“Like a Swarm of Locusts”

Abstract

This chapter talks about Lieutenant Washington Bartlett of the USS Portsmouth, who believed that the two hundred Mormon seafaring migrants that arrived in San Francisco presaged a much larger overland Mormon migration from Nauvoo, Illinois. It describes Bartlett's doubt of Sam Brannan's American patriotism and the patriotism of other Mormon leaders like Brigham Young. It also looks into Bartlett's comparison of the Mormons to a “swarm of locusts” and a “vast horde” that reveals his perception of Mormons as a very real geopolitical threat, whose arrival in California would irrevocably ruin the territory's potential prosperity. The chapter examines Bartlett's fear of the Mormon arrival that reflected the fact that he made no presumption about US sovereignty over California. It discusses how Mormon leaders understood the contingency of western geopolitics.