Item Detail
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12457
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2
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0
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English
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Mormons, Indians, and Gentiles and Utah's Black Hawk War
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Arizona State University
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Ph.D. diss.
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"Beginning in 1865 a brilliant Native American named Black Hawk led a combined force of Utes, Navajos, and Paiutes in a series of intense stock raids on the Mormon settlements in the Territory of Utah. Directed by Brigham Young, Utah's Latter-day Saint citizens mobilized a church militia called the Nauvoo Legion. Bloodshed on both sides plunged Mormons and Indians into a war of vengeance, and related killing and raiding continued until federal troops stepped in in 1872. While Utah's Black Hawk War was unquestionably part of the general Native American response to white expansion during the 1860s and 1870s, unique factors made it an anomaly in Western history. Black Hawk astutely judged that political conflict between the federal government and Mormon Utah would keep U.S. soldiers from chastising his band. With polygamy and theocracy at the heart of the white contest, both groups determined keeping troops out of the war was in their respective best interests. As a result, Black Hawk and others carried on their activities for almost eight years without incurring the federal military reprisals Indians on all four sides of the Mormon heartland experienced. To keep the government from using the war as a pretext for sending more troops to Utah, Latter-day Saints withheld information, making it an almost secret war as far as the rest of the nation was concerned. Ultimately a historical victim of this policy and the resulting lack of coverage in the national press, Black Hawk and his remarkable attempts to turn back the tide of white expansion have been ignored by students of Indian history. This dissertation is the first comprehensive study of the Black Hawk War. It identifies Black Hawk as an Indian patriot of prime importance and examines his strategies. It explores the intricate political conditions that allowed the war to erupt and continue unchecked by the federal government. Similarly, it examines Mormon-Indian policy and concludes that Brigham Young's teachings regarding the treatment of Indians were extraordinary. In practice, however, his followers were often more in line with their non-Mormon contemporaries." [Author's abstract]