Mormon-Catholic Relations in Utah History : A Sketch
Dialogue : A Journal of Mormon Thought
Summer 2018
51
2
Farmington, UT
Dialogue Journal
2018
61-84
One of the happy surprises that makes history so interesting is the fact that Utah ever became Mormon Country, for during the roughly one hundred years before 1847 it had been, if anything, Catholic Country. Catholic explorers, soldiers, fur trappers, and traders had repeatedly plied their trades back and forth through the territory. Brigham Young University historian Ted J. Warner offers an intriguing speculation as to what might have happened if the Franciscan friars Dominguez and Escalante had been able to fulfill their promise to the Indians at Utah Lake that they would return and establish a mission among them.1 If they had, when Brigham Young started looking for a place no one else wanted where he could bring the Latter-day Saints, he would have seen a thriving Catholic community in Utah and perhaps turned his gaze elsewhere, to Mexico, Texas, or somewhere else. But of course, for various reasons, they did not, and so the friars became one more entry in the long list of transient Utah Catholics. By 1866, when the Catholics made their first attempt at a permanent institutional presence in Utah, the territory had for almost two decades become home to a large and well-entrenched Mormon population. The Catholics would henceforth never become more than a tiny minority in Mormon Country, and getting along with their numerous Mormon neighbors became an imperative priority. That imperative has occupied a very large part of Utah Catholic history. [from author]