On the 5th of December, 1857, John B. Floyd, then Secretary of War, in his report to James Buchanan, President of the United States, states that the people of Utah implicitly obeyed their prophet, and that from the first day of their settlement in the territory it had been their aim to secede from the Union.  He says that for years they had not even pretended obedience to Federal authority, and that they encouraged roaming bands of Indians to rob and massacre the emigrants bound for the Pacific coast.

Previous to the assembling of any troops for duty in Utah to enforce obedience to the laws of the government, an opinion was asked of General Winfield Scott, then commanding the army, as to the feasibility of sending an armed expedition into the territory.  Scott’s decision was most emphatically against the proposition to send troops there so late in the season.  The general’s advice was not heeded, however, and in May orders were promulgated that the Fifth and Tenth Infantry, the Second Dragoons, and a battery of the Fourth Artillery should assemble at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, with the Valley of the Salt Lake as their objective point.

In June, 1858, more than six thousand troops were mobilized for Utah, and the command was given to Brigadier-General W. S. Harney.

In the whole military history of the country, before the Civil War, no expedition had ever been better equipped and rationed than that which was to be called “The Army of Occupation in Utah.”  Thousands of cattle and immense supply-trains were started across the plains in advance.  The price for the transportation was twenty-two cents a pound.

These exorbitant contracts made the lucky individuals who had secured them very wealthy.  By a little political wire-pulling he who had secured the flour contract obtained permission to provide the troops with Utah flour.  It cost him but seven cents a pound, but he received the twenty-two cents which it would have cost to have transported it from the States.

This large army was stationed in Utah Territory for nearly four years.  It is stated on good authority that the private soldiers asked of each other, “Why were we sent here?  Why are we kept here?” while the common people wondered whether the authorities at Washington kept them there to make the contractors rich.

At that time the people of the territory were in a starving condition in consequence of the failure of crops and the unusually severe winter of 1856-1857.  There were thousands who for over a year had never realized what a full meal meant; children by the hundreds “endured the gnawings of hunger until hunger had become to them a second nature”; yet despite this condition of affairs the orders issued to General Harney from Washington display a lamentable ignorance, or a determination to compel the Mormons to feed the troops on the basis of the miracle of “the loaves and fishes.”  His instructions were as follows: