Review: Will Bagley, ed., “The Whites Want Every Thing”: Indian-Mormon Relations, 1847–1877. Vol. 16 of Kingdom in the West: The Mormons and the American Frontier. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019.

Authors

Katrina Phillips

Keywords

Indian-Mormon, indigenous, conflict

Abstract

In the foreword to Will Bagley’s “The Whites Want Every Thing”: Indian-Mormon Relations, 1847–1877, Floyd O’Neil highlights how integral American Indians have been in Latter-day Saint doctrine—and history. Additionally, he contends that a dearth of available Mormon-created sources has left a gap in the scholarship on the long history of the relationships between Latter-day Saints and Indians in the American West. While some encounters were “routine” or “lacking in conflict,” to quote O’Neil, contestations over resources in places such as the Utah Valley led to more violent and protracted battles that would stretch into the twenty-first century (17). “The Whites Want Every Thing” is the final installment in the sixteen-volume series Kingdom in the West: The Mormons and the American Frontier published by the Arthur H. Clark Company and now the University of Oklahoma Press. Since 1997 the series has delivered volumes dedicated to the now-infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857 and documentary histories of the Utah War, the California Gold Rush, and Mormon theocracy in the American West, among other subjects.

BYU ScholarsArchive Citation

Phillips, Katrina (2021) "Review: Will Bagley, ed., “The Whites Want Every Thing”: Indian-Mormon Relations, 1847–1877. Vol. 16 of Kingdom in the West: The Mormons and the American Frontier. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019.," Mormon Studies Review: Vol. 8: No. 1, Article 14.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr2/vol8/iss1/14