State of Deseret

And it also housed the public library, for instance, for a short time.

And even the University of Deseret was there, which later becomes the University of Utah.

So take that, you know, for the holy war between BYU and Utah.

That's one point for the U of U, I'm just saying.

In the middle of the crowd, Brigham Young climbs to the top of a buggy to speak, and his thoughts immediately went back to Nauvoo, in fact.

Now, keep in mind, it's been almost exactly seven years since the saints began their exodus from Nauvoo.

And Willard Richards, who's one of Brigham Young's counselors in the first presidency, summarized his remarks for the Deseret News.

Here's what it says.

The settlers weren't just city builders, they were state builders.

The dream didn't end with a Mormon city, but a Mormon state, the state of Deseret.

With the US wrestling control of the Southwest from Mexico in 1848, Mormons were once again within the confines of the US, a country whose laws seemed to come down hard on Mormon practices like polygamy, but didn't seem to protect them from mobs and militias who threatened and attacked the saints in the past.

The best recourse, they figured, was statehood, something not necessarily sovereign, but certainly not reliant on the rest of the nation either.

As they fought for the expansive Great Basin state they called Deseret with politicians in Washington, they furthered their own self-sufficiency with colony building of their own.

Until 2022, St. George's Utah Tech University was called Dixie State.

Its nickname, until recently, was the Rebels.

Colonization as a strategy to self-sufficiency wasn't just a one-off, either.

So the details are a little more complicated than the image of him simply being Brigham Young's gunman.

So Porter was appointed, elected deputy marshal in the provisional state of Deseret.

way back in 1849, which made him an authorized peace officer, Casey, right? And contemporary Utah institutions later evolved as Deseret becomes Utah territory.

And so Porter continues to perform law enforcement duties for years afterward.

Yeah, for sure.

Brigham Young led the saints into the Great Basin and imagined a Mormon territory called Deseret.

But that homeland was already occupied.

Southern Paiute, Northern Paiute, Ute, Goshute, Shoshone, and other native people were living across the region long before Mormonism.