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Podcast transcript:
I recently heard the claim that Brigham Young had Latter-day Saint settlers in early Utah add shards of glass to sacks of flour, which were then given to Native Americans. Is it true? Let’s talk about it.
So, I first heard this claim from a guy on Instagram. He commented, “Can you talk about Brigham Young and putting glass in flour for the natives?” This was the first time I had ever heard this claim, so I responded, “Happy to look into it for you — what are your sources for this claim?” He replied, “Eh, as you’re the professional educator, I’ll let you find the sources.” I usually try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but I don’t think this guy’s question was particularly sincere. I think he was just trying to stir the pot. But if he brought it up, this is obviously a claim that is floating around out there. So, the first item on my to-do list was to track down where it was coming from. I searched through three different biographies of Brigham Young and three different books about the history of Native Americans in Utah, — none of them mention anything about glass-tainted flour.
So, where does this claim actually come from? Well, I did find that there was no shortage of critics of the Church talking about this claim online, and they were all pointing back to the same ultimate source: TimpanogosTribe.com.
Background info: According to the Department of the Interior, there are 574 federally recognized American Indian tribes and entities. Timpanogos Tribe is not one of them. I’ll leave some links in the YouTube description of this video if you want to learn more about that — there’s been a lot of drama (including legal issues) between them and the federally recognized Ute Indian Tribe, but I digress. On the Timpanogos Tribe website there is a page that includes the one-paragraph-long biography of one Illa Chivers (who only just recently passed away). We read, “Illa shared the story of her family getting a sack of Flour from the Mormons; when Old James Reed saw the flour, he dumped some of it on the table and brushed his glove-covered hand across it, exposing the broken glass fragments hidden inside. She always warned against taking food from Mormons because of this.” Please note that Illa didn’t write this. This is someone else’s recollection of what Illa apparently said. You can take that for what it’s worth.
Chief Executive of Timpanogos Tribe, Mary Meyer, expanded on this claim on the homepage of the website. She wrote that Latter-day Saint settlers brought “confusion as they spoke of their God and peace while sharing sacks of flour laced with broken glass. Brigham Young said, ‘You can get rid of more Indians with a sack of flour than a keg of powder.’ Destroying us with what appeared to be acts of kindness.”
Now, I found a couple of critical YouTube videos about this claim, and in one of them, the creator of the video apparently contacted Mary about this claim. Mary apparently said the claim was true and offered further documentation. Unfortunately, the creator never made a follow-up video to update us on what that documentation was, if it existed at all. So I reached out to Mary, who was kind enough to chat with me on the phone for a half hour. She was not able to give me any other source for this story other than Illa (who apparently shared the story with Mary about 15 years ago), supplemented again by that same quote attributed to Brigham Young about getting rid of more Indians with a sack of flour than a keg of powder. Illa’s bio doesn’t mention Brigham Young at all, so it’s unclear to me whether Illa included Brigham Young in her original telling or if that was a conclusion that Mary came to independently.
When I asked where Illa had heard this general story from, Mary said that Illa had experienced it first-hand. The problem is that Illa was born in 1937, long after the death of Brigham Young and the problems between the Saints and the natives. So, either Latter-day Saints were, for some reason, sharing glass-tainted flour in the mid-20th century, or, more likely, Illa heard this story from someone else, who may have heard it from someone else, etc.
Maybe Illa’s grandfather or great-grandfather (who were both named James Reed) really did find some glass in a sack of flour. But if Latter-day Saints under Brigham Young were systematically trying to kill native Americans with glass-tainted flour… why is there only one single decades-late account of it? With all due respect to Illa, this sounds like family folklore.
I asked historian and author Sondra Jones if she’d ever heard this claim before. She replied, “Bottom line, no, I have never seen anything even close to this ‘glass-in-the-flour’ story … IF it ever happened, it was done by a rogue settler, doing something on his own. It was never a B-Young policy.”
But what about that Brigham Young quote about killing Indians with sacks of flour? Well, that quote comes from the October 20th, 1866, issue of the Denver Rocky Mountain News. The article is not about Brigham Young or anyone else hiding glass in flour. Flour is used in this article as a symbol representative of colonization and contact with white settlers. The article itself explains why flour is considered “deadly,” and it has nothing to do with glass. It says,
“…make a treaty with them [Native Americans], and pay them as the government does in salt bacon, sugar and flour, and the Indian becomes lazy and a beggar, while the change of food brings with it diseases which were to the Indian unknown before, and which, with the nameless diseases that he gets from contact with the whites, soon finish off his mortal career.”
Another symbol of colonization is used towards the end of the same article: “…it is a well-settled fact that a locomotive will kill more Indians in a given space of time than even flour or bibles.”
They’re not talking about natives being literally killed by a train, or flour, or Bibles. These are just symbols of colonization and the effects of trying to “civilize” the natives.
I also want to note that the Denver Rocky Mountain News does not even claim that the quote in question is even a direct quote from Brigham Young. It’s represented as a
[Quote] “And right upon this, I will say to our government if they could hear me, ‘You need never fight the Indians, but if you want to get rid of them, try to civilize them.’ How many were here when we came? At the Warm Springs, at this little grove where they would pitch their tents, we found perhaps three hundred Indians, but I do not suppose that there are three of that band left alive now. There was another band a little south, another north, another further east, but I do not suppose there is one in ten, perhaps not one in a hundred, now alive of those who were here when we came. Did we kill them? No, we fed them. They would say, ‘We want just as fine flour as you have.’ To Walker, the chief, whom all California and New Mexico dreaded, I said, ‘It will just as sure kill as the world if you live as we live.’ Said he, ‘I want as good as Brigham, I want to eat as he does.’ Said I, ‘Eat then, but it will kill you.’ I told the same to Arapeen, Walker’s brother, but they must eat and drink as the whites did, and I do not suppose that one in a hundred of those bands are alive.[close quote].
As harsh as this quote may seem, please again note that there is no mention of putting glass in flour. The flour is again spoken of in terms of colonization. “It will just as sure kill as the world if you live as we live.” It’s not the flour that kills; it’s living as the settlers lived.
If people want to believe these quotes are all really veiled references to a deadly, serious atrocity, I can’t stop them. But the fact is that nobody in Brigham Young’s day was interpreting this that way. At the end of the day, this claim has more holes in it than Camp Green Lake. Now, I’m certainly not saying that Brigham Young never made mistakes or that he was beyond reproach. Like most everyone else in those days, to an extent, he certainly was prejudiced against Native Americans. But no matter how you feel about Brigham Young or Latter-day Saints, we shouldn’t be laying atrocities at his feet (or anyone’s feet) when the evidence just isn’t there.
If you want to dive deeper into relations between Latter-day Saint settlers and Native Americans, go listen to episode 10 on this podcast, and have a great day!