The wide currency of the story suggests it was a standard part of Brannan’s repertoire, designed to distance himself from his Mormon past and spread the legend of his bold defiance. There is little doubt he was convinced this defiance had put his life in danger. John Morris recalled that Brannan always traveled with a heavily armed escort when he visited his estate at Calistoga.

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California pioneer Asbury Harpending concluded that Brannan’s fearlessness stood him in good stead. According to Harpending: “Brigham could not permit such a flagrant breach of church discipline to remain unpunished. Flock after flock of ‘destroying angels’ took flight from Salt Lake City, duly commissioned to bring back Samuel’s scalp or perish in the attempt. But their holy work was always a dismal failure.” Brannan always managed to waylay “the ‘destroyers’ halfway out in the trackless desert, or mountain fastnesses, with a competent group of exterminators.” Some of the angels, Harpending said, returned to Salt Lake “minus tail feathers and otherwise damaged,” but most never returned at all. He credited Brannan with conducting “a private and successful war” against the Mormons, but details of that victory are hard to come by.

Sam Brannan enjoyed the notoriety such stories brought him and remained an implacable foe of Brig-ham Young’s brand of Mormonism until the day the prophet died, on August 29, 1877. But Brannan never lost his affection for his old friends still in the church.

In the 1880s, when the now-broke mogul dreamed of starting another empire, he offered John Taylor, Brigham Young’s successor, half his 200,000-acre Mexican land grant if Taylor would settle it with industrious Mormons and send Brannan $1,000.

Western historian Will Bagley’s edition of Sam Brannan’s collected works, Scoundrel’s Tale: The Samuel Brannan Papers, was published by Utah State University Press in 1999.

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