David L. Bigler

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David L. Bigler | The Aiken Party Executions and The Utah War, 1857–1858 | The Western Historical Quarterly, 38.4 | The History Cooperative

The Aiken Party Executions and The Utah War, 1857–1858

Six men rode into Salt Lake Valley and disappeared during the 1857–1858 Utah War. Their fate reveals the absence of federal law, which moved President Buchanan to dispatch troops to the Mormon territory. It also exposes the conditions that led to the Mountain Meadows massacre and Brigham Young's autocratic leadership.

SIX "GENTLEMEN OF GOOD ADDRESS," known as the Aiken party, rode into Salt Lake Valley from California in October 1857 and were never seen or heard from again by family members or friends. Their covert arrest and execution illustrates why James Buchanan early in his presidency ordered troops to Utah to enforce federal law and exposes the conditions that led Mormons and their Indian allies that year to massacre over one hundred California-bound emigrants at Mountain Meadows.¹ The Aiken party murders, ordered by Mormon leaders and carried out by church members in central Utah, are also a haunting reminder of the fear and desperation the millennialist Mormons felt, and the absolute power Brigham Young exerted over the lives of all who entered the territory.²

Named after brothers Thomas and John Aiken, the party knew that in May of 1857, Buchanan had ordered the U. S. Army to escort a new governor to Utah to replace Brigham Young and serve as a posse comitatus in asserting federal law in the vast theocratic territory.³ Members of the Aiken Party planned to meet the federal army approaching Utah and profit from the stationing of some 2,500 soldiers in Salt Lake Valley, but Brigham Young's explosive reaction would ignite the 1857–1858 Utah War and prevent for eight months the arrival of U. S. troops.⁴

"If they can send a force against this people, we have every Constitutional and legal right to send them to hell, and we calculate to send them there," Young thundered.⁵ On 15 September 1857, acting as governor after his term had expired and before his appointed successor arrived, he proclaimed martial law. Young ordered the territorial militia, known as the Nauvoo Legion, to repel the "invasion" and shut down travel without a permit "into or through or from" a region of the American West that reached a thousand miles from the Rocky Mountains to the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada.⁶

The immediate impact of the trails closure, which virtually cut the nation in half, fell on California. There the newly elected fifth governor, John B. Weller, expressed alarm over the effect of "Mormons and Indians" on immigration. He said people were entitled to protection "whilst traveling through American territory" and called on the "whole power of the federal government to ensure it."⁷ As he gave his inaugural address in January 1858, volunteer companies were forming in gold mining towns along the Sierra Nevada, ready to march against Utah from the west.⁸

Now largely forgotten, the 1857–1858 military confrontation was the nation's first civil war, but the third Mormon conflict in only twenty years. The Mormons and their millennialistic faith had seen little peace since Joseph Smith, Jr., founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1830. Professing to speak for God as in the days of Moses, Smith established a governing system the faith's founding prophet termed a "theodemocracy."⁹ But civil conflicts in Missouri and Illinois in 1838 and 1845–1846 had proved that theocratic rule by any name was incompatible with governments by the people through their elected representatives.

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