Growing up in Utah, I heard many pioneer stories about my ancestors and their colleagues who traveled west to settle the Intermountain West region. I found, however, that many of the stories focused on the journey itself rather than the years that followed as they established settlements and survived in an arid region. The latter half is just as important, as is the observation that many people uprooted their lives repeatedly to settle more remote areas beyond the Wasatch Front in Utah. One dramatic story of that sort is among the last that could be considered pioneering—the settling of the Big Horn Basin in northern Wyoming in the early twentieth century.
John Gary Maxwell’s The Last Called Mormon Colonization: Polygamy, Kinship, and Wealth in Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2022) provides a detailed glimpse into aspects of the Latter-day Saint settlement in the Big Horn Basin. It was very thoroughly researched and provided in-depth glimpses into who settled there, where they came from, and the conditions that led to the colonization. It also discusses the challenging conditions that the colonists faced as they settled, dug canals, and farmed, such as poverty, isolation, and alkali soils that were aggravated by irrigation. Leaders and key moments in the enterprise, as well as discussions about how the colonies fared throughout the twentieth century, were featured throughout (here is where it has the most overlap with Buffalo Bill and the Mormons by Brent M. Rogers). It also clarifies that the title of the book is a reference to the venture being the final time that Church leaders called people to colonization as a church assignment, as compared to other colonization ventures that occurred around the same time.
My main complaint about the book is that it felt very unfocused. The chapters were each focused on topics that related to the settlement, but often felt disconnected from each other or tangential to the settlement of the Big Horn Basin. Overlapping aspects covered in different chapters led to some overlap in content and timeframes, muddying the underlying narrative. For example, chapters focused on disparate topics like post-Manifesto polygamy, a general overview of the displacement and elimination of indigenous peoples under European powers (with a specific example being the Uintah reservation in Utah rather than anything in Wyoming), biographical summaries of the lives of four apostles who were involved in the Big Horn Basin, biographical overviews of five men who happened to settle in Wyoming and also happened to have the last name Woodruff (the three non-Latter-day Saints didn’t even seem to show up outside of that chapter). It was only about halfway through that it started to consistently focus on more closely related narratives, but even then, the text occasionally veered off course into topics like the Church’s controversial financial practices in recent years.
One thing the book does particularly well is to discuss post-Manifesto polygamy. The book explores when the marriages were happening and who was performing the marriages and the various efforts the United States government made to eradicate the practice. While not as in-depth as B. Carmon Hardy’s Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage, it highlights how the apostles that seemed most committed to perpetuating polygamy were the ones most directly involved in settling the Big Horn Basin and uses that—along with other examples of polygamists among the original settlers (and among the inhabitants of the basin today)—to suggest that Latter-day Saint settlements there were intended to be out-of-the-way havens for polygamists that were committed to pursuing the Practice.
Despite my complaints about lack of focus, John Gary Maxwell’s The Last Called Mormon Colonization: Polygamy, Kinship, and Wealth in Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin is a very worthwhile read, especially for those interested in the history of Wyoming, Latter-day Saint colonization of the western United States, and the practice of plural marriage.