The Anomaly: Elliott West’s Continental Reckoning and its Latter-day Saints

Review of Elliott West, Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023). 704 pages, $39.95 (hardcover).

Abstract: This review explores how Latter-day Saints are portrayed in a new landmark history of the American West. Noting the author’s generally accurate portrayal of the Saints, this review focuses on some areas that were missing in this Bancroft Prize winning book that has numerous implications for Latter-day Saint studies.

Elliot West, a prolific historian of the American West and author of numerous works including The Contested Plains[1] and The Last Indian War,[2] explores an expansive history of the Greater Reconstruction in the American West in his recently published prize-winning work Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion.[3] “Greater Reconstruction” is a larger temporal framing of the United States’ effort to “reconstruct” the nation following the Civil War. West argues that the process of Reconstruction began not in 1865 with the end of the Civil War but instead in the 1840s, as [Page 98]American forces marched into Mexican territory. This view prioritizes the American West not only as a laboratory for society and empire, but as a place of dramatic change that influenced the eastern United States far more than scholars have previously suggested. West skillfully argues throughout his book that the birthing and growth of the American West led to dramatic changes in the rest of the United States. As he notes near the beginning of his text, “the remaking of the nation . . . unsettled it more profoundly than ever in its history” (p. 2).

Following explorers, settlers, soldiers, Native Americans, politicians, and miners across the wide expanse of the American West, Continental Reckoning is a tour-de-force that will be generative of many important discussions in coming years. Stretching across twenty-three chapters, West explores the familiar and the less well known as he suggests that “the American West was both the child and the midwife of the new United States” (p. 454).

While there are numerous aspects of this work that will be of interest to scholars of Latter-day Saint history, I will focus primarily on the role that Latter-day Saints play within the text itself. The idea of expanding Reconstruction beyond the eastern United States with a longer temporal framework will likely receive a warm welcome by Latter-day Saint scholars, some of whom have already sought to push the timeframe of Reconstruction to include the federal government’s campaign against the Latter-day Saints in the 1880s and 1890s.[4] Scholars of Latter-day Saint history will readily note that the Latter-day Saint experience of Reconstruction could be said to have started long before the final shots of the Civil War, as eastern politicians sought to remake the Latter-day Saint faith to match a broader American Protestant tradition. Latter-day Saints were an “other,” demonized and racialized as a sub-human group throughout America and the broader Atlantic world.[5]

The role of Latter-day Saints in the West and its growth has long been documented by historians too numerous to name, yet Latter-day Saint readers will perhaps be surprised by how little attention is granted to Latter-day Saints within Continental Reckoning. It should be acknowledged that West has undertaken a colossal work, attempting to bring order to a region with millions of complicated and unique [Page 99]stories. As West rightly notes, the history of the American West is one of deep global connections and as such has a multitude of cultures and visions vying for life in the new “imagined space.” As in any synthesis, much must be left on the editing-room floor for future scholars to discuss, which should be acknowledged at the outset. West’s history could not cover it all. Yet it should be noted how and where his narrative can improve regarding the role of Latter-day Saints in the story of the American West.

The first mention of Latter-day Saints comes well into the book when West notes that the overland road between “Fort Bridger and the Mormon settlements” factored into the US Army’s Topographical Corps route-making in the early 1850s (p. 86). The first discussion of the Latter-day Saints occurs over twenty pages later in the midst of West’s discussions about Indian slavery and focuses on Latter-day Saints’ uneasy entry into the practice (p. 110). A more extended discussion occurs in chapter seven under the section “A Western Dixie.”

Though he rarely uses the full name of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (he consistently refers to Latter-day Saints as Mormons with no explanation of the changing usage of the name in the past decade), West has a far more sympathetic discussion of Latter-day Saint beliefs and practices than can be found in many histories. For West, “Mormonism was a paradox” and “embodied many of the nation’s common values” (p. 115). Framing their experiences against the backdrop of persecution, West argues that the Latter-day Saints’ attempted exodus outside the bounds of the United States was similar, in some degree, to the experiences of the East Coast tribes that were forcibly removed to the American West by Indian removal policies. Both groups sought sanctuary outside the United States. Both became subsumed within the growing nation (p. 117).

Focusing on the creation of Deseret and then Utah, West frames the Latter-day Saint experience as a constant resistance to federal control. Emphasizing, I would argue correctly, Latter-day Saint efforts to ally with Natives over white Americans, West carries readers through the 1850s ending with the Mountain Meadows Massacre (pp. 114–24). The Latter-day Saints are thus part of a larger effort shaping the eastern United States as the “Mormon Question” became a continual aspect of national politics for the next several decades. Later, West notes how different the Latter-day Saint economic experiment was from the majority of the American West, particularly in its agriculture and approach to business. West states, “The achievements [Page 100][of the Saints] were undeniable, notable if nothing else for the brash effort to bring into fruit country known for its main feature, a dead lake” (p. 360).

West is a more careful and nuanced historian than others that have brought the Latter-day Saints into a broader history. However, there are some questionable framings that will leave layman and scholar alike puzzled. First, though less an issue for many scholars, is West’s repeated usage of “Mormons” and his reference to the Church’s founding prophet as “Joe Smith” (p. 114–15). While certainly less offensive to some members of the Church, the refusal by the publisher or author to at least attempt to vary from the institutional moniker can be seen as part of a larger refusal of many to respect the self-identification of the Church and many of its members.

Of more scholarly concern is West’s selection of secondary literature. A critique that could be connected to other areas of the work is his reliance on older scholarship, primarily before 2005. This, perhaps, is most evident in West’s exploration of the Utah War and Mountain Meadows Massacre. Relying heavily on the scholarship of David Bigler and Will Bagley,[6] West is correct in detailing this as one of the darkest moments in Latter-day Saint history. Most perplexing, however, is the complete lack of engagement with Massacre at Mountain Meadows[7] which is the current definitive exploration of the massacre. Furthermore, the privileging of Bigler and Bagley, who, as reviewers noted of their book The Mormon Rebellion, present “unsubstantiated or confusing claims”[8] through the lens of “their enemies’ eyes” with “little effort to see the conflict from the point of view of the Mormons,”[9] presents a distorted and less nuanced view of the tragic events of 1857. Even Brigham Young’s call for the Saints to leave the Salt Lake Valley is framed as part of declaring a “new kingdom” rather than an effort to preserve lives (p. 121). While certainly when writing such a massive volume the nuance of scholarly debates may be constrained, the lack in the bibliography of any Latter-day Saint [Page 101]historical scholarship published during the past two decades is a flaw in Continental Reckoning that is a detriment to this otherwise engaging book.

Others may quibble with odd judgments about Latter-day Saints that West occasionally sticks throughout the book (one example is deeming some of their wartime poetry “bad”) or with the general lack of engagement with most religions and religious experience in the West; however, by and large, Continental Reckoning contains a mostly fair and respectful abridgement of the Latter-day Saint narrative. Through it all, the reader may question how such a large population in the Intermountain West (numbering in the tens of thousands even in the 1850s) could only appear on less than two dozen pages of a synthesis of Western history. Perhaps the simplest answer is found within West’s text. He stated that in the larger context of Western economic history, “the Mormon enterprise was anomalous. As a survival of a common prewar impulse to find in the West independent loyalties and arrangements of power, its vision was glaringly at odds with the postwar impulse to make of the West a national unifier” (pp. 360–61). This perhaps suggests the largest reason for the brevity paid to the Saints: they do not fit. As West noted in another spot, “Mormons were different” (p. 115). This leaves future scholars to grapple with the implications of West’s engaging and well-written story of Greater Reconstruction and how it impacted and shaped Latter-day Saint history.

1. Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998).

2. Elliott West, The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

3. Elliott West, Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023). Continental Reckoning won the 2024 Bancroft Prize from Columbia University, the 2024 Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize.

4. See, for example, Clyde A. Milner and Brian Q. Cannon, eds., Reconstruction and Mormon America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019).

5. See, for example, W. Paul Reeves, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

6. David L. Bigler and Will Bagley, The Mormon Rebellion: America’s First Civil War, 1857–1858 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011).

7. Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley, and Glen M. Leonard, Massacre at Mountain Meadows (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

8. Brent M. Rogers, “Review,” Mormon Historical Studies 12, no. 2 (Fall 2011), 167, 170.

9. W. Paul Reeve, “Review,” The Journal of American History 99, no. 1 (June 2012), 305.

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