child will be dead by 2021. The Brigham Young wanted an all Mormon legislature for the territory. He wanted that to be a law. You had to be a Mormon to serve on that territory's legislature. And he told the U.S. government in so many words that he and his people would not accept

anything else. This was not what you'd call a time of peace for the country. This was 1857. The Dred Scott decision had just come down, bleeding Kansas was in full swing over slavery, and government officials were literally beating each other with canes on the floor of the Senate. Back when they were honest. Yeah.

That's what they, if they could just get it out. I do believe if they, because that's what we liked about watching a lot of the U.K. news, was they really get to scream at each other. Oh, they do. In Parliament. Yeah. And they really need to get it out. We need to set up like a wrestling thing where like Lindsey Graham can get himself all fucking

hard and he can get in there and see who's willing to get at him. You know what I mean? If they're willing to tangle with the Lins. Oh yeah. That would be a lot like, Lindsey Graham would be a lot like Andy Kaufman wrestling with the ladies. He has to tape down his erection, but of course he's not wrestling ladies. He's wrestling men.

And on top of all that, the government now had to deal with the Mormons out in Utah, essentially being an open rebellion against the United States. So President Buchanan sent 2,500 troops to Utah to remove Brigham Young as governor. In response to word that the army was coming, Brigham Young reinstated the Niveau Legion, recruiting boys as young as 14 to fight a trained military force. And he started covertly stockpiling ammunition. But while all this was happening, a tragedy struck the Mormon people that would send shockwaves through all of Utah.

Around the same time that the army was mobilizing, Mitt Romney's great-great-grandfather, Parley Pratt, was murdered in Arkansas. No. Oh no. It's bad. He was murdered. Oh wow. Oh no.

I'm going to light a candle. Well, it turned out Parley had married a woman in Arkansas who was already married. And when Pratt and his new wife were in the process of absconding, this woman's first husband pulled Pratt into a thicket of trees, stabbed him three times, and shot him in the neck. Dog, that's what happens, man. You out in the fucking pen, dude. You out in the fucking pen.

You don't expect some guys going to kick, kick, kick, kick, get you, bro? Like, give me a little bit of this, stick, stick, stick, stick, stick, stick, stick. Trying to come up with my piece, dude. I don't know why it applies, but you can't triple stamp a double stamp. Oh yeah, good. At least that is 90s. As long as you're up into the 90s. This is a great castle.

You starting to sound like a bathroom reader. I'm hip, I'm cool, a duck, a duck, a duck, a duck, a duck, a duck, a duck, a duck, a duck. That's from 2000s. No, that's 96. That's also 96, okay. Oh, wow. Now, this action, the murderer, Parley Pratt, didn't necessarily have much of an effect on Brigham Young personally, because Pratt had married outside of Young's authorization.

About the murder, Brigham said, quote, I was glad for it, for he paid the debt he owed. But Young was also never one to let an opportunity pass. Although he believed that Pratt got what he deserved, he still used the murder as inspiration to pump up the Mormons, comparing it to the vigilante murder of Joseph Smith. And Young needed his men ready, because the army was well on its way to Utah. This was fucking serious. Yeah, dude. And they were coming, and he's ramping it up, because so part of what he used, the first

wave of this shit, was like, no trading any goods with Gentiles, nothing outside, no old, any Mormon fucking acquisition, anything we have they want, we're not selling it to anybody. So at first he shut off that, that vein, where he's pumping it up, but then he keeps turning up the heat just to see how much farther the US government will go. And this whole thing was perfect for Buchanan, because Buchanan was hoping the Mormons would distract the country from the whole slavery thing, because Buchanan was still thinking like, this is going to calm down. Of course.

Yeah. Like this is all going to blow over, we just kind of got to make it through the hard times. But this is one of those like, wad the dog, bullshit, like it's always been this way. It's always been this way. They use this issue as a distraction issue to say like, we're going to go wipe out this cult that's taken over our states, and like, that's the whole thing that everybody can rally behind. I don't think you understand, Henry, 12 people have died from vaping.

I saw a map and there was blood, there was red over every state, because every state has had complaints about vaping. Has had complaints. Yes. And so if we don't take immediate action, I don't know what's going to happen. I pray for the family of Joe Campbell. I pray for that family and what they've been through. Well, meanwhile, the Mormons were batting down the hatches.

Brigham Young was preparing for total war with the United States, instructing his people to clear their fields, quote, to bury strangers in. Damn. They started burning down their crops and shit. Yeah. They started like, they were like, fuck it, we're going to like, when they come here, they're going to find nothing. Yeah.

Damn. I pray that the Mormons would be able to kill as many soldiers as the government was willing to send. And he fully prepared Salt Lake City for a seven year siege, telling his people that the final war of extermination was coming. People, in other words, were freaked out. Yeah. Yeah, dude.

And this is fucking for a cult. Oh. This is just so good because the government is really coming for you. This is Jim Jones. Right. And the Senator showing up at the people sit like, this is, this is huge. And he's getting them all ready because again, I just bought seven years of fucking full on cult time.

Right. Because now you all are going to prepare for this, this whole fucking like for an entire siege. And now I really, really got you, got you. Yeah. But the mass murder that was coming to Utah would not be committed by the U.S. Army, nor would the victims of said mass murder be Mormons, rather the Mormons would be the perpetrators and the victims, innocent men, women and children.

In other words, it's a finally time to get into the Mountain Meadows massacre. Oh. Is that good? Damn. All right. In September of 1857, a group of 150 odd immigrants from Arkansas in 30 wagons were passing through Mormon territory on their way to California. Now Mormons were none too trusting of these people from Arkansas, seeing how Parley Pratt

had just been murdered there. And since the opportunity for blood atonement for Parley's murder necessitated a trip to the other side of the country, the Mormons suddenly felt pretty lucky to have a convenient proxy on their own home turf. The wagon trains first encounter with the Mormons came in Nephi near Central Utah. A local bishop requested that the train move along because they were destroying his winter feed pastures, and soon word of Arkansas settlers in Mormon territory spread. The Mormons also refused to trade with the Arkansas company because, as Henry said,

Brigham Young had forbidden all trade with the Gentiles due to the upcoming war with the United States. And this only furthered the divide between the Mormons and everyone else. It set them completely apart. They were sitting ducks because they showed up with all their bullshit. They have their entire lives in these wagons and they're trying to get through and they're getting like, because they didn't know what to hear because they knew for a while, I really believe that Mormons were very accepting of people because they're trying to pad their

numbers. So they showed up thinking like, oh, like we'll get harbor with them, we'll do all this kind of shit, and they were just getting a surprising amount of cold shoulders as soon as they arrived. A lot of side eyes. So the Arkansas company moved on to Corn Creek, where they traded with a couple of utes. Somehow a false rumor after this trading got started that the Arkansas company had poisoned both the creek and the ox that they had traded to the local tribe.

And where it also began to spread about how these settlers from Arkansas had wagons loaded with valuable goods worth about a hundred grand in today's money, but what happened next is possibly the most debated subject in existence amongst frontier historians. That's because nobody really knows the full truth about the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Now Larry McMurtry does a fantastic job trying to undo the knot in his book on frontier massacres called, oh, what a slaughter, we really loved it, which was helpfully recommended to me by my father. Thank you, dad.

Oh, very nice, Mr. Parks. Thank you so much. Good sir. Oh yes. But not even McMurtry could come up with anything definitive. And while we do know where the mass grave is, the state government of Utah has routinely blocked attempts to excavate it and forensically study the remains. Only once in 1999, when the grave was first discovered, did forensic scientists get their

hands on at least some of the remains, but only a tiny fraction of the bones were examined before the governor, who just happened to be a descendant of one of the massacre participants, shut it down. No kidding. No way. Weird. Whoa. And while all of the people at the scientists have been like, bring us the bones.

It's like, oh yes, we have our associate who's here. He's helping us to get some of this evidence from the massacre, Mr. Bone Splitter, Mr. Bone Cleaver. Yes! I brought thousands of bones. Scientists are cool. What we do know, though, is why the settlers stopped at Mountain Meadows. Along with the wagons, the settlers also had about 1,600 head of cattle, and the Meadows

was a perfect place to let the herd graze. And Brigham Young was well aware that the Arkansas Company was there. The day before the massacre, Brigham sent a letter to the leader of the Southern Utah Mormons, Elder Isaac Haight, who was in charge of the Mountain Meadows area. And although Brigham Young explicitly told Haight that he must not meddle with the settlers, Brigham followed that statement with this sentence. The Indians, we expect, will do as they please, wink, wink, wink, wink. It's funny that he actually wrote in the wink, wink, wink, wink.

Furthermore, it's possible, if not likely, that the letter either wasn't delivered at all or was delivered well after the massacre began. And some think there may have even been a second letter sent while the non-meddling letter was sent as cover. Now, there's no proof that Young ordered this massacre. And honestly, I'm not necessarily inclined to believe that Young ordered it, because this was a fantastically risky move for very little gain, at least relatively so. But even if Brigham Young did not give the order, the environment that he had cultivated

ensured that the men who participated in the massacre felt no hesitation in murdering Gentiles. Specifically, Gentiles from Arkansas. Well, they've already been dehumanized completely. So you have a group of people here that you're saying are eating your resources. You have a blood atonement to get to. Yeah. Right? You got to get to it.

You're looking at these people, and you feel like maybe we could help them from their own sins. I don't think you'd need an actual command from Brigham Young, because he's already done it. I thought atonement could have been the spark here, or Brigham Young could have been using the age-old cult tactic of spicing things up with murder. We don't know. He might have sent the order.

He probably didn't, but fuck, he might have. But most likely, the main motivation was probably greed, plain and simple. The settlers had a lot of cattle, they had a lot of goods, and the southern Mormons wanted it. And since the Arkansas settlers were Gentiles, who gives a shit? And they're not getting a lot of trade, because they have, since they have also cut off the American government, they're also not getting shit that they need. So now they're getting a whole bunch of free shit to show up in our territory and we can

kill them, and God loves it. Great. Yeah, it's a perfect storm. But no matter what the reason behind the massacre actually was, the first shots began on the morning of September 7th. See, the southern Mormons had allied themselves with the Paiute tribe, and when the settlers looked out there who was shooting them, it appeared to be a Paiute raiding party. Because what I've read, because what I read was that they landed, right?

So they got sent to the mountain meadows area that ended up being very beautiful. And apparently when they arrived, they were so tired, they did from the long travel that they had set up camp, but they didn't do the customary circling of the wagons, where they didn't set up a perimeter like they normally do. They kind of just all flopped and fell asleep, and they were like, all right, we'll set shit up in the morning. But then pop, pop, pop, pop, they woke up to getting shot at. Yeah, and what this meant is that when they finally did circle the wagons, they did not

have a substantial water supply anywhere near them. They hadn't done their due diligence. But as the siege continued, the settlers started to notice that out of the 250 so Paiutes attacking, a good number of those guys out there obviously had white skin under their war paint. Now this deception was the brainchild of a Mormon named Major High Higbee. Higbee had reason that it would be a bad look if it was just Mormons attacking the settlers. So he blended his men with the Paiutes to make it a little more palatable, because the initial plan probably wasn't to kill everyone.

Probably these people haven't heard about cultural appropriation, because that my friend is the... That's a little problematic. That's a little problematic. Yes, you can kill people, but you do it as your own person. But as the siege went on, it was becoming obvious to the Mormons that they weren't going to overtake the wagon circle by force. And since Mountain Meadows was a relatively well trodden trail, it was only a matter of

time before other people showed up, possibly even the army itself. What was more, the settlers had obviously seen Mormons fighting with the Paiutes. Or they may not have known they were Mormons, but at the very least, they're white people, we're in Utah, they're probably Mormons. And if those settlers were let go, then it wouldn't be long before punishment truly rained down on Utah. Okay, so they're not going to take the Arkansasians by force. Do they take them by dance?

When we were in Berlin, that's all you have to do. If you want to get a group of Germans to go anywhere, you just put a giant set of speakers on a van blasts an EDM and they will just goth rave. Honestly, in Berlin, it was amazing because we were there during the climate march and they were literally science raving to save the climate. I don't know if that's how you're going to do it, but they were a delight. Three o'clock in the afternoon, six vans with huge speakers all blast in a different EDM DJ and every van, 20 Germans behind it just fucking through dancing their asses off.

Now we don't know who came up with the plan to commit the massacre specifically, or who, if anyone from above, gave the order to go through with it, but the Mormons knew they had to get the settlers off the main path where the whole thing could be ended, somehow. So they took off their war paint and used themselves as decoys to offer the settlers safe passage. They claimed to be friends of the Paiutes and they offered to negotiate a peace and escort the settlers to nearby Cedar City and all the settlers would have to do hand over their guns.

Oh, that's it. Now if the settlers hadn't been cut off from water, they probably wouldn't have gone along with this deal because they knew the Mormons had been right alongside the Paiutes shooting at them for four days straight. But the settlers had a lot of kids and while grown men and women might be able to survive a siege until someone came along to help, the kids probably wouldn't. So the settlers took the deal. Four days after the siege began, on the morning of September 11th, the settlers turned over

their weapons. The women and children were marched out ahead while the men were made to stay behind with the Mormons. The Paiutes laid in wait. And after the men were marched a suitable distance, Major Higbee appeared on the ridge ahead, waved his arms and shouted something that sounded like, Do Your Duty. At that moment, the Mormons turned their guns on the settlers and murdered each and every one of them with shots to the head.

Those that didn't die immediately had their throats cut. So as Larry McMurtry put it, the atoning blood could flow more freely. And at the same time that the men were being murdered, the Paiutes came out of hiding and slaughtered the women and every child above the age of seven by bludgeoning them to death. A man named John Doyle Lee actually joined the Paiutes in this, chasing down one little girl himself and slitting her throat while two other young girls were raped and murdered on sight. After it was all said and done, at least 120 innocent settlers were murdered, although

some estimates put it as high as 140. And as soon as the killing was done, the Mormons and the Paiutes cut ears from bodies for the earrings, cut fingers from hands for the jewelry, and stripped the dead of all their clothes. As many as 140 bodies were left to rot naked in two piles on the grounds of Mount Meadows. And by the time the next travelers came down the road, two weeks later, the corpses had been ripped apart by animals. The only survivors were 17 children, all under the age of seven, saved because according to Mormon belief, they had not yet passed out of the age of innocence.

These children were just given to Mormon families, although eventually some were returned to Arkansas. Now, hey, my question, now is there, there's a lot of quotation marks throughout this entire thing because of the, because we only know about this from witnesses that believe that they were a part of it. Like John Doyle Lee would go on and be the guy that say the Mormons were the ones that did this because they were the official line is that Paiutes reacted alone essentially. Isn't the idea that weren't many of these so called Paiutes, a large percentage of them

were Mormons in makeup? No, there was about 200 Paiutes and about 50 Mormons. Now, it was that we know that to be sure. We don't know that 100% to be sure, but what we do know comes from the forensic evidence from the 1999 excavation, they were not able to uncover every single body, but they were able to uncover about 18 bodies. And out of those bodies, the men had gunshot wounds to the head, the women were bludgeoned. And we know that Mormons used guns while the Paiutes used blunt weapons like they used

blunt instruments. And so John Doyle Lee's John Doyle Lee's or at least the people that were there, their testimony that the Mormons killed the men, the Paiutes killed the women and children, that at least holds true somewhat. But we don't know 100% for sure because they were not allowed to examine all of the bodies. But the Mormons made this seem like they were under attack, right? The Mormons made this seem like they weren't even there because the official line from the Mormons was that the Paiutes had murdered the settlers because the settlers had given

them a poisoned ox. So this is truly a hate double shot where it's like you get to kill a bunch of people and then you also get to blame it on a minority group. Yeah. And you also get to be disloyal to a minority group that you were supposed to be allied with. Triple shot. Yeah.

Absolutely true. They were in minority then. We were the minority. Yeah. But that's not good. It's just they were hated. They were just hated. Yeah.

And so it was easy to position ourselves against them because they were, we distrusted them because we were stealing their lance and they were upset about it. Yeah. It makes sense. Now supposedly Brigham Young was told about the massacre as soon as word could reach him. But according to John Doyle Lee, Brigham Young said this. I have made that matter a subject of prayer. I went right to God with it and asked him to take the horn vision from my sight if it

was a righteous thing that my people have done in killing those people and mountain meadows. God answered me that once the vision was removed, I had evidence from God that he had overruled it all for good and the action was a righteous one and well intended. Well isn't that what I'd call a kawankid? Yeah. So interesting how he's just like, oh, I lost it. Now this massacre could very well have spelled the end of Mormonism.

If anything, it could easily be compared to Jim Jones ordering the murder of Congressman Leo Ryan in Guyana, which led to the massacre in Jonestown and there's no chance that Brigham Young would have forced a mass suicide like Jim Jones did. But a big, big push from the US government could have easily led to the deaths of thousands all across Utah. But the mountain meadows massacre did not happen in 1978 like Jonestown did. This was 1857. There were no camera crews, there was no instantaneous communication, and there were no real forensic

investigative bodies. As such, the Mormons faced no significant repercussions as a result of the massacre. Well you heard Brigham. God took it from his brain. Yeah, so it's cool. I can't even think about it. Why would I even think about it? I can't think about it.

It's been taken from me. It took 18 years for anyone to be punished. And even then, the Mormons offered up only John Doyle Lee as a scapegoat, who was found guilty and taken out to mountain meadows where he was executed by a firing squad. So one man did it. One man. And by the way, all Mormon jury. Now the reason why it took 18 years was because Brigham Young formed rank immediately following

the massacre. He proclaimed that any Mormon who didn't support the official story, which was that the Paiites did it because of a Poison Docs, and that Mormon would quote, Die a dog's death and be damned and go to hell. Damn all four of them. And be sticky. Have sticky breath. And he won't be able to dance.

What? And I won't allow him to see, oh, isn't that Mystery Singer song on show on tonight? He won't be able to see that. And I'll spoil the ending good for him and I'll tell you who it was. It was Kato Kalen. Whoa, Kato Kalen. And the most ridiculous part about all of this was that it was starting to become clear that the army wasn't going to come after all because they had run into supply problems

in Wyoming and their march had slowed to a crawl. The great Mormon war that seemed destined to predate the American Civil War never came to pass. Gregam Young had whipped his people into a bloodthirsty frenzy for nothing and 140 people died horrific deaths as a direct result. What's even worse was that the Mountain Meadows Massacre set a new template for Frontier Slaughter. At least four copycat attacks occurred in the wake of Mountain Meadows, most of which involved rape, death, and gougings.

Not gougings. What is gouging of eyes or something? Gouging of eyes, yes, the gouging of eyes, because they spiritually then can't be witnesses. I know it's ridiculous to say, but that's a part of when you see serial killers when they remove those types of things or they cover the face, it's about not being seen. But even with the massacre hanging over his people's heads, Gregam Young was still waging what war he could against the United States because the army had not quite stopped their advance just yet.

Porter Rockwell, who if you'll remember had been Joseph Smith's assassin in the attempted murder of Missouri Governor Little Burn Boggs, became one of Gregam Young's main thugs, and Rockwell spread murder across the Salt Lake Valley. When word got around that traders were in Utah territory hoping to sell to the US Army, Porter Rockwell captured them and led the group 100 miles south of Salt Lake City where he killed four out of the six merchants. But when the army was only a 12 day march from Salt Lake City, winter settled into Wyoming and the army got stuck for the season.

This sudden change in weather likely saved the thousands of lives Gregam Young was willing to spend on Mormon sovereignty. As such, the winner gave Gregam Young time to settle down, and it gave the United States the opportunity to send a skilled diplomat named Thomas Cain to broker a peace with the Mormon people. Eventually, the army entered the territory and Gregam Young was stripped of his political offices, although not a goddamn thing was ever done about the Mountain Meadows Massacre apart from the token execution of John D. Lee.

It reminds me of Ted Kennedy when he was like, oh my god because of Chappaquiddick, I could never run for president, and it's like oh what a travesty after you murdered that woman. Gregam Young even visited the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre himself in 1861, and as a final arrogant fuck you, he ordered the meager memorial that had been built on Mountain Meadows destroyed. Yeah, he showed up, he saw the sign, he gave the sign of the Masonic sign of due action, which is the squared arm, and then he went and destroyed the entire thing. Damn.

But at the very least, Young's last years on earth were beset by painful maladies. He claimed to suffer from quote, deranged bowels and hemorrhoids. But that's just what happened to our friend Eddie, that's not that bad. Yeah, it comes from living like shit, nothing but just bare grease. Yeah, they said that Gregam Young's waist at its largest, 45. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. Uh, and Gregam Young was forced to use enemas that he mixed with consecrated oil, the same

oil that they used in rituals, Gregam Young was shooting up his ass. So this makes it not gay, right? This is like, it's not gay? Shut it up, my ass, what do I have to, do I have to tell you twice? I need to make my colon as slippery for Jesus Christ as possible. Okay, Mr. Young, bend over, do you want to play Here Comes the Torpedo or do you want to play Here Comes the Bullet? I'm not bending over, I'm not a chair, you do it while I'm standing.

Okay, well then that's Here Comes the Torpedo, you're getting it all over my legs. And Gregam Young never stopped being a dick. When the Civil War finally came, the Mormons just waited it out. See, Gregam believed that society would be better off without any black people at all, free or slave. As far as he was concerned, he could take or leave slavery, so it didn't really matter who won. All he really cared about at this point was making Utah a state while still retaining

polygamy. You know, sometimes you gotta make a decision. The Civil War, I think that's a better time to take a stand. That's one of those times, yeah. But as long as polygamy was a part of the Mormon church, Utah was never gonna be a state. Really the only benefit the Mormons got from the Civil War was that the government was too busy to truly prosecute the bigamists in Utah. But once the Civil War was over and done with, the United States turned its eye towards

true Western expansion. And it just wouldn't do to have a huge population of polygamous weirdos right where the railroads had to be built. Yeah dude, just too many wives, too few cars, you're getting out there, everybody, you don't know who's single or not, I mean, everybody's married five or six times, everybody's freaky and shit all the time, one guy uses his bowels were all deranged. So for years upon years afterwards, bill after bill came through Congress to try to get the Mormons to abandon polygamy.

They were just at a stalemate. Although the Mormons were usually able to kill the bills with a well-placed bribe. But by the 1870s, Brigham Young was starting to show signs of seriously failing health. His urological system was breaking down. And he had to use a catheter lubed up with what else but consecrated oil to urinate. Yeah, fish it up there. You know what I've even said is what's the point of even having a cock if I can't get to the piss fast enough?

Tell you what, asshole, what I'm hoping is that at some point a weird human beings would evolve to laying one big type of egg that was filled with shit and piss that I could just get at easily because all of this cock is just keeping my piss from coming out. So get that tube right up to the bag of piss inside of the middle of me, please, just so I can really express it out. So the only justice we get here is he's got a catheter in his cock and an enema in his butt? I mean, deranged bowels.

People love it, though. It's not even a punishment. No, there's a whole of our grandfathers having it, so we're gonna have to. There's so many neighborhoods of cities, Denver, San Francisco, where you go and they want these things inside of them. And Brigham Young never stopped being a hypocrite. When one of his wives divorced him in 1873 and sought $1,000 a month in alimony, Young argued that he didn't owe her a goddamn thing because their marriage wasn't technically

legal. See? Oh, okay. And that's where he's got you legally. I see. Okay. But finally, Brigham Young's body revolted against itself. On August 23, 1877, Young collapsed, vomiting and shitting himself, and his appendix burst

two days later. Six days after that, the Lion of the Lord was dead. Damn. You know, I'm not for big game hunting, but I do think this lion deserved to die. Polygamy continued in Utah for another 13 years before the United States finally figured it out of way to legally seize all church property and assets unless the Mormons renounced polygamy completely. And by some extraordinary coincidence, God changed his mind about polygamy right around

the same time, and Utah finally became a state in 1890. And around this time, blood atonement was officially denied and repudiated by the church as well. But there were some in the Mormon communities who believed that both blood atonement and polygamy were essential parts of Mormon belief. And those people used those doctrines to justify horrific crimes about a century later. And those are the people we'll cover in the conclusion to our saga on Mormonism. Woo, there it is, folks, Mormonism.

Part five, we will be going in to the 20th century on Mormonism. Part six. Wow, that is absolutely incredible. I cannot believe there is still a university with this man's name on it. And there are active children being like, that's where I want to go. Learn about life. It is a lesson we learned last week, an idea of starting right. They are, they have such a, it's a troubled history.

Yeah. If you imagine if we actually got a modern view of how Christianity was birthed, I imagine we would see a lot of the same. This is some, it's interesting to see how it goes. And now, next week, when we cover this kind of modern incarnation, like, well, I think we'll talk a little bit about the fact that, you know, Mormonism has done its best to change. The whole point is that they're trying to be more legit, they're trying to be more liberal, they're trying to add more to the conversation so they can finally have a president one day,

because that's what they really want, because it's been Joseph Smith's secret wish since the very beginning. It seems like they're only changing because society is like forcing them to change. If they had their way, they would still be doing child brides and 35 wives. But the entire thrust of Mormonism is that they, they are, they sway like the reed in the wind. And the first comedy special will be called Child Wives and Child Brides and 35 Wives. Good Lord.

But then next week, what we're going to see is these, we're going to cover two specific stories a little bit, as much as we fully can, that show how in modern times, these little fringe Mormon systems, they still create mayhem that is completely ordained by the church, even if they kind of go, oh, I'm not seeing it, I don't know what's happening over there. It's still in many ways another like little slippery little fingers of the Mormon church. And I'm the next episode of Assuming We Will Be Discussing, a character that the U.S. Justice Department was able to.

Get ready to go to San Angelo next week, boys. Speaking of traveling, it's a weird one. King of the Segway, Ben Kissel, put on your cap. Speaking of traveling, we're going to be back on the road for our Back in the Habit World tour. Number one, thanks to everyone who came out to see us in Europe, that was a dream come true. We had such a great time and everyone was so sweet.

It was so fucking cold. I loved it so much. Yes. So October 18th, 9th, in October 18th, we are going to be in Tampa, Florida, the 19th of October, Miami, Florida, and then October 20th, Orlando, Florida. And then we have November 21st in Portland, November 27th. Portland, Maine. Yeah, November 21st, Portland, Maine, November 22nd, North Hampton, Massachusetts, and November

23rd, Buffalo, New York. And then finally, in December, December 5th, Toronto, December 6th, finally we are going to Detroit. Yep. Can't wait. We are so excited. We are going to. It's also the perfect time to go.

Yes. It's the perfect time to be in Detroit. I can't wait for the tropical vibes, I can't wait to have a pina colada and sit by the beach. No, and we're not under a massive time crunch. In no way is there going to be a snowstorm in the Midwest in December. No, everything's going to be totally fine, guys. Toronto, Detroit, to Columbus in December, smooth sailing, boys.

Smooth sailing. That's right. December 7th, Columbus, Ohio. So please come out to those shows. We can't wait to see everybody on the road again. Oh, and one more thing. I'd also like to give an extra special thanks to research assistant Joel McKean for his work on the Brigham Young book on this episode.

He was absolutely invaluable. Thank you, Joel. Thank you, Joel. Also, Ben Kissel and I will be doing an episode of Side Stories Live, November 8th in Washington, D.C., part of the Death Becomes Us Festival. See Kissel and I weave a tale of imagination in front of you. See as we speak to you and wonder what we'll say. Yes, indeed, as we wonder what we'll say as well.

No, that will be wonderful. We always love going to Washington, D.C. and so, yes, hang out with us and we will have a great time together. Can't wait to see you all on the road. I guess that's basically it as far as announcements go, right? I believe so. Oh, and we're going to be returning to Adult Swim this Tuesday. The stream last stream on the left is going to be returning to the airwaves this Tuesday

at 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Go to adultswim.com slash streams this Tuesday at 8 p.m. EST to check us out. All right. Can't wait to see you guys. Cannot wait to see you guys again and strut and fret our hours upon the internet stage for you. Absolutely. All right, everyone, never forget.

Hail yourselves. Hail Satan. Oh, Hail Geen. Let's do a magustillation, shall we? Magustillations? Hail me. Now, is it, would it be too bad to try to sweep pivot towards like getting our own little community?

I mean, I think we could do it right. Ah, that's what they all say. I think, no, honestly, the Flaming Lips have done it right. Ugh, I've heard tell it's kind of rough over there. No, it's great that you just make stuff Jared Leto, however, is starting a cult. And he's not doing it right. He doesn't have the right people around him. I could help.

Just trust me. We're all bad multitaskers. Yeah. God damn it. This show is made possible by listeners like you. Thanks to our ad sponsors, you can support our shows by supporting them. For more shows like the one you just listened to, go to lastpodcastnetwork.com.