In 1856 well over one thousand poor emigrants left Liverpool, at contract rates, for Iowa City, where the parties were to be organized and ample equipment in handcarts and provisions were promised to be ready. On arrival in Iowa City it was found that slovenly management had not built enough of the carts. Delayed by the necessary construction of these carts, some of the bands could not get on the trail until late in the summer,--too late for a successful trip, as a few of their more cautious advisers had said. The earliest company got through to Salt Lake City in September with considerable success. It was hard and toilsome to push the carts; women and children suffered badly, but the task was possible. Snow and starvation in the mountains broke down the last company. A friendly historian speaks of a loss of sixty-seven out of a party of four hundred and twenty. Throughout the United States the picture of these poor deluded immigrants, toiling against their carts through mountain pass and river-bottom, with clothing going and food quite gone, increased the conviction that the Mormon hierarchy was misleading and abusing the confidence of thousands.
That the hierarchy was endangering the peace of the whole United States came to be believed as well. In 1850, with the Salt Lake settlement three years old, Congress had organized a territory of Utah, extending from the Rockies to California, between 37° and 42°, and the President had made Brigham Young its governor. The close association of the Mormon church and politics had prevented peaceful relations from existing between its people and the federal officers of the territory, while Washington prejudiced a situation already difficult by sending to Utah officers and judges, some of whom could not have commanded respect even where the sway of United States authority was complete. The vicious influence of politics in territorial appointments, which the territories always resented, was specially dangerous in the case of a territory already feeling itself persecuted for conscience' sake. Yet it was not impossible for a tactful and respectable federal officer to do business in Utah. For several years relations increased in bad temper, both sides appealing constantly to President and Congress, until it appeared, as was the fact, that the United States authority had become as nothing in Utah and with the church. Among the earliest of President Buchanan's acts was the preparation of an army which should reëstablish United States prestige among the Mormons. Large wagon trains were sent out from Fort Leavenworth in the summer of 1857, with an army under Albert Sidney Johnston following close behind, and again the old Platte trail came before the public eye.