Ethical Review of Social Sciences

Durham & Thunmann, 2025. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.

https://doi.org/10.70150/1xs2kg94.

THE ORIGINS OF A REBELLION:

RELIGION, LAND, AND A WESTERN ENVIRONMENTAL ETHIC

JERROLD A. LONG*

Abstract:

This article examines an apparent irony in the environmental ethic

of the contemporary American West. Much of the Interior West is

dominated by a particular culture that is the product of Mormon

settlement in the Salt Lake Valley and subsequent expansion

throughout the region. The teachings of early Mormon leaders

contained significant threads of what today would be recognized

as environmentalism. Despite these teachings, and despite

Mormons’ famously strict adherence to other theological tenets,

the environmental ethic of the contemporary West is often

perceived as anti-environment. Why would this culture, which

holds so fast to its other religious teachings — including those

teachings that for a time had significant and negative political,

legal, and economic effects — reject this aspect of religious

doctrine? Using the Mormon experience as a case study, this

article argues that the contemporary West’s conservative

environmental ethic is a tapestry woven from the interrelationships

of legal regimes found and developed during western settlement,

the cultural origins and destinations of the settlers, and the physical

landscape itself. It is both what settlers found and developed upon

arriving in the interior West that led to the region’s contemporary

environmental conservatism.

Keywords: Public Lands, Environmental Ethics, American

West, Pragmatism, Religion, Mormonism

JEL Codes: K00, K32, O13, Q00, Q20, Q30, Q56

The Henrys Fork country was one of the last regions settled by

Mormons. It includes the Teton River, Fall River, and Henrys Fork

Introduction

An environmental ethic emerges out of the lived

experience in a place, a product of the recursive

interactions of law, culture, and the physical

landscape. It is a deliberate pragmatic choice about the

particular pathway that might work best given

particular legal and ecological constraints and

opportunities, but it is also a choice both enabled and

constrained by the constellation of previous and

ongoing choices that create and perpetuate cultural

understandings, shape the physical landscape, and

formalize legal regimes.

Over eighty years ago, Bernard DeVoto (1936, p.

82) argued that Mormon settlement “is probably the

most important chapter in the history of the trans-

Mississippi frontier[.]” Thirty years after DeVoto’s

writing, Rodman Paul (1967, p. 512) acknowledged

that “the Mormons were the most important single

group in colonizing the intermontane West.” The

contemporary West continues as the social, cultural,

and physical manifestation of the Mormon experience

in settling the Salt Lake Valley and expanding

throughout the Interior West (Meinig, 1965). The

contemporary western environmental ethic is a

product of those experiences, a tapestry woven from

the interrelationships of legal regimes found and

developed during western settlement, the cultural

origins and destinations of the settlers, and the

physical landscape itself. It is both what Mormon

settlers found and developed upon arriving in the

Interior West that led to the region’s environmental

conservatism.

Three elements of their experience in the Interior

West, and in particular in the Henrys Fork country in

the far northern reach of the Mormon Cultural

Region,

might explain how a progressive

environmental proto-ethic evolved into the

conservative ethic we perceive today. The first is the

landscape itself. The Interior West is a place of aridity

and temperature extremes, with environmental

difficulties increasing the farther Mormons traveled

from Salt Lake City. Second, that harshness combined

with a specific cultural perception of the purpose of

the natural world. Mormons believed, consistent with

other westerners, that it was their role to improve

natural conditions, and that with hard work and faith,

God would make the “desert blossom as the rose.”

watersheds in southeastern Idaho, USA. This paper focuses on the

Mormon experience in that region.

* Professor of Law, University of Idaho, Moscow, USA.

And finally, in the Henrys Fork country, Mormons

settled in a place where the law already described a

particular type of relationship with nature, one that

was consistent with the Mormons’ own expectations

about how they should improve the natural world.

This combination of law, culture, and the physical

landscape created conditions that rewarded a

particular type of environmental ethic. Mormons

chose the environmental ethic that seemed to work

best given the legal, cultural, and landscape conditions

they faced.

1. An Environmental Religion?

The contemporary ethic notwithstanding, the

original environmental ethic taught by Mormon

leaders was not the environmental ethic assumed of

Judeo-Christian religions today. In his influential

work “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis,”

Lynn White, Jr. (1967) argued that the Judeo-

Christian tradition has inculcated a social

understanding of the natural world as serving

exclusively human purposes. In this understanding,

the earth was created for humans, who were alone

created in God’s image, and similarly were the only

spiritual beings. Genesis 1:26 (King James Bible,

1769/2025) provides: “And God said, Let us make

man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have

dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of

the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and

over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the

earth.” In Genesis 1:28, God commands Adam and

Eve to go forth and replenish the earth, and subdue

and have dominion over it. White (1967, p. 1205)

argued that, “[t]he spirits in natural objects, which

formerly had protected nature from man, evaporated.

Man’s effective monopoly on spirit in this world was

confirmed, and the old inhibitions to the exploitation

of nature crumbled.”

Contemporary Mormon culture lends support to the

White thesis. Recent studies of the environmental

perspectives of Mormons suggest that Mormons

demonstrate the lowest levels of environmental

concern when compared to both adherents of other

religions and non-religious individuals (Brehm &

Eisenhauer, 2006; Peterson & Liu, 2008). And several

recent events suggest that many Mormons might

prefer use and development over conservation or

preservation. The easiest examples, but not

necessarily most accurate or useful, are the two

confrontations in Nevada and Oregon orchestrated by

members of the Bundy family. Cliven Bundy, whose

belief that the Bureau of Land Management has no

authority over his grazing leases in Nevada led to the

infamous standoff at his ranch in April 2014, is a

For discussions of this point by Mormon scholars, see Handley, Ball,

& Peck, Stewardship and the Creation: LDS Perspectives on the

Environment (2006) and Kay & Brown (1985).

descendent of Mormon settlers. His son, Ammon—

named after an important missionary in the Book of

Mormon (The Book of Mormon, 1830/2025, Alma,

Ch. 17-19)—claimed that his occupation of the

Malheur National Wildlife Refuge was in response to

divine inspiration (Petty & Rindels, 2016).

Although the actions of the Bundys should not be

considered representative of Mormons generally,

recent activity in the state of Utah does suggest a broad

dissatisfaction with the state of natural resource

regulation in the region. Utah has been the most

aggressive of the western states in its efforts to obtain

title to federal lands within its boundaries. For over a

decade, Utah has dedicated significant state resources

to building a legal case to obtain ownership of the

federal lands; it recently initiated a lawsuit in the

United States Supreme Court seeking the transfer to

the State of approximately 18.5 million acres of

federal lands (Hufham, 2024).

But these contemporary stories are inconsistent

with some very real threads of Mormon

environmentalism in the late 19th Century. While

Mormon mistrust of government might be

understandable given the church’s history, the relative

lack of concern for the natural environment is much

less so. Contemporary Mormon culture might be

somewhat anti-conservation, but it was not always so.

Any understanding that Mormonism, as a theology, is

inherently anti-conservation is misplaced.

As discussed above, the Judeo-Christian

relationship with the natural world begins with the Old

Testament and the book of Genesis. The Bible’s

commandment to have dominion over all of the earth’s

creatures, and to subdue the earth, suggests a

particular type of relationship with the natural world.

But understanding how it might influence a Mormon

environmental ethic requires taking an additional step.

One of the tenets of the Mormon faith is that the

Christian Bible is the word of God “so long as it is

translated correctly” (Pearl of Great Price, 1851/2025,

The Articles of Faith, 1:8). Over time, as the Bible was

translated from its original Hebrew to Greek and

Latin, and finally into English, Mormons believe that

errors were incorporated into the text.

Because of these mistranslations, Mormons believe

Joseph Smith retranslated the Bible from its original

Hebrew. In the Book of Genesis, Joseph Smith’s

translation adds some nuance to God’s

commandments regarding how his people should

interact with the natural world. Following the flood,

when God covenants with Noah, the Joseph Smith

translation provides: “Every moving thing that liveth

shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I

given you all things. … And surely, blood shall not be

shed, only for meat, to save your lives; and the blood

of every beast will I require at your hands” (Joseph

Smith Translation Appendix, 2025, Gen. 9:9-11). In

Joseph Smith’s other writings, believed also to be

retranslations of the Bible, God characterizes the trees

and all animals as having “living souls” (Pearl of

Great Price, 1851/2025, Moses 3:9 & 19)

This new translation of the Genesis commandments

influenced other core elements of Mormon doctrine.

Mormons are perhaps most well-known for abstaining

from alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, and other things

believed to be unhealthy or harmful. In addition to

these more well-known elements of the “Word of

Wisdom,” the teachings also provide that meat—from

the “living souls”—be used sparingly, only in times of

hunger and famine: “flesh also of beasts and of the

fowls of the air, I, the Lord, have ordained for the use

of man with thanksgiving; nevertheless they are to be

used sparingly; And it is pleasing unto me that they

should not be used, only in times of winter, or of cold,

or famine…. [T]he beasts of the field, and the fowls of

heaven, and all wild animals that run or creep on the

earth; And these hath God made for the use of man

only in times of famine and excess of hunger”

(Doctrine and Covenants, 2025, 89:12-15).

Throughout the Books of Moses, additional

commandments are provided to care for animals, both

domestic and wild. And in Proverbs, we find perhaps

the most well-known discussion of animals in God’s

Kingdom: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb,

and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the

calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a

little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear

shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together:

and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the

suckling child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the

weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’

den” (Isaiah 11:6-9).

These religious teachings had a significant impact

on early leaders, and Mormon theologians and

historians contend that a progressive environmental

ethic was an integral part of Mormonism (Handley,

Ball, & Peck, 2006). Thomas G. Alexander (1998, p.

488) argues that “Joseph Smith, and his successor,

Brigham Young, taught an environmentally conscious

theology based on the belief that human beings bore

an absolute responsibility to care for God’s

creations[.]” A few illustrative stories are common in

these arguments. Joseph Smith somewhat famously

refused to kill rattlesnakes and argued that “[m]en

must become harmless, before the brute creation”

(Joseph Smith Papers, p. 8).” Lorenzo Snow gave up

hunting upon realizing that he was “amusing myself

by giving pain and death to harmless, innocent

creatures that perhaps had as much right to life and

This book is an edited and annotated compilation of Rigby’s journal

entries. The original journals are available in Special Collections at the

McKay Library at Brigham Young University-Idaho.

In his influential book, The Great Valleys and Prairies of Nebraska

and the Northwest, land speculator and author Charles Dana Wilbur

enjoyment as myself” (Snow, 1884, p. 28). And in

some surprising contrast with contemporary ideology

in Utah, the church voted in 1902 at a general

priesthood meeting to support withdrawing the forest

lands above Utah’s valleys as federal forest reserves

unavailable for settlement, in order to protect fragile

watersheds (Alexander, 1998, pp. 490-491).

If early Mormon theology included a real

environmentalism, why was that part of the theology

apparently rejected in the Mormon Cultural Region?

The Mormon experience in the last place they

settled—in the Henrys Fork country of southeastern

Idaho—demonstrates how an environmental ethic

emerges from a place, as a product of the lived

experience in that place.

2. “July 3d … it was very cold …”

Mormon settlers believed that the locations of their

settlements were divinely inspired, and that if they

were industrious and kept the faith, God would bless

them and make the land productive. Church leaders

even preached that God would change the climate of

an area as a result of their hard work and faith. When

he visited the Teton Basin in late 1890 to help dedicate

a new Mormon meeting house, William F. Rigby

recorded in his journal that he (and other church

leaders) “counseled the saints as we had done to go

right to farming & prophesied many good things in

regards [to] the future of the valley & the modifying of

the climate & the success that should attend the united

labors of the saints in farming” (Housley, 2008, p.

463).

Mormons shared the optimism of all western

settlers, for whom the hoped-for adage “rain follows

the plow” justified settlement across an arid region

that still cannot support it.

Mormons were highly successful town and

community builders; they were highly organized,

believed they were called of God, and had ample

experience in settling new country (Jackson, 1978).

However, much of their early success in the Great

Basin was due to favorable environmental conditions,

even if they did not recognize it. Mormons would

struggle much more when they traveled north into the

Henrys Fork country.

The harshness of the Henrys Fork landscape should

not have been a surprise. Early visitors to the area

remarked often about the climatic conditions. Warren

A. Ferris visited the Teton Valley in 1832 with the

American Fur Company. He recorded that

“throughout the month of June, scarcely a day passed

without either rain, hail, or snow, and during the last

three days of the month, a snow storm continued

(1881, p. 68) coined the phrase “rain follows the plow” to promote

settlement of the arid West. Consistent with Mormon culture described

herein, Wilbur also relied on Biblical stories to justify his claims.

without intermission, the whole time, night and day.”

(Ferris, Alter, & Auerbach, 1940, p. 121). In July of

that same year, Captain Nathaniel J. Wyeth reported

that “the weather is warm in the day but frost every

night.” (Wyeth & Young, 1899, p. 159).

Mormons had themselves been to the north before,

temporarily occupying Fort Lemhi near present-day

Salmon, Idaho in the late 1850s (Beal, 1942). And

Richard “Beaver Dick” Leigh, who likely guided

many early Mormons and was well known to church

leaders,

lived in the Teton Basin in the 1870s and was

familiar with its conditions. His diary (Leigh,

1875/1956, pp. 4-8) from that time shares the

following:

June 1 it frose ice last night the wind rased and it

commenced to snow at sun rise it was very cold… it

was snowing and too cold to ride… 4th… in the teton

Bason thare is plenty of snow on the mountins yet, it is

fresing every night… 8th… thare is new snow on the

mountains all around us… 20th… everything was

allright only my garden was Backwards on a count of

the late spring we sufrd from day light until about

eleven Oclock with a very cold wind it sperd that I

sufred more then I did eny day last winter… 21st it

frose hard last night niped every thing in my gardin

close to the ground only the peas and carrots was

saved… July 3d… it was very cold…

Two decades later, not much had changed. The

stories of Henrys Fork country settlers are full of

references to the difficult conditions and harsh

winters. For example, Don Carlos and Annie Marie

Howard homesteaded near the Fall River (a tributary

to the Henrys Fork) in 1889. They moved into their

cabin with a two-month old daughter, and would have

nine more children in the same home. But for the

resolve of his wife, Don Carlos acknowledges that the

winters likely would have driven him from the

homestead: “We had terrible winters. We had so much

snow, we had to shovel our horses and cattle out of the

stables, and we had to haul water from the Fall

River…. The snow was so deep everyone carried

shovels wherever we went. Whenever we met

someone on the road, we would turn out and then have

to shovel ourselves back onto the road. Many times I

would have sold out for little or nothing just to get out

of the snow” (Howard, 2006).

Even with the advent of automobiles and airplanes,

the Henrys Fork country remained rather isolated. In

the winter of 1948-1949, for example, blizzard

conditions closed all roads accessing the Teton Valley

for twenty-three days. When plows finally opened

Idaho Highway 33 to nearby Rexburg, Idaho, the wind

immediately closed it again for another four days

(Jensen, 1982).

Apparently it was Brigham Young himself, then leader of the

Mormon Church, who first called Richard Leigh “Beaver Dick.”

(Thompson & Thompson, 1982, p. 9).

Complaints of cold temperatures and harsh winters

might be an expected part of settlement stories from

anywhere in the West, but the Henrys Fork country

might have been just a bit harsher than most other

areas the Mormons settled. Compared to the Salt Lake

Valley, the growing season in the Henrys Fork country

is much colder and shorter, with frost possible any day

of the year; in the Salt Lake Valley, farmers never run

the risk of frost in the summer.

Even in comparison

to neighboring areas, the Henrys Fork country is a

harsh landscape, producing significantly less winter

wheat per acre as nearby, lower elevation locations.

(United States Department of Agriculture, National

Agricultural Statistics Service, 2024).

While climatic conditions are difficult across the

Interior West, in the Henrys Fork country Mormon

settlers encountered nearly the full suite of western

challenges: aridity and unpredictable water supplies,

cold and snowy winters, and short and inconsistent

growing seasons. Considered alone, the climatic

conditions Mormon settlers faced might have been

sufficient to promote an ideology that preferred

development and modification of the natural world.

But these conditions were exacerbated by a cultural

and theological tradition that taught that the

environment would improve to better support human

needs as a result of faith and hard work.

3. The Desert Shall Blossom as the Rose

Mormon theology’s threads of progressive

environmentalism are only one aspect of Mormons’

complicated relationship with the natural world.

Mormon theology also teaches that humans can

‘improve’ natural conditions, making the land more

fertile and useful for human uses. In particular,

Mormon theology counsels that these improvements

will follow righteous living. That belief—that God

would bless and improve the lands of the righteous—

had a significant effect on the environmental

ideologies that would emerge in the Mormon Cultural

Region.

The Henrys Fork country is only one sparsely-

settled corner of the Mormon Cultural Region, but it

is representative of conditions Mormon settlers faced

in other parts of the Interior West, which is

characterized by its aridity more than any other factor.

Although some areas of early Mormon settlement—

the Salt Lake Valley, for example—might not have

challenged settlers in the same way the Henrys Fork

country and other similar areas did, the Mormons

believed that they did. By the end of the 19th Century,

Mormons believed that the entire Great Basin,

including the relatively verdant Salt Lake Valley, had

Between 1981-2000, the temperature at the Salt Lake International

Airport never dropped below freezing during the months of June, July,

August, and September, and did only on average once every five years in

May.

been barren and sterile when they arrived—a

“howling desert… in the heart of the great American

desert” (Jackson, 1978). In a sermon given in 1857,

Brigham Young gave thanks that the “Lord has

brought us to these barren valleys, to these sterile

mountains, to this desolate waste, where only the

Saints could or would live, to a region that is not

desired by another class of people on the earth”

(Jackson, 1978, p. 331).

In the Old Testament, Isaiah prophesied that at the

second coming of the Lord, “The wilderness and the

solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert

shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose” (Isaiah 35:1).

This notion that God will reward both righteousness

and hard work with actual environmental change is an

important thread in both Mormon teaching and its

mythology. George Handley (2006, p. 62) describes

the importance of the passage from Isaiah: “Like many

such passages throughout the Bible and the Book of

Mormon, it teaches a profound and important

principle that God blesses the land according to our

righteousness and that our ability to feed ourselves and

prosper is enhanced by divine environmental

intervention when we live according to the

commandments of the Lord.”

The Book of Mormon is replete with stories of God

blessing the lands of people deemed righteous, and

cursing the lands of the wicked. At the beginning of

the Book of Mormon, God promises the prophet Lehi

that “inasmuch as ye shall keep my commandments,

ye shall prosper, and shall be led to a land of promise;

yea, even a land which I have prepared for you; yea, a

land which is choice above all other lands” (The Book

of Mormon, 1830/2025, 1 Nephi 2:20). Similarly, God

asks in modern Mormon scripture, “will I not make

solitary places to bud and to blossom, and to bring

forth in abundance?” (Doctrine and Covenants, 2025,

p. 117:7).

But to some extent, the Salt Lake Valley did not

cooperate with these prophesies. According to

Mormon mythology, as noted above, the 1847

pioneers arrived in the Salt Lake Valley to find a

barren and desolate landscape. From this assumed

beginning, Mormon leaders created a story of

overcoming significant adversity through faith and

hard work. This story is of obvious spiritual benefit to

Mormon settlers. If their scripture indicated that God

would reward the righteous by blessing their lands,

then it was important to think that the valley’s current

favorable conditions did not exist previously. The

story would also benefit church leaders in the years

after arriving in the Salt Lake Valley, as they called

members to settle in new areas where climatic

conditions were more difficult. These second-wave

Mormon pioneers were buoyed by the heroic feats

their brothers and sisters in the church had performed

in traveling across the country and settling in the Salt

Lake Valley (Jackson, 1978).

But the Mormons’ initial reactions to the Salt Lake

Valley did not describe a barren, desolate wasteland.

To the contrary, the first arrivals described an

attractive, green valley with ample water and grass:

“We gazed with wonder and admiration upon the most

fertile valley spread before us… clothed with a heavy

garment of vegetation, and in the midst of which

glistened the waters of the Great Salt Lake, with

mountains all around towering to the skies, and

streams, rivulets and creeks of pure water running

through the beautiful valley” (Woodruff, 1983, July

24, 1847).

Richard Jackson (1978, p. 324) describes how the

initial settlers reacted very favorably to the conditions

they found, noting in their journal entries that the soil

was of “most excellent quality,” and that the valley

floor was covered with “very luxuriant” grasses.

Jackson’s summary is that “the general landscape was

described in grandiose terms by the Mormon pioneers,

with no negative comments.” Although the place they

encountered was different than anticipated, they were

“happily disappointed in the appearance of the

valley[.]”

That the Mormon mythology would so rapidly alter

their memories of the land they had encountered

demonstrates the importance of the “blossom as the

rose” prophesies in Mormon culture. It took only five

years before Mormon leaders, in their public sermons,

were describing the valley they encountered as “a

desert, containing nothing but a few bunches of dead

grass, and crickets enough to fence the land” (Smith

G. A., 1854, p. 44). Just over a decade later, church

leaders claimed that Mormons had traveled to the Salt

Lake Valley “because it was so desert, desolate, and

Godforsaken that no mortal upon earth ever would

covet it” (Smith G. A., 1867, p. 177). As Jackson

(1978, p. 332) notes, “three decades after the

enthusiastic view of the Salt Lake Valley recorded by

the pioneer company, the official view was that they

had found one of the most barren places on earth.” The

new mythology is understandable. It is somewhat less

inspiring if the only benefit of righteousness is for the

rose to blossom as the rose. And recognizing the

original advantageous conditions of the Salt Lake

Valley would have done little to provide confidence to

new Mormon settlers traveling into much harsher

landscapes.

In practice, the effect of this changing mythology

was a more intense focus on “improving” the natural

world. Mormons were little different from other

westerners in this regard, but with spiritual

motivations supplanting the patriotic (and, admittedly,

at least quasi-spiritual) motivations of Manifest

Destiny. George Handley (2006, p. 66) argues that the

“notion that ‘rain follows the plow’ was important to

many settlers of the American West, arguably because

of the dry conditions, and became the mantra of

Brigham Young, who regularly promised the pioneers

that if they planted diverse trees and dressed the land

(and, of course, proved themselves worthy), the Lord

would provide.”

In the Henrys Fork country, the amount of

landscape improvement required, and spiritual

motivation or fortification necessary to achieve that

improvement, were significant. Brigham Young long

believed that the northern reaches of the Great Basin

were too cold to support settlement. (Jackson, 1978,

pp. 326-328). He focused settlement efforts to the

south, despite the obvious difficulties of surviving in

a real desert, and advised against even the short move

north to Utah’s Cache Valley (Jackson, 1978, p. 326).

But as more Mormons arrived in the Great Basin,

and as the blossom-as-the-rose mythology solidified,

Mormon settlers moved even farther afield. One of the

Teton Valley’s early settlers was Alfred Durtschi, who

arrived in the Valley in 1909. Alfred had joined the

Mormon Church in Switzerland in 1905 and soon

moved to Utah. But he found that in Utah, all of the

Lord’s work was done: “We liked Utah, but the time

had come when we felt that we were reaping where we

had not sown. Our younger brothers were now big

enough to help Father run the farm so Edward and I

came to the conclusion that it was our duty to do our

share towards helping to make the desert blossom,

which meant, get out in a new country and help dig

canals and ditches, put desert land under cultivation

and to help build new church houses” (Durtschi, n.d.).

Mormons believed they were called of God to make

the desert blossom like the rose, to improve the land,

and to make it suitable for thriving, industrious

communities. It is not so important that the Salt Lake

Valley was or was not a barren wasteland. What

matters is that Mormons came to believe that is was,

and that through their faith and hard work, they had

overcome that desolation and made the desert

blossom. In what is purported to be a history of the

Teton Valley in the upper Henrys Fork country, B.W.

Driggs (1926, p. 150) wrote: “The young people of

today may sometimes complain of hard times and the

difficulties they encounter, but the bridges have been

built, the great canals that required herculean efforts

by the few pioneers then, have been constructed, the

virgin soil has been broken, beautiful homes built, and

now that the ‘desert has been made to blossom as the

rose’ the way has been paved and an easier path made

for them to travel.”

The fundamental Mormon relationship with the

natural environment is thus somewhat ambivalent.

The earth is one of God’s sacred creations, to be loved

and cared for. And the plants and animals are not only

God’s creations, but have eternal living souls of their

own. Animals should not be killed unless absolutely

necessary, in times of famine or hunger. But

coincident with this apparent respect for the natural

world is a belief that the natural world can and should

be improved, both through righteousness and hard

work. Mormons still believe that in the Great Basin,

they made a paradise out of what was a desert.

4. Law on the Landscape

The relationship of Mormon settlers with their new

home was thus not one of accepting the landscape on

its terms, and adjusting expectations and behaviors

accordingly, but rather of modifying the landscape to

accommodate the needs of its new inhabitants. This

relationship is not unique to Mormon settlers. When

Mormons arrived in the Henrys Fork country, non-

Mormon culture—as formalized in law—was already

in place on the ground and expressed the same

preferences. Mormon settlers were not uninfluenced

by these legal and cultural surroundings.

We often mythologize western expansion as an

experience of settling and subduing a lawless, wild

frontier. That mythology is both complicated and

contested in a number of ways (Limerick, 1987), but

in the Henrys Fork, it is also largely false. Although

trappers, horse thieves, and some isolated and

temporary travelers visited the region throughout the

19th Century, the first permanent residents of

European ancestry did not arrive in the Henrys Fork

country until the 1880s, with the principal settlement

not arriving until almost a decade later. At a time when

Idaho was drafting its state constitution, and the Idaho

legislature was designating Moscow as the site of the

state’s Land Grant University, the Henrys Fork

country was only beginning to think about town sites.

A formal, legal landscape thus already existed when

Mormon settlers first wandered into the Henrys Fork

country. Much of what would be their experience with

their natural environment was already shaped and

constrained by decisions made in other places. So

although Mormon settlers in the Henrys Fork arrived,

from all over the world, with their own cultural

meanings in tow, those meanings were both confirmed

and influenced by the legal landscape the settlers

encountered upon arriving in the Henrys Fork country.

That already extant legal landscape would play a

significant role in the ecological culture that would

develop over the next decades.

Aridity has always been one of the fundamental

components of our understanding of the Interior West.

In 1879, Major John Wesley Powell published his

Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United

States. In that Report, Major Powell (p. vii) claimed

that the “redemption” of the arid lands west of the

100th meridian of longitude and east of the Cascades

would only be possible with irrigation, including

“extensive and comprehensive plans, for the execution

of which aggregated capital or cooperative labor will

be necessary.” In addition, early mining activities

required substantial water to wash placer deposits,

often in places where little water existed. Western

water law thus grew out of both ecological and

economic necessity.

The first gold discovery in Idaho was in 1860, on

Orofino Creek in the Clearwater country near what

would become the town of Pierce. (Gold in 1860:

Newspaper Reports of the Pierce Gold Strike, 1959);

(Burcham, 1960). At the time, the Clearwater country

was still part of Washington Territory, with its capital

in Olympia almost 400 miles away. It was also within

the newly created Nez Perce Indian Reservation, and

supposedly off limits to non-Indian miners and

settlers. When miners moved into the Clearwater

country after Pierce’s gold discovery, they entered a

land largely without law. But responding to the

practical demands of mining, these Idaho miners

developed their own laws and customs to manage their

competing efforts to acquire scarce resources, much as

had occurred elsewhere in the West. The Mining Laws

of the Oro Fino District, adopted by the miners on

January 5, 1861, formalized mining customs, both

with respect to rights to prospect for gold as well as

rights to water (Mining Laws of the Oro Fino District

(adopted Jan. 5, 1861), 1959-1960).

Like irrigation, mining requires that water be taken

out of the stream. Idaho placer deposits required

washing through sluices to extract gold. Many of these

placer deposits were located out of perennial stream

channels, in old or ephemeral water courses, often far

away from riparian areas. Without water, those

deposits were unworkable, so the Oro Fino code, like

others across the West, specifically recognized the

right to remove water from its natural channel.

Given Idaho’s aridity and the early importance of

mining in the territory’s economy, it is unsurprising

that the territory’s first formal water legislation

followed the miners’ lead and recognized that water

rights could be acquired by appropriating water from

a stream. That early law required appropriators to

work diligently and without unnecessary interruption

until they achieved “complete diversion,” at which

point the water right would be perfected. The 1881 law

required the diversion to be for a “useful and

beneficial purpose (1881 Idaho Terr. Sess. Laws 267,

1881). While the territorial law did not define “useful

and beneficial purpose,” Idaho’s constitution, adopted

nine years later, provides some context. It recognizes

as legitimate uses of water: domestic, agriculture,

manufacturing, mining, and milling. (Idaho Const. art.

XV, §3). All of these are out-of-channel uses,

consistent with the idea that water must be diverted

from a stream before rights can be perfected.

In 1888, the Idaho territorial Supreme Court

specifically acknowledged and adopted the “prior”

element of prior appropriation, at least with respect to

the claims of competing appropriators. In Malad

Valley Irrigation Co. v. Campbell (1888), the

territorial court adopted the first in time, first in right

concept, acknowledging that in times of scarcity, the

right of the prior appropriator would be satisfied first.

And two years later, just before statehood, the

territorial Court confirmed that prior appropriation

would be the only law in Idaho, rejecting the riparian

doctrine used in Eastern and Midwestern states:

“[T]he maxim, “first in time, first in right,” should be

considered the settled law here. Whether or not it is a

beneficent rule, it is the lineal descendant of the law

of necessity.… The use of water to which they had

been accustomed, and the laws concerning it, had no

application here…. [T]hey disregarded the traditions

of the past, and established as the only rule suitable to

their situation that of prior appropriation” (Drake v.

Earhart, 1890, p. 542). And later that year, the Idaho

constitutional convention made the prior

appropriation doctrine an explicit part of the new

state’s constitution.

The two territorial court decisions, the 1881

territorial law, and even the Idaho Constitution are not

the sources of prior appropriation in Idaho, but rather

affirmations of a quasi-legal regime that already

existed on the ground. When the Mormon settlers

began arriving in the Henrys Fork region at the end of

the 19th Century, they arrived in a place that already

had a specific legal imprint placed upon it—both

informally and then formally. Whatever their origins,

their relationship with this new western landscape was

already structured in a particular way. For several

decades by that point, the custom, and then formal

law, of the region was one that preferred the extraction

or appropriation of water from natural water courses

for its use elsewhere.

But Powell’s recommendation for a broad approach

using aggregated capital and cooperative effort

requires more than the establishment of the basic legal

rights. From their beginnings in Utah, Mormon

settlers had worked together to create water projects.

Although they would transition from communal

systems to the more formal and legal canal

organizations used today, the early Mormons in the

Henrys Fork country did work together to build canals

and other projects, exchanging time and effort for

shares in canal cooperatives. But to fully exploit the

water resources available in the West required more

than these rural farmers could do on their own.

Finally heeding at least part of Powell’s

recommendation, in 1902 Congress enacted a law

known as the Newlands Reclamation Act. It is hard to

overstate the Newlands Act’s effects on western

landscapes. Federal reclamation projects in the West

now irrigate ten million acres of land, growing sixty

percent of the nation’s vegetables and as much as

twenty-five percent of its fresh fruit and nut crops. The

U.S. Bureau of Reclamation manages 490 dams, 294

reservoirs that store 140-million-acre feet of water,

and over 10,000 miles of canals. (The Bureau of

Reclamation, 2025). In the Henrys Fork and Upper

Snake River country, the Minidoka Project—

authorized in 1904 and one of the oldest Reclamation

projects—consists of seven dams and 1,600 miles of

canals. (Stene, 1997). It stretches from Grassy Lake

and Jackson Lake dams high up in the watershed near

the southern boundary of Yellowstone National Park

(the latter dam is within the boundaries of Grand

Teton National Park), to the Minidoka dam on the

main stem of the Snake River in south-central Idaho.

Like the understanding of what constitutes a

“beneficial use” of water in western water law, the

Newlands Act reified particular understandings of the

value of the natural world. Those understandings are

demonstrated by the name of the act itself—the

Reclamation Act. Whatever the conditions of land

prior to human intervention, or whatever other non-

human purposes it might serve, the Reclamation Act

is a collective statement that land’s purpose is to serve

human needs.

When Mormon settlers first arrived in the Henrys

Fork country, the legal landscape that already existed

demonstrated that the purpose of water was to serve

human needs, whatever the potential consequences to

the natural systems that previously relied on streams

as such. And that legal landscape was reinforced over

the passing decades as increased federal funding and

development further modified natural water systems.

These broader cultural statements about the value of

water would have been an omnipresent influence on

the developing environmental ethic of Henrys Fork

Mormons.

Water was not the only legal arena that might have

influenced the developing environmental ethic of

Mormon settlers. When Mormons arrived in the

Henrys Fork country, federal land management had

already begun to change in a significant way.

Beginning with the creation of Yellowstone National

Park in 1872, and continuing with the creation of the

first forest reserves in 1891, public lands law began to

draw two different, somewhat confusing, distinctions

about the use of the public lands. First, as Yellowstone

made clear, some public lands would be set aside for

protection or preservation, while others would

continue to be part of the public domain. This same

distinction occurred when the forest reserves were

first created, identifying lands to be reserved and lands

that would remain open for settlement. Second, and

both more subtle and confusing, public lands law

began to make distinctions between public lands that

would stay public, but nonetheless would be available

for certain private uses, and public lands that would

not be so available. These two distinctions may have

influenced the Henrys Fork Mormons’ attitudes about

the natural world.

When Mormons arrived in the Henrys Fork country,

the nation’s public lands policies were undergoing a

significant change. Since the post-Revolution era, the

nation’s policy was to transfer the public domain to

private interests, first via auctions and then later

through railroad grants and homesteading laws. These

transfers occurred throughout the Mormon settlement

period, with the bulk of the public domain land entries

occurring between 1862 and 1938, with a peak of

Not until Congress enacted the National Forest Management Act in

1976 did the National Forest system have its own comprehensive

management regime. (National Forest Management Act of 1976).

approximately twenty-three million acres transferred

in 1910. (Leshy, Fischman, & Krakoff, 2022, p. 95).

But although the Henrys Fork settlers arrived

during the peak of the disposition era, the legal

landscape had already started a nearly century-long

evolution that would end in the permanent retention of

millions of acres of public lands. And nowhere was

this transition, and the conflict it could create, more

obvious than in the Henrys Fork country and

surrounding areas.

In 1872, just ten years after it enacted the first

Homestead Act, Congress passed “An Act to set apart

a certain Tract of Land lying near the Head-waters of

the Yellowstone River as a public Park.” In just three

paragraphs, Congress set in motion events that,

eventually, would significantly alter the public’s

perception of the purpose of the public lands. The

creation of Yellowstone National Park indicated for

the first time that some lands would be protected in

perpetuity, directing the Secretary of the Interior to

“provide for the preservation, from injury or

spoliation, of all timber, mineral deposits, natural

curiosities, or wonders within said park, and their

retention in their natural condition.” But even as it

provided for the “preservation” of the park lands,

Congress also established that those lands should be

used as a “public park or pleasuring-ground for the

benefit and enjoyment of the people.”

Nineteen years later, Congress turned what had

been an isolated occurrence into a path away from the

disposition era. In Section 24 of the General Revision

Act of 1891, Congress adopted a short provision—

included as an undebated rider on that bill—that

ultimately gave rise to our modern National Forest

System: “the President of the United States may, from

time to time, set apart and reserve, in any State or

Territory having public land bearing forests, in any

part of the public lands wholly or in part covered with

timber or undergrowth, whether of commercial value

or not, as public reservations[.]”

The General Revision Act did not provide the

President with any guidance as to what lands should

be reserved, and how or for what to manage them once

reserved. That failure gave rise to what is often called

the Forest Service Organic Act of 1897. That Act, also

enacted as an undebated rider to the largely unrelated

Sundry Civil Appropriations Act of 1897 (Bassman,

1974), would guide management of the national

forests for the next seventy-nine years.

It provided the

following direction: “No public forest reservation

shall be established, except to improve and protect the

forest within the reservation, or for the purpose of

securing favorable conditions of water flows, and to

furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and

necessities of citizens of the United States[.]”

The forest reserves, and to a lesser extent

This provision remains codified at 16 U.S.C. §475.

Yellowstone, established a dual-purpose regime for

the public lands. The purpose of the forest reserves

was to protect water supplies and ensure a sustainable

supply of timber. These are purposes that recognize

that land should be used for human benefit. And that

first purpose, to protect water flows, is very much

locally-focused, given both how water is managed in

the West and the significant difficulties of transporting

it long distances.

Yellowstone includes parts of the headwaters of the

Henrys Fork, and many of the first forest reserves

surrounded Yellowstone and included parts of the

Henrys Fork country. Much like Idaho water law

suggested a particular purpose for the natural world,

these legislative acts communicated a particular

ambivalence, or even tri-valence, about the purpose of

land. Both Yellowstone and the forest reserves

identified specific parcels of land and specified their

purposes: preservation and enjoyment for

Yellowstone, and timber and water supply for the

forest reserves. Of these, only the preservation aspect

of Yellowstone suggests a potential non-human

purpose, and even that purpose is largely so humans

could enjoy, if not develop, the protected landscape.

So even those protected landscapes were intended to

serve human ends.

But what does that say about the non-protected

landscapes? Law is, again, the formalization of our

culture and values. In the Henrys Fork country, as

across most of the West, those portions of the public

domain not reserved or protected were thus primarily

for human benefit. If they were not important for a

sustainable supply of timber, or to protect water

supply, then the timber could—perhaps in fact

should—be harvested in its entirety, and the water and

landscapes used without concern for the

consequences. Even with its nuances, federal land

policy thus set up a “use this/preserve that” kind of

dichotomy, including on the newly reserved forest

lands.

While the Henrys Fork Mormons may have

experienced this dichotomy in a local, specific way,

their experience mirrored a larger national experience.

During the time Mormons were settling the Henrys

Fork country, and determining the meaning of law and

place in that context, the national public was also

having a conversation about the meaning of the natural

world. This conversation concerned whether

conservation or preservation should be the

predominant paradigm. (Worster, 2008; Smith M. B.,

1998). In the end, Gifford Pinchot’s conservation—

“The first great fact about conservation is that it stands

for development” (Pinchot, 1910)—proved more

useful. That ideology would influence all Americans,

including Mormons, in the decades to follow.

Western water law, the forest reserves, and even the

For an excellent history of the origins of pragmatism, see Menand

(2002).

creation of the world’s first national park all suggest

that the purpose of the natural world is to serve human

needs. These broader cultural values had been

formalized as law, or soon would be, when the

Mormon settlers arrived in the Henrys Fork country.

At a time in which Mormons were desperately trying

to assimilate into broader American culture, having

entered the Union in 1896 as the 45th state, forgoing

the practice of polygamy in exchange, that culture

demonstrated through its formalized legal regimes

how it valued water and the natural world. These legal

regimes, and the messages they communicated, likely

played an important role in influencing the developing

environmental ethic in the Henrys Fork country and

all of the Mormon Cultural Region.

5. Pragmatists in an Ideological World

Human culture is not simply a byproduct of the

environment in which it emerges and evolves, but

neither is it independent of that environment. And

while geological, ecological, and other natural

processes can and do occur in the absence of human

influence, any human-occupied landscape is an

always developing constellation of human and natural

elements. Law, as the most precise formalization of

culture (both as influence and product), is thus

interwoven into culture and landscape in both obvious

and unrecognized ways. Understanding a place, and

the people that live there, requires peering deeply into

the smallest cracks and fissures where law, culture,

and the physical landscape interact.

When Mormons arrived in the Great Basin, and

later expanded out into its farthest corners, they did so

with an environmental ideology already in place. But

in many ways, that environmental ideology did not

function in this new world. What did work, or provide

value, was the industry and faith that are the hallmarks

of Mormon culture. What did not work was the belief

that people must become harmless before the brute

creation.

The early Mormons were thus pragmatists,

consistent with the American philosophical tradition

that emerged at the same time the Mormons were

settling the far corners of the western “howling

desert.”

When they arrived in the Henrys Fork

country, Mormon settlers had to assess whether their

existing beliefs about the natural environment would

work given the physical landscape, existing legal

regimes, and their religious, family, and cultural

histories. Together with these somewhat secular

influences was a deep and abiding faith that they had

been called of God both to expand the boundaries of

Zion, as they understood it, and to tame and improve

the land.

Our understandings of both possible and desired

future conditions, and present meanings, are shaped

by our cultural and ecological origins. (Geertz, 1973,

p. 35). It is the lived experience in a place—including

its cultural, legal, and physical components—that

provides the range of plausible futures available to

both the individual and community. Figuring out our

desired future, including the cultural norms and legal

rules that might effect that future, occurs as we figure

out the potential range of futures available to us, i.e.,

we decide what we want as we decide what is

available for us to have. (Bromley, 2008). And what

we understand as our available futures is, in part, a

product of the legal, cultural, and physical structure of

our place.

Thinking of Mormons as pragmatists is

complicated in one sense. Pragmatism’s core

argument is that people make decisions based on the

plausible real world consequences of those decisions.

William James argued that these real world

consequences are all that matters. For Mormons, this

idea might seem initially counterintuitive. In fact, for

many religious adherents, it might seem offensive to

characterize them as pragmatists. Pragmatism, at its

core, is about “cash value.” (James, 1907, p. 200).

Isn’t religious belief just the opposite, about acting

despite the lack of immediate earthly reward?

Mormons are most famous for their non-traditional

behaviors. Many of these, like their famous dietary

restrictions, might seem highly pragmatic. Their

collective choice in 1833 to foreswear tobacco and

alcohol, to reduce meat consumption, and to generally

maintain a healthy diet—so they “shall run and not be

weary, and shall walk and not faint”—was remarkably

prescient and pragmatic. They likely immediately

recognized the real benefits of this belief.

In other areas, Mormon belief was much less

pragmatic, at least from a worldly perspective. This is

most obvious with the practice of polygamy.

Mormons continued to practice polygamy long after it

had become a cultural and economic harm. There are

few other examples in the American experience that

match the level of religious oppression and

persecution—by the government—suffered by

Mormons on account of this particular religious belief.

The United States Congress enacted multiple laws

targeted directly and specifically at Mormons,

including the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887, which

dis-incorporated the church, seized many of its assets,

and largely prohibited Mormons from voting or

serving on juries. The law was not repealed until 1978.

(An act to repeal certain provisions of law establishing

limits on the amount of land certain religious

corporations may hold in any Territory of the United

States, 92 Stat. 2483, 1978).

Similarly, in Idaho, where then and now almost a

quarter of all residents are Mormons, the territorial

legislature in 1884 enacted the Test Oath Act, which

prohibited all Mormons from voting, holding political

office, or serving on juries, whether they themselves

practiced polygamy or not. The Idaho Constitution

originally incorporated the same prohibition, which,

although it was ruled unconstitutional by the Idaho

Supreme Court in 1908 (Toncray v. Budge, 1908),

remained part of the Idaho Constitution until 1982.

Although Mormons officially gave up the practice of

plural marriage in 1890, they suffered significantly—

and faced their complete dissolution as an

organization—before doing so. These were actions

taken without immediate or earthly benefit.

But even if the Word of Wisdom appears pragmatic,

and polygamy less so, in both cases Mormons

followed the clear teachings of their faith. With

respect to their relationship with the natural

environment, however, their religious ideology was

ambivalent, suggesting two different paths. They were

told to respect and protect the natural world. And they

were told to subdue and improve it. In large part then,

given the lack of the clear spiritual guidance they were

accustomed to in other aspects of their lives, their

developing environmental ethic was influenced by the

consequences, on the ground, of the various options

before them. So although Mormons could have

developed an environmental ethic consistent with

church teachings acknowledging the sanctity of the

natural world, that ethic did not prove useful in

making the Interior West blossom as the rose.

As we consider the three aspects of place—law,

culture, and landscape—that Mormon settlers might

have developed a conservative environmental ethic

becomes unsurprising. Of the apparently ambivalent

spiritual teachings Mormons received, one

understandably might have been considered

predominant. The very purpose of Mormon expansion

in the Interior West, including in the Henrys Fork

country, was to realize prophesies and promises in

their scripture and spiritual tradition. Perhaps more

significant, improving the desert and making it

blossom as the rose likely would have been perceived

as consistent with other teachings to care for the

natural world.

The Mormons’ spiritual motivations also were

consistent with the broader cultural trajectory in the

developing West, as formalized and explained by

western legal regimes. Prior appropriation and federal

land laws that emphasized use and development more

than preservation suggested the same purposes of land

and the natural environment as did Mormon “blossom

as the rose” mythology. Pinchot’s utilitarian

conservation tenet—the greatest good for the greatest

number over the long term—could have as easily

emerged from the Mormon approach to resource

management.

The Mormon story suggests that notwithstanding

the environmental ethic professed by early church

leaders, and many contemporary Mormon authorities,

the Mormon environmental ethic evolved in much the

same way as the broader western environmental ethic.

The ethic that emerged was the ethic that Mormons—

together with their non-Mormon counterparts—

believed to be most useful given the legal, cultural,

and ecological conditions they faced at the end of the

19th Century.

The West was, and remains, a difficult place to

fashion a living. When Mormons arrived in Utah and

expanded out into the Great Basin and beyond, most

aspects of their lived experience suggested that the

land must be subdued; that in fact, its very purpose

was to be subdued. That was the ideology that

appeared most useful to Mormon settlers at the turn of

the 20th Century. It was the ideology with cash value.

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