The Mormon church was born in New York in the 1820s. So how did it end up in Utah? Almost from the beginning, the church’s unusual beliefs led to persecution, and members kept transplanting themselves to avoid harassment.
Things got especially messy when founder Joseph Smith received a revelation that he should start taking more wives. Lots more. Soon he was encouraging other Mormon men to do the same. This diminished the available supply of comely young women, which upset a lot of non-Mormon men, especially the bachelors. For this reasons-among others-an angry mob killed Smith in 1844.
This left master-organizer Brigham Young in charge. He solved the angry-bachelor problem by deciding to move the Mormons west to a place that had no white settlements. Thus began the Mormon exodus to the Salt Lake basin in the mid-1840s.
It wasn’t long before Young petitioned Congress to create a new state for his people. Although the Mormon leader wanted a giant property, he skillfully drew boundaries to avoid conflicts with established outposts such as the California gold fields or Oregon’s newly popular Willamette Valley. And he made sure to grab a bit of coastline in southern California. At this point in history, southern California was pretty empty. Hard to imagine.
Young’s super-sized state never came to be, mostly because of an anti-Mormon bias then pervasive in American culture. (This was long before the Osmond family taught us that Mormons are super-sweet folks with great teeth.) After a few decades, the Mormons abandoned polygamy (sort of), and Congress finally offered statehood.
Citizens overwhelmingly preferred calling their new state Deseret, a name found in the Book of Mormon. But the federal government chose Utah, after the Ute tribe.
The state’s final size was much smaller than the Mormons had originally hoped. The entire western half of the Mormon empire was sliced off to form Nevada, establishing one of the oddest geographical juxtapositions in the United States. Could two states like Nevada and Utah be more different? Is it a joke that they are adjacent? In Utah, it’s really hard to get a drink. In Nevada, it’s really hard not to get a drink.
