Jacob Hamblin was a Latter-day Saint missionary to the indigenous peoples of the Southwestern United States, an explorer, and a negotiator in conflicts with Native Americans. His life was full of adventure and difficulties as he worked to carry out the callings that Brigham Young extended to him. In this interview, Todd Compton discusses Jacob Hamblin’s life and accomplishments.
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Read more about Jacob Hamblin in A Frontier Life: Jacob Hamblin, Explorer and Indian Missionary.
What is Jacob Hamblin best known for?
Jacob Hamblin was widely known as a Latter-day Saint missionary to Indians in southern Utah (mostly the Paiutes) and Arizona (mostly the Hopis and Navajos). He was also an explorer, mainly because he and his companions were sent to visit the Hopi Indians, in modern Arizona, south of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River, in 1858. Traveling from Santa Clara (near St. George) to the Hopi mesas was an adventure, to say the least. Just crossing the Colorado, before ferries and bridges, was extremely dangerous.
After making his first trip to the Hopis in November-December 1858, Jacob and his companions crossed the Colorado every year for many years, as they continued to visit the Hopis and later the Navajos. In these trips Jacob combined proselyting, exploring, and trading.
After helping to found Santa Clara, Jacob and his family (he had four well-documented wives and three less-well-documented Paiute wives) were sent east to Kanab, and he was another early founder there.
In Kanab he worked with Grand Canyon explorer John Wesley Powell, as an Indian interpreter and guide, and he and Powell were able to travel to Fort Defiance in eastern Arizona to bring a Mormon-Navajo conflict to an end in 1870.
Later, Hamblin was sent to be part of the Little Colorado Mission in Arizona, and he and his family ended up in the far eastern part of that mission, at Pleasanton, New Mexico.
In his early days in Utah, he had a spiritual experience that led him to avoid bloodshed when dealing with Indians, and so he tried to work with them through friendship and negotiation. He sincerely liked to spend time with Indians. Hamblin always worked as a counter-balance to Latter-day Saints who wanted to use war and quick violence in dealing with Indians. Letters he wrote to Brigham Young and John Wesley Powell show that he mourned how Paiutes lost much of their land to Latter-day Saint ranchers and farmers.
As a devout Latter-day Saint, Jacob Hamblin was obedient to Brigham Young and other church leaders, but he also saw the tragedy of Latter-day Saint colonization in southern Utah from the viewpoint of Native Americans.
Why were you interested in writing a biography about Hamblin?
After writing a book about some 33 women (the wives of Joseph Smith), I wanted to write a book about a man as a novelty.
The more serious answer is that I’ve always been interested in Native Americans—and writing about Hamblin allowed me to research and write about Paiutes, Hopis, and Navajos. My parents retired to St. George, and worked there as Latter-day Saint senior missionaries, and they gave tours through the Jacob Hamblin home.
So, I started looking into what books and writing I could find about Hamblin. There were three biographies written about Hamblin by Paul Bailey, Pearson H. Corbett, and Hartt Wixom, which were all very helpful. However, I found that they were somewhat out of date and did not make use of primary documents now available at the Church History Library and other repositories. So, I started collecting documents and writings about Hamblin, which grew into the biography
Why did Jacob Hamblin take a pacifist stance toward Native Americans?
In Utah, Jacob Hamblin and his second wife, Rachel, settled in Tooele, west of Salt Lake City, in 1850. Also in the Tooele area were Gosiutes, who were connected with the Shoshoni and Ute tribes. Immediately, there were conflicts, as the Saints wanted to use Tooele Valley as a place for ranching and cattle-grazing, and this took away land Gosiutes used to harvest grasses they ate at certain times of the year and caused tensions over water. In addition, the Gosiutes did not understand white concepts of property and land ownership, and the Saints did not respect the Gosiutes’ claim to land ownership.
As a result, a small-scale war with the Gosiutes took place, and Jacob Hamblin was called upon to be part of this and sometimes lead small militia groups. His bishop took a hardline view of the Gosiutes and ordered Hamblin to kill a group of them in a military expedition.
However, when Jacob found the Gosiutes, he saw them scatter and heard their children scream in terror. He could not bring himself to attack them and tried to make friends with them. He brought some of them back to Tooele to get to know the Saints in his community. Hamblin’s bishop was upset, as this went directly against his orders.
Jacob Hamblin began to think he may have been wrong in sparing the Gosiutes. The next time Gosiutes drove off some cattle, the bishop again directly ordered Jacob, the leader of the militia group, to kill the Gosiutes responsible. Hamblin’s group of soldiers located the Gosiute band they were pursuing in the mountains west of Tooele and attacked them early in the morning. The Gosiutes scattered up into the mountains.
Hamblin followed a tall Gosiute and, at a certain point, aimed his gun at him and fired—but the gun would not shoot. He would have to reload, which was not a quick process. The Gosiute saw that Hamblin was relatively defenseless and began shooting arrows at him.
The rock hit the Indian in the chest and he reeled backwards.
One arrow bounced off the the guard of Hamblin’s gun. Another arrow hit Jacob’s hat, the next whizzed by his head, and a third pierced his coat but didn’t touch his body. Hamblin saw a big rock he could throw, jumped forward, picked it up, and threw it at the Indian. The rock hit the Indian in the chest, and he reeled backwards. Jacob was able to reload and shot twice at the Gosiute—but again, his gun would not shoot, and so the Gosiute ran off. Jacob, without a functioning weapon, did not pursue.
At first, Jacob felt that he had failed his bishop in not killing this Indian. But as he continued to think about this incident, he came to see it as a sign given to him by God. He was not supposed to kill Indians, and if he did not kill them, God would not allow them to kill him.
After this, Jacob started to spend time with Gosiutes, go hunting with them, and geting to know them.
Also, I think by temperament, Jacob was a gentle person who was inclined to negotiate rather than solve problems by violence. Other Latter-day Saints, like Hamblin’s bishop in Tooele, were inclined to deal with Indian “problems” with quick violence and used the rhetoric of “extermination” as the goal in these conflicts.
What did Jacob Hamblin accomplish as an explorer?
In 1858, Jacob Hamblin was the first white (that we know of) to cross the Colorado at the “Crossing of the Fathers,” after Dominguez and Escalante crossed it in 1776. Later, in 1864, he was the leader of the first group to navigate across the Colorado at Lee’s Ferry, which became the main crossing point between Utah and Arizona for many years. Because he was crossing the Colorado every year, he came to know the Grand Canyon area quite well.
He also crossed the Colorado south of St. George at the Grand Wash in 1862, so he also knew the western Grand Canyon/Colorado River. In that same 1862 trip, he traveled east to visit the Hopis, then returned to Santa Clara via the Crossing of the Fathers. He thus circled the Grand Canyon, a remarkable first. When Joseph Christmas Ives steamed up the lower Colorado in March 1858, guess who he met? Thales Haskell, in a group led by Jacob Hamblin.
In 1870, when John Wesley Powell was preparing for his second trip down the Colorado, Jacob Hamblin worked with him and acted as his guide and Indian interpreter. Jacob led him to the Hopi mesas and then to Fort Defiance.
I should mention that Hamblin was an explorer only in the sense of being someone going places that whites didn’t know about. He had Indian guides, and they knew the area well. The Crossing of the Fathers was known to Jacob and Indians as “the Ute Crossing.” Indians had been using it long before Escalante in 1776. Indian trails led to the crossing. Paiutes helped Jacob learn how to cross the Colorado.
Additionally, other remarkable men accompanied Hamblin while he led these groups. The youthful Ammon Tenney knew Spanish, so was an important member of the first trip to the Hopis. Ira Hatch came to know Indian languages so well that sometimes he felt like he had forgotten English. He married a Navajo wife and had a large family. Thales Haskell, Zadok Judd, William Bailey Maxwell, Dudley Leavitt, Andrew Smith Gibbons, and John Steele were all remarkable men—devout Latter-day Saints and experienced frontiersmen.
Was Jacob Hamblin an apostle?
Jacob Hamblin was referred to as an apostle, but not in the sense of being a member of the Twelve. In James Bleak’s “Annals of the Southern Utah Mission,” we read that Jacob “was ordained an Apostle to the Lamanites on Friday, 15th Dec., 1876, at St. George by President Brigham Young.” The ordination is also solidly attested by a John D. Lee document, which is good—but at an earlier date, which muddies the dating issue.
Why was Brigham Young so interested in southern Utah and Arizona?
There were a number of factors that led Brigham Young to colonize Utah and nearby states.
First, some Latter-day Saint settlements started as Indian missions. This shows the early Latter-day Saint interest in converting Indians. (However, often, the Indians did not convert as quickly or thoroughly as the Saints hoped, and then these towns changed into communities focused on economic issues. Santa Clara is one of these. Then, there were tensions between the original Indian missionary settlers and the later “economic” settlers.)
Second, there was a continual influx of converts into Utah, in large part due to the Church’s nineteenth-century doctrine of literal gathering. So, there was a danger of overpopulation in northern Utah. Therefore, Brigham Young had to send new Latter-day Saint immigrants to viable communities in northern, central, and southern Utah and in other states.
It was a tragic ending to a mission begun so idealistically.
One of my favorite stories is about a sizable group of Swiss converts who arrive in Salt Lake City after a long journey from their home in the Alps. Brigham Young says welcome to Zion, your home is going to be Santa Clara in southern Utah, five days’ journey from here, in a dry desert country, with temperatures often in the 100s. One of these Swiss immigrants became Jacob Hamblin’s last wife, Louisa Bonelli. Her brother, Daniel Bonelli, became an important leader in southern Utah.
Third, Brigham Young stressed self-sufficiency and wanted Latter-day Saints to live on their own products. This resulted in the Iron Mission in Parowan and Cedar City and the Cotton Mission in St. George. Both failed in their original intent but became important Latter-day Saint communities.
Fourth, Brigham Young needed communities that could work as polygamous havens if the anti-polygamy crusade in Washington D.C. threatened to put Latter-day Saint leaders in prison. John Alton Peterson, in his Juanita Brooks lecture on Pipe Springs, describes Young playing the “Great Game” against Washington, and founding communities as possible refuges or havens as a result.
Incidentally, Jacob Hamblin was planning to move to Mexico as a polygamy refugee in the years before his death in 1886. He was still married to his last two wives, Priscilla Leavitt and Louisa Bonelli, in the 1880s, so federal marshals were looking for him.
I should mention that his wives had difficult lives, with Jacob often going on his long journeys and visits to Indians. Louisa told a grandchild:
I was not happy unless I was miserable, for I knew nothing except hardships.
Louisa Hamblin on her life with Jacob Hamblin
When the Hamblin family had to leave their roomy home in Santa Clara in favor of Kanab, Priscilla was not happy at all. Later, just as the Hamblin families had begun to feel settled in Kanab, they were called to join the Little Colorado Mission in Arizona, one of the most difficult settlement missions in Latter-day Saint history.
Why did he consider the founding of St. George disastrous to the Paiutes?
Jacob Hamblin wrote three remarkable letters (one to Brigham Young in September 1873 and two to John Wesley Powell in November 1880) in which he described how the degradation of Paiute environmental living areas by white settlers and ranchers was causing Paiutes to starve to death. Paiutes traditionally would migrate through the year, planning on specific foods to be available at specific times and places. One of their key food sources was grass seed; however, Latter-day Saint ranchers often led their cattle to these grass pastures, and when the Paiutes arrived, needing food, the grass and its seed would be gone.
Brigham Young had sent Hamblin on a mission to the Paiutes in 1854, and now Latter-day Saints were taking away the Paiutes’ basic food necessities. Hamblin wrote to Young,
The game also disappears, grievances are talked over at the camp fire, the women & children beg at the door of the white man, necesity drives the Indian to steal, the white man wants to bring the Indian to his standard of civilization, they are both driven to desperation, all for the want of a little understanding. All these evils we have had to contend with, from the early settling of this Territory.
Jacob Hamblin to Brigham Young
These are remarkable letters; they show Hamblin had great insight into the problems of Paiutes dealing with ever-increasing white settlement. One could ask: why didn’t Hamblin do more? However, he was not a religious-political leader, like a General Authority or even a Stake President.
The Paiutes around Santa Clara were nearly all wiped out during a major pandemic, likely smallpox. Any survivors probably went to live with other Paiute groups. It was a tragic ending to a mission begun so idealistically a few decades earlier.
How did the U.S.-Navajo Wars affect Hamblin and other Latter-day Saints in southern Utah?
Starting in 1863, Major General James Carleton (the same man who had visited Mountain Meadows and made an early investigation of the massacre) subjected the Navajos in New Mexico and Arizona to a scorched-earth war that forced them to leave their ancestral homeland, undergo the Long Walk, and live in a terrible reservation called Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico. Thousands of Navajos died.
Some Navajos who stayed in Dinétah, the Navajo homeland, were pushed up north into southeastern Utah and began raiding Latter-day Saint flocks in 1863. Some of them became allies with Utes, who were involved in the “Utah Black Hawk War” from 1865 to 1868.
The Navajos were allowed to leave Bosque Redondo in 1868 and return to their homelands in New Mexico and Arizona, the new Navajo Reservation. However, starting over again from scratch was difficult for the Navajos, and some of them continued the raids into southern Utah.
These raids resulted in the deaths of Latter-day Saints, Paiutes (generally allied with the Latter-day Saints), and Navajos. Latter-day Saints organized into militia units to pursue Navajos heading to the Lee’s Ferry crossing with Latter-day Saint-owned cattle. Jacob found himself working with the military, to a certain degree against his own principles, and felt a bitter feeling of loss every time he saw the body of a Navajo. He wondered if it would be possible to confer with Navajo leaders and stop this conflict.
Why has the Fort Defiance Treaty been called Hamblin’s “crowning achievement”?
Joseph Wesley Powell made his first trip down the Colorado in the summer of 1869. In 1870, he came to Utah to prepare for a second expedition, and Brigham Young introduced him to Hamblin. Jacob and his friends in Kanab helped Powell and his companions prepare for the second expedition, and then Hamblin and Powell agreed to travel to the Hopi mesas, a route Hamblin knew well, and then continue east to Fort Defiance, and possibly have a peace conference with Navajo leaders, and with Navajo agent Frank Tracy “Big Belly” Bennett. Ammon Tenney, the invaluable Spanish translator, also joined the group.
They arrived at the fort on November 1, 1870, and Bennett sent out messengers to many Navajo leaders. They arrived on the 5th, and the peace talk with Powell, Hamblin, and especially Navajo leader Barboncito was recorded by a clerk. Barboncito spoke eloquently, promising peace with the Latter-day Saints in southern Utah.
I hope you’re getting a sense of what an amazing life Hamblin led.
This has been called Hamblin’s crowning achievement because it brought to an end the Navajo-Mormon conflict that had started in 1863. By making the difficult journey to Fort Defiance and working with Powell, Bennett, and especially Barboncito, the Navajo-Mormon conflict ended. Communities in southern Utah could breathe a sigh of relief. Navajos began making trips to Lee’s Ferry and southern Utah towns to trade beautiful blankets for horses.
How did Hamblin help John Wesley Powell with his expeditions?
Jacob Hamblin, along with Henry Miller and Jesse Crosby, boated west from the Grand Wash (on the Colorado, southwest of St. George) in April 1867, and traveled along the Colorado for a substantial distance. Brigham Young apparently gave John Wesley Powell a diary of this expedition, and Powell had this when he made his first trip down the Colorado in 1869. This diary helped Powell and his companions understand that they could finish the journey after a moment of strife and uncertainty at Separation Canyon, where two of Powell’s men deserted the expedition.
So, Hamblin’s earlier experience boating the Colorado and the diary of his journey helped Powell finish his journey. This is not to take away from the great accomplishments and talents of Powell. But Hamblin did have substantial experience with the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon before Powell arrived on the scene.
As was mentioned above, Jacob Hamblin and his friends connected with Powell in 1870 and helped him prepare for the second Powell expedition, 1871-72. They transported food to key points on the Colorado, which was not an easy task.
Hamblin served as a guide for Powell in the Grand Canyon area and as an Indian interpreter. In the first Powell expedition, the two men who had left him at Separation Canyon had simply disappeared. Powell wanted to know what happened to them. Hamblin led Powell to a Paiute band living on the north rim of the Grand Canyon who knew the story of these men—they had been killed by Paiutes due to a misunderstanding at the instigation of Indians south of the Colorado.
He deserves to be better known.
By the way, I hope you’re getting a sense of what an amazing life Hamblin led: full of adventure and danger, trying to navigate white and Indian cultures and religions, trying to survive in his travels from Utah across the Colorado to the Hopis and Navajos.
He deserves to be better known. I hope an intelligent, skillful novelist writes a book about him sometimes. Or maybe an intelligent, skillful documentary filmmaker could make a good movie.
What role did Hamblin play in the aftermath of the Mountain Meadows Massacre?
For the Mountain Meadows Massacre generally, I’m not an authority and haven’t researched or written extensively about the subject. So, I refer you to the books of Juanita Brooks, Will Bagley, Richard Turley, Ron Walker, and Barbara Brown.
On the date of the massacre, Jacob Hamblin was in Salt Lake City, getting married to his third wife, Priscilla Leavitt. He lived at the Santa Clara Fort, but he had a ranch just north of the site of the massacre. His second wife, Rachel Judd, was there at the time of the massacre, and the massacre perpetrators brought her the children survivors to take care of. Jacob had an adopted Gosiute son, Albert, a teenager at the time, and he witnessed the massacre.
When Jacob returned, the unburied bodies still lay there on the massacre site. So he knew early on from his family what had happened and that Latter-day Saints had been involved. He also would have known that local Paiutes did not have the firepower or the temperament to carry out a massacre like this all by themselves.
Naturally, it became widely known that whites were involved in the massacre.
When relatives of the massacred people in Arkansas found out that there were children survivors, they asked the Utah Indian agent, Jacob Forney, a non-Mormon, to find them and return them to their relatives. Jacob Hamblin, as the Mormon sub-agent, was asked to help, so he helped gather as many children as he could find among the Latter-day Saints of southern Utah and turned them over to Forney. Of course, neither Forney nor Hamblin should have been involved, technically, as no Paiute Indians had any of the children survivors.
Hamblin took part in the general Latter-day Saint cover-up of the massacre, at times. However, in 1859, he told two non-Mormons, Forney and his assistant, William Rogers, that there was white Latter-day Saints involvement in the massacre, and whites even planned it. Forney listed Jacob and Rachel Hamblin as his sources for a generally correct account of the massacre in a formal letter to a non-Mormon Utah official, attorney Alexander Wilson. The letter listed eight guilty parties, including Stake President Isaac Haight and John D. Lee.
Jacob once told Frederick Dellenbaugh, a member of the second Powell company, that “if he had been at home the Mountain Meadows Massacre would not have occurred.”
It’s one of those unknowable historical enigmas: Could Jacob have stood up to Stake Presidents Haight and Dame?
What led to Jacob Hamblin’s falling out with John D. Lee?
Originally, Hamblin and Lee were allies, even though Hamblin disapproved of Lee’s actions in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. After Lee was excommunicated in October 1870, he felt that all of his former friends in the church turned against him, from Brigham Young to Jacob Hamblin.
Specifically, Lee accused Hamblin of telling one of his plural wives that she should leave him since he had been excommunicated. Lee also accused Jacob of lying when he testified in the Lee trials. His antagonism to Hamblin is well documented in the Lee diaries and writings. Unfortunately, we don’t have Hamblin’s side of the story, on many of the specifics of this “feud.”
Juanita Brooks tells the story that when the feud developed, both Lee and Hamblin told their children they could not marry into the other family. The result was that in later years, the children intermarried frequently.
Where is Jacob Hamblin buried?
He was first buried in Pleasanton, Catron County, New Mexico, where he died on August 31, 1886. Later, his body was moved closer to where many of his descendants lived in Alpine, Apache County, Arizona.
How many children did Jacob Hamblin have?
Jacob Hamblin had 32 children (7 of which were adopted) with four wives:
- With Lucinda Taylor Hamblin, five children.
- With Rachel Judd Page Henderson Hamblin, five children.
- With Priscilla Leavitt Hamblin, nine children.
- With Louisa Bonelli Hamblin, six children.
- Then, there were about seven adopted children.
He reportedly married three Paiute women, of whom one was named Eliza, but no children are recorded from these marriages.
What do you hope people remember about Jacob Hamblin?
I think Jacob Hamblin had an essential gentleness that caused him to stop the killing of Gosiutes when he heard their children screaming in terror as they fled from a camp with the whites pursuing them. In addition, he had a religious viewpoint and felt that God had given him a sign that he should not kill Indians and that he would be protected if he didn’t seek to kill them.
I think we whites are often focused on on heroic accomplishments of our pioneer forefathers. Hamblin showed us, in the three letters mentioned above, that we should also view the Latter-day Saint settlement of Utah and other states from the viewpoint of Indians—which is sometimes a tragic story. While Latter-day Saints made many mistakes in their dealings with Indians and were sometimes prone to resort to violence, we should also appreciate that there were some Saints who tried to reach out and understand and help them. I hope someday Pioneer Day can be re-envisioned to focus on Native Americans somehow.
By the way, right now, I’m finishing up a biography of one of Hamblin’s friends, the great Navajo peace chief, Totsohnii Hastiin, also known as Ganado Mucho.
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About the Interview Participant
Todd Compton is an American historian who specializes in the history of polygamy in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He is a person of faith with a complex view of religion and has sometimes called himself a “liberal Protestant Mormon.” Compton is the author of A Frontier Life: Jacob Hamblin, Explorer and Indian Missionary and two landmark books about Joseph Smith’s polygamy, In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith (1997) and In Sacred Loneliness: The Documents (2022).
Further Reading
- Who Was Wakara?
- What Happened Between Jim Bridger and Brigham Young?
- Was Marcus Whitman Responsible for Frontier Killings?
- What Did Buffalo Bill Really Think About Utah Pioneers?
- How Did the Book of Mormon Influence Views of Native Americans?
Jacob Hamblin Resources
- A Frontier Life: Jacob Hamblin, Explorer and Indian Missionary (University of Utah Press)
- Four Things You Might Not Know about Jacob Hamblin (Church History)
- Becoming a “Messenger of Peace”: Jacob Hamblin in Tooele (Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought) [PDF]
- Caught In Between: Jacob Hamblin and the Southern Paiutes During the Black Hawk-Navajo Wars of the Late 1860’s (Utah Historical Quarterly)
Sources Cited
John Alton Peterson, Brigham’s Bastion: “Winsor Castle” At Pipe Springs And Its Place In The Great Game. Juanita Brooks lecture, March 23, 2016. https://library.utahtech.edu/special_collections/Juanita_Brooks_lectures/2016.pdf
A few good books to read on Indians and Latter-day Saints in Utah are:
- John Alton Peterson, Utah’s Black Hawk War (University of Utah Press)
- Jared Farmer, On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Harvard University Press)
- Will Bagley, The Whites Want Every Thing: Native Voices from the Mormon West (Oklahoma University Press)
- Martha Knack, Boundaries Between: The Southern Paiutes, 1775-1995 (University of Nebraska Press)
- Sondra Jones, Being and Becoming Ute: The Story of an American Indian People (University of Utah Press)
- Robert McPherson, The Northern Navajo Frontier 1860-1900 (Utah State University Press)
- Forrest Cuch, editor, History of Utah’s American Indians (Utah State University Press)
