Fort Limhi
Fort Limhi
David L. Bigler
373 pages

ISBN 978-0-87421-569-4
paper $24.95

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Fort Limhi

The Mormon Adventure in Oregon Territory, 1855-1858

David L. Bigler

Also by David Bigler - Army of Israel: Mormon Battalion Narratives and Forgotten Kingdom

"With its astonishing fish stories, desperate Indian battles, life-threatening chases, and heroic rides to rescue a terrified and helpless outpost, this work has all the elements of a great frontier novel." —Will Bagley

"It is a pleasure to read a work by an accomplished scholar and writer like David Bigler. . . . His book is a real contribution to Mormon and the northern Rocky Mountain region's history. Brigham Young's plan to extend his kingdom to the north has never been fully explained until Bigler's contribution." —Brigham D. Madsen

In May 1855 twenty-seven men set out from the young Mormon settlements in Utah to establish the northernmost colony of the Kingdom of God, "the Northern Mission to the Remnants of the House of Jacob"-American Indians. More colonists, including families, would join them later. Building a fort in the Limhi Valley, four hundred miles to the north and at the foot of the pass by which Lewis and Clark had crossed the Continental Divide, they began to proselyte among Sacagawea's Shoshone relatives as well as members of the Bannock, Nez Percé, and other tribes. Three years later, some of their expected and actual Indian converts violently drove the colonists out and destroyed Fort Limhi.

In Fort Limhi: The Mormon Adventure in Oregon Territory, 1855-1858, David Bigler shows that the colony, known as the Salmon River Mission, played a pivotal role in the Utah War of 1857-1858 and that the catastrophic end of the mission was critical in keeping that conflict from becoming an all out war between Mormon Utah and the United States. In the process, he uses a multitude of primary sources, many newly uncovered or previously overlooked, to reconstruct a dramatic and compelling story involving stalwart Mormon frontiersmen, Brigham Young, a variety of Native American individuals and groups, the U. S. Army, and "mountaineers," as the surviving fur trade veterans now commonly known as "mountain men" called themselves.

David L. Bigler is the author of the award-winning Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon Theocra-
cy in the American West, 1846-1896; the editor of The Gold Discovery Journal of Azariah
Smith and A Winter with the Mormons: The 1852 Letters of Jotham Goodell; and the coeditor of Army of Israel: Mormon Battalion Narratives.