A Basket of Chips: An Autobiography

Basket of Chips, page 106

A Basket of Chips and demanded the horse. All parties were well armed. Porter stepped up to Bill and said: "Touch that horse and 1'11 bust your thigh open." Bill and his men rode away, but a very bloody affair was looked for. I have heard my father tell of the time he thought his hour had come. One of Hickman's men found father in a lonely spot and took him by the throat and said, "I'd like to slit your wind pipe." The army was here then and such doings were soon at- tended to. These men and others of the lower element in the Mormon church believed that the gentiles sent for the army but this was not true. The United States knew what was going on in Utah at this time, and acted accordingly." And because of this, and the fact that my father was no longer an active mem- ber, Hickman and his men thought he should make the blood atonement - which was a shedding of the blood to save the soul.`o At nine years of age I went with my father on his trips for firewood and to the mining camps. He hauled fruit, vegetables, flour, and produce to sell, and then returned with a load of ore to where it was to be shipped by rail. He then brought from 9 "By the spring of 1857 . . . disgruntled officeholders were assembled in Washington clamoring for the newly inaugurated president . . . to do something about the state of affairs in Utah . . . . Between April and the early part of May [Buchanan] . . . decided to replace Brigham Young as Governor. By the end of the month he had chosen an even more drastic course of action." He d ispatched troops to Utah to install the new federal official s in office, and the Utah War was the result. Arrington and Bitton, Mowzon Experience, 165. 10 In "an attempt to forestall that kind of difficulty [apostatizing from the Mormon church] as far as possible. Brigham Young preached the doctrine of `blood atonement,' declaring: `There are sins that men commit for which they cannot receive forgiveness in this world, or in that which is to come, and if they had their eyes open to see their true condition, they would be perfectly willing to have their blood spilt upon the ground, that the smoke thereof might ascend to heaven as an offering for their sins.' Such talk, in the mounting tension between federal officials and the Mormon people, was symptomatic of the closeness to violence . . . and, although it [blood atonement] seems [to have been] . . . rarely prac- ticed, the atmosphere was one of inordinate group loyalty to the point of fanati- cism." Thomas F. O'Dea, The Mormons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 101. 106