Utah Westerners

November Announcement for the Utah Westerners

January 9, 2017 at 1:41 pm kenttschanz Leave a comment

“NEW KNOWLEDGE ABOUT AN OLD CONFLICT: SURPRISES FROM THE UTAH WAR”

WILLIAM P. MacKINNON

Bill MacKinnon will speak about the Utah War and his recently published work: ‘At Sword’s Point, Part 2,’ the concluding book of his two-volume documentary history of the Utah War of 1857-1859.

Bill’s Part 2 picks up the war’s action in January 1858 and takes the reader through Thomas L. Kane’s gratuitous trip west to try to end further bloodshed, U. S. Army Capt. Randolph B. Marcy’s epic trek from Fort Bridger to New Mexico to remount the Utah Expedition, Lt. Joseph Christmas Ives’ ascent of the Colorado River in search of an invasion route into southern Utah, President Buchanan’s plans to open a second front from the Pacific Coast while planning a related incursion into northern Mexico and the acquisition of Spanish Cuba, Gen. Winfield Scott’s bizarre attempt to supersede Albert Sidney Johnston, Brigham Young’s  quixotic efforts to raise a whole new force (the Standing Army of Israel) for a spring assault on Forts Bridger and Laramie, the massive Move South toward Sonora of 30,000 Mormon refugees, and Buchanan’s surprise dispatch of peace commissioners armed with stiff terms and a blanket presidential pardon to end the military phase of the war.

MacKinnon will focus on the war’s regional and even international sprawl as well as the truth and errors of its enduring mythology while sharing his conclusions about who started the war, its winners and losers, leader accountabilities, the impact of the war on individual participants, and the societal forces unleashed by the conflict that changed Utah, the West, and America forever. Attendees are urged to come prepared with the questions they have always wanted to ask about our country’s greatest and most expensive military adventure between the Mexican-American and Civil wars.

Bill MacKinnon is an independent historian living in Montecito, Santa Barbara County, California, who has researched, and written about Utah’s turbulent territorial period since 1958. He has been a member of the Utah State Historical Society since 1963 and is now both a fellow and honorary life member of that organization as well as a member of OCTA’s Crossroads (Utah) Chapter. He is a past president of the Mormon History Association and former sheriff of the Santa Barbara Corral of the Westerners. In his other careers as a business manager and community volunteer, he has been a vice president of General Motors Corporation, president of his own consulting firm, chairman of Children’s Hospital of Michigan, and a trustee of public and private educational, philanthropic, and health care organizations. He is an alumnus or veteran of Yale, Harvard, and the U. S. Air Force.

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