The Last Called Mormon Colonization: Polygamy, Kinship, and Wealth in Wyoming's Bighorn Basin

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints founded hundreds of settlements throughout the Intermountain West, including Wyoming. A small LDS group settled in Burlington in 1893. Their modest success brought the Bighorn Basin to church leaders’ attention as a place for expansion with arable lands in Utah filling up and the church telling converts around the world to stop gathering to Zion in 1899.In 1900, Lorenzo Snow, fifth president of the church, called his predecessor Wilford Woodruff's son, Apostle Abraham Owen Woodruff, to head the last colonization mission of the church—the Big Horn Basin Colonization Company—as a safety valve to release the pressure. Owen was assisted in the endeavor by Byron Sessions, Jesse W. Crosby, and Charles A. Welch.The Bighorn Basin is approximately one hundred miles wide (twelve thousand square miles) and bounded by the Absaroka and Beartooth ranges on the west, the Pryor Mountains to the north, the Big Horn Mountains on the east, and the Owl Creek and Bridger Mountains on the south. From 1900 to 1901, more than a thousand LDS settlers reached the Bighorn Basin and established the sister cities of Byron and Cowley. Some later migrated to augment the towns of Basin, Cody, Greybull, Lovell, Powell, Thermopolis, and Worland in northeastern Wyoming along the Shoshone, Greybull, Sage Creek, and Big Horn Rivers.Those hardy and faithful settlers who faced such tremendous obstacles in establishing Byron and Cowley—approximately seven miles apart—included ancestors of John Gary Maxwell. Inspired by their stories of crossing the plains in handcarts and settling in Utah, their faithful answering of a call to trek to Wyoming to start all over again is the subject of Maxwell's The Last Called Mormon Colonization: Polygamy, Kinship, and Wealth in Wyoming's Bighorn Basin. Maxwell, a retired professor of surgery at the University of Utah and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has authored books covering the civil war years in Utah and the life of Robert Newton Baskin.Maxwell's thesis contends “this last officially called colonization by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Apostle Abraham Owen Woodruff was intended to preserve, in frontier isolation, a place to continue plural marriage” (6). He places the colonization “within the broader context of financial, socioeconomic, and political crises of their time” with a much greater emphasis on plural marriage as a motivating factor for migrating (6). Maxwell credits historian Floyd O'Neil for planting the seed to investigate whether Abraham Owen Woodruff's mission call was a ploy to secretly sustain post-Manifesto polygamy in perpetuity within the confines of the United States, in addition to polygamist colonies in Canada and Mexico.The Big Horn Colonization Company enterprise initially had a lot going for it. It was sanctioned by President Snow to distract some from the challenges of the economic depression, prolonged drought, church indebtedness, and persecution. Four apostles—Owen Woodruff, Matthias Foss Cowley, John Whitaker Taylor, and Mariner Wood Merrill—all supported the Bighorn Basin colonization effort and each of them carried an extraordinary depth of devotion to continuing polygamy as a new and everlasting covenant that could not be discontinued in principle nor practice. Woodruff was a rising bright star in LDS leadership, one of the youngest apostles, and the president/agent of the “Colonization Committee of 1896.” Moreover, church leaders sought for and received the support and encouragement of Wyoming's governor Deforest Richards and secretary of state Fennimore Chatterton. Finally, they had the support of Wyoming's most famous citizen, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, who offered land and water to help establish Cody as the eastern entrance to Yellowstone.The Mormon colonists of 1900 and 1901 comprised a hardy lot of those who answered the “call” and some who “volunteered,” many of them emigrating from southern Utah near Parowan but also coming from all areas of the state. Occupations included bakers, plasterers, craftsmen, artisans, ranchers, miners, and about 25 percent had some farming experience. They laid out the townsites and drew lots to receive their parcels and build shelters for the winter in Byron, Cowley, or nearby Lovell.The Latter-day Saints organized together to undertake a herculean effort to dig a canal to irrigate forty-to-eighty-acre plots of alfalfa, vegetables, oats, sugar beets, and wheat. The men dug by hand and with horse-drawn scoop scrapers a canal thirty-seven miles long, twenty-five feet wide at the top, fifteen feet wide at the bottom, and five feet deep, with a grade of two feet per mile. Even a massive boulder holding up the project cleaved in twain following an earnest prayer for divine assistance, earning the name Prayer Rock. Completed in 1904, colonists hoped the desert would blossom. Unfortunately, the heavy clay soil quickly became waterlogged and salt-encrusted alkali caused repeated crop failures.The extension of the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad offered the Mormons a contract to build a railroad line from Montana to Cody. This temporary respite provided cash and supplies to those in desperate need. But it was not enough. Many decided they had endured sufficiently and moved away within the first decade, some trying their hand at colonizing the Uintah Basin of northeastern Utah after it opened to settlement in 1905.Maxwell focuses on the post-Manifesto polygamy practices of a few Latter-day Saints who thought church leadership endangered an unchangeable and everlasting doctrine. Church leaders, they insisted, capitulated to political pressure, and compromised practices to ensure the church's survival in the court of public opinion, as well as after the 1890 Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of the Edmunds-Tucker Act (1887) outlawing polygamy and cohabitation and authorizing confiscation of church finances and property. This ruling prompted President Wilford Woodruff's 1890 Manifesto, followed by President Lorenzo Snow's 1900 Manifesto, and President Joseph F. Smith's repeated denials in 1904 and 1906 of continued or new polygamy within the church. Despite the federal law and church denials, apostles Woodruff, Cowley, Taylor, and Merrill continued to enter into new plural marriages themselves and perform them for others between 1890 and 1905. Congress subpoenaed all four to testify in Washington during the Reed Smoot hearings, but none complied.Owen Woodruff's death in 1904 and the “resignations” of apostles Taylor and Cowley in 1906 and their subsequent excommunications in 1911 ultimately led to post-Manifesto polygamy falling completely out of favor within the mainstream church. Splinter groups formed fundamentalist communities throughout the West, and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints denounced Lorin C. Wooley and the “Council of Seven Friends” as apostates in an official statement in 1933.The author incorporates information gleaned from primary accounts and newspapers, and builds upon earlier works by Marshall Bowen, Melvin Fillerup, Kurt Graham, Mark Partridge, Charles Welch, and Lawrence Woods. The research is sound, although there are a few factual errors like on page 163 where he states Lyman is located in Uintah County, Utah, rather than in Uinta County, Wyoming. Lyman was founded by Owen Woodruff and Francis M. Lyman in the late 1890s and would have bolstered the author's case of another concurrent LDS colonizing effort in Wyoming. The author discusses the inevitable challenges of researching something secret and criminalized (post-Manifesto polygamy) and acknowledges the shortcomings of cryptic and fragmentary notes that only suggest the conclusions he draws from an incomplete record. He acknowledges that no written evidence yet produced reveals Owen Woodruff's intent to secretly preserve plural marriage and his suppositions remain circumstantial (145, 154).The Last Called Mormon Colonization provides an important record of the Big Horn Basin Colonizing Company, as well as a significant contribution chronicling post-Manifesto polygamy between 1890 and 1906 and the forces within and without working simultaneously toward polygamy's continuation and its eradication. Whether this last LDS colonization effort of an isolated region of Wyoming was an expression of a refusal to abandon plural marriage remains a conundrum.

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