02/24/2002
SALT LAKE CITY – When Brigham Young entered the Great Salt Lake Basin,
legend has it he had but four words to say:
"This is the place."
But if history had unfolded slightly differently, "the place" might have
been Corpus Christi.
In 1844, Mormon leaders were in serious discussions with Sam Houston
about moving their flock to Texas, not Utah. Houston, anxious to put
some sort of barrier between its boundaries and Mexico, came close to
selling the southern tip of his young Republic to the church, which
wanted to turn it into an independent theocracy the Mormons called the
Kingdom of God.
When an untimely murder stopped those plans, the church's flirtation
with Texas was quickly forgotten. A few scholars have known pieces of
the tale for decades. But as the world focuses on Salt Lake City for the
Winter Olympics, a new book to be published this summer by a Brownsville
historian describes just how close Texas came to being Mormon country.
"They were dead serious about coming to Texas. They were ready to go,"
said Michael Scott Van Wagenen, author of The Texas Republic and the
Mormon Kingdom of God and a lecturer at UT-Brownsville.
Converts and opponents
The central figure of the story is Joseph Smith, the man who turned a
series of visions into a new religion that took hold of the nation's
imagination. According to Smith, an angel named Moroni appeared to him
in 1823 and showed him ancient scriptural documents buried in a hill in
upstate New York. Smith said that over the next seven years, he read and
translated the documents and published them as the Book of Mormon, which
he viewed as a supplement to the Bible.
Smith started telling others of his visions and soon gained a small
cluster of converts. And almost as quickly, he gained opponents. Voting
as a bloc, church members could achieve considerable power locally.
Rumors swirled about odd sexual practices such as polygamy. People
frightened or threatened by the church harassed, and in some cases, took
up arms against it. In the 1830s, the Mormons were chased from New York
to Ohio to Missouri to Illinois.
In 1839, Smith bought up a tiny Illinois village on the Mississippi
called Commerce. He changed its name to Nauvoo and set about building it
into a home for his followers. Within a few years, it rivaled Chicago as
Illinois' largest city. But the familiar cycle began again: As the
Mormons grew in strength, neighbors grew to fear their power.
Smith built a 5,000-man militia called the Nauvoo Legion to defend his
followers. But as Illinois leaders turned against him, Smith believed it
would be necessary to move again. And this time, he wanted to go
somewhere where he wouldn't be bothered.
"Joseph Smith's attitude was, 'We've got to go somewhere where nobody
else is, we've got to be the first,' " said Glen Leonard, director of
the Museum of Church History and Art in Salt Lake City.
Hundreds of miles south and west, Sam Houston and the Republic of Texas
were also having problems with troublesome neighbors. Mexico was eager
to reclaim the lands lost with the Republic's creation.
Of particular concern was the area between the Rio Grande and the Nueces
River, which reaches the Gulf of Mexico at Corpus Christi. Texas and
Mexico both claimed the area, and because there were few settlers there,
Houston knew it would be difficult to defend.
"Houston had almost no control of anything south of the Nueces," Van
Wagenen said. "Houston knew it was only a matter of time before Santa
Anna attacked."
Houston hoped Texas could be annexed into the United States where it
would have the protection of the U.S. Army. But concerns over slavery
meant annexation efforts were going nowhere in Washington. So Houston
had to consider other options.
As recently as 1840, Texas contemplated giving the Nueces Strip over for
the formation of a new country. The Republic had supported the creation
of the Republic of the Rio Grande, which included parts of northern
Mexico and Texas land up to the Nueces. Texas leaders thought the new
nation could provide a buffer between Texas and Mexico, but it only
survived a few months before Mexico took back its land.
In other words, the needs of Texas and the needs of the Mormons
coincided. Joseph Smith was looking for a piece of empty land to move
his followers to. Sam Houston was looking for settlers and had been
proven willing to give up a slice of Texas in exchange for added
security.
Turning to Texas
The idea of a Texas move reached Smith on March 10, 1844 in a letter
from Lyman Wight, one of the 12 church "apostles" who served directly
under Smith. Smith was considering other options, including a move to
the Oregon Territory, but Wight's letter prompted him to take action. He
called a meeting of the Council of 50, a governing body of the church.
Smith wrote in his journal:
Letter was read from Lyman Wight ... about removing to the table
lands of Saxet ... Joseph asked, can this council keep what I say, not
make it public, all held up their hands ... if Notsuoh will embrace the
gospel ... can amend that constitution and make it the voice of Jehovah
and shame the US.
Smith wrote in a simple reverse code in his journal: Saxet was Texas,
Notsuoh was Sam Houston. Smith wanted to buy up the majority of the
Texas Republic and turn it into an independent Mormon kingdom. Other
documents from the period disclose the land the Mormons wanted: all of
the Nueces Strip, plus nearly the entire Republic west of Austin.
On March 14, a church leader named Lucien Woodworth left for Austin to
negotiate a deal. George Miller, a member of the Council of 50, recorded
what happened on May 2, when Woodworth returned to Nauvoo:
The council convened to hear his report. It was altogether as we
could wish it. On the part of the church there was commissioners
appointed to meet the Texas Congress, to sanction or ratify the said
treaty, partly entered into by our minister and the Texas Cabinet.
A preliminary deal had been struck. Details are not known, but Van
Wagenen considers it unlikely that Houston would have agreed to the
initial Mormon offer. Houston had dreams of expanding "Greater Texas"
all the way to the Pacific, and selling all of West Texas to the Mormons
would have prevented that.
Two later Mormon documents from 1847 give clues that the negotiated area
was the Nueces Strip. One directly mentions "the Church removing to
Texas, to the country lying between the Nueces and Rio Grande rivers."
Orson Hyde, a top church official, wrote to Smith, asking if he would
"write to President Houston and ask him what encouragement he could give
us if we would commence an immediate emigration there, and supply him
with 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 thousand soldiers to help fight the battle."
The Council of 50 named Lucien Woodworth, George Miller and a third man
to head back to Austin and finalize the deal. Assuming negotiations
would be successful, Smith also named Miller and Lyman Wight to be the
pioneers who would settle the territory and prepare it for an influx of
Mormons.
'I shall die innocent'
Smith never got a chance to complete any of his Texas plans. A month
after Woodworth's return, anti-Mormon forces were growing more
aggressive. The governor of Illinois accused Smith of treason and issued
a warrant for his arrest. Smith decided to surrender to authorities.
A mob broke into Smith's jail cell on June 27, 1844. Smith was shot and
killed.
Smith had not publicly chosen a successor, so the newly leaderless
church was unsure how to proceed with Texas. Miller wrote later that he
wanted to "get the authorities together and clothe ourselves with the
necessary papers, and proceed to meet the Texan Congress, as before
Joseph's death agreed upon ... so that we would be able to complete the
unfinished negotiation of the treaty for the territory mentioned in my
former letters."
But Miller quickly found that the man who was taking over Smith's
leadership role, Brigham Young, didn't share his enthusiasm for Texas.
Rumors were swirling around Nauvoo that some members of the mob that
killed Smith were going to Texas to hide. And Young may have thought
better of moving the Mormons, in their weakened state, to land
immediately between two warring nations.
And, in retrospect, it was probably a smart call. The Mexican War broke
out in the proposed "Kingdom of God" just two years after Smith's death.
But Lyman Wight, the man who had first proposed Texas to Smith, wasn't
very interested in Young's thoughts. The two men were rivals, and Wight
considered his mission from Smith – to lead an advance party into Texas
– still binding.
Wight announced he was going to take a band of Mormons on his own from
Wisconsin into Texas. In September 1845, Wight and his party left for
Texas. They spent the winter in Grayson County before traveling south
through Dallas, passing on Preston Road, and making it to Austin.
Austin had only 500 residents at the time, so the 150 new Mormons in
town quickly became integral to Austin life. They became regionally
famous for their furniture manufacturing, and they built Austin's first
jail.
But Wight's efforts were cursed from the start. Floods and economic
hardship forced them to move four times in 11 years. In 1858, in the
midst of another move, Wight died. His followers dispersed around the
country. Some joined the rest of the Mormons, who by then had reached
Utah; others stayed in Texas and blended into the population.
"Their descendants still live in Texas," said Van Wagenen, who is
Mormon. "I bet if you went up to them and told them about their Mormon
ancestors, they'd have no idea what you're talking about."
North Texas interest
Van Wagenen acknowledges there was no guarantee the Mormons would have
moved to Texas if Joseph Smith had lived.
In fact, there is evidence that, in the last month of his life, Smith
may have been changing his target from South Texas to North Texas. Just
before his death, he was contacted separately by two Texas land
speculators, one of whom tried to sell him a piece of land north of
Dallas, on the Red River. One wrote to Smith:
In Texas you will find no dense population to contend with, no bigots
to oppress, no overwhelming power to crush you in your infancy, but a
new field open to the enterprising pioneer.
Van Wagenen suggests that these communications with private land
speculators might mean that Smith was souring on the idea of forming an
independent nation, and shifting his goal to living peacefully within
Texas, on the superior land in the Republic's north.
Traditional Mormon history has virtually ignored Smith's dalliance with
Texas, or considered it as something Joseph Smith considered only
cursorily.
Leonard, for example, said he believes Smith considered Texas primarily
as one of several "gathering places" for Mormons around the country, and
that Smith was not interested in moving the greater part of the faith to
Texas. "Texas was never seen as a headquarters," he said.
But D. Michael Quinn, a Mormon historian whose controversial research
has gotten him excommunicated from the church, said that the historical
record supports the Texas thesis.
"It's very common for historians to view history from hindsight," Quinn
said. "They're not looking at it from the point of view of 1844 and what
the church's options were then. ... I think Texas was far more serious
an option in 1844 than anything involving Utah."
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Map of proposed region
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Official website