God’s Country, Uncle Sam’s Land: Faith and Conflict in the American West
by Todd M. Kerstetter, University of Illinois Press, Champaign, 2006, $36.
What do the Mountain Meadows Massacre (1857), the Wounded Knee Massacre (1890) and the Waco Massacre (1993) have in common? Well, for one thing, these three “massacres” (not everyone calls them by that lurid label) are the principal events considered in God’s Country, Uncle Sam’s Land. Author Todd M. Kerstetter, an associate professor of history at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, suggests that while widely diverse religious groups have found homes in the West, the Mormons, Sioux Ghost Dancers and Branch Davidians were each involved in a collision of guns, religion and government. The two 19th-century events are of course well-known to most readers of Wild West Magazine. The heavily armed federal attack on the Branch Davidians’ Mount Carmel compound, near Waco, Texas, which is not labeled a “massacre” in the book, has never before been mentioned in Wild West or in most Western histories. But as Kerstetter notes, the 1993 conflict, like those in Utah Territory and Dakota Territory, was an example of politics and religion intertwining and leading to disaster. “Near the dawn of the twenty-first century,” he writes, “the Branch Davidians learned what the Mormons and the Ghost Dancers had learned in the nineteenth: The West had limits when it came to religious freedom. American society still did not tolerate barbarians in the garden.”
Kerstetter actually takes a broader look at the 19th-century Mormons than just the Mountain Meadows Massacre (the September 11, 1857, tragedy in which an emigrant wagon train party was virtually wiped out by local Mormon militiamen). He also includes in the equation the Utah Expedition of that same year, in which U.S. soldiers occupied Utah Territory to enforce martial law, and the federal government tried to end polygamy and limit the power of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Even ardent supporters of mainstream America who held reservations about using force to preserve Protestant and republican values saw its merits in the case of Utah,” Kerstetter writes. Speaking of reservations, the Wounded Knee tragedy of December 1890 unfolded on the Sioux reservations of Standing Rock and Pine Ridge. As was the case in the Utah Expedition, U.S. soldiers were responding to a perceived “religious” threat. At Waco, the U.S. government responded to yet another religious threat with heavily armed agents rather than soldiers. As it turned out, American forces killed hardly any Mormons. But the other two events were much bloodier, even though, as the author notes, “no evidence suggests the government intended to kill Ghost Dancers or Branch Davidians.”
One can argue the merits of the author’s decision to compare these three examples of government reaction to non-mainstream religions, but he follows through quite well, and the comparisons rarely seem forced. Kerstetter notes that Mormon leader Brigham Young was labeled a charlatan and liar by many newspapers and government officials at the time, as were Ghost Dance prophet Wovoka and the Ghost Dance leaders. Would they have been seen in a different light had they, like Branch Davidian leader David Koresh, come on the Western scene in the late 20th century instead of the 19th century? The author seems to be saying no. Was the government response to Koresh more civilized than the 7th Cavalry’s response to the Ghost Dancers? The author again seems to be saying no. So what can we make of all this? Perhaps that the West is no longer wild, except when threatened by some “wild” religion.
Originally published in the August 2006 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.
