Four Hundred Children

The 1852 Act for the Relief of Indian Slaves and Prisoners — granting the charge, and correcting it

Grant It

More than four hundred Indian children from Ute, Paiute, Goshute, Shoshone, and Navajo communities were taken into Latter-day Saint homes as indentured servants or adoptees. About sixty percent of them were purchased through trading with raiders. That is not a critic’s number. It is the Church’s own number, published on its own website, in a Church History Topic titled “Indian Slavery and Indentured Servitude,” footnoted to peer-reviewed scholarship.

So the charge is GRANTED at the outset. Latter-day Saints bought Indian children. A territorial legislature dominated by Latter-day Saints wrote the law that regulated the buying. Brigham Young encouraged the practice before the law existed. Children died in those homes. Others grew up estranged from the people they were born to and never fully accepted by the people who raised them.

There is NO version of this history that comes out clean, and this page will not attempt to manufacture one.

What follows is narrower. The critic’s argument makes four moves beyond the granted facts: a claim about scale, a claim about complicity, a claim about scripture, and a claim about motive. Each of those is checkable. Three of them fail on the same sources the critic is citing.

What the Number Actually Is

The four hundred figure is usually deployed as though it described a single event in 1852. It does not. The Church’s page dates the total from the passage of the 1852 law to the early 1880s — roughly three decades, across the whole of Utah Territory, at a time when the settler population ran into the tens of thousands. That is on the order of a dozen or so children a year, territory-wide.

Does the arithmetic make it acceptable? No. A wrong done to four hundred children is not diluted by the calendar. But scale is a factual claim, and if the argument depends on the image of a mass roundup, the argument is depending on something that did not happen.

The same applies to the twenty-year term. Twenty years was a statutory CEILING, not a standard sentence, and the surviving indentures generally ran to majority rather than to the maximum. This is exactly how American apprenticeship law worked in the same period — a borrowed legal form, applied to a population that had not chosen it.

What Gets Left Out of the Church’s Own Page

Here is the odd thing about the standard version of this attack. It treats the Church History Topic as authoritative — correctly — and then stops quoting it partway through. The page says more than the four hundred figure and the sixty percent.

Quoted — and Not Quoted

  • Quoted: over 400 children; about 60 percent purchased through trading with raiders.
  • Not quoted: nearly 20 percent were sold or given to Latter-day Saint families by parents or relatives, who did so largely out of economic necessity.
  • Not quoted: some Saints bought children, in the page’s words, “in some instances after seeing the traders kill or torture those the Latter-day Saints did not purchase.”
  • Not quoted: the statute required an indenture agreement processed with county officials, clothing “in a comfortable and becoming manner,” and education.
  • Not quoted: outcomes varied — some returned to Indian communities, some remained and felt marginalized, and “yet others became missionaries and Church leaders as adults.”

Why does the quotation always stop after the second line? A source is either reliable or it is not. If the Church History Topic is trustworthy enough to establish the charge, it is trustworthy enough to establish the qualifications printed in the same three paragraphs. Selecting the first half and discarding the second is not a reading of the source. It is a USE of it.

The Demand Side, Conceded

The strongest version of the critic’s case is not about the law at all. It is about what came before the law, and it deserves to be stated at full strength.

In May 1851 — ten months before the statute — Brigham Young met with settlers in the Parowan area and counselled them, in the phrase that has become the title of the standard scholarly treatment, “to buy up the Lamanite children as fast as they could.” That is Brian Q. Cannon’s article title in the Journal of Mormon History, and it is the same article the Church cites in its own footnotes. Was that a reluctant accommodation to a trade already running? No. It was an instruction to participate in it, and it created DEMAND.

In the same year the apostle George A. Smith issued Ute leaders a “talking paper” — a trading pass — wishing them success and good bargains, with Piede children named among the goods. A caution on this one: the exact wording circulates widely online, and I was not able to check it against Cannon or Jones directly, so it is paraphrased here rather than quoted. The substance is not in dispute. An apostle gave the territory’s slave-raiding leadership a friendly commercial endorsement that contemplated the sale of children.

Three more concessions belong here, unhedged. Utah’s twenty-year ceiling was longer than the terms customary in New Mexican practice, so the statute was not uniformly more humane than what it replaced. The same 1852 legislature that passed the Indian act also passed the Act in Relation to Service, which gave legal standing to Black slavery in the territory — a body legislating on behalf of captives in one bill and on behalf of masters in another. And the mortality rate among indentured Indian children in Latter-day Saint homes was high, a fact the scholarship reports and no defense of the period should skip past.

Fourteen years later came Circleville. In April 1866, during the Black Hawk War, Latter-day Saint settlers in Circleville disarmed and imprisoned a band of Southern Paiutes who had done nothing, then killed about twenty-seven of them, including women and children. It is the largest massacre of Indians in Utah’s history. It is not the indenture story, and it is not caused by the indenture story, but anyone arguing that Utah settlers understood Indians as souls to be redeemed has to hold Circleville in the same hand.

Pedro León Luján

Everything above concedes the demand-side argument. This section is where it gets tested.

The argument runs like this: a reliable buyer sustains the raider. Whatever the Saints told themselves about rescue, a standing market for captive children gave Ute raiders a reason to keep taking them. That is a serious argument. Sondra Jones has made a version of it, Brian Cannon has made a version of it, and Ned Blackhawk has built a large part of his account of the region on it. It should not be waved away, and nothing here waves it away.

But an incentive claim makes a prediction. What does it predict? If the Saints wanted the supply line open, they should have protected it. What did they actually do?

In December 1851, Utah authorities out of Manti arrested a party of New Mexican traders led by Don Pedro León Luján of Abiquiu, a fifty-seven-year-old trader who had come north to buy Indian slaves. They were prosecuted in the First Judicial District Court at Great Salt Lake City under the federal Trade and Intercourse Act of 1834. The jury concluded that Luján’s account was a device to evade the law and convicted the defendants of illegal trading with the Indians. He was stripped of his property — horses, goods, supplies — and sent back to New Mexico, three hundred miles, on foot.

Weeks later the territorial legislature banned the traffic outright. According to Jones’s account, enforcement continued into 1853 with militia orders to apprehend remaining traders, and the suppression of the trade contributed to the outbreak of the Walker War — the Ute leader Walkara having lost a market he depended on. Those last details come from Jones’s book, which I could not access directly; they are reported here on her authority rather than verified against the text. What is independently confirmed is the trial itself, the forfeiture, the expulsion, and the judgment that this prosecution heralded the end of the trade.

Count what that cost. A prosecution. Confiscation of a foreign trader’s entire outfit. Expulsion. A statutory ban within weeks. Ongoing enforcement. And then a war, in a territory of scattered, under-defended settlements that could not afford one.

NOBODY pays that bill to keep a supply chain open. Whatever else the record shows, it does not show a community protecting a market it wanted.

Now the part of this section that hurts. Luján made a charge of his own, and Jones sustains it: he and his traders were punished for doing substantially what the Mormons had been doing for some time without penalty. The captives freed from Mexican traders did not go home. A number of them were placed in Latter-day Saint households. The Saints suppressed a trade and then absorbed its inventory, and told themselves the difference was motive.

BOTH things are true at once. The suppression was real and expensive, and it was also self-serving in a way its authors seem not to have examined. A defense that reports only the first half is doing what the attack does with the Church’s page.

Exodus 21:16

The scriptural charge is that Exodus 21:16 settles the matter: he that stealeth a man and selleth him, “or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.” On the critic’s reading, mere possession of a purchased person is a capital offense, which would make the Utah settlers condemned men by their own Bible.

That reading proves far too much. The same body of law regulates indentured service a few verses earlier in Exodus 21:2–6, and Leviticus 25:44–46 permits Israelites to acquire servants from surrounding nations. A statute cannot make possession of a bought person capital in one chapter and lawful in the next. So what is the verse actually forbidding? Man-stealing for traffic — kidnapping a free person in order to sell him.

The nearer parallel is Nehemiah 5:8, where Nehemiah says plainly that he and his brethren bought back Jews who had been sold to the heathen. He paid money to men holding human beings, and the text presents it as righteous. The vocabulary of redemption is purchase vocabulary throughout scripture — believers are “bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6:20). Buying a captive is not automatically the same act as stealing one.

Then the limit, stated plainly. Nehemiah redeemed and released. He then rebuked the men still holding their countrymen in bondage, and they let them go. Did Utah do that? No. Utah redeemed and retained, holding children to majority under a borrowed apprenticeship framework, and the retention is the part Nehemiah condemns rather than the part he models. This section explains why the Saints did not think of themselves as slavers. It does not establish that the arrangement was right, and it is offered as explanation rather than defense.

Intent Cannot Work in Only One Direction

There is a structural problem in the way this charge is usually closed out.

The argument insists that intention is irrelevant. The law carved out no exception for good intentions; buying a child is buying a child whatever you meant by it. Taken seriously, that is a defensible principle — consequences over motives.

But the same argument almost always lands on a verdict about motive. The settlers are said to have acted out of contempt, viewing Indians as godless savages to be civilized. That is a claim about what was in their heads, offered as the aggravating fact.

So which is it? If intent cannot mitigate, it cannot AGGRAVATE either. A standard under which motive is inadmissible for the defense and decisive for the prosecution is not a standard. It is a verdict with a procedure written around it afterward.

A Scope Check

One observation, and only as a check on a specific framing. The charge is often built to suggest something uniquely Mormon — a peculiar savagery arising from peculiar doctrine. The Southwest’s genízaro system had absorbed captive Indians into New Mexican households for well over a century before any Latter-day Saint reached the Great Basin, and the federally funded Protestant and Catholic boarding schools that followed took Indian children from their families on a scale the Utah indentures never approached. Does that lessen what happened in Utah? Not by one child. Nothing in it is exculpatory, and it is not offered as such. It bears only on whether the practice requires a distinctively Mormon explanation, and it does not.

The Verdict

The honest verdict is a mixed record that varied by decade and by settlement, and the sources will not support anything tidier.

What the sources establish: Brigham Young urged the purchase of Indian children before any law authorized it, and that urging created demand in a market that ran on captured children. An apostle blessed a raider’s trading venture. Over four hundred children passed into Latter-day Saint homes over thirty years, most of them bought. Some were sold by desperate parents. Some were bought from traders who had just demonstrated what they would do to the ones nobody purchased. The statute that regulated all this imposed real obligations and a twenty-year ceiling that was worse than New Mexican custom, and the legislature that wrote it legalized Black slavery in the same session. Children died. Survivors were frequently strangers to both peoples for the rest of their lives. A few became missionaries and Church leaders.

And the same community prosecuted Pedro León Luján, confiscated his outfit, expelled him from the territory, banned the traffic by statute within weeks, kept enforcing it, and absorbed a war that followed — then placed some of the children it had freed into its own households and did not notice the contradiction.

“They enslaved four hundred children” does not describe that. Neither does “they rescued four hundred children.” What the record shows is a people who moved into a slave market already running, tried to end it, participated in it, wrote a law that both restrained and entrenched it, and left behind four hundred children whose lives were permanently altered by decisions they had no part in making. Some of those children were saved from something worse. Some were harmed by people who believed they were helping. The sources do not let anyone sort them cleanly, and pretending otherwise — in either direction — is the one move this history will not bear.

One last thing is worth noticing, and then it should be left alone. Every fact in the indictment — the four hundred, the sixty percent, the purchasing from raiders, the marginalization, the deaths — was published by the Church itself, voluntarily, on its own website, with footnotes directing readers to Cannon and Kitchen and Blackhawk. The critic’s evidence is the Church’s disclosure. An institution running a cover-up does not write the indictment, footnote it to the scholars most critical of it, and post it where anyone can find it.

Sources