Professor Peter Coviello

Right.

And he is called by many historians the great colonizer of the West.

He is going to be the great systematizer.

So where Joseph Smith has left behind this intense cosmology that's kind of under codified, he is going to turn it into a structure of leadership in which he sits at the top.

and he distributes authority carefully.

And that makes him very shrewd.

It's easy to think of him, I find in my own writing, I have to resist the urge, which I don't fully resist, to think of him as kind of a villain in as much as the theology of Mormonism is

ungovernably multiple before Joseph Smith is murdered polygamy is just for men but is it just for men well the women in the female relief society had some other idea and then Brigham systematized systematizes

He patriarchalizes an already patriarchal culture.

He bans African-American priesthood.

He identifies with the racial state, even as he disidentifies from the United States as such.

He just thinks the Mormons deserve an imperial investiture.

So he's that sort of complicated figure.

He believes that the United States is doomed.

He's also incredibly pragmatic and he wants to protect America.

native peoples, that what you mentioned before about the Mormons fleeing Salt Lake, when people wonder why there are so many Mormon settlements out West, going all the way down to Mexico, all the way up the coast, out to the West, it's in part because he thought the federal government is not going to slaughter all of us if we're scattered, not just in Salt Lake, but in these outposts everywhere.

That's a response to this sense of incursion and the sense of vulnerability.

That marks the landscape today.

Yep.

77, I think, many years later, like 20 years later.