The Other Slavery (42 page)

Initially, Brigham Young had been cautious in his dealings with the Indians. He had counseled his brethren not to sell guns to them. He had also sought to restrict their presence inside the fort that he and his followers had built near the Great Salt Lake. “When the Lamanites are about, you will keep your gates closed and not admit them within the walls,” Young had said as he prepared for an extended absence. “So far as you come in contact with them, treat them kindly but do not feed them or trade with them or hold familiar intercourse with them within the city. But if you wish to trade with them, go to their camp and deal with them honorably.”
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However, once Young gained more confidence and understood that the Indian slave trade had existed in the region for centuries and was deeply rooted, he changed his mind. By 1850 or 1851, he had become persuaded that the way to move forward was by buying Indians. “The Lord could not have devised a better plan than to have put the saints where they were to help bring about the redemption of the Lamanites
and also make them a white and delightsome people,” Young said to the members of the Iron County Missions in May 1851. Other church leaders were no less enthusiastic. “The Lord has caused us to come here for this very purpose,” said Orson Pratt, one of the original Mormon “apostles,” in 1855, “that we might accomplish the redemption of these suffering degraded Israelites.”
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Yet there was one major drawback. By buying Indian children, the Mormons would be giving impetus to a terrible traffic that caused bloodshed, mayhem, and war. Therefore Brigham Young’s solution was to steer a middle and contradictory course: he cracked down on some traffickers but also advocated the passage of the Act for the Relief of Indian Slaves and Prisoners of 1852, which enabled Utah residents to become guardians of Indian minors for up to twenty years. In this way, Young intended to curb the most brutal aspects of the Indian slave trade and at the same time pursue the Mormon goal of Indian redemption.
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New Mexican traffickers were the first to feel the effects of Young’s policies. For seventy years, Hispanic merchants had been involved in the overland trail to California and had grown accustomed to bartering horses and slaves along the Old Spanish Trail, which cut a swath through Utah. This was still the case in the fall of 1851 when a New Mexican from Abiquiu named Pedro León Luján found himself leading a party of merchants through central Utah. Luján was bearing a trading license from the governor of New Mexico, and his intention was to barter for captives. But Luján was a prudent man. He knew that his license was about to expire, so he sought out Brigham Young to extend it. Luján and his companions spent days tracking down the Utah governor, but when he found Young, the meeting did not go well. Through an interpreter, Governor Young explained that since the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the laws of the United States applied in Utah. Such laws, he said, prohibited the enslavement of Indians—an argument that must have amused the hardened New Mexicans, whose predecessors had operated in contravention of Spanish and Mexican law since the sixteenth century. “The Mexicans listened with respect,” observed the interpreter, “and all seemed satisfied and pledged their words that they would return to their homes without trading for children.” However, on the way
back to New Mexico, Luján did acquire some Indian children and one woman—perhaps forced by the circumstances, as he would later testify, but more likely in defiance of the governor’s prohibition. In any case, he was subsequently apprehended, tried, and found guilty. Luján’s property was confiscated, including the captives, who were promptly placed in Mormon homes.
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The trial and conviction of Don Pedro León Luján sent a clear message to New Mexicans wishing to do business in Utah. It was an important precedent, but it did not spell the end of the traffic of Indians. In 1851 Utah was vast—far larger than it is today, as it included portions of Nevada, Colorado, and Wyoming—and therefore utterly impossible to police. During the 1850s and 1860s, New Mexicans continued to rendezvous with Utes and Navajos at lonely outposts, exchanging horses for humans. Luján himself continued to own Paiute Indians, as the 1870 census reveals. Governor Young’s unenforceable interdiction merely drove the traffic underground and made it more difficult to detect, as had occurred in centuries past.
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Brigham Young’s next target was Chief Walkara, or “the Hawk of the Mountains,” as the Ute leader called himself. Walkara was the most important supplier of Indian children in Utah, but Young had to tread lightly, as Walkara’s band was powerful and could inflict serious damage on exposed white settlements. By the 1840s, Walkara had a lock on the middle section of the Old Spanish Trail between New Mexico and California. John Frémont met Walkara in 1844 and reported that the Ute chief was “journeying slowly towards the Spanish Trail to levy the usual tribute upon the great California caravans.” The Ute chief also sold Paiute Indians to the passing merchants, thus turning the Old Spanish Trail into a great source of power and wealth. Walkara was well known among New Mexican traffickers, but he also conducted business at the trail’s southern end. In California he sold bison robes as well as Indian children. According to one witness, one time Walkara was mistreated by California ranchers who confiscated his property. So the Hawk of the Mountains retaliated by stealing horses. A single horse-stealing campaign in 1839–1840 through Cajon Pass, near Los Angeles, reportedly netted three thousand animals, making it one of the biggest hauls in
the annals of horse thievery. Walkara’s band is an example of an equestrian power operating across different Euro-American groups, exploiting weaker indigenous groups, and thriving on the basis of superior mobility and the chief’s keen business sense.
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When the Mormons first arrived in Utah in 1847, Chief Walkara welcomed them as potential trading partners and customers. It also helped that the Mormons initially settled by the Great Salt Lake, well to the north of Walkara’s domain in southern and central Utah. But as the Mormons continued to migrate into Utah in the 1850s, their settlements spilled southward into Ute lands. Adding insult to injury, the Mormons’ conviction of Pedro Luján delivered a major blow to Chief Walkara’s livelihood. Walkara and his family greatly resented these trading restrictions. A few months after Luján’s Indian trafficking trial, Walkara’s brother Arapeen arrived in the town of Provo to sell children. When the Mormons refused to buy, Arapeen went into a rage, saying that they had no right to prevent Mexicans such as Luján from buying children unless they themselves acquired them. What Arapeen did next became etched in Daniel W. Jones’s memory: “Several of us were present when he took one of the children by the heels and dashed his brains out on the hard ground, after which he threw the body toward us telling us that we had no hearts or we would have saved its life.”
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It is tempting to think that the Mormons opposed Indian slavery and that the trial and conviction of Luján and the difficulties with Chief Walkara were steps toward the total elimination of it in Utah. But such an interpretation is impossible to reconcile with the passage of the Act for the Relief of Indian Slaves and Prisoners in 1852. The discussions that took place prior to this act reveal that Young and other Mormon leaders did not so much want to do away with Indian slavery as to use it for their own ends. They objected to Indian children and women being left in the hands of Ute captors to be tortured and killed and to allowing them to fall into the “low, servile drudgery of Mexican slavery.” But they were fully in favor of placing Native children and women in Mormon homes to associate them “with the more favored portions of the human race.” Mormons used euphemisms such as “buying the slaves into freedom” to refer to this equivocal process. In fact, the Act for the Relief of Indian
Slaves and Prisoners allowed any white resident of Utah to hold Indians through a system of indenture for a period of up to twenty years—longer than in California or New Mexico. Masters in Utah were required to clothe their indentured Indians appropriately and send youngsters between seven and sixteen years of age to school for three months each year. Other than that, they were free to put them to work.
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Determining the total number of Indians acquired through slavery and indenture in Utah requires painstaking research in census records, diaries, genealogies, and assorted documents. Richard D. Kitchen has identified more than four hundred Indians taken into Mormon homes between 1847 and 1900. The actual number must have been much higher considering that many indentured Indians died immediately after contact or survived only a few months or years, thus leaving little or no paper trail. We know, for example, that T. D. Brown acquired five Indian children but only two were still alive by the end of the year; Zadok and Minerva Judd adopted at least three children but only one reached adulthood; and the Cox family adopted a seven-year-old Indian girl, Sylvia, who promptly died during a measles epidemic. There were many other such cases. Without question, Indians of the Great Basin were especially susceptible to new illnesses introduced by white colonists. When the Mormons first reached Utah in 1847, there were an estimated 20,000 Native Americans within the territory. By 1900 the number had plummeted to 2,623. In other words, eighty-six percent of the Indians in Utah vanished in half a century. It would not be until the 1980s that the Indian population there regained its pre-Mormon levels. As usual, it is impossible to disentangle the extent to which biological and man-made factors contributed to this catastrophic decline. But Indian slavery was certainly a major factor.
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More questions revolve around the living and working conditions of the indentured Indians. All along Mormons claimed that they acquired Indian children with the intention of civilizing rather than enslaving them. Between the 1830s and 1860s, some of them actually wrote sketches of their indigenous dependents. Often these were edifying stories of obedience and contentment, such as those of Ammon, a young boy who refused to play with the other children but nonetheless became
“a good student, also religious, honest, and industrious”; Rose, who was raised by the Daniels family and was “apt and willing to learn and became a very good cook and housekeeper and did the work about the home as any girl or daughter would do in the home of a large family”; and Mary Thomson, who was employed in many of the homes of the town of Ephraim “and became a faithful, devoted friend to the members of those families.” And yet additional evidence reveals less uplifting stories of Indians who ran away from their adopted homes or had difficulty integrating into Mormon society. The
Deseret News
of September 18, 1852, for example, includes an ad from one Christopher Merkley offering a reward for the return of a twelve-year-old boy who had fled from his possession and spoke very little English. Similarly, Thomas Forsythe traded a horse and saddle in exchange for a boy named Moroni. He grew up to be very useful around the farm. But one day when he failed to bring in the cows, Forsythe, who was an ill-tempered man, reprimanded Moroni severely, prompting him to flee.
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Some Mormons viewed Indians as outright slaves, or at least treated them as an underclass that could be readily exploited. Over the winter of 1849–1850, a posse of about one hundred Mormon men from Parowan, in southern Utah, gave chase to some Indians who had been raiding their cattle. They succeeded in killing about twenty-five or thirty warriors and taking their women and children. In effect, their retaliatory expedition had turned into a slaving raid. One member of the posse, Joel H. Johnson, recorded in his diary how he had kept two women and three children “who were all sick, occasioned by exposure after having the measles.” Of the five, only a ten-year-old boy survived. Yet this did not deter Johnson from acquiring more Indians. In a letter to the editor of the
Deseret News
on January 25, 1853, Johnson observed that he employed several Paiutes to assist him in tending a herd and doing chores. “When employed and fed by the whites they are a great help to the farmers,” Johnson affirmed, “and will do as much work as most any white man in a day and can be hired for their board and some small present, by way of old clothing.” Many colonists believed that agricultural work was the best way to redeem the Indians of Utah. Brigham Young himself
repeatedly wrote about the beneficial effects of the “peaceful avocation of herding or cultivating the soil” as a way to curb the Indians’ “wilder and more dangerous exploits of predatory war” and to counter their natural tendencies toward idleness.
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