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Published: November 21st 2012
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BATTLE OF THE BULLS
The Mormons had gotten themselves kicked out of both Jackson County, Missouri and out of Nauvoo, Illinois by January of 1846 and were hunkered down on the prairie with the Pottawatomie Indians up in Iowa. They were busily trying to find a way of surviving through the hard winter ahead with what few meager possessions they still had. Plans were to leave the United States soon as they could and settle somewhere out west in territory belonging to Mexico. They were seeking a place so remote that the Mexican Government would not bother them, and they would be free from persecution by Americans. They wanted land that nobody else could live in or near. Problem was they couldn’t get there without help from the government. In January Brigham Young dispatched a fellow named Jesse C. Little to Washington D. C. to see what sort of welfare was available. Fortunately war with Mexico had begun and the government was in desperate need of more soldiers. In June an offer was extended by the real President, James K. Polk, allowing conscription of a Mormon battalion. The Mormons, of course, declined to join until Brigham gave the venture his blessing. Each man that joined up was given a clothing allowance of $42 all of which went into the church coffers. There were 543 men who enlisted in the First Iowa Volunteer Regiment so the clothing allowance was just over $21 thousand dollars. It was the money that the church needed to outfit for the journey to Utah. The ragtag soldiers set off from Council Bluffs for Fort Leavenworth, Kansas on July 20 under command of Captain James Allen who was a gentile regular army officer. At Fort Leavenworth they were outfitted for war and given their clothing allowances which went back to Iowa. Allen took sick and died at Fort Leavenworth and the First Iowa set off in civilian clothes down the Santa Fe Trail under command of First Lieutenant Andrew Jackson Smith, another non-Mormon. His command also included 33 women, 20 of whom were laundresses, and 51
children. Before they left Iowa Brigham selected five Mormon officers as company commanders and those officers were allowed to bring along their plural wives and children. It was an iron-clad guarantee that the outfit would never see combat, and it didn’t. The only action it saw was when the column was attacked by a couple of wild bulls on the San Pedro River. Two men and several mules were gored before guns could be unpacked, loaded and fired. The bulls were remnants of a herd brought into Arizona as part of the Boquillas Land Grant. The Boquillas settlement failed in that hard country due to Apache depredation. The Mexican settlers fled back home and the Apaches quickly devoured the cattle, but they left those mean bulls alone. By the time the Mormon Battalion happened upon them those two bulls were extremely horny and in dire need of sexual release. The photo shows the monument erected by the church near where the Battle of the Bulls occurred. The battalion was not entirely useless however. They did blaze a trail through Southern Arizona parts of which would be used by the Butterfield Stage Line, the Southern Pacific Railroad, and the Interstate Highway System. The route they followed would lead to the Gadsden Purchase in 1854. The land purchase was such an unpopular move in Mexico that it toppled the regime of President Santa Anna and drove him into exile.
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