The next time you hear Brigham Young’s pithy observation that he found it “cheaper to feed the Indians than to fight them,” keep one thing in mind: it’s a complete myth designed to hide a really ugly reality. The idea that Latter-day Saints were exceptional among Western settlers in treating Native People kindly has been a mainstay of Mormon folklore—and Mormon visual culture—for a hundred fifty years, but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
Pioneer Day is a great opportunity to reconsider this perspective. I came across a photo album at the Utah Historical Society of the Pioneer Day parade in Salt Lake in 1897, the fiftieth anniversary of Utah’s settlement. Among the lineup of floats are two back-to-back entries from Davis County: one depicting the county in 1847, and one representing its current state. The first features a stereotypically dressed “Indian” perched near a boulder, surrounded by sage brush and wild grass with a couple stuffed birds suggesting that this is barren wilderness. The second float, though, is basically a giant produce cart loaded with hundreds of tomatoes and onions, cabbages and squashes and more, crowned with a multi-tier display of canned vegetables. Not the most complicated iconography: before, the land was worthless waste, now the land is, as the banner on the side of the float proclaims, “The Garden Spot of Utah.” No wonder, by this logic, that the “Indians” needed feeding and that the Mormons were able to rise to the occasion.
It’s impossible to grow up in Utah without learning about Brigham Young’s benevolence toward Native Americans, captured in his oft-quoted adage that giving charity was the right thing to do both morally and practically. There are several important reasons, though, why this idea needs more thoughtful consideration.
First, it promotes a paternalistic view of colonization, in which generous white settlers saved impoverished Native People from starvation. This perception was used by countless nineteenth-century Americans to justify colonization.
The reality is that Native People in Utah were only facing serious food insecurity because Mormon settlers had destroyed the sophisticated ethnoecologies that had allowed them to flourish since time immemorial. Settlers stole Native farmlands for their own fields, they replaced game animals with grazing herds, they limited access to fisheries, and they interrupted food-trading networks. The Davis County in 1847 float (along with countless other images of Native Americans created by Mormon settlers) would have us believe that Native People lived a marginal subsistence in the wilderness. It’s a degrading and baseless misunderstanding of the diverse Native Nations living in what is now Utah, whose own worlds were as abundant in their own ways as the Davis County in 1897 float.
Second, the “cheaper to feed than fight” legend implies that Mormons did not fight Native Americans. I learned growing up in Utah that the state’s settlement was uniquely peaceful in the history of the West—that despite some occasional flareups like the Black Hawk War, Mormons and Indians mostly got along, and that the worst violence was perpetrated by the US Army.
In fact, Latter-day Saints and Native Americans engaged in frequent violence during the territorial era. Mormon settlers were responsible for multiple massacres in which Native People of all ages and genders were indiscriminately killed, although these were frequently remembered as “battles” to make them seem more palatable. Occasionally—the “Circleville Massacre,” for example—even Mormon leaders recognized the barbarity of their own actions. Nor were Latter-day Saints blameless in the US Army’s atrocities. Many Mormon settlers supported, encouraged, and celebrated Patrick Connor’s troops in the Bear River Massacre, an event of inconceivable barbarity. And, despite all the self-congratulatory talk of Mormon benevolence, the outcome in Utah Territory was just like every other Western settlement: Native People were violently removed to and confined on remote reservations, regardless of the economics of feeding and/or fighting.
One more thought in relation to that last point: Brigham Young certainly thought Native People were cheaper to feed than to fight, but he strove continually to make someone else pay for the food. The fiasco of the Uintah Reservation—based on the never-ratified Treaty of Spanish Fork—came about in part because Young wanted to shift responsibility for feeding “Indians” to the Federal Government and away from Mormon colonists. Feeding Indians may have been comparatively cheap, but letting taxpayers foot the bill was an even better deal.
The one thing about the “cheaper to feed than to fight” idea that is not a myth is that Brigham Young actually said it. He repeated it so frequently that even non-Mormons outside the territory recognized it as a catchphrase. It’s critical, though, to understand this statement as a rhetorical strategy, not a historical reality. Driven by their sincere conviction of their moral rightness, combined with their commitment to convert Native People and “redeem the Lamanites,” Young and the Latter-day Saints wanted to frame their settlement as a positive example that stood out from the violence and destruction that attended Western colonization. Yet their words seldom matched their actions, and the feeding instead of fighting happened mostly in legend rather than in reality.
I’ll let you decide how to celebrate Pioneer Day. Whenever you think about pioneers, though, you might consider what you could learn not only from the virtues they aspired to, but from the places where their aspirations fell short. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to focus less on the mythical abstraction of “pioneers” in general and more on the specific actions of actual individuals. And you might also consider learning about the people they displaced, getting beyond the superficial gloss in your seventh grade Utah History textbook, and—this is really important—understanding that Native People are and have always been part of the present and not the past.
Just a couple of the many great places to learn more are Elise Boxer’s “This is the Place!: Disrupting Mormon Settler Colonialism,” in Decolonizing Mormonism (University of Utah Press, 2018) and Jared Farmer’s On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Harvard University Press, 2010). I write about Utah landscape painting in the context of colonization in Mormon Visual Culture and the American West, but we need much more scholarship on how images both express and help to create Latter-day Saints’ understanding of race, history, and settlement.