House of Card

The settlement of the prairies gave an unanticipated boost to religious freedom in Canada. The pressing need for farmers and workers to cultivate and populate the West overcame the scruples of a Protestant elite and led to group settlements of Mennonites, Ukrainian Catholics, Jews, and Russian Doukhobors. The religious historian Brooke Kathleen Brassard urges us not to overlook the Mormons in the throng of newcomers who seized the chance to make a life and practise faiths that challenged straitlaced Anglos.

No one would confuse Thirsty Land into Springs of Water with the musical The Book of Mormon: this is a thorough but rather dry account of how the Latter‑day Saints settled on the lands that are now Alberta and came to consider themselves Canadian. Written by a respectful outsider to the faith, it is short on jokes. Yet Brassard’s sober narrative is nonetheless an absorbing one, reminding us of the relative ease with which even the most fervent believers have been able to negotiate a place in our capacious nation.

There had been Mormons in eastern Canada almost since the angel Moroni first appeared to Joseph Smith in September 1823. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‑day Saints was a spiritually democratic movement that was imbued with New World optimism. As such, it proved attractive to people who had grown restive with their pinched and hierarchical Protestant denominations. Yet most of these Canadian converts quickly headed south to seek the community of their co-religionists. When Mormons returned, they did so as refugees. From the 1860s to the 1880s, federal authorities in the United States initiated a far-ranging legislative crackdown on polygamy, a practice then central to the faith. In 1887, some Latter‑day Saints hightailed it to the North-West Territories under the leadership of Charles Ora Card.

Most of them prudently arrived with just one wife, leaving their other spouses behind in the United States. They had to accept that the country in which they sought asylum was no more tolerant of polygamy than the one they had fled. Card claimed that when he and other leaders met with John A. Macdonald to arrange their passage, the prime minister had nodded his approval of polygamy, accepting that it could efficiently colonize the West. But this was a wishful misunderstanding. The authorities viewed monogamy as a vital buttress for civilization and Christianity. They despised and aimed to discourage marriage “Indian fashion”: the non-monogamous relationships common among the First Nations people who still outnumbered Europeans. Parliament promptly included in the Criminal Code a ban on “what among the persons commonly called Mormons is known as spiritual or plural marriage,” and mounted police prowled villages looking for evidence of illicit cohabitation.

In the end, church presidents in Utah made a decisive turn against polygamy, sidestepping serious friction on the issue. Their First and Second Manifestos, in 1890 and 1904, committed the faithful to respect the law of the land in which they lived. Indeed, Brassard cannot discern much difference between the early twentieth-century family values of Mormons and of other Canadians. Mormons resembled mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics in preaching that the sexes were separate but equal and in considering that women should mainly be homemakers. If they were mildly countercultural, it was insofar as they became more patriarchal over time: by the early twentieth century, the distinctive practices of faith healing and prophesying were monopolized by the male priesthood. In the interwar years, Mormon women flocked to join the Women’s Institute and the somewhat more progressive United Farm Women of Alberta. They avidly subscribed to the dire warnings these organizations issued about threats to the godly Canadian family, not least of which was (ironically enough) immigration.

Mormons and other Christians were meanwhile discovering that they could collaborate on the development of Alberta, despite some mutual suspicion. Like most migrant groups to the West, the newcomers were initially an introverted lot who sought to reproduce the communities they had left behind. As Card’s wife Zina wrote, “What Jerusalem is to the Jew, — so is Utah to the hearts of her mountain boys and girls.” Unlike most settlers, who lived in dispersed farmsteads, Mormons clustered quite densely in villages and towns in which everyone lived within walking distance of a meeting house. The menfolk commuted from these miniature Zions to their farms. Mormons were economic cooperators who created joint-stock companies to pool the risks of building up their settlements. Card founded the Cardston Company, which tried to control the economic life of the town named for him. In 1897, the Canadian branch of the church incorporated itself as the Alberta Stake of Zion, so that it could contract mortgages and sell and exchange land.

Nothing could be more Canadian than a fondness for corporations. Yet these vehicles provoked resentment from those who feared that outsiders were buying up Alberta for their clannish ends. When the corporation of the Alberta Stake bought 67,000 acres of prime grazing land from the Cochrane Ranch in 1905, newspapers commented severely on the “further invasion of Mormons in the Canadian west.” They were right to sense that the venture was a strange blend of economic, religious, and communal objectives: Edward Wood, who ran the new venture, was also the stake president. In time, though, local bosses who wished to develop southern Alberta grasped the benefits of partnering with Mormon entrepreneurs. Charles Magrath, a land surveyor and the first mayor of Lethbridge, involved Card in constructing a canal between Cardston and Lethbridge. Mormons duly named the new town of Magrath in his honour.

This convergence of economic concerns encouraged Mormons to enter politics. They found an echo of their communalist approach to the economy in the Alberta Farmers’ Association — later the United Farmers of Alberta. Admittedly, they did not share the evangelical desire of the UFA to build the kingdom of God on the prairies, but they were excited by the prospect of creating the Alberta Wheat Pool, which would enable farmers to share risk, much as the citizens of Cardston had tried to do. In the interwar years, their politics changed again: many joined the Alberta Social Credit Party, which strove to defeat the menace of socialism by relaxing the restrictions that the federal government put on borrowing by individual farmers and entrepreneurs. As Brassard mordantly remarks, there was no truer way of demonstrating you were a genuine Albertan than by taking on Ottawa. The Mormons John Horne Blackmore and Solon Earl Low actually served as leaders of the Social Credit Party of Canada from 1935 to 1961 and sat in the House of Commons.

As Alberta politics advanced and as Mormons adopted Canadian values, it seemed easier for them to insist on their spiritual distinctness. Although the ambitious meeting houses and stake tabernacles they put up were an early sign that they intended to stay in their new home, they sedulously copied the Gothic style then in vogue for Christian churches — rose windows and all. The temple they dedicated at Cardston in 1923 therefore marked a step change. Its very creation relaxed the spiritual dependence of Mormons on the United States: they could now “seal” their marriages without having to travel to temples south of the border. The building lacked the giant statue of Moroni that usually adorned such edifices, but it was also a defiant and strange declaration of identity. Brassard discerns Frank Lloyd Wright’s influence in this hulking white granite structure, while its admirers likened it to a Meso-American pyramid. Once it was finished, Mormons began to add reliefs of it to their tombstones, which they had once been content to decorate with the generic pious phrases that Protestants also used.

Brassard’s story ends rather sedately in the 1940s, but the Canadianization of the Latter‑day Saints was not quite as complete as she implies. In 1947, the church investigated and then excommunicated John Blackmore for advocating (but not actually practising) polygamy. His son Harold was one of the fundamentalists who disputed the rulings of the First and Second Manifestos and had moved west to Lister, British Columbia, to create the splinter community of Bountiful in the Creston Valley.

After its members transferred allegiance to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‑day Saints, Bountiful lived on as a reminder of Mormonism’s wild beginnings. In 2017, a B.C. court convicted John Blackmore’s nephew Winston of polygamy, after he was proven to have married twenty-four women between 1990 and 2014. A decade before, the authorities had declined to prosecute him, fearing that policing the ban on polygamy might infringe on constitutional religious freedoms. The Mormons might have negotiated a place in Canada, but some of them have retained the strange power to test its traditions of toleration.