The Utah War of 1857-58: Johnston's Army, the Move South and Camp Floyd

In the spring of 1858 Provo, a town of about 4,000 people, briefly held something like three times that many. Families from Salt Lake City and the settlements north of it had loaded wagons and driven south, leaving their homes ready to be burned, because a federal army was camped in the mountains east of the Salt Lake Valley and Brigham Young had decided not to wait for it. For about three months Provo served as the working headquarters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. By that fall the army was building the largest military post in the country in Cedar Valley, less than an hour's drive from downtown Provo, and Utah County's west side was briefly one of the busiest places in the territory.

That episode, usually called the Utah War, left no battlefield. What it left in Utah County is a single army storehouse, an adobe inn, a cemetery whose markers had to be moved, and a long argument among historians about what the whole thing was for. This guide covers what happened, what ended it, and where you can still see its marks, with every interpretation attributed to the source that makes it.

Why an army marched on Utah

The short version, as the Church of Jesus Christ's own history topic tells it, is that relations between Latter-day Saint leaders and federal appointees in Utah Territory broke down in the mid-1850s. The church page describes a 1856-57 "reformation" in Utah marked by strongly worded preaching against apostasy and outside influences, complaints about the territory in the national press from residents who were not church members, and quarrels between federal officials and church leaders over public policy. In 1857, it says, the territorial legislature told the new president, James Buchanan, that it would no longer tolerate "corrupt" appointees.

Buchanan concluded that an insurrection could break out. He sent Alfred Cumming to replace Brigham Young as territorial governor and ordered an army to go with him. In Buchanan's words, as quoted on the church page, the goal was to restore "the sovereignty of the Constitution and laws over the Territory of Utah."

Richard D. Poll, writing the "Utah War" entry for the Utah History Encyclopedia (republished by the Utah Historical Society on its History To Go site), adds the national politics. Republicans at the time were attacking Democrats over the "twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery," and Poll writes that Buchanan's decision to replace Young rested on reports from Judge W. W. Drummond and other former territorial officials, made "without investigation." The Utah mail contract was canceled. Because no one formally told Utah's leaders what the administration intended, Poll writes, they read the army's approach as religious persecution. The church history page makes a similar point: Latter-day Saints feared the intervention could incite persecution on a national scale.

How big was the army? Three answers

Readers will run into very different numbers for the size of what Latter-day Saints remember as "Johnston's Army," and the differences are mostly about what is being counted.

• At least 1,500 soldiers. This is the Church of Jesus Christ's figure, which it pairs with the description of the expedition as the largest and most expensive U.S. armed undertaking between the Mexican-American War and the Civil War.
• 2,500, then reinforcements. Poll's encyclopedia entry and Audrey M. Godfrey's "Camp Floyd" entry for the same encyclopedia both say 2,500 men were ordered to Utah in May 1857. Poll adds that over the winter Buchanan, Secretary of War John B. Floyd and Army commander Winfield Scott sent 3,000 more regular troops, and Congress authorized two volunteer regiments.
• 3,500, nearly a third of the Army. This is the figure on Utah State Parks' Camp Floyd history page. Historian William P. MacKinnon, in a 2012 chapter published by BYU's Religious Studies Center, also describes the Nauvoo Legion facing "nearly one-third of the U.S. Army."

None of these is wrong on its own terms. If you see a single number quoted without context, it is fair to ask which part of the force it describes.

Fall 1857: delay instead of battle

The army's original commander, according to Godfrey's encyclopedia entry, was Gen. William S. Harney. Col. Albert Sidney Johnston took over and led the troops to the northeastern edge of the territory in the fall of 1857, the church history page says.

Young, still governor, declared martial law. The church page says militia officers stationed men along the main routes into the settlements, and women at home collected warm clothing for them. It quotes Margaret Clawson, whose mother "sat up many nights knitting woolen stockings" for the men in the mountain passes.

The militia's strategy was to slow the army down without fighting it. Poll writes that the territorial militia, known as the Nauvoo Legion, burned three army supply trains and drove hundreds of government cattle into the Salt Lake Valley. The church history page says militiamen also burned Fort Bridger, the main trading post and military installation in the area, set grass fires and stampeded army animals. Poll calls these "scorched earth" tactics and says they forced the expedition to spend the winter at Camp Scott and Eckelsville, near the burned-out Fort Bridger in what is now Wyoming. Communities in Utah were asked to equip 1,000 men to hold the roughly 100 miles of mountains between Camp Scott and Salt Lake City.

The expedition set up its winter base, and Cumming began his term as governor there, in a camp far from the territory he was supposed to govern.

Mountain Meadows

Any honest account of the period has to include the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which happened in southern Utah in September 1857, while the army was still on its way. The Church of Jesus Christ's history topic on the massacre says Latter-day Saint militiamen from southern Utah, aided by Paiute Indians they had recruited, killed about 120 men, women and children traveling from Arkansas to California in a wagon train led by Alexander Fancher and John Baker. Seventeen young children were spared. The church's Utah War page calls it "the most violent episode of the conflict."

John D. Lee was the only participant convicted and executed; MacKinnon's chapter dates his execution to 1877. The church's massacre page says a 2008 church-supported book concluded that Brigham Young did not order the killings, though his intemperate preaching helped create a hostile climate, and it quotes church leader Henry B. Eyring calling the massacre "a terrible and inexcusable departure from Christian teaching and conduct." The massacre has its own large literature and is beyond the scope of this guide, but it connects to Provo directly in 1859, as described below.

Kane, Cumming and the pardon

What ended the standoff was mediation. Poll's encyclopedia entry says Thomas L. Kane, a Pennsylvanian and longtime friend of the Latter-day Saints, got permission after Christmas 1857 to go to Utah as an unofficial emissary. He traveled by way of Panama and California and reached Salt Lake City in late February 1858. His first contacts with Johnston at Camp Scott were discouraging, Poll writes, which confirmed Young's pessimism.

Kane eventually persuaded Cumming to come to Salt Lake City without the army. They arrived in April 1858; Poll's BYU Studies article dates their arrival to April 12. Young gave up the title of governor and, Poll writes, built a working relationship with Cumming. Buchanan then publicly appointed two peace commissioners, Lazarus Powell and Ben McCulloch, to carry an amnesty proclamation. They reached Utah in early June. Under the arrangement, Poll writes, church leaders accepted forgiveness for past offenses in exchange for accepting Cumming as governor and an army garrison in the territory.

The Move South: when Provo became headquarters

The part of this story that happened in Provo began before the peace was settled, when Kane's mission still looked likely to fail.

Poll calls it the "Sebastopol" policy. Sources differ by two days on when he announced it. Poll's encyclopedia entry says March 23, 1858. His longer BYU Studies article, "The Move South," places the decision at a special conference in the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City on March 21, 1858, and quotes Young telling the congregation, "I am in favor of leaving them before I am obliged to." Northern settlements would be emptied and prepared for burning if the army entered.

Poll's BYU Studies article lays out the timeline. Exploring parties, including one called the White Mountain Expedition, had searched the Great Basin in mid-March for a refuge and found nothing suitable. Young and other leaders began moving their families south on April 1. The exodus peaked in late April and May, when up to 800 wagons a day traveled between Salt Lake City and Utah County. The arrival of Cumming and Kane on April 12 did not stop it.

Contemporary estimates, Poll writes, put about 30,000 people on the move: about 20,000 from Salt Lake City and 10,000 from elsewhere. Historian Leonard Arrington later raised the estimate to 35,000, a figure Poll considers high, noting that the territory's whole population in 1860 was 40,273. About 1,500 people stayed behind in the northern settlements.

Most of them came to Utah County. Poll writes that Provo's population rose from about 4,000 to 12,000 and possibly 15,000. Church headquarters functions moved here. Young worked out of the barely finished seminary building, and the Church Historian's Office set up in the Provo Music Hall, where church records were stored. Tithing flour was kept on the public square under a "marquee" made partly of wood and partly of tent. Families built shanties out of lumber hauled from the towns they had left, and temporary shelters lined both banks of the Provo River. By late May the Bowery had to be enlarged to hold Sunday crowds. Young bought a house and two lots from stake president James C. Snow for $1,000.

It was not comfortable. Poll quotes Lorin Farr: "Accommodations of the crudest kind were all that Provo could offer." Farr also described bad water, sickness and insects. Other families went to Lehi, American Fork, Spanish Fork, Payson and Nephi. The Deseret News prepared to move first to Fillmore and then to Parowan, and published a weekly four-page edition from Fillmore from May 5 to Aug. 25, 1858, though Poll notes it "never moved beyond Fillmore."

The Church of Jesus Christ's history page tells the move through individual families. It describes Cynthia Jane Park Stowell, whose husband had been captured by soldiers the previous fall, leaving her Ogden home one week after giving birth and walking more than 50 miles "with one wagon and two yoke of steers" with 12 children.

June 1858: the march through an empty city

On June 26, 1858, Johnston's army marched through a nearly deserted Salt Lake City and camped across the Jordan River, according to both of Poll's accounts. On June 30, Poll writes in BYU Studies, Young announced that people could go home. His own family left Provo that evening. MacKinnon dates Young's return to Salt Lake City to July 1.

The return was largely uncoordinated, Poll writes, and stretched through July and into August. Some families stayed in central Utah for good. Poll cites Martin Luther Ensign, who got home to Brigham City on July 10, 1858, and found his property stripped for boxes and fences.

Camp Floyd and Fairfield

The army did not stay near Salt Lake City. It moved about 40 miles southwest, into Cedar Valley, across a creek from the small settlement that became Fairfield. Godfrey's encyclopedia entry says soldiers, helped by Latter-day Saint laborers and artisans, built the post and raised its flag on Nov. 9, 1858. The military reservation covered nearly 100 acres, and the men built a watering system and gardens. Utah State Parks says the army spent nearly $200,000 in the local economy building it, and that at its height Camp Floyd was the largest military installation in the United States. The National Park Service, on its Pony Express National Historic Trail page for the site, calls it the first military installation built in present-day Utah. (A Bureau of Land Management study of Utah's Pony Express stations, hosted on the NPS history site, instead calls it the second, counting an earlier 1853 reservation in Rush Valley.)

The camp took its name from Secretary of War John B. Floyd. MacKinnon dates Floyd's resignation to December 1860, after which the post was renamed Fort Crittenden.

Next to the post, a town grew fast. The BLM study says Fairfield reached about 7,000 people, 3,000 of them soldiers, making it the third-largest city in the territory, and that it had 17 saloons serving soldiers and the army payroll. Utah State Parks gives the same 7,000 total for Camp Floyd and Fairfield combined. Godfrey writes that the camp-follower settlement was called Frogtown. For more on how that small town became and stopped being a boomtown, see our Cedar Fort and Fairfield guide.

The Stagecoach Inn went up across the road in 1858. Utah State Parks says John Carson built the two-story adobe and frame hotel, which became the first stop south of Salt Lake City on the Overland Stage Route and also served the Pony Express. The BLM study says the Carson family ran it until 1947 and lists guests including Horace Greeley, Mark Twain, Sir Richard Burton, Porter Rockwell and Johnston himself. The NPS says the separate Pony Express station was a small adobe building several hundred feet northeast of Carson's inn and no longer exists. The NPS also notes that the camp supplied troops to keep the trail open for the Pony Express, stage lines and other travelers. Our Pony Express Days guide covers how Eagle Mountain marks the same trail today.

The Church of Jesus Christ's history page says the permanent presence of federal officials and thousands of new residents changed the local economy and brought "unwanted social, cultural, and political elements." MacKinnon's chapter adds a small detail from the soldiers' side: they called the valley's dust storms "Johnsoons."

1859: soldiers in Provo

The army's presence reached Provo again in March 1859. A summary by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College, citing Hubert Howe Bancroft's 1890 History of Utah, says federal judge John Cradlebaugh opened a court session in Provo mainly to pursue indictments against men implicated in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Provo had no jail or regular court facilities, so Cradlebaugh asked for federal troops to guard the proceedings.

Provo's mayor protested. According to the same summary, Governor Cumming asked Johnston to withdraw the troops; Johnston refused, citing the judge's request; Cumming then ordered their removal on his authority as governor. Cradlebaugh denounced the order from the bench, but the troops went back to their units a few days later. The episode shows how unsettled the relationship among the governor, the federal courts and the army remained even after the pardon.

1861: the fire sale

Johnston left Camp Floyd on March 1, 1860, according to MacKinnon. When the Civil War began, the troops were pulled east. Godfrey writes that the post was abandoned by midsummer 1861; the BLM study says it was abandoned and ordered destroyed by May 1861, and that by September 1861 Fairfield was down to about 18 families.

Utah State Parks says about $4,000,000 in surplus was sold for a few cents on the dollar. Godfrey writes that the government auctioned what it could not haul away and destroyed munitions and armaments, that local residents bought goods at very low prices, and that scavengers later carried off stones and lumber for farm buildings. Nearly every building was dismantled or demolished. Only the commissary building and the cemetery remain from the post itself.

The men who had served there scattered into the Civil War. MacKinnon counts more than 35 officers, enlisted men and civilians from Johnston's command who became Union or Confederate generals. Johnston, a Confederate general, died at Shiloh on April 6, 1862. Utah State Parks lists Buford, Reynolds, Bee, Heath and Lander among the future generals who took part in the Utah campaign.

How historians read it

Because the Utah War involved a church, the federal government and the slavery crisis at once, interpretations vary widely. A few, each from the source that makes it:

• Utah State Parks argues on its Camp Floyd history page that the expedition was a strategy by both northern and southern interests to shift national attention away from states' rights and slavery toward the "Mormon problem" and polygamy. The page says Buchanan believed Democrats and Republicans could unite over restoring order in Utah, and that southern Democrats, including Floyd, also saw a chance to direct government contracts to southern businessmen. This is the state park's interpretation, presented on a state website.
• Richard D. Poll, in the Utah History Encyclopedia, writes that Camp Floyd and Fairfield created the first sizable non-Mormon population in Utah and ended the dream of a geographically separate Zion. He says the war ended church outpost settlements in present-day California, Nevada, Wyoming and Idaho and weakened the European missionary effort. On the Move South specifically, he writes in BYU Studies that "most of the consequences were negative" and that the move did not materially change the war's outcome or federal policy toward Utah.
• William P. MacKinnon, in his BYU Religious Studies Center chapter, calls Buchanan's handling of the crisis a "failure of nerve" that foreshadowed his response to secession. He writes that the expedition drained the Treasury and helped bankrupt the freighting firm Russell, Majors and Waddell, and that the war's legacy "remains with us, though largely unrecognized."
• The Church of Jesus Christ notes on its history page that some called it a "so-called war" because Congress never declared war and bloodshed was relatively limited, and that the army's official name was the Utah Expedition.

Readers who want to go further can start with the books Poll's encyclopedia entry recommends: Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict, 1850-1859, and Poll's own Quixotic Mediator: Thomas L. Kane and the Utah War.

Where the Utah War left marks in Utah County

Camp Floyd State Park Museum, Fairfield. The 1858 commissary building is the only standing structure from the post. Utah State Parks says soldiers built it to store equipment and provisions, and that it was sold at auction in 1861 to the Beardshall family, moved, and used as their home. It now holds the museum. The park opened to the public in 1964.

Stagecoach Inn, Fairfield. Across the street from the museum. Utah State Parks says it was restored from disrepair in June 1959.

Camp Floyd Cemetery. Utah State Parks says it was established in 1858 and abandoned in 1861. The War Department dedicated a monument in 1913, and the American Legion added a fence and granite markers in 1960. Ground-penetrating radar located the burials in 2009, and in 2011 new headstones reading "Unknown" were placed over them, since the identities are not known.

Fairfield District Schoolhouse. Not from the Utah War era, but on the same park grounds. Utah State Parks says it was built in 1898 with federal funds Utah received after statehood and was designed by Richard Watkins, who also designed Maeser Elementary in Provo.

Provo itself. The 1858 buildings Poll describes, the seminary, the Music Hall and the Bowery, are not standing today, and Provo has no single site that interprets the Move South. For a sense of how downtown grew afterward, our Tabernacle Block walking history covers one of its oldest blocks; as you walk, remember that for a few months in 1858, temporary shelters lined both banks of the Provo River. Our short history of Provo covers the town as it stood before and after.

The army's route. Johnston's troops marched through what is now Eagle Mountain on the way to Cedar Valley; our history of Saratoga Springs and Eagle Mountain covers that stretch. Lehi, one of the towns that took in Move South families, has its own short history.

Visiting Camp Floyd from Provo

Route. From Provo, take I-15 north to Lehi and follow State Route 73 west through Saratoga Springs and Eagle Mountain, then south past Cedar Fort to Fairfield. The museum is at 69 West Main Street. Our state parks roundup estimates about 48 minutes and 36 miles. Rush-hour traffic through Lehi and Eagle Mountain can add to that, so check a map app before you leave. One caution for navigation: when we checked on Nov. 11, 2026, the park's own page listed the address city as Wallsburg, which is a different town in Wasatch County. Enter Fairfield.

Hours. Utah State Parks lists Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., closed on Thanksgiving (Nov. 26 this year), Christmas and New Year's Day. The posted hours do not include Sunday, so a Sunday drive will find it closed.

Fees. The park's fee page lists standard entry at $3 per person or $10 per family. Special events cost $5 per person or $15 per family. The state parks site also links to an online day pass.

Events. The park's page showed no upcoming events on Nov. 11, 2026. If you want to time a visit to a program or reenactment, check the page or call 801-768-8932 a week or two ahead.

What's there. The park page lists a museum, visitor center, gift shop and restrooms, plus geocaching and a Junior Ranger program for kids. A 2026 museum brochure is linked from the page. The museum, inn and cemetery make a compact visit.

What to bring. Cedar Valley is open, dry sagebrush country, and the cemetery is outdoors. Bring water, a jacket in the colder months and sun protection in summer. Fairfield and Cedar Fort have very little commercial development, so eat and buy gas in Lehi, Saratoga Springs or Eagle Mountain on the way.

Who should skip it. If you want dramatic scenery or a long hike, this is a short, quiet history stop rather than a full outdoor day. Families with young kids may want to pair it with another stop; the Junior Ranger program gives them something to do inside.

Before you go. Check the Camp Floyd page on stateparks.utah.gov the morning of your trip for any closure or schedule change, and call if you are driving out for a specific building, since the schoolhouse is used for programs and rentals.

Related Guides

• A Short History of Provo: From Fishing Camp to College Town
• Cedar Fort & Fairfield: Camp Floyd and Utah County's West Desert Edge
• Utah State Parks Within Two Hours of Provo: All 21 of Them
• A Short History of Saratoga Springs and Eagle Mountain: Utah County's Youngest Cities
• Pony Express Days: The Celebration That Spreads Across Three Weekends
• The Tabernacle Block: A Walking History of Provo's Most-Used City Block
• A Short History of Lehi: From Dry Creek to the Center of Utah

Sources: Utah State Parks Camp Floyd pages (overview, history and fees), the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints history topics on the Utah War and the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Richard D. Poll's "The Utah War" and Audrey M. Godfrey's "Camp Floyd" in the Utah History Encyclopedia (Utah Historical Society, History To Go), Poll's "The Move South" in BYU Studies, William P. MacKinnon's "Prelude to Civil War" (BYU Religious Studies Center), the National Park Service Pony Express trail page for Camp Floyd and Stagecoach Inn, the Bureau of Land Management study "The Pony Express Stations of Utah in Historical Perspective," and the House Divided Project at Dickinson College. All checked Nov. 11, 2026.

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