Nathan K. Rees

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.

I’ve written about race in Mormon art in the context of Utah colonization. Even in that niche, I’ve only just scratched the surface. There are a handful of great scholars who have taken on this issue from a variety of other perspectives, but for a religious tradition with such a long and complicated history of theological, social, and political perspectives on race, there is *so* much more to be said. I’m really excited to be collaborating with Heather Belnap on a project that will deepen the conversation around this very important issue. If you’re interested in exploring any topic related to race in Mormon art/visuality—from any branch of the Mormon Restoration, in any time period, through any visual medium—please consider submitting a proposal, and please share with anyone you know who might be interested.

Here’s a pdf to share.

Proposals are due November 1. Hope you’ll submit, and let me know if you have any questions at all.

Last month while I was in Utah I tried to get a photograph from the view that George Ottinger captured 150 years ago in the painting I chose for the cover of my book. I think I got fairly close, although I wasn’t lucky enough to catch the amazing purple sunset that Ottinger painted.

The mountains in the background haven’t changed much, but Ottinger would be astonished to see what the Salt Lake Valley looks like in 2021. The 1870 census counted 12,854 people in Salt Lake City with about 6,000 more in the valley. Currently the city has nearly 200,000 residents, with just over a million people living in the Salt Lake Valley.

The red brick buildings in the foreground are part of what’s left of Camp Douglas (later Fort Douglas), but they date from after Ottinger’s painting. The original buildings are visible in a photograph by Ottinger and his partner Charles R. Savage, taken from the opposite perspective, looking away from the city.

I was surprised how much the Tabernacle dominated the Salt Lake City skyline around 1870—the Temple was still twenty years from completion, and none of the city’s meetinghouses or public buildings were particularly tall. The Tabernacle, completed in 1867, was a brand new addition to the skyline when Ottinger painted it. Now the Tabernacle and the Temple are are mostly obscured from that vantage point by the Hotel Utah (now the Joseph Smith Memorial Building), which opened in 1911.

The most surprising thing I learned researching this work, though, was that Ottinger likely painted it while he was imprisoned at the camp. More on that next time!

I presented at the Mormon History Association last week in Park City, which was my first in-person conference since October of 2019. It was great to remember how fulfilling non-virtual human interaction is, and it was exciting to see really powerful work on Mormonism’s complicated history related to race. My talk explored how landscape paintings by Mormon artists worked to promote colonialism, using the rhetoric of “improving” or “reclaiming” land and water resources to justify displacement of Native people.

I focused on a little-known painting, Harvest Time, Ephraim, that C. C. A. Christensen completed late in his career in 1904. At first glance, it seems like an unassuming pastoral landscape like scores of others painted in Utah around the turn of the century. Yet it highlights the source of Mormon agricultural success that most other works took for granted: irrigation.

Mormonism has a fascinating relationship with irrigation. Even though they were settling a semi-arid region, nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints were committed to building an agrarian society. They largely succeeded—by intervening in the region’s natural hydrology to redirect water resources on a massive scale. I had no idea, growing up in Salem where we had a water turn from the Strawberry Water Users Association, that the water I was turning down rows in our garden had been diverted from the Colorado River watershed through a massive tunnel across the Wasatch.

Irrigation wasn’t just the basis of Utah’s agricultural economy—it also became a powerful symbol of Mormons as quintessential pioneers, making the American desert “blossom as the rose.” Especially as they sought to rehabilitate their image after the nineteenth-century struggle over polygamy, early twentieth-century Latter-day Saints constantly promoted their innovations in irrigation as evidence of their essential Americanness. Farming scenes like Christensen’s weren’t just pretty pictures; they were great PR (or propaganda, depending on how you look at it) for Mormonism.

Maybe less obviously, they were also propaganda for white displacement of Native people. This rhetoric is easier to see in images that actually depict Native people, like Christensen’s imagined view of Temple Hill in Manti at the arrival of the first Latter-day Saint settlers. He juxtaposed that scene with an image of the Manti Temple forty years later, highlighting its pristinely manicured formal gardens (which were never quite completed as Christensen depicted them). The message was obvious to contemporaneous Mormon viewers: where other people had never managed to rise above the wilderness in which they lived, the Latter-day Saints had “reclaimed” the landscape as a verdant, orderly garden.

If you’re interested in learning more about Mormon settlers’ interactions with Native people, Jared Farmer’s On Zion’s Mount is an excellent place to start. The super-abbreviated version is that Latter-day Saints initially worked to convert and assimilate the Northern Ute, Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, Diné, and other Native nations whose lands they were settling. By the end of the nineteenth-century, they had largely given up that effort and instead relied on the United States government to remove and confine Native people on remote reservations. Mormons of the era worked hard to justify settlement, using texts and images to hide the brutal reality of intercultural violence (I explore this in much more detail in Mormon Visual Culture and the American West).

I tried to make two really important points in my MHA talk. The first is that images of Native absence are just as much a part of this promotional agenda as images that record Native presence. Christensen’s Harvest Time, Ephraim is as much about Mormon claims of cultural superiority as his paired paintings of Manti’s Temple Hill. Harvest Time, Ephraim—really all the pastoral landscapes produced in Utah around the turn of the century—celebrate Mormon farmers as helping the land blossom into its divine potential through irrigated agriculture, justifying the physical and cultural violence attending “Indian Removal” by erasing Native presence in images of the very landscapes from which Native bodies had been violently displaced.

The other important point is that although we tend to think of the establishment of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation in the 1860s-70s as the end of colonization in Utah, settlers were still taking Native lands and water resources well into the twentieth century. In fact, the year after Christensen painted Harvest Time, Ephraim, Theodore Roosevelt signed the proclamation opening vast tracts of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation to white settlement. One of the strongest arguments for this new stage of “Indian removal” was that Mormon settlers could employ irrigation to “improve” the region in ways that Northern Utes and other Native peoples had allegedly failed to. Most of my research has been on the nineteenth century, but I’m working on an essay exploring the twentieth-century intersections of race, colonization, and water in Utah art and visual culture.

If you’ve spent much time in Salt Lake City, you’ll know the This is the Place Monument by the artist Mahonri Young. I hadn’t thought much more of it than being the giant granite thing with statues you drive by on the way to the zoo. When it was built in the 1940s, it must have been much more monumental perched on the bench where you could see it from most anywhere in the north end of the valley, but now it’s been a bit crowded by development. It’s also been incorporated into a much larger historical/educational facility, This is the Place Heritage Park, where, beginning in the 1970s, the state relocated or rebuilt nineteenth-century buildings.

I find it fascinating how the new context of the park treats the monument itself as a kind of historical relic—originally a modern commemoration of a historical event, now it’s a remnant of mid-twentieth century Utah/Mormon history. I think that historicized position is probably a good thing, since it opens some space between our understanding of the monument and our interpretation of the history that it represents. Whereas its creators would have preferred us to think about it as a transparent representation of the settlement of Utah, it’s hard not to see it now as a window on what that history meant to mid-twentieth century Utahns, and how they employed the representation of their ancestors of 1847 to further their own interests a century later.

While I was teaching at the University of North Dakota, two of my colleagues and I were intrigued by the similarities between the This is the Place Monument and another memorial halfway around the world—the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, South Africa. Both were built by white settler groups to commemorate their ancestors’ journeys to settle the remote interiors of their respective colonies. And both migrations had been spurred by conflict with other white settlers. The two monuments are physically very different, but they include a number of remarkably similar elements, especially in their construction of historical narratives that justify settlement and assert their sponsoring communities as the fittest, most deserving, and most successful settlers.

While these similarities were intriguing, a number of much more interesting questions arose when we realized that placing the monuments in comparison revealed places where each monument spoke through silence. This is especially evident in their representation of race. The Voortrekker Monument is aggressively vocal in asserting the racial superiority of the white Voortrekkers over the Indigenous peoples whose lands they colonized. Black Africans are represented throughout as threatening, savage, and duplicitous; hardly a surprise in a monument to Afrikaner Nationalism erected just as the Apartheid system was being encoded into South African law.

Viewed from this perspective, the This is the Place Monument is bizarrely silent about race. The only conflict its pioneers are shown engaging is with nature (in a relief depicting the Donner Party struggling to pull wagons through the canyon), and not with the Native peoples with whom Mormons violently clashed on numerous occasions over decades. The only Native American represented on This is the Place is Chief Washakie of the Northern Shoshone, represented in a full-figure portrait on the monument’s reverse.

Far from being threatening, Washakie seems totally approachable—his expression is pacific, he presents a “peace pipe” with his right arm and holds a ceremonial weapon down at his side with his left, signaling his desire not to fight. Furthermore, the monument’s inscription informs viewers that Washakie was a “close friend of Brigham Young and the Mormon people.”

The presence of Washakie and the absence of any other Native figures—including the numerous, well-known opponents of Brigham Young and the Mormon people—leaves viewers with a false sense that Mormon colonization of the Great Basin was characterized by interracial harmony. It reinforces white Utahns’ self-congratulatory narrative of having fed rather than fought Indians, while denying a voice to the multiple Native nations still very present in the state in 1947.

I don’t think that Mahonri Young and the others who helped plan and execute the monument thought of Native Americans as a significant part of twentieth-century Utah. I get the sense that to Young and his colleagues, Native people seemed more like historical relics, a fringe population whose presence really only mattered in the past. There’s a note in Mahonri Young’s papers with a joke about the monument’s dedication ceremony:

“Young said they told him he could have ten minutes and he took less than two, ‘the shortest talk of the day.’ Dr. John Sharp, a brother-in-law, said, ‘I beg your pardon, Hon [Mahonri’s friends called him ‘Hon’], Wasikie—grandson of Chief Wasikie—depicted on the monument, made the shortest talk of the day—’Ugh-h-h!'”

It’s worth considering whose place the This is the Place Monument claims Utah is. It’s also been fascinating exploring how monuments by other settler groups reveal how the broader discourse of early twentieth-century colonialist commemoration informed what This is the Place chose to show, and what it chose to conceal. For much, much more detail on this comparison, check out our first publication, “Enshrining Gender in Monuments to Settler Whiteness: South Africa’s Voortrekker Monument and the United States’ This Is the Place Monument,” which was generously made open-access by the journal Humanities. I’ll be posting soon about how the monument represents gender—and I’ll also add an update about another forthcoming piece where we look even more specifically at the issue of race.

We were lucky to have a huge amount of scholarship to draw on as we thought about the politics of representation in public monuments. I was especially delighted to find that Sara M. Patterson has already been doing amazing scholarship on this very issue in relation to Mormon monuments, including the This is the Place Monument. Her book, Pioneers in the Attic: Place and Memory Along the Mormon Trail, which just came out last summer, is a really important reconsideration of “Mormon history” as a meaningful concept in the present, not an objective collection of facts about the past.

How are Sacred Harp minutes so boring and so fascinating at the same time? Lists of names and numbers are hardly interesting reading, yet just about every singer I know gets an awful lot more out of the Minutes Book than merely those stats. I wrote a piece for a non-singing audience that explores how the Minutes Book communicates more than meets the eye—https://muse.jhu.edu/article/751778

I’m excited to share that my book is now available! It’s an exploration of art and Mormonism in nineteenth-century Utah – showing how art both documented and participated in Mormon religious practice, colonization, the struggle over polygamy, and more: https://www.routledge.com/Mormon-Visual-Culture-and-the-American-West/Rees/p/book/9780367271770