The massive movement of pioneer migrants into the Great American West has long captured the attention of scholars and popular writers. As with immigration to America during the colonial and early national periods of United States history, the prime motive for trans-Atlantic uprooting and settlement was commonly economic. Yet there are major exceptions, such as John Winthrop’s Puritans, whose city-on-a-hill motives were largely other-worldly. So it was with the great Mormon migration that resulted in the unlikely confluence of desert and Saints in the Great Basin. These members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, imbued with the religious zeal needed to reenact the Hebrew exodus on an American stage, had been the victims of the intolerance and bigotry of an era characterized both by its anti-Catholic and pro-slavery activities.
Still, there was much good in America, with its abolitionists, its moral crusaders, and its Declaration-and Constitution-loving citizens. The Mormons, who prided themselves on being loyal subjects to a young country with both great heritage and high ideals, opposed slavery, opposed alcoholic intemperance, opposed closed-mindedness, and finally left the United States for Mexican territory that would soon become US territory. Persecution would continue, via “Buchanan’s blunder” and the blundering long-distance leadership of other presidents and congressional leaders, but the Latter-day Saints would not, this time, be dislodged. They would, instead, thrive, colonize, and bring tremendous population growth through heavy immigration and large families. Their momentous spiritual odyssey required economic diligence to achieve. Historians have chronicled the economic successes and failures of various traditional economic enterprises. Yet it is critical to acknowledge the substantial personal and community growth that came from those “failures,” and to bear in mind that measuring success is not solely a quantitative endeavor.
The Latter-day Saint economy was in many ways typical of that of other areas in nineteenth-century America. Cash was used, but in a highly agrarian society (even city dwellers grew substantial gardens) commodities were also a major means of exchange, commerce was both in kind and in cash, with the latter gaining increasing ascendancy as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Yet there was a major difference, a practice seen nowhere else in America on the scale to which it emerged in Utah. For numerous Latter-day Saints, the first and foremost religious duty, and economic priority, was to give away one-tenth of their increase to the Church. Payment of the religious tithe became both common and extensive, so much so that the management of commodities became a major concern, especially prior to the final decade of the 1800s, when cash became, officially, the leading means of exchange. This area of public resource management not only had religious implications, but also economic and social welfare consequences. Commodities could sustain workers on major building projects (including the magnificent Salt Lake Temple), but could also alleviate hunger and distress and welcome immigrants (who were plentiful in this missionary-minded church). As settlements expanded, tithing donations likewise grew, and an accompanying network of bishops proliferated to manage the tithing resources at the local, regional, and central levels. It is on these leaders, these ecclesiastical managers of donated resources that could melt, rot, make noise, and even run away, that this book focuses.
