n, across the Plains in 1847. The success of this people in
treating with the Indians has often been noted, and has been made the
occasion of many unjust reflections upon the United States, as if a
popular government, giving, both of necessity and of choice, the largest
liberty to pioneer enterprise, could be reasonably expected to preserve
peaceful relations with remote bands of savages as effectively as a
political and religious despotism, keeping its membership compact and
close in hand. But, while the Mormons have certainly been successful in
maintaining good terms with the natives of the plains, it is not so
certain that their influence upon the Indians has been advantageous to
the government, or to the white settlers not of the church. It clearly
has been for their interest to attach the natives to themselves rather
than to the government; it clearly has been in their power to direct a
great many agencies to that end; and it will probably require more faith
in Mormon virtue than the majority of us possess to keep alive much of a
doubt that they have actually done so. We certainly have the opinion of
many persons well informed that it has been the constant policy of the
Latter-Day Saints to teach the Indians to look to them rather than to
the government as their benefactors and their protectors; to represent,
as far as possible through agents and interpreters in their interest,
the goods and supplies received from the United States as derived from
the bounty of the church; to stir up, for special purposes or for
general ends, troubles between the natives and the encroaching whites,
east, west, and south; and, finally, so to alienate from the government
and attach to themselves the Utes, Shoshones and Bannocks, as to assure
themselves of their aid in the not improbable event of a last desperate
struggle for life with the power of the United States.

The next event historically which tended to the disruption of the policy
of seclusion was the discovery of gold upon the Pacific slope, which in
three years replaced the few insinuating priests and indolent
_rancheros_, who had previously formed the white population of the
coast, with a hundred thousand eager gold-hunters. That the access of
such a population--bold, adventurous, prompt to violence, reckless, and
too often wantonly unjust and cruel--should stir up trouble and strife
with the sixty thousand natives, upon whom they pressed at every point
in their eager searc