He Couldn’t Take the Crowding

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When the Saints first arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, a city plat was laid out but no one lived in the newly laid out city, but rather in the fort, except for one. This one individual claimed he could not take the crowding in the fort. Who was the one individual that was first to build a home on the city plat?

a.                  Porter Rockwell

b.                  Lot Smith

c.                   Green Flake

d.                  Lorenzo Young

Yesterday’s answer:

B   The state allowed the county to administer its own rules

Within months of [Joseph] Smith’s revelation, Mormon settlers began making preparations to gather to Jackson County in obedience to the commandment of God spoken through their prophet. Mormon settlers moved into a society that at the time was “homogeneous and simple,” according to Jackson County resident Alexander Majors. Named after Andrew Jackson, the famed military hero and future president, Jackson County was organized in 1826, five years after statehood. The original settlers to the county came principally from Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky. By 1830, Jackson County residents numbered about 2,600 in addition to their 193 slaves. The Mormon influx to the state reflected the boom in Missouri’s population during the 1830s which grew from 140,455 to 383,702. As new settlers arrived, Missourians methodically divided their land into numerous counties. Less than fifty years after statehood, Missourians had carved their state’s 69,686 square miles into 114 counties; only three states had more. In considering why Missourians divided their state into so many counties, one state historian cited the Missouri tradition “that every person should be within a day’s horseback ride of his county seat. . . .  This suggests,” she concludes, “the priority of local control and numerous political opportunities.” Missouri state officials left much of the local decision –making to settlers. Such a trend was a carryover from Missouri’s territorial days, when full responsibility for internal improvements, education, poor relief, and community policing fell to local authorities. Thus, when Mormon settlers began pouring into Jackson County in the summer and fall of 1831 they met a locally minded people who, as the first settlers of western Missouri, felt they had prior rights under “national law” in organizing and governing the region.

Matthew B. Lund, A Society of Like-Minded Men: American Localism and The Mormon Expulsion From Jackson County, Journal of Mormon History, Summer 2014, 176.