“Cleave the Gentile from the land!” Moroni had commanded Usher years before. “Take thy sword and cleave the head from the body of these Gentiles!”
By 1840 at their new settlement of Nauvoo, Illinois, Joseph Smith had announced his own divine revelation regarding the doctrine of plural wives.
It made Jubilee smile now as his huge frame settled into the huge oak chair he had his Negro manservant tote around for his comfort. Here Usher sat of every morning and evening. Big as it was the day they discovered it among the possessions of a settler’s farm they plundered, with its crowning back and leonine arms ornately carved, his Danites came to call the heavy chair Colonel Usher’s throne.
This morning they would move out, continuing their march down the slope of South Pass, into the Pacific watersheds. And his old nigger George would once more struggle to make a place for the chair in the army ambulance they had captured back in Missouri, home of the Gentiles who had killed Joseph Smith. Where Brigham Young had been anointed as the Saints’ new Prophet.
So again Jubilee smiled to think on how Young himself had only sporadic visitations from the angels, much less from God Himself, while Jubilee had almost daily contact with the grand and martial angel Moroni.
“Cause the fields of the Gentiles to winnow in the sun and their rivers to run red with their blood!” the archangel had commanded Usher.
At fifteen, looking much older than those tender years due to his early physical development, he had joined Porter Rockwell, Joseph Smith’s personal bodyguard, with a handful of others in plotting the assassination of the anti-Mormon governor of Missouri, Lilburn W. Boggs. The Prophet himself had given approval to Rockwell’s plot to murder Boggs during a secret temple ceremony for the Saint-elect. While many of the faithful came to know of the plans, few among the plotters proved as brazen and fearless as the young Jubilee Usher. Rockwell’s avenging angels struck before scattering to disappear into the darkness of the middle frontier.
Through 1843 and 1844 the nearby Gentile communities of Carthage and Warsaw became increasingly afraid of the growing strength of Smith’s theocratic community at Nauvoo. When a rival group of Mormons splintered off from the Prophet, printing their own newspaper as a protest over Smith’s polygamist doctrine, paranoia came to rule around the throne, and again the mighty hand of the Church elders reached out to smite the unfaithful.
One of the fingers on that mighty, wrathful fist, brought forth to torch the upstart newspaper offices and destroy the evil printing press, was none other than a young Jubilee Usher, his face gleaming in the flickering light of those flames that brought to an end the threat to Joseph Smith’s hold on the one true Church.
An unfaithful Mormon was as evil an enemy to God’s Empire as was a blasphemous Gentile.
Fearing that civil unrest had come to that heated portion of his state, Illinois governor Ford declared himself in charge of the situation in June of 1844 and ordered the arrest of Joseph Smith, along with Smith’s brother Hyrum. Days later, on the twenty-seventh, a mob of citizens from nearby Carthage and Warsaw townships blackened their faces and marched on the town jail, dragged the Smith brothers from their cell, and lynched the Mormon leaders to a chorus of cheers and hallelujahs.
Into that yawning vacuum of divine power now stepped the Prophet’s chief lieutenant—Brigham Young.
And it wasn’t long before Young and his Quorum of Twelve decided that they must once and for all escape the land of the unclean, to flee forever the murderous Gentiles. They were commanded by God to seek out their own haven, a pure sanctuary in the West, where God Himself directed Young to take his faithful. By late in the winter of 1846, the first expedition bound for the valley of the Great Salt Lake embarked from the Saints’ nomadic Camp of Israel, bound for the unknown of that immense wilderness of the plains.
Across the next five years the Saints persevered just as the Hebrews fleeing the bondage of Pharaoh had done: building their dreams of Zion—raising their glorious City of the Saints from the valley floor in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. All the while Brigham Young grew more jealous of the one man who seemed to possess more power than did the Prophet here in the mountain West: Jim Bridger. Young dispatched ISO of his Danites, his “Avenging Angels,” to burn Bridger’s post and ferry, steal Bridger’s stock, and kill Bridger if they could.
The Angels, among them twenty-six-year-old Jubilee Usher, failed to find Bridger at home—but they did quench their blood lust by murdering every last one of the old mountain man’s employees at Bridger’s ferry on the Green River before turning around and marching back to the land of Deseret, mantled in glory.
Still, the fact that he had not yet secured the scalp of Jim Bridger continued to nettle Brigham Young more and more with each passing month across those next two years, until in 1853 Jubilee Usher himself convinced the Prophet of the need to occupy Bridger’s fort, and to intermarry with the daughters of the Shoshone tribes as had Bridger, so that the Saints could wrest control and dominion of the various bands in that country from a handful of decrepit old mountain men.
Jubilee had begun to position himself closer and closer to the throne, speaking to the Prophet’s own fears, and offering a solution that would certainly assure young Usher of a place at the right hand of Brigham Young himself.
Now of a morning as he waited for his Negro manservant to bring him sweetened coffee in the white china cup he so favored with breakfast, Jubilee remembered the end of that long ride to Bridger’s fort. He sat here beneath the awning at the front flaps of his tent, hearing no sound from the woman. She had been his for … something like four years now, since he took her off that farm in southern Missouri, along with the chattel of a daughter and two sons.
The boys he had sold into slavery to the comancheros. Bound for Chihuahua, likely they were already somewhere in northern Sonora, Mexico, where they would be worked hard to repay the handsome price paid Usher for them. And the girl, ready any day for womanhood, was herself traveling with another company of Danites, commanded by his chief lieutenant, Major Lemuel Boothog Wiser. Tidy now, things were. Which left only the woman for Usher to concern himself over. He had a passion for her—that blond hair and those pale eyes a blue he had never before seen. Those eyes seemed to grow all the more pale with each passing day, as if the light behind them were flickering out, ever so slowly—as one would roll a lamp wick down until the lamp’s glow grew ever so faint. And finally snuffed itself out.
Still, he did not underestimate the woman. Jubilee allowed nothing sharp to be brought around her. Nothing that could be used as a weapon. Not that he feared she would use it on him. Far from it. He was, instead, afraid the woman would use most anything to kill herself. Clumsily she had tried it twice before and had to be constantly watched when he was not with her.
“Thank you, George,” Jubilee said to the Negro who poured him his coffee. Around them the camp buzzed to life with men loading wagons, finishing breakfast, saddling horses.
Sweeping some of the long black curls from his shoulder, Usher sipped at the thick, steamy brew and gazed off through the trees to the south. It would not be that many more days before they would march into the streets of Deseret—a homecoming after lo, these many, many years of self-enforced exile in the border states. Doing God’s bidding.
So it was with bitterness that Jubilee again recalled how a dozen of Jim Bridger’s old fur-trapping companions had held off Brigham’s well-armed band of Danites back in fifty-three, until a blizzard had settled on the land. In their hasty retreat back to Salt Lake City, Usher had vowed he would never allow himself to be that cold again, nor allow his pride to suffer such a stinging wound as he had suffered at the hands of those smelly old trappers.