UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
The Mormon Battalion Experience: Four Soldiers, Four Stories By EUGENE H. PERKINS and WALDO C. PERKINS
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t first thought, the Mormon Battalion was an unlikely historical occurrence. The Mormons were trekking across Iowa, headed somewhere into the West and feeling terribly betrayed by a government that had failed to protect them from mob action in Missouri and Illinois. On the other hand, Stephen Watts Kearny, commanding the Army of the West whose task it was to establish American authority in New Mexico and California in the Mexican War, did not need or particularly want a new battalion of untrained and untested troops.Yet, here in the summer of 1846, President James K. Polk saw some political advantage in authorizing such a military force. As for Mormon leader Brigham Young, the payoff would come in two ways — an infusion of hard cash into his community of saints and an enhanced image for the Mormons in the public eye. Thus the deal was struck, and some five Panel on the Mormon Battalion hundred Mormon men accompanied by thirty-four of their women and forty-four chil- Monument depicting “The dren, departed for Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Enlistment” of young Mormon on July 20 and 22.1 After two weeks spent men into the U. S. Army. Eugene H. Perkins, a retired immunologist living in Provo, researched and published extensively as a research scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, Oak Ridge,Tennessee. Waldo C. Perkins, an otolaryngologist, retired in 1989 after twenty-nine years of practice at the Salt Lake Clinic. 1
Norma Baldwin Ricketts, The Mormon Battalion, US Army of the West, 1846-1848 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1996), 17. Several basic histories of the Mormon Battalion include Daniel Tyler, A Concise History of the Mormon Battalion in the Mexican War, 1846-1847 (Glorieta, New Mexico: Rio Grande Press, 1969); Frank E. Golder, ed., The March of the Mormon Battalion from Council Bluffs to California Taken from the Journal of Henry Standage (New York: Century, 1928); Paul D. Bailey, Sam Brannan and the California Mormons (Los Angeles:Westernlore Press, 1953).
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