Last Called Mormon Colonization

More than three hundred Latter-day Saint settlements were founded by LDS Church President Brigham Young. Colonization-often outside of Utah-continued under the next three LDS Church presidents, fueled by Utah's overpopulationrelative to its arable, productive land. In this book,John Gary Maxwell takes a detailed look at the BighornBasin colonization of 1900-1901, placing it in the politicaland socioeconomic climate of the time while examiningwhether the move to this out-of-the-way frontier was motivatedin part by the desire to practice polygamy unnoticed. The LDS Church officially abandoned polygamy in1890, but evidence that the practice was still tolerated(if not officially sanctioned) by the church circulatedwidely, resulting in intense investigations by the U.S. Senate. In 1896 Abraham Owen Woodruff, a rising star inLDS leadership and an ardent believer in polygamy, wasappointed to head the LDS Colonization Company. Maxwellexplores whether under Woodruff's leadership the BighornBasin colony was intended as a means to insure the secretsurvival of polygamy and if his untimely death in 1904,together with the excommunication of two equally dedicatedproponents of polygamy-Apostles John WhitakerTaylor and Matthias Foss Cowley-led to its collapse. Maxwell also details how Mormon settlers in Wyomingstruggled with finance, irrigation, and farming and howthey brought the same violence to indigenous peoplesover land and other rights as did non-Mormons. The 1900 Bighorn Basin colonization provides an earlytwentieth-century example of a Mormon syndicate operatingat the intersection of religious conformity, polygamy, nepotism, kinship, corporate business ventures, wealth,and high priesthood status. Maxwell offers evidence thatalthough in many ways the Bighorn Basin colonization failed, Owen Woodruff's prophecy remains unbroken:"No year will ever pass, from now until the coming of theSavior, when children will not be born in plural marriage."