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Slouching Towards Slaterville: Joseph Morris’s Wide Swath in Weber County
Slouching Towards Slaterville: Joseph Morris’s Wide Swath in Weber County
By VAL HOLLEY
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
– William Butler Yeats,“The Second Coming”
Early in the summer of 1861, on the cusp of the American Civil War, the Utah correspondent of the New York Times announced that a “new prophet,” Joseph Morris, was claiming spiritual empowerment “far beyond the attainment of the original [Mormon founder Joseph] Smith or of the living Brigham [Young].” Morris prophesied “the early destruction, by ‘judgments,’ of the incorrigible portion of the Mormon community,” their twelve children, Mottsville, after which he and his followers would inter-vene and occupy Salt Lake City. A steady stream of converts, called Morrisites, could be seen driving their wagons, herds, and flocks to Morris’s headquarters, the old Kington Fort at South Weber, Davis County.With the newly-formed Confederate States of America in mind, the Times correspondent apprehended that “secession must be infectious.” 1
Former Slaterville residents and Morrisites Agnes Cowan Bull (seated, far left) and William Field Bull (white beard) with eleven of their twelve children, Mottsville, Nevada,c.1889.
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Reports of the Morrisites’ unusual beliefs animated the Times’ dispatches from Utah. They consecrated their wagons, animals, and food to be shared equally among themselves, making Kington Fort “a tolerably good place for the poor.” Because they were sure that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent and that the spoils of Salt Lake City would fall into their hands, they planted no crops. Most ominously, they maintained a supply of firearms in anticipation of being attacked by the Mormons.2
Conflicts between the Morrisites and their neighbors and local law officers led ultimately to the “Morrisite War” in June 1862. A cannon-bearing militia marched to Kington Fort to enforce judicial writs previously ignored by Morris and his advisers. After three days of siege and exchange of gunfire, in which Morris, a few of his followers, and two militiamen were killed, the Morrisites surrendered and their able-bodied men were taken to Salt Lake City as prisoners. At their March 1863 trial, seven Morrisite defendants were convicted of murder while the rest were fined for armed resistance to the law, but three days later the non-Mormon governor, Stephen Harding, acting on a petition from Utah’s non-Mormon citizens, pardoned them all.3 Soon after, the majority of the Morrisites quit Utah for Carson Valley, Nevada, or Soda Springs, Idaho.
While the Morrisite War has long fascinated Utah history buffs, many aspects of the Morrisite experience remain obscure. The site of Morris’s first success as a spiritual leader, Slaterville in Weber County, was always overshadowed by the events at Kington Fort, but it merits a closer look because it spawned the highest concentration of Morrisite converts in Utah territory. Moreover, a smaller but equally cohesive cluster of Morrisites in the neighboring town of Marriott had been completely forgotten until now. Thanks to the digitization of nineteenth-century newspaper collections, much enlightenment on Morris and his followers in Slaterville and Marriott has resurfaced. This article focuses on the individual identities, histories, and motivations of these forgotten persons as a means of understanding what made the Morrisite movement possible. 4
Joseph Morris, an English convert to Mormonism, was destined to become Utah’s gadfly-in-chief from the moment he set foot in the territory in 1853. His obsession with spiritual conundrums alienated his associates and crippled his capacity to support himself. Living nomadically in Ephraim, American Fork, Provo, and Salt Lake City, he tried to convince fellow Mormons that their church had gone astray, which kept him in constant trouble with local Mormon leaders. Frustrated at their rejection, Morris began writing to Brigham Young, accusing him of greed and corruption and claiming divine authority to rescue the church. Young apparently read Morris’s letters and penciled comments such as “He’s weak minded” in the margins. Perhaps Young had been told of Morris’s injuries in coal mine explosions as a teenager in England, which Morris’s brother claimed left him “visionary and flighty in his mind ever after.” 5
While Morris never recorded the date or reason for his move to Slaterville, he may have sensed that, like Yeats’ rough beast, “its hour come round at last,” his prophetic career would kindle in Weber County. According to an account in Tullidge’s Quarterly Magazine, he boarded with Thomas Virgo, one of Slaterville’s earliest settlers, whose home was on the south side of present-day Pioneer Road in the 2500 block, “for about a period of two years.”Virgo was also English and about six years younger than Morris.
The parallels between Virgo and Morris are, to say the least, uncanny. Virgo, another injured veteran of the English coal mines, “became very restless and noisy and troublesome to his neighbors, at times a religious maniac. [Virgo’s] influences seemed to affect Morris, [who] grew very indolent and indisposed to labor.” Morris, in turn, began telling people in Slaterville and Marriott that he was a revelator and had been “raised up to represent Moses for the seventh time.” 6
When harvest season arrived, Morris’s revelations suddenly multiplied rapidly, perhaps a harbinger of the Morrisite trait of eschewing farming in favor of prayer and cogitation.While he had recorded only three revelations previously, twenty-two more would come between August 17 and November 13, 1860.The first of these called Brigham Young and his counselors the “rebellious shepherds of my flock” and said they “turned a deaf ear” to God’s will, prompting “the cries of my people [to] come up into my ears for redress.” 7 If Morris disseminated it among the locals, it could have resonated with any who questioned Young’s authority and leadership.
Another Slaterville revelation called for Brigham Young to abdicate the presidency of the Mormon church and serve as first counselor to Morris, and for John Banks, a renowned missionary and orator, to become Morris’s second counselor. Reinforcing this notion was the appearance of the Great Comet of 1860 on the northwestern horizon early in the summer, which Morris interpreted as “the seventh star spoken of by John the Revelator, representing the seventh angel that has come forth.” Morris believed himself to be the seventh angel and the comet a sign of his imminent ascension as head of the church. 8
The breakthrough in Morris’s crusade came one day as he mowed hay with a farmer called Father Jones. Morris asked, “Do you know who I am?” Jones answered, “Yes, I do know that you are a prophet of God, for the spirit has told me so.” Jones’s testimony reinforced Morris’s dogged convictions. Mother Jones, the farmer’s wife, did not at first approve of Morris’s teachings, but she liked him and helped him to avoid the enemies who were “constantly on his track.” 9
Beginning with Father Jones, Morris made significant inroads among the people.“Several otherwise good men,” noted Tullidge’s,“yielded to this influence of darkness, and became followers of Morris.” 10 They were clustered in Slaterville’s west end along present-day Pioneer Road and in northwestern Marriott along present-day 700 South Street. No mysterious common thread among them has been found to explain their collective alacrity for Morris. A few pairs of these Morrisite families were related, while others had sailed to America on the same ships or crossed the plains in the same companies, but otherwise, few knew each other before moving to Slaterville or Marriott. The majority were English-speaking immigrants, although the most obvious connection between the clusters was Italian Piedmontese siblings, Slaterville’s Catherine Cardon Byrne and Marriott’s John Cardon. 11
Once the groundswell for Morris became apparent to local Mormon officials, they no longer welcomed his presence. Tullidge’s reported, “R[obert] E. Baird [a local captain in the territorial militia], under the direction of [Slaterville Branch] President Thomas Richardson, advised [Morris], for the peace and good order of the people, to leave the settlement.” Morris at first ignored the edict, but his nonchalance made Mother Jones nervous and she nagged him until he packed his belongings into a small bundle anddeparted. Interestingly, Morris never mentioned Baird or Richardson in connection with his expulsion from Slaterville. Writing to Brigham Young on November 20, 1860, he charged that “Chancy [sic] West has driven me away from the place which I was staying at and now I have no place to go.” 12
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Chauncey Walker West of Ogden was the Mormon presiding bishop of Weber County, responsible for managing its tithing office. Bishop West maintained a most active oversight among the county’s congregations. With Weber Stake president Lorin Farr, he had supervised Slaterville’s organization as a branch of the church on September 10, 1858. His immersion in the minutiae of stake business—blessing babies, performing marriages, brokering divorces—is clear from frequent references to him in diaries and minutes. Authorized biographies emphasize West’s reputation for “unbounded” hospitality and as “friend of the poor.”13
But when it came to dissenters in general and Morrisites in particular, West’s policy was zero tolerance. During their time at Kington Fort, the Morrisites appealed to West, Ogden’s acting justice of the peace, to intervene against ruffians’ frequent stealing of their cattle, but West said he could not help them because “there was no law for apostates.” In 1863, West would excommunicate a North Ogden man who had allowed a Morrisite in his home for half an hour.West declared, “[Brigham Young’s] counsel at conference was to cut off all who harbored these damned scamps in their houses.” 14
Presumably, West felt strongly that Morris must go. He and Morris might well have collided but for the unforeseen intervention of an act of God. As related in an 1867 letter from “An Old Mormon” to Salt Lake City’s Union Vedette, Morris “was driven from [Slaterville] by his persecutors, who were after him with their guns; but a heavy hurricane caused them to seek shelter, and he made his escape.” 15 According to the Deseret News, a “terrible storm” of thirty-six hours’ duration struck northern Utah beginning the night of November 15, 1860, forcing West to abandon all previous engagements. An Ogden correspondent wrote that the storm nearly destroyed that city’s tithing office, but “thro’ the timely exertion of Bishop West,” who directed the securing of its roof with a strong cable rope, the building was saved. 16
Trudging unscathed towards Salt Lake City, Morris encountered John Cook of South Weber, Davis County. Cook regarded Morris’s claims favorably and suggested that his brother Richard, bishop of the South Weber Ward, might also be receptive.The Cook brothers offered Morris the security and comfort to which he felt entitled, freeing him from the need to importune Brigham Young and facilitating his altered plan to establish his own church in lieu of ruling the Mormons. In South Weber, Morris quickly attracted at least sixteen followers.
While the “Morris problem” in Weber County had been handled locally, Morris’s success in Davis County, entailing the spiritual abduction of a bishop, genuinely alarmed the Mormon general authorities in Salt Lake City. Two apostles, Wilford Woodruff and John Taylor, notified Bishop Cook that they would “regulate” his ward on Monday, February 11, 1861. From a previous appointment in Ogden, Woodruff and Taylor were chauffeured to South Weber by Chauncey West in his horse-drawn sleigh. 17
The apostles had somehow collected abundant and intimate intelligence on Morris before the meeting, noting that he had been excommunicated twice for adultery and had spent the previous year with the wife of a “crazy” man. Woodruff admonished Morris that he was neither a prophet of God nor the seventh angel. “I told Morris,” wrote Woodruff, “that when the 7th Angel Came to Earth he would not spend the first year of his Mission with a woman whose Husband was Crazy & Commit Adultery with Her … Morris Denyed of Being with that woman.” 18
The only adult male categorized as insane in the 1860 census of Weber or Davis counties was Thomas Virgo. Most likely Virgo’s wife, Ann, was the woman to whom Woodruff referred.
Morris’s sixteen South Weber adherents were summarily excommunicated at the meeting’s conclusion, many of them polygamous Cook brothers and their multiple wives. Three months had elapsed since Morris’s ouster from Slaterville, where his sympathizers were apparently enjoying temporary forbearance. But no sooner did news of the South Weber meeting reach Slaterville than the branch conducted its first three excommunications. Overall, at least twenty-nine Slaterville Morrisites would be cut off in monthly Sunday sessions through June, followed by three more in September. For Marriott, excommunication records have not been found, but at least six Marriott families and one married man would unite with the Morrisites at Kington Fort.19
Among those excommunicated in Slaterville were Charlotte Dinwoodey Lee, great-aunt of future Mormon apostle Henry Dinwoodey Moyle, and her husband Andrew; Peter Lamb McCue, a former bishop of the Salt Lake First Ward, and his wife Mary; and William Magee, a former counselor to McCue, and his wife Sarah. McCue had earlier been president of the Mormon conference in Glasgow, Scotland. 20 The Magees were passengers on the ill-fated steamboat Saluda, which exploded while ferrying Mormon immigrants from St. Louis to Kanesville, Iowa, in 1852; both were injured, Sarah seriously so. 21
McCue and Magee were not the only Slaterville Morrisites with solid records as faithful Mormons. In 1857 William Field Bull joined seventy other missionaries called to pull handcarts from Utah to the Missouri River to refute negative perception of handcart immigration; from there he continued to Canada to proselytize. Bull, McCue, and James Cowan Jr. used their Mormon priesthood authority to bless babies in the year preceding their excommunications. William Harris blessed his infant daughter, Hannah Rosa, on February 7, 1861, only three months before his excommunication. 22
In Marriott, the Morrisites included William J. Jones, whose eventual rebellion and imprisonment at Kington Fort were the catalyst for the Morrisite War, and his wife Ann; and John Cardon, who would build Ogden’s first wool carding mill and one of its first molasses mills. 23
Some Slaterville and Marriott followers joined Morris at Kington Fort even before the formal organization of his new church on April 6, 1861. Among the first six members baptized, confirmed, and ordained that day was Slaterville’s Moses Byrne. Three other Slaterville men, William Magee, Andrew Lee, and William White, were also baptized that day. Marriott’s John E. Jones and Slaterville’s James Cowan Sr. would become Morrisite apostles. In June, William Harris was called as bishop and instructor to the Aaronic priesthood. After both Marriott’s Joseph Astle and Slaterville’s William Jones died in the spring of 1862, Morris produced a consoling revelation explaining that the two men were needed in the spirit world to report on the progress of Morris’s earthly mission. 24
When the Morrisite army organized in the spring of 1862, John E. Jones and Andrew Lee became company captains. A few Slaterville and Marriott men, however, appear neither in the army rolls nor in the list of prisoners taken after the Morrisite War. They and their families had already left Kington Fort, whether out of disillusionment with failed prognostications of the Second Coming or impatience with uncomfortable living conditions. The bolters included the Cowans and Bulls, who were related; the Byrnes and John Cardon, also related; and the Harrises. 25
The most ominous absence from the army rolls is Marriott’s William J. Jones, who wanted to quit Kington Fort and reclaim the oxen and wagon he had consecrated. But the Morrisite hierarchy denied Jones’s request. After he resorted to subterfuge to seize his property, he and two confederates were captured, shackled, and jailed. 26 Territorial Chief Justice John F. Kinney issued a writ of habeas corpus to gain the prisoners’ release, but the Morrisite leaders ignored it. Acting governor Frank Fuller then ordered the militia to South Weber to arrest Morris and the other obstinate leaders, triggering the Morrisite War.
Among the Morrisite men taken prisoner after the war were eleven from Slaterville and Marriott: Richard Alvy, Charles Higham, William H. Hill, John E. Jones, Andrew Lee, Peter Lamb McCue, Peter McCue Jr.,William Magee, John Petrie, Jens Christian Sorrenson, and William White. Slaterville’s Winter Hastings, who was not arrested but testified for the defense at the March 1863 trial, may have surrendered before the war’s end. 27
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The ultimate question of what motivated the Morrisites intrigued scholar C. LeRoy Anderson, who asked why they would “forsake their relatively secure life among the Mormons and join a group of outcasts in a ramshackle fort?”28 No document revealing a Weber County Morrisite’s rationale was known to exist until the recent discovery of a remarkable letter in the Birmingham (England) Daily Post of January 17, 1863. The letter was written late in 1862, a few months before the March 1863 trial of the Morrisite men. Its anonymous author was one of twenty absentee defendants who had slipped quietly out of Utah soon after their June 1862 arraignment.29 It was published in several British Isles newspapers and the Brooklyn (New York) Eagle of February 6, 1863.The author was “a convert to Mormonism, who left the neighborhood of Bristol some ten years ago to join the company of [Latter-day] Saints in Utah.” After a synopsis of the Morrisite War, the author concluded,
Of the twenty missing defendants, the only one to hail from “the neighborhood of Bristol” was William H. Hill, whose home in Utah had been Marriott. Hill, with wife Ann, sons William and Eleazer, and daughters Elizabeth and Ellen, immigrated to America in 1853 on the ship International and crossed the plains the same year in the Cyrus Wheelock company. “During my stay in the country,” Hill wrote,“I made considerable property. I had eleven cows and other young stock, a pair of mules, and horses and sheep, and plenty of wheat and a good farm.” At Kington Fort, Hill’s sons were musicians in the Morrisite army. Although the sons apparently left Kington Fort before the war, Hill remained to the bitter end, writing, “We fought them until our ammunition was all spent, after which we surrendered, when they rushed in upon us after we had hoisted a flag of truce.”31
Hill achieved agricultural prowess despite deep and private reservations over his decision to come to Utah with his family.
There was not only general antipathy to top Mormon leaders in Hill’s letter but specific resentment towards an unnamed Mormon emissary with an apparent Weber County connection.
William H. Hill and Joseph Morris, it turned out, had a nemesis in common. The “man in London” and General was Chauncey West, serving in 1862 as European mission president. Hill was in the Weber County militia under West’s command, marshaled in 1857 to prevent the U.S. Army’s Utah Expedition from entering the territory through Echo Canyon, and may even have been his neighbor when West first moved to the county in 1855.The ill-fated “men from California” were six gamblers, later called the “Aiken party,” who expected to rendezvous with the army in Utah but were arrested as spies by the militia. Hill’s accusing West of cattle thievery could have stemmed from the perception that West had tolerated the stealing of Morrisites’ cattle, or from an 1857 rumor, later printed in the New York Times, that West had goaded the Snake Indians in Weber Valley to steal emigrant trains’ cattle. 34
As a window into the mind of a Morrisite, the Hill letter may be most significant for what it did not say. Hill praised Richard Cook and John Banks, “able speakers as ever stood before an audience,” but oddly failed to mention Joseph Morris except as collateral damage in the Morrisite War. While Hill did say “a man from Manchester in England, arose, and represented himself to be Brigham Young’s superior … which proved a good opportunity for myself and others to back him up,” he did not think to identify the man as Morris.35 Nor did he cite the seventh angel, the Second Coming, consecrated property, or any other distinct Morrisite concept.
Hill’s indifference to Morris and his theology shows that his chief concerns about life in Utah were not doctrinal but political. Indeed, rather than leaping into uncharted doctrinal waters, the Morrisites were retaining Mormon practices in baptism, confirmation, ordination, greater and lesser priesthoods, divine authority, canonical works, church hierarchy, and even the same date, April 6, of organizing their church. Their objections boiled down to who their governmental leaders should be.
In fact, there had been no means for Utahns so inclined to form a loyal opposition. The New York Times described the dilemma when Utah’s legislature convened late in 1861, observing on one hand much diversity and “vigorous antagonistic talk” among the individual lawmakers, but on the other hand, when it came to action, “these naturally discordant elements have the faculty of unanimity to a surprising degree, almost amounting, at times, to fusion – there being, apparently, not the shadow of an ‘opposition.’” 36
In the years immediately preceding Morris’s rise, there had been desultory attempts at a two-party system. The territorial election of August 1858 saw the first votes ever recorded in Salt Lake City for non-Mormon candidates, and the citizens of Green River County (now in Wyoming) elected a non- Mormon representative. The following year, a “Gentile convention” at Camp Floyd fielded a slate of candidates for territorial offices. But these pluralistic stirrings, which in any case stood no chance of success, had no connection to Weber County. Thus the new order heralded by Joseph Morris would have appealed to Hill and his neighbors who “wished that something might take place to bring about a better state of things.”37
The Morrisites’ saddest fate is our unawareness of who they were, which is inconsistent with Utah’s tradition of exhaustive human inventory. Historians alphabetize, annotate, and catalog significant sets of persons, whether the Mormon Battalion, future Civil War generals in the Utah Expedition, or plural wives of Brigham Young. Yet the rank-and-file Morrisites’ names cannot be found in any readily available historical source, and their lives are not chronicled.
Oral tradition holds that Mormon leaders cursed the Morrisites unto the fourth generation.38 Certainly Brigham Young’s public remarks showed his anger at their affront to his leadership. Speaking in the Salt Lake bowery two weeks after the Morrisite War, Young lambasted the Morrisites’ folly and wickedness and proscribed commerce and social intercourse with them. They would be barred from “com[ing] into the congregation of the [Latter-day] Saints,” and Mormon elders could not baptize them.“Let them alone,”Young exhorted, “and let them wait a thousand years and then see what chance [there] will be for them.” 39
Mormon treatments of the Kington Fort saga regarded the Morrisites not as individuals but as a degraded underclass. Historian Richard W. Young cited their “obviously enfeebled intellects.” Orson F. Whitney decried their “constant menace” to neighbors and ridiculed as “brilliant” their notions of resistance to the law. B. H. Roberts called them a “deluded people,” having a “fanatical and implacable element.” 40
The truth is that each Morrisite, before defecting to Kington Fort, had incurred the same persecution and hardships in service to the Mormon cause as other Utah pioneers, and many future Morrisite men had shivered and starved alongside their fellow militiamen in defending Echo Canyon against the U.S. Army’s Utah Expedition. They sailed on the same ships and crossed the plains in the same companies as the men who discharged cannons and rifles at them. These considerations surprised territorial chief justice John F. Kinney, who told the Morrisite prisoners at their arraignment, “I have been misinformed about you men. You were represented to me as a banditti of low, degraded men – robbers and thieves; but I see before me a class of intelligent men.” 41
Ironically, many Morrisites were complicit in their own annalistic disappearance. Although some continued to practice the Morrisite faith, most would feel embarrassment over aligning themselves with Joseph Morris. Very few Morrisites of Marriott and Slaterville ever discussed that portion of their past with their descendants. Slaterville’s James Cowan Jr. and his wife Priscilla are an apt example. Just weeks after arriving in Utah, James joined apostle Orson Hyde’s 1853 colonizing mission to Fort Supply in present-day Wyoming. He was in the rescue party to the snowbound Martin and Willie handcart companies late in 1856. In 1857 he married Priscilla, whose father, Richard Slater, served in the Mormon Battalion and was Slaterville’s eponymous settler. Later that year James served under Chauncey West in the Echo Canyon campaign. Early in 1860, when several families from Slaterville were called to colonize Franklin in Cache Valley, the Cowans and their two small children pulled up stakes and headed north. 42
As Pioneer Day approached, the Cowans and two other families set out for Slaterville to celebrate the holiday with relatives. Near Smithfield on July 23, 1860, a group of Indians attacked them, killing one man and shooting James in the chest; the bullet shattered some of his ribs and lodged against his spine. As he recuperated in Smithfield, the pain was so intense that he had to stamp his feet on the ground for relief. Finally a man using a butcher knife gouged out the bullet. The courageous Priscilla collected James’s rib fragments as they were extracted.Within a year of the attack, the Cowans moved to Kington Fort. 43
Ultimately, the Cowans recited all of their history to their twelve children with the exception of their Morrisite phase, which they edited out. Their eldest daughter, Annie, did not recall it in her detailed oral history of her parents’ pioneer experiences, and their youngest daughter, Nellie, said she never heard of the Morrisites and had no idea why her brother had been born at South Weber in March 1862. 44
By the beginning of the twentieth century, in fact, no institutional memory remained in Slaterville or Marriott of the Morrisite excitement. Slaterville’s only known pioneer diarist, Edwin W. Smout, first counselor to branch president Thomas Richardson and thus privy to conversations on the town’s Morrisite situation, wrote nothing about it. No hint of it occurs in The History of Slaterville, whose author, Jerome Wheeler (1883-1963), was aware of the Virgos (his grandparents purchased the Virgo property in 1861) and possessed an otherwise comprehensive sense of the town’s past.
If there was a curse on the Morrisites, the remarkable Park family was apparently immune to it. The Parks never lived in Weber County, but after moving to Carson Valley, Nevada, intermarried with Slaterville’s McCue and Bull families and Marriott’s Hill family. Four generations later, the Parks were among the wealthiest families of Nevada, owning the Park Cattle Company in Douglas County, which in turn owns the land on Lake Tahoe’s south shore beneath the Horizon Casino Resort, MontBleu Resort Casino and Spa, and Harvey’s Lake Tahoe parking garage. 45
In 2001, the Nevada legislature passed a resolution honoring the late W. Brooks Park, founder of the Park Cattle Company and great-grandson of Slaterville Morrisites Peter and Mary McCue. Regrettably, the resolution suffered from the Morrisite amnesia. It stated that W. Brooks Park’s grandparents, Unity McCue and David Brooks Park, “journeyed from Canada to Nevada, arriving in Mottsville in 1863 … and began ranching in the valley …”The legislature, relying on family-supplied history, knew nothing of the Parks’ decade-long sojourn in Utah between its Canada and Nevada years. 46
Only a few Slaterville and Marriott Morrisite families would remain in Utah.The Cowan families and Mary Ann Baker Bateman returned to their Slaterville farms; John Cardon resumed farming in Marriott. William J. and Ann Jones stayed in South Weber; their descendants preserved a cannonball fired during the Morrisite War that landed in Ann’s lap. Andrew and Charlotte Dinwoodey Lee went to Camp Douglas, where the U.S. Army offered protection and employment to Morrisites. Andrew died before the March 1863 Morrisite trial; Charlotte then married Charles Cooney, a soldier. Three weeks after giving birth to Charles Cooney Jr., she died of a broken blood vessel. 47
In addition to the McCues, several Weber County refugees settled in western Nevada, including Slaterville’s Magees, Bulls, Whites, Harrises, and Alvys; and from Marriott, the Hills and Petries. Few are known to have continued in the Morrisite faith. John Petrie, who became a miner and settled his family in Virginia City, tried with limited success to establish a Morrisite congregation in San Francisco in 1874. Rhoda Jones, whose husband had died at Kington Fort, resumed her earlier surname, White, and in 1870 was running a boarding house for Chinese laborers in Ormsby County. In 1877 she was baptized into a local Morrisite splinter group. By 1880 she had retired to Dayton, Lyon County, Nevada, living next to her son-in-law and daughter, William and Sarah Harris, as she had in Slaterville. Her son William White, a farmer, was rearing his family in Carson Valley.48
William H. Hill, anonymous author of the Birmingham Daily Post letter, fled to California with other recalcitrant Morrisite defendants in 1862. He may have been the William Hill in Grass Valley Township, Nevada County, in the 1870 census. A Morrisite apostle reported that Hill died in Carson Valley (no date given).49 Hill’s sons remained in Utah a few years but eventually moved to Carson Valley, where his son Eleazer and his granddaughter Mary Elizabeth married siblings of David Brooks Park.
The William Magee family built and operated a hay station and bar for teamsters in Churchill County, Nevada, along the “emigrant road” to Carson City. According to a local historian, the Magees’ descendants “would never acknowledge that their parents or grandparents had been Mormons … They may not have been aware of the connection, particularly if earlier generations kept an imposed silence.” 50
Two families from Marriott relocated to Idaho. Charles and Jane Higham established a farm in Eagle Rock (now Idaho Falls). Esther Astle, who emerged from Kington Fort as a widow, married a Camp Douglas soldier, Enoch Coberly; they and her six children were among the first settlers of Soda Springs. Esther was soon reported to be one of the “prettiest dancers and most graceful partners” at a local cotillion. Along with many who found Soda Springs too cold for farming, they soon moved to Deer Lodge, Montana. 51
Moses Byrne, although one of the first six baptized Morrisites, was “shortly after cast off.” He moved his family by Catherine Cardon Byrne to Piedmont, Wyoming, in 1862, where he became railroad stationmaster and later built five coke ovens to supply fuel for railroad passenger cars. He maintained his other family by Anne Beus Byrne in Ogden. 52
The polygamous Sorrensons, the only Danish Morrisites from Slaterville, went their separate ways after Kington Fort. Mary Sorrenson married a man named Smith and moved to Spring City, Utah. Jens Christian and Anna Sorrenson and their children relocated to San Francisco, California, also claimed John E. and Mary Jones of Marriott, who settled permanently in Round Valley, Inyo County, after a few years in Jack Valley, Nevada. Jones had briefly soldiered on as a Morrisite apostle in Nevada but soon withdrew from what little remained of the movement. 53
Winter and Mary Hastings and their family, who had lived but briefly in Slaterville before Kington Fort, relocated furthest from Utah to Springfield, Illinois, where Winter was a state committeeman for a “grand camp meeting” of midwestern spiritualists in the summer of 1875. 54
Thomas Virgo, landlord to Joseph Morris in Slaterville, died in 1861. Ann Virgo may have moved to Plain City, Slaterville’s neighbor to the west, where pioneers recalled a Mrs.Virgo who peddled vegetables in Ogden. 55
Chauncey West died of consumption at forty-two, his open-air drills during the Echo Canyon campaign and a chronic cold contracted in Europe having taken their toll. The Deseret News reckoned West’s demise would “excite the sympathy of many thousands.” He was given the equivalent of a state funeral, delayed two hours to accommodate a trainload of dignitaries representing the territorial militia. 56
While the Slaterville and Marriott Morrisites were the earliest to embrace Joseph Morris, there is little evidence that his theology drew them to him; instead he provided cover for a political alternative to Brigham Young. Although the New York Times’ comment that “secession must be infectious” was made archly, there was truth in it.The people of Utah were well aware of the grave political differences that provoked the South’s withdrawal from the United States regardless of probable dire consequences, which suggested to Morris’s followers that they were not without choices.
Chief justice Kinney’s recognition of the Morrisites as “a class of intelligent men” serves as a call to restore their good names. If we do not agree with their secession, we must at least acknowledge their legitimacy as pioneers and that they worked as hard as their Mormon neighbors to tame Utah’s aridity and make it “blossom as a rose.”Their individual histories are no less interesting than those of other Utah pioneers. Surely Utah would have been richer for the contributions the Morrisites and their descendants might have made to its progress and fortunes.
NOTES
Val Holley,a law librarian in Washington,D.C.,is a sixth-generation native of Slaterville.
1 New York Times,July 16,August 16,1861.I am persuaded,from genealogical records and contemporary references to founder Robert Kington in the Deseret News,that Kington,not Kingston,was the fort’s correct name.
2 New York Times,June 25,July 7,1862.
3 Stephen Harding’s only stated rationale was “divers good causes me thereto moving.”See Deseret News,April 1,1863.
4 C.LeRoy Anderson, Joseph Morris and the Saga of the Morrisites (Logan:Utah State University Press, 1988) is the definitive study of Joseph Morris and the Morrisites. See also G.M.Howard,“Men, Motives, and Misunderstandings: A New Look at the Morrisite War of 1862,” Utah Historical Quarterly 44 (1976): 112-32;David Bigler, Forgotten Kingdom (Logan: Utah State University Press,1998),208-17;Gordon Q. Jones, Pioneer Forts in Davis County,Utah (private printing,1998). H. Orvil Holley, “History and Effect of Apostasy on a Small Mormon Community” (M.A.thesis, Brigham Young University,1966),was the first study of the Morrisites in Slaterville, but it did not examine individual Morrisites or the links between them.
5 Anderson, Joseph Morris,14;George Morris,“Autobiography,”Harold B.Lee Library,Brigham Young University,122.
6 “History of Weber County,” Tullidge’s Quarterly Magazine 2 (1883):622.The Tullidge’s account,never before cited in Morrisite studies,mistakenly attributed this narrative of Morris and Virgo to the town of Lynne,not Slaterville.Thomas and Ann Virgo were counted in the 1860 census but Joseph Morris was not. Their location is given in Jerome Wheeler, History of Slaterville (private printing,1978),34.
7 Joseph Morris, The Spirit Prevails:Containing the Revelations,Articles,and Letters Written by Joseph Morris (San Francisco:George S.Dove and Company,1886),16.
8 Ibid.,19.
9 Ibid.,3-4.It is not clear whether “Father Jones”was Slaterville’s William Jones or Marriott’s John E. Jones (later a Morrisite apostle).
10 “History of Weber County,” Tullidge’s Quarterly Magazine, 622.No known source suggests the extent to which Morris participated in Slaterville Branch meetings and business (if at all) or describes the specifics of Morris’s interactions with Slaterville people. We learn only that “he had made some warm friends.” See John R. Eardley, Gems of Inspiration: A Collection of Sublime Thoughts by Modern Prophets (San Francisco: Joseph A.Dove,Printer,1899),15.
11 The Cardon siblings were great-aunt and great-uncle to Utah first lady Lucybeth Cardon Rampton (1914-2004).
12 Morris, The Spirit Prevails,4;Morris to Young quoted in Anderson, Joseph Morris,52.
13 Edwin Ward Smout Journal,September 10,1858,July 15,1860,Huntington Library,San Marino, California; Deseret News,November 17,1860;Richard W.Sadler and Richard C.Roberts, Weber County’s History (Ogden:Weber County Commission,2000),152;Franklin L.West, Chauncey W.West,Pioneer, Churchman (Salt Lake City:Publishers Press,1965),24-25;Edward W.Tullidge, Tullidge’s Histories,(Vol.II) Containing the History of All the Northern,Eastern and Western Counties of Utah;Also the Counties of Southern Idaho.With a Biographical Appendix of Representative Men and Founders of the Cities and Counties;Also a Commercial Supplement,Historical (Salt Lake City:Juvenile Instructor Press,1889),Biographical Appendix 67.
14 Eardley, Gems of Inspiration,19; History of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints,6 vols.(Independence:Herald House,1896),3:371.Adulation for West was not universal.Ebenezer Clawson Richardson,a Mormon pioneer of Weber County,filed a motion to prevent West from testifying in an 1860 horse-stealing case because “the people over which he presides as Bishop is morrally and religiously bound to acknowledge his bishop C.W.West’s word as law and gospel,there for the parties now arrainged do not feel safe to go to tryal [sic] under these auspices.”See Dale L.Morgan, History of Ogden (Ogden: Ogden City Commission,1940),45-46.
15 Union Vedette,July 14,1867.
16 Deseret News,November 28,1860.
17 Susan Staker,ed., Waiting for World’s End: The Diaries of Wilford Woodruff (Salt Lake City: Signature Books,1993),259;Sadler and Roberts, Weber County’s History,149.That Brigham Young himself was monitoring the developments is indicated in the New York Times of July 16,1861:“Brigham considered it expedient to have a long string of the names of the [Morrisite] backsliders read over in the public meeting Sunday.”
18 Staker, Waiting for World’s End,260.
19 Record of Members,Slaterville Ward,LDS Church History Library and Archives,Salt Lake City, Utah.(Hereinafter cited as LDS Church History Library.) “[Morrisite] Roll of Membership”(San Francisco:George S.Dove and Company,1886),Library of Congress.
The Marriott Morrisites were Joseph and Esther Astle, Charles and Jane Higham, William and Ann Hill, John E. and Mary Jones,William J. and Ann Jones ,and John and Mary Petrie. John Cardon was a Morrisite but his wife, Anna Furrer Cardon, a doctor, testified in 1879 that she had never been a Morrisite. She went to Kington Fort on the final day of the Morrisite War to tend to the wounded. See Ogden Junction, February 26,1879.
The Slaterville Morrisites and dates of excommunication were February 17,1861:William Magee, Jabez Harris,Clarissa Taylor;March 31,1861:Moses Byrne,Catherine Cardon Byrne,James Cowan Sr., William Jones,Rhoda White Jones,and her children William and Hannah White,Winter Hastings,Mary Hastings;April 28,1861:Peter Lamb McCue,Mary McCue,Peter McCue Jr.,Andrew Lee,Charlotte Dinwoodey Lee,Richard Alvy,Sarah Alvy,Sarah McKeachie Magee,Janet Cowan,Sarah White Harris; May 19,1861:William Harris,Mary Ann Baker Bateman;June 9,1861:William Field Bull,Mary Bull, Agnes Cowan Bull,James Cowan Jr.,Priscilla Slater Cowan;September 15,1861:Jens Christian Sorrenson,Mary Sorrenson,Anna Sorrenson.Robert Cowan and Ann Beus Byrne,plural wife of Moses Byrne,were not on the Slaterville Branch’s excommunication list but were on the Morrisite roll of membership.
20 Andrew Jenson,Manuscript History of the Salt Lake First Ward,LDS Church History Library.In 1845 Wilford Woodruff found the Glasgow conference “in a most encouraging and prosperous condition, under the presidency of our beloved brother Peter Mc.Cue.”See Millennial Star 5 (1845):182.
21 Roberta Childers, Magee Station and the Churchill Chronicles (Reno:Jamison Station Press,1985),1214.Sarah McKeachie was a widow when the Saluda exploded and did not marry Magee until 1853. Magee’s sister Mary and her husband John Mather of Salt Lake City also became Morrisites.
22 Deseret News,June 17,1893;May 2,1896;Slaterville Ward Record of Members,LDS Church History Library.
23 Sadler and Roberts, Weber County’s History,80,110.
24 Richard Young,“The Morrisite War,”Contributor 11 (1890):281.Young misidentified Moses Byrne as “Nathan”and Andrew Lee as “Arthur.”The Harris,Astle,and Jones revelations are in Morris, The Spirit Prevails,101-102;503-505.
25 The Cowans’son John was born March 7,1862,at South Weber.They must have left Kington Fort between that date and the formation of the Morrisite army in the spring.
26 For William J.Jones’s own narrative,see John Banks,“A Document History of the Morrisites” (Thesis,University of Utah,1909),32-39.
27 Deseret News,June 25,1862;April 1,1863.
28 Anderson, Joseph Morris,73.
29 The Deseret News of March 18,1863,listed the absentees,some of whom left “by freight teams.”See Eardley, Gems of Inspiration,31.
30 Birmingham (England) Daily Post,January 17,1863.The letter also appeared in the Caledonian Mercury (Edinburgh,Scotland),January 17,1863;and the Glasgow (Scotland) Herald,January 19,1863,which said it reprinted the letter from the Manchester Guardian
31 Ibid.Originally,the letter was “writ[ten] to a friend.”Whether publication was intended is unknown. Hill’s sons were not listed as prisoners or defendants.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 New York Times,February 4,1858.West was made Brigadier-General on March 2,1858.In 1862 West had five wives,not seven.The bodies of two Aiken party men were dumped not in the Jordan River but in deep springs in Juab County.
Although Hill’s letter was not published in Utah,its existence was known.The journal of William Ajax, a Welsh immigrant to Utah,for May 3,1863,notes:“Wrote a letter for bro.James Lewis to his father-inlaw,containing the account of the attack on the Morrisites in June last,and refutations to certain charges made lately in a certain anonymous letter that has recently appeared through the majority of the British papers.”See http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/upbover:@field(DOCID+ @lit(dia558317)) (Accessed September 6,2006).Any Mormon in the British Isles or Brooklyn could have seen it and alerted the Utah church.
35 Joseph Morris was a native of Burwardsley,Cheshire,but may have once resided in Manchester.
36 New York Times,January 3,1862.
37 New York Times,September 6,1858; Valley Tan,August 3,1859.Another useful exposition of Morrisite grievances is the deposition of Abraham Taylor of Salt Lake City in “George R.Maxwell vs.George Q. Cannon,”House of Representatives Miscellaneous Document No.49,43rd Congress,1st Session (1873),20.
38 Jones, Pioneer Forts in Davis County,31.
39 A.Karl Larson and Katharine Miles Larson,eds., Diary of Charles Lowell Walker,2 vols.,(Logan:Utah State University Press,1980),1:232,cited in Anderson, Joseph Morris,248.
40 Young,“The Morrisite War,”471;Orson F.Whitney, History of Utah,4 vols.(Salt Lake City:George Q.Cannon and Sons,1890-1904),2:51;B.H.Roberts, A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,6 vols.(Salt Lake City:Church Deseret News Press,1930),5:52.
41 Morris, The Spirit Prevails,8.
42 Deseret News, December 1,1853; Ogden Standard-Examiner, August 19,1934.
43 Deseret News,Aug.1,1860; Ogden Standard-Examiner,August 19,1934.The man who operated on Cowan was Sylvanus Collett,who stood trial for the Aiken murders in 1878.
44 Holley,“History and Effects of Apostasy,”29.Jean Rio Baker and her sons,early Slaterville settlers, also withheld their Utah experiences from their descendants.See Sally Denton, Faith and Betrayal (New York:Knopf,2005),166,168,178.
45 Las Vegas Review-Journal,January 28,2000.
46 Senate Concurrent Resolution No.44,File No.89 (Nevada Legislature 2001).Unity McCue was born in Utah and never lived in Canada.
47 Holley,“History and Effects of Apostasy,”29; Union Vedette,March 14,1865;April 6,1865; Ogden Standard,March 29,1907.Jeremiah and Mary Ann Baker Bateman later moved to Contra Costa County, California,to live with niece Jean Rio Baker.The Joneses’daughter Margaret married Joseph Higham,son of Marriott Morrisites Charles and Jane Higham.The Lees left behind five children;their sons soon went to work for Dinwoodey Furniture.Two Slaterville persons excommunicated on February 17,1861,Jabez Harris and Clarissa Taylor,apparently never moved to Kington Fort.Both married and remained in Utah.
48 George S.Dove and James Dove, A Voice from the West (San Francisco:Church of the Firstborn,1879), 14-15;James Dove, A Few Items in the History of the Morrisites (San Francisco:Church of the Firstborn, 1892),4-5.
49 Dove, A Few Items,20.
50 Childers, Magee Station,12,41.
51 Union Vedette,March 10,1864.
52 Young, Morrisite War ,281; An Enduring Legacy ,12 vols.(Salt Lake City: Daughters of the Utah Pioneers, 1978),11:295-96.
53 Anderson, Joseph Morris,190-191.
54 Religio-Philosophical Journal 10 (1875):124-25.
55 Daughters of the Utah Pioneers,“Plain City History,”http://www.plaincityutah.org/bodily/ utah_pioneers.htm (Accessed December 11,2006.)
56 Jean RioBaker Diary,November 24,1869,Utah State Historical Society; Tullidge’s Histories , Biographical Appendix 65; Deseret Weekly News,January 12,January 19,1870.
