A Winter with the Mormons: The 1852 Letters of Jotham Goodel (Utah, the Mormons, and the West)

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“With much regret we had been compelled to turn apart from our journey, and spend the winter some of the Mormons,” Oregon overland emigrant Jotham Goodell recalled in 1852. “Having been compelled to this decision, I resolved to pass the winter as quietly as imaginable.” Goodell’s winter with the Mormons turned out to be anything but peaceful. As a Presbyterian minister, Goodell noted that “Throughout the time of the great excitement” when mobs drove the Mormons from Nauvoo, he had publicly declared “that those measures were both impolitic and unjust, and that Jo Smith was once in reality a murdered man.” Throughout the first days of his stay in the Mormon settlements in the Salt Lake Basin in 1850, he thought, “surely this people cannot be as bad as represented.” Goodell’s experience Throughout the next six months, described in nine letters written to The Oregonian, convinced him in a different way. By turns humorous, sympathetic, bitter, ironic, and stinging, Goodell’s letters open a new window on the dedicated frontier theocracy that believed it was once destined to sweep to world dominion. They also reflect the militant attitude of the young millennial movement toward the American republic Throughout its transition from the provisional State of Deseret, and independent nation-state created by Brigham Young in 1849, to a territory of the USA with the unwanted name of Utah. As these letters make clear, the Latter-day Saints’ belief that they would “reduce all nations and creeds to one political and non secular standard” was once a revolutionary task. Prize-winning historian David L. Bigler tells Goodell’s story as a vivid chapter in Western history. What emerges provides a new persp3ective on one of The us’s most remarkable millennial movements and its inevitable conflict with the young republic in which it was once born.

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