DiaBLOGue

With the Utah War’s sesquicentennial commemoration now underway, it is appropriate to reexamine that campaign’s origins, conduct, significance, and historiography. This article’s purpose is to stimulate such probing. I hope to do so through the story of my own research and conclusions about the war over the past half-century—one-third of the period since President James Buchanan and Governor Brigham Young came into armed conflict during 1857-58.

A friend who is a soprano once related a story to me of a rime when she was accompanied by a male pianist. They worked together on the piece for some weeks; and finally, when they performed, the ecstatic release, the sense of the flowing together of their spirits, was, in her words, “like making love.”