OMG. It doesn't get much worse than this.

"Mormons Tried to Stop Native Child Slavery in Utah. They Ended Up Encouraging It.

Children were purchased in an attempt to save them from being degraded, but soon became a vital source of labor for early Mormon settlers....

Some groups of Native people, including the Utes, participated in the slave trade, raiding nearby tribes, capturing potential slaves and selling them to the Mexican elite. They also stole horses and sold them to travelers. By positioning themselves as slave traders, not potential slaves themselves, people like Ute Chief Walkara, or Walker, could evade the enslavement of their own people while maintaining a powerful status relative to other bands and tribes.

But Walkara was unprepared for the tenacity of the Mormons. For Mormons, Native Americans—whom they termed “Lamanites”—represented an economic and religious opportunity. According to a prophecy in the original text of the Book of Mormon, the Lamanites were destined to become “white and delightsome” once they converted to Mormonism.

Many Mormons believed slavery was immoral and opposed any kind of enslavement. But once they reached Utah’s Salt Lake Valley, they were initiated into the slave trade by a bloody incident that launched them, even if unintentionally, into the role of slave owners.

“Early one morning we were excited at hearing their shrill, blood-curdling war whoop,” wrote John R. Young, who was camped with the Mormons in what would become Salt Lake. The Native people they encountered had just returned from a raid in which they had captured two girls. “One of these they had killed, and were torturing the other,” wrote Young. One of the Mormon settlers intervened, buying the captive girl.

Soon, Mormons were buying slaves regularly in an attempt to save them from their enslavement and to convert them to Mormonism. “It is essentially purchasing them into freedom,” Brigham Young, the pioneers’ leader, wrote. He encouraged other Mormons to “buy up the Lamanite children as fast as they could and to educate them and teach them the gospel.”...

Native Americans weren’t the only slaves in Mormon households: At least three black slaves came along with the original Mormon settlers, and with an 1852 law legalizing slavery in Utah, other Mormons followed suit. By 1850, two-thirds of the around 100 black people in Utah were slaves. The same paternalistic attitudes that drove indigenous slavery among the Mormons were applied to black slaves, and once Utah determined it would be a slaveholding territory in 1852, even more slave owners entered the state.

As an official slave territory, Utah regulated both the African and Native slave trades. Native American slaves were “indentured” for 20 years; black slaves until they could “satisfy the debt” their master had incurred to purchase them. Slave owners were also required to educate and punish their slaves. The laws held a double standard; black slaves were handled more harshly than Native American ones....

Then, in 1862, Congress outlawed slavery in all United States territories, including Utah. Most black slaves, now free, moved out of the state. Meanwhile, many Native people stayed with the families they had lived with during slavery. Some assimilated, though few married Mormons due to taboos against mixed-race marriages; others went back to what remained of their families of origins and tried to reintegrate into Native society.

Historians still argue about whether the church is culpable for engaging in a slave trade that most Mormons recognized as evil and tried to curb. But intentions are not outcomes, and the consequences of Mormons’ willingness to tolerate slavery in Utah can still be felt today. Though slavery technically ended in Utah in 1862, the church’s attempt to convert Native Americans did not.

Between the 1950s and 1970s, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints fostered roughly 50,000 Native American students, encouraging their conversion and assimilation. A century and a half later, the repercussions of slavery still reverberates in the lives of the Native people and African Americans the church once helped subjugate—even if few people remember that a slave trade once existed in Utah."

I don't know why I find this shocking, but I do. Mountain Meadows Massacre wasn't the only atrocity committed by early Mormon settlers. The slave trade was longer running and apparently part and parcel of Brigham Young's public policy for the territory of Utah at that time. Ignorant bigoted bastards that they were.

https://www.history.com/news/native-american-slavery-mormon-utah



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/20/2019 10:33AM by Amyjo.

"Slavery of African-Americans in Utah began with the settlement of Mormon pioneers in 1847 and lasted for 15 years until the practice was made illegal in 1862.

Three slaves, named Green Flake, Hark Lay, and Oscar Crosby, came west with the first Mormon pioneer company in 1847. According to some reports, it was Green Flake who drove the wagon that brought Brigham Young into the Salt Lake Valley.

https://www.utahhumanities.org/stories/files/fullsize/af9eb22b24f14557169c3a924706185e.jpg

At the time, the LDS Church had no official stance regarding slavery, and the views of its leaders reflect the ambivalence of the country during this time. Joseph Smith wrote in 1836 that slaves owed their owners obedience, but also supported abolition during his 1844 presidential campaign. Brigham Young declared slaveholding to be a practice ordained by God, but was not in favor of creating a slave-based economy in Utah. In 1851 Apostle Orson Hyde said the LDS Church would not interfere in relations between master and slave.

Although slavery of African-Americans was never widespread in Utah, records do document the active sale of slaves, and the Federal Census reports the existence of 26 black slaves in Utah in 1850, and 29 in 1860. Slavery was legal in Utah due to the Compromise of 1850, which created the Utah Territory and declared that its people could decide the slavery issue for themselves. Slaveholding was formally sanctioned by the Utah Legislature two years later in 1852, although the law cautioned against inhumane treatment and stipulated that slaves could be declared free if their masters abused them.

This seeming benevolence – and ambivalence – is misleading, however. While a few people freed their slaves in Utah before required to do so by law, the majority did so only after the US Congress abolished slavery in the Utah Territory during the Civil War in 1862."

https://www.utahhumanities.org/stories/items/show/201

The 13th amendment to end slavery not only required slaves to be freed, it required an end to involuntary servitude. In Utah, Black slaves were freed, American Indian women and children were still held in involuntary servitude.

Involuntary servitude for Indians was still the law in 1866, after the 13th amendment had been ratified.
http://www.archive.org/stream/actsresolutionsm09utah#page/86/mode/2up

Oh, thanks for adding that. I had no idea.. Another shameful part of Utah's past.

:/

Who wrote the account?

If European American(s) does it present a negative image of Native Americans?