Your copy of the paper is in the mail.

Edje, really fascinating research. I hope you do publish it. I’d love a copy of the paper if you are willing. It dovetails nicely with some of my current research. We are getting at some of the same issues but through very different routes.

As for the diminishment of Utah, John makes a good point about territories being frequently divided, or realigned for a variety of reasons. What I’ve come to understand is that James Ashely, chairman of the US House Committee on Territories had a great deal to do with much of this realignment. He played fast and loose with the cartographer’s pen throughout his tenure. The shape of the present US West owes a considerable amount to him. Montana and Idaho, Utah and Nevada, Wyoming and Colorado, all took their present forms under his sometimes heavy hand. If he would have had his way, Montana would have been above Idaho, or vice versa, and Utah would have ceased to exist.

The issue of population goes back to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. A territory was supposed to have 60,000 population before application for admission as a state. There were no racial or religious provisions one way or another, yet in application there were (John’s 1870 population numbers are most telling, with Utah and NM with the largest populations, yet both kept out of the Union longer than the rest). Nevada is admitted as a State 20,000 people shy of the mark while Utah and New Mexico are denied admission. Clearly something more than simple territorial divisions was taking place. Especially if you consider the 1866 border move it is important to consider the reasons given on the floor of the House for this move. I believe there is clear evidence of bias built into the Utah/Nevada border, more than the normal losing of territory and as such fits within Edje’s “conquest” model just as well as his 1890s examples. The Utah/Arizona acquisitions both passed Congress in 1866. (Both territorial delegates argued against the moves, to which one Congressman replied, “I hope by all means we will give Nevada a slice.”). The Utah/Nevada border shift took effect immediately upon passage in Congress because the Nevada constitution contained a provision allowing for Nevada to move its border one degree of longitude with no additional consent from the Nevada legislature necessary. The Arizona transfer had to wait for the Nevada legislature to approve it, which it obviously did in 1867. Note that the two affected territories had no say in the process. James Ashley presided over the transfer. By 1869 he attempted to reduce Utah to 20,000 square miles with the aim of eliminating it altogether. Given Ashley’s public scorn for Mormons, this is clearly not your typical loss of territory. I argue in Making Space that power (who has it and who does not) is key to understanding this process.

Bill MacKinnon has a great article in the UHQ 71 (Spring 2003), “Like Splitting a Man Up His Backbone” which deals with the rest of Utah’s border losses, some of which were typical territorial adjustments.

Re-examination of my #6, however, reveals that I didn’t write that. So, I apologize, and let’s try again. In #6, replace the “lose” and “lost” with, mutatis mutandi, “the conversation about taking from” and otherwise reorient the comment to refer to 1890s Wyoming and Nevada with their present-day boundaries, speaking of taking parts of present-day Utah.

Back to the 1860s: You are clearly correct about Utah’s relative population and the losing of territory. Although I’m sure the losses irked President Young, they fit the general model of dividing territories around population growth. However, the 1860s divisions provide the backdrop for labeling the 1890s proposals as conquest-driven. Removing the western-Colorado and the eastern-Nevada deserts from Utah in the 1860s strikes me as a fundamentally different sport than claiming northern Utah for Wyoming when the populations of Salt Lake City and Ogden alone were almost equal to the entire population of Wyoming.