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Show By the early 1870s commercial prospects between Utah and the northern mines led Latter-day Saints in northern Utah to depart from their introverted, self-sufficient economy to the extent that they undertook to build the Utah Northern Railroad to Montana. Although this intent suggested that the free enterprise of the mining trade was infiltrating the Mormon community, the comment of one Wells Fargo Company agent suggested that the Mormon towns along the Bear River had partaken only modestly of business influences. "One Gentile," he reported, "makes as much business as a hundred Mormons and the Utah Northern has found out that a well settled Mormon community will not furnish business enough to run a railroad." 11 By the mid-1870s Logan's Moses Thatcher and other local promoters had sold their interests in the Utah Northern to Jay Gould of the Union Pacific Railroad, thus suggesting that they lacked the necessary cultural attributes—not the least of which was financing—to carry on this kind of enterprise. Colonel Connor's defeat of the Bear River Indians also had other repercussions. Regarding it to be his duty as a Union commander to reduce Mormon control over Utah and bring the territory into fuller support of the North's cause in the Civil War, Connor promoted mining " Robert G. Athearn, Union Pacific Country (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1971), p. 248. The Hayden photograph, Survey's USHS camp in Cache Valley, 1870. William Henry collections. Jackson |
