The Interpreter Foundation and Redbrick Filmworks continues to release a new episode of their not-for-profit series of mini-documentaries titled Becoming Brigham each Monday. This week, they released the following episode:

Episode 33: “From Stolen Shirt To Open War?”

• How did a stolen shirt turn a mission to the Native Americans into two decades of war?
• What would Utah history have looked like if the Saints and the Utes had treated sharing and consecration as a conversation instead of a one-way religious task?

A relatively peaceful first two years in the Salt Lake Valley—which at the time was a buffer zone between Native American tribes—gave way to armed conflict as settlement pushed into Utah Valley. Fort Utah was built near the religious and economic heart of the Native lands. A clash over a stolen shirt ended with the killing of a Native American man. The Utes demanded the perpetrator be handed over. Brigham Young, unaware of the shirt incident, consulted non-Mormon officers from the Stansbury expedition and sent Daniel H. Wells and a few hundred Nauvoo Legion men south. He later said the Spirit had told him to be patient, but he yielded to a “show of force.” Historian John Peterson calls that decision nearly fatal to Mormon–Ute relations; serious fighting continued for about twenty years in Utah and longer across the West. Peterson quotes the John Turner line that Mormons paradoxically saw Indians as both religious kindred and savage enemies.

Why this docuseries? Many people are aware of Brigham Young as a pivotal figure in American religious and frontier history, but Brigham is also often misunderstood, seen as a larger-than-life caricature rather than as a man. Who actually was Brigham as a man, a father, a husband, and a prophet? The video web series Becoming Brigham debunks fictions and provides surprising new insights into the real Brigham Young. Learn more in the article “Becoming Brigham: The Video Series Premieres.”