Henry Wells Jackson, Mormon Battalion and Civil War Veteran

Statue at San Diego Mormon Battalion Historic Site

Henry Wells Jackson was a wandering Mormon hero who was motivated by duty to God, country, and family. His life was marked by many significant firsts.[1] He was among the first to march west to California in the Mormon Battalion, the first U.S. military unit based on religious affiliation. He was among the first to pan for gold only weeks after its discovery at Sutter’s sawmill. He served in Utah’s early territorial militia and mail service between Utah and California. Years later, he was commissioned a Union lieutenant in the Civil War and was shot by Confederates while leading an assault on a railroad bridge, becoming the first Latter-day Saint known to be killed in an American national war. He was the Civil War’s first and only battle fatality from Utah.[2] This essay will focus on his service in the Mormon Battalion and then reenlistment in the Mormon Volunteers. An expanded version will be delivered at the Mormon History Association's annual meeting in San Antonio, Texas, on June 6, 2014. This year marks 150 years since Lt. Jackson's death.

Captain James Allen

Mormon Battalion Service

On July 1, 1846, at Council Bluffs, Iowa, Captain James Allen of the U.S. Army met with Brigham Young to recruit five hundred Mormon men to march west to California in support of the war against Mexico.[3] Some twelve thousand Latter-day Saints were scattered across Iowa, and initially many of the potential recruits fiercely opposed serving a federal government that had forsaken them. They had been expelled first from Missouri and then Illinois.

John Steele recorded his strong opposition to fighting for the United States: “I will see them in hell before I will fire one shot against a foreigner for . . . those who have mobbed, robbed, plundered and destroyed us all the day long and now seek to enslave us to fight for them.”[4]

  

President Young, however, saw providence in this offer. Months earlier he had sent his nephew Jesse C. Little to the nation’s capital to seek financial opportunities for emigration, charging him, “as a wise and faithful man, [to] take every honorable advantage of the times you can.”[5] At the encouragement of non-Mormon advocate Thomas L. Kane,[6] Little wrote to President James K. Polk on June 1, explaining the Saints’ intent to go west and hinting that they wanted to remain loyal to the United States but might look for help from foreign governments. President Polk wanted to maintain the balance of power in California and authorized Colonel Stephen W. Kearny to form a battalion to march to California.[7]

President Young urged the men to enlist and donate their funds to help the Saints move west. One recruit, Daniel B. Rawson, recorded his change of heart: “I felt indignant toward the Government that had suffered me to be raided and driven from my home. . . . I would not enlist. [Then] we met President Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball and [Willard] Richards . . . calling for recruits. They said the salvation of Israel depended upon the raising of the army. When I heard this my mind changed. I felt that it was my duty to go.”[8] Nineteen-year-old convert Henry Wells Jackson also heeded the call to serve and consecrated his earnings. He enlisted as a fife player in Company D along with Rawson and the newly softened Steele.[9]

 

Henry likely viewed this military service as a grand adventure.That sense of adventure must have worn thin, however, as the footsore battalion marched some nineteen hundred miles through the deserts of the Southwest—from Council Bluffs to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas Territory; to Santa Fe, New Mexico. The journey was arduous. Three sick detachments traveled north to Pueblo, Colorado. Meanwhile, often marching without enough food and water, the rest of the battalion created a wagon road from Santa Fe to the Pima Indian villages in Arizona.

Wagon road through Box Canyon, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park.

Courtesy of Mike Stangeman.

Final Approach to San Diego

Sgt. Daniel Tyler recorded the difficult final approach to the San Diego area in the Anzo-Borrego region: “We here found the heaviest sand, hottest days and coldest nights, with no water and but little food. . . . At the time the men were nearly barefooted; some used, instead of shoes, rawhide wrapped around their feet, while others improvised a novel style of boots by stripping the skin from the leg of an ox. . . . Others wrapped cast-off clothing around their feet.”[10] 

On January 19, 1847, Box Canyon had to be widened so the wagons could pass. Tyler recorded: “As we traveled up the dry bed, the chasm became more contracted until we found ourselves in a passage at least a foot narrower than our wagons. Nearly all of our road tools, such as picks, shovels, spades, etc., had been lost in the boat disaster [at Yuma, Arizona]. The principal ones remaining were a few axes, . . . a small crow bar, and perhaps a spade or two. These were brought into requisition, the commander [Philip St. George Cooke] taking an ax and assisting the pioneers.”[11]

Philip St. George Cooke

On January 27, the battalion boys cheered when they saw the Pacific.[12] Their long march ended on January 29, and they camped about five miles north of San Diego. The day after arriving, Lt. Col. Philip St. George Cooke praised their endurance: “History may be searched in vain for an equal march of infantry. . . . With crowbar and pick and ax in hand we have worked our way over mountains which seemed to defy aught save the wild goat, and hewed a passage through a chasm of living rock more narrow than our wagons.”[13] His remarks were “cheered heartily.”[14] Through their hardships, they had formed a wagon road to the Pacific and helped define the southern boundary of the United States.[15]  

Flag Raising at Fort Moore, Los Angeles, July 4, 1847

Peacekeeping and Construction

For the next five months in southern California, they performed occupation duties. They served as a reliable unit to block John C. Frémont’s unauthorized bid to control California. They built Fort Moore in Los Angeles and managed to complete it in time to celebrate California's first Fourth of July celebration.[16] Toward the end of their service, the U.S. Army desperately sought their reenlistment to provide military stability. Chief among those recruiters was their latest commanding officer, Colonel Jonathan D. Stevenson, who delivered a flattering speech on June 22. Robert Bliss summarized the speech in his journal: “Gave us the praise of being the best company in the Southern Division of California; the most intelligent & correct Soldiers. Said we were universally esteemed & respected by the inhabitants & in Short we had done more for California than any other people.”[17] 

The Mormon Volunteers in San Diego

The battalion was mustered out in Los Angeles on July 16, 1847. Henry was among eighty-one Mormons who reenlisted as a company of Mormon Volunteers and served eight more months.[18] He had no family on the way to Utah, so he likely reenlisted to earn more money and continue providing military stability. Many of those who reenlisted were either unmarried or reenlisted for financial reasons. The Mormon Volunteers reenlisted only on condition that they be discharged by March 1848, allowing time to plant crops in the Salt Lake Valley, and that they be furnished with pay and rations for their trek.[19]

 

Replica uniform of Seventh New York Regiment of Volunteers. Courtesy of Paul A. Hoffman.

Most of this ragged little company, including Henry, began serving in San Diego, where they were newly attired in uniforms belonging to the Seventh New York Regiment of Volunteers.[20] With Captain Daniel C. Davis in command, one of their first duties was to remodel the leaky pueblo barracks. They also helped keep the peace and constructed a brick courthouse. Col. Richard B. Mason, acting military governor of California, offered high praise: “Of their services . . . , of their patience, subordination, and general good conduct, you have already heard, and I take great pleasure in adding, that, as a body of men, they have religiously respected the rights and feelings of these conquered people, and not a syllable of complaint has reached my ears of a single insult offered, or outrage done, by a Mormon volunteer.”[21] Although a few of the men were dishonest, the battalion's overall service was exemplary.

Reconstructed Sutter's sawmill and millrace

During this period of service, several battalion boys traveled northward to work for John Sutter, digging the millrace where gold was discovered on January 24, 1848. Less than two months later, on March 14, the Mormon Volunteers disbanded, and Henry joined the battalion boys at nearby Mormon Island (now under Folsom Lake), where he panned for gold for about a year. He and many other battalion members made substantial deposits in the Utah gold account, an important resource to back the early Utah currency.[22] Historian Kenneth N. Owens concludes that “without the 1848 gold discovery and the rush for riches that followed, the development of the LDS church and community in the Great Basin must certainly have taken an alternative course. The difficult economic challenges the Saints faced in their valley in the mountains would have intensified.”[23] 

Early Mormon currency

As Brigham Young predicted two years earlier, the Mormon Battalion became “the salvation of Israel.” They consecrated money that helped the emigrating Saints. They created important roads that paved the way for future settlement of the Southwest. They helped stabilize California. They deposited gold that shored up Utah's fledgling economy. And they become confident frontiersman who helped colonize the western United States.

Notes

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[1] Henry Wells Jackson was born in Chemung, Chemung County, New York, on March 10, 1827, to William Jackson (1787–1869) and Mary Troy (1795–1838). Henry and his brother James joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in New York and moved to Nauvoo, Illinois.

[2] Henry Wells Jackson’s life story is briefly summarized in Robert C. Freeman, “Latter-day Saints in the Civil War,” in Civil War Saints, ed. Kenneth L. Alford (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2012), 280–81.

[3] The causes of the war and the Mormon Battalion’s involvement are detailed in Sherman L. Fleek, History May Be Searched in Vain: A Military History of the Mormon Battalion (Spokane, WA: Arthur H. Clark, 2006).

[4] John Steele, “Extracts from the Journal of John Steele,” Utah Historical Quarterly 6, no. 1 (1933): 6–7, in Fleek, History May Be Searched in Vain, 54.

[5] Jesse C. Little’s report as cited in B. H. Roberts, A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1930), 3:67.

[6] On May 13, 1846, Kane attended a Mormon conference in Philadelphia where Jesse C. Little was speaking. Thus began Kane’s lifelong advocacy for the Mormons’ cause. See Matthew J. Grow, “Liberty to the Downtrodden”: Thomas L. Kane, Romantic Reformer (New Haven, CT: Yale, 2009), 47–56.

[7] See David L. Bigler and Will Bagley, eds., Army of Israel: Mormon Battalion Narratives (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2000), 31–37.

[8] Daniel B. Rawson, as cited in Norma Baldwin Ricketts, The Mormon Battalion: U.S. Army of the West, 1846–1848 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1996), 13.

[9] This telling of Henry Jackson’s life story relies heavily on two family histories: The Story of Eliza Ann Dibble and Her Three Husbands, Orson Spencer, Henry W. Jackson, and Julius A. C. Austin, comp. Marilyn Austin Smith (n.p., 1995) and “Hidden Personalities among Mormon Battalion Members,” by Don Smith; https://familysearch.org/photos/stories/1079244/daniel-browett-hidden-personalities-among-mormon-battalion.

[10] Daniel Tyler, A Concise History of the Mormon Battalion in the Mexican War, 1846–1847 (Salt Lake City: n.p., 1881), 244–45.

[11] Tyler, Concise History, 248. This wagon road became part of the Butterfield Overland Mail Route.

[12] Tyler, Concise History, 252.

[13] Lt. Col. Philip St. George Cooke, Order No. 1, quoted in Bigler and Bagley, Army of Israel, 17.

[14] Tyler, Concise History, 255.

[15] See Michael N. Landon and Brandon J. Metcalf, History of the Saints: The Remarkable Journey of the Mormon Battalion (American Fork, UT: Covenant Communications, 2012), 7.

[16] For more detail, see Fleek, History May Be Searched in Vain, 321–23.

[17] Robert S. Bliss, “The Journal of Robert S. Bliss, with the Mormon Battalion,” Utah Historical Quarterly 4 (July/October 1931): 96.

[18] Although Col. Stevenson, 7^th New York Regiment of Volunteers, was glad when some of the battalion members agreed to reenlist, he privately confided to Col. Mason, military governor of California, worries that they might try to take over southern California to aid their Utah settlement. See confidential letter, Col. J. D. Stevenson to Governor Mason, July 23, 1847, Records of the 10th Military Department, 1846–1851, National Archives Microfilm Publication, microcopy 210, roll 2.

[19] John F. Yurtinus, “The Mormon Volunteers: The Recruitment and Service of a Unique Military Company,” Journal of San Diego History 25, no. 3 (Summer 1979): 242–61.

[20] Col. J. D. Stevenson, 7^th New York Regiment of Volunteers, wrote to Col. R. B. Mason, July 23, 1847, stating that the reenlisted members of the Mormon Battalion were dressed “from cap to shoe, in the uniform of my Regiment.” In Charles Hughes, ed., “A Military View of San Diego in 1847: Four Letters from Colonel Jonathan D. Stevenson to Governor Richard B. Mason,” Journal of San Diego History 20, no. 3 (September 1974): 33–43.

[21] Richard B. Mason to General R. Jones, Sen. Exec. Doc. 18 (31-1), Serial 557, 318–22, in Bigler and Bagley, Army of Israel, 394–95.

[22] Henry Jackson’s deposits to the Utah gold accounts are listed by amount in J. Kenneth Davies and Lorin K. Hansen, Mormon Gold: Mormons in the California Gold Rush, 2^nd ed. (North Salt Lake City: Granite Mountain, 2010), 83–84, 153. For a discussion of Mormon Battalion involvement in the gold rush, see Kenneth Owens, “Far from Zion: The Frayed Ties between California’s Gold Rush Saints and LDS President Brigham Young,” California History 89, no. 4 (2012): 5–23.

[23] Kenneth N. Owens, Gold Rush Saints: California Mormons and the Great Rush for Riches (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 369.