The Utah War: A Ghost City Marched Through
Near Salt Lake City, Utah
In the summer of eighteen fifty-seven, President James Buchanan sent twenty-five hundred United States Army soldiers toward Utah Territory. He did not notify Brigham Young that he was removing him as territorial governor, or that the army was coming. Young and other LDS leaders, who had spent their entire adult lives being driven from Illinois and Missouri at gunpoint, interpreted the approaching army as another act of religious persecution.
Young declared martial law. He deployed the local militia, the Nauvoo Legion, to harass the troops from a distance, burning three supply trains and driving hundreds of cattle into the desert. The soldiers, pinned down by winter at what remained of Fort Bridger after the militiamen burned it, spent months snowbound and hungry. It was a strategy Young named after a Russian military retreat in the Crimean War: the Sebastopol policy.
By spring of eighteen fifty-eight, the standoff had reached its absurd peak. Young announced that all Mormon settlements in northern Utah would be evacuated, every building prepared for burning. Thirty thousand people left their homes and moved south, leaving the entire northern half of the territory empty. The move became known as the Move South.
When General Albert Sidney Johnston finally marched his army into Salt Lake City on June twenty-sixth, eighteen fifty-eight, he found a ghost city. Thousands of soldiers walked through empty streets past empty houses stuffed with hay and waiting for a torch that was never lit. The march took four hours. The soldiers kept going, past the city, southwest to a site called Cedar Valley, where they built Camp Floyd and stayed until the Civil War called them home.
The Utah War killed almost no one, resolved nothing about the underlying conflicts between the LDS church and the federal government, and cost the United States roughly forty million dollars. The residents returned. The hay was removed from the houses. The city resumed.
