About the Novel

Col. Thomas Hoyer Monstery’s California Joe’s First Trail: A Story of the Destroying Angels (1884) is a prime example of anti-Mormon prejudice in American literature. With its Western plot tropes and use of the Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, as villains, First Trail anticipates Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage by nearly thirty years. The novel's portrayal of the LDS Church as a militant secret society bears no resemblance to reality, but it illuminates the suspicion with which Americans outside of Utah regarded the Mormons in the late nineteenth century. 

The story is set circa 1850 “during the gold fever of the early days of California,” but after “the fever had lasted a year or so” (page 2). These statements place the story’s events immediately after the Mexican-American War, in which the U.S. annexed nearly half of Mexico. As Americans colonized the new territories, they displaced the Native American nations located near key natural resources, triggering the “Indian Wars” of the mid- to late nineteenth century. Western colonization also meant extending U.S. control over “Deseret,” the Latter-day Saints’ theocratic state in present-day Utah, where Mormons practiced communal economics and plural marriage, or polygamy. Monstery’s readers in 1884 would have been aware of the Supreme Court’s ruling against plural marriage and the government’s prosecution of LDS men who had multiple wives.

First Trail follows two families, the white Scotts and the Creole Gabelles, traveling to California. They are joined by a young adventurer named Moses Embrie Milner, alias “California Joe,” who is a fictionalized version of the real Moses Milner. Milner was not a novice frontiersman, but rather a Mexican War veteran and experienced scout (Weiser-Alexander). Joe’s foil is an apparent Methodist deacon named Simplicity Fox, who reveals himself to be a Mormon and converts the Scott family. Fox tells Joe that he commands the “Destroying Angels,” a paramilitary group that attacks wagon trains and kidnaps women to become Mormon plural wives. The deacon has led Joe’s wagon train into Native American territory outside Salt Lake City; if the travelers disobey Fox, then the Native forces will attack. Joe uses his new frontier knowledge to save himself and a kidnapped woman named Alice from the Mormons. 

Monstery incorporates widespread prejudice against Native Americans and Mormons by presenting them as two specters haunting the West. Indeed, Monstery has Native American and Mormon characters jointly attack a wagon train, while a horrified Joe watches. The grotesque sequence is inspired by the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which LDS and Paiute forces attacked a pioneer convoy ("Mountain Meadows Massacre" 2018). Monstery, indulging in anti-Mormon sensationalism, suggests that massacres like the one at Mountain Meadows were routine for the Mormons, and that the raids were used to force women into sexual slavery. This stereotype of Mormons enslaving women was a common plot device in dime novels (Lambert 1992). Monstery’s portrayal of the Angels as a paramilitary group draws on American fears of the “Danites,” a short-lived organization from the Mormons’ time in Missouri. Rumors of Danite conspiracies endured for decades, inspiring pulp authors such as Zane Gray and Monstery (Whittaker 2007).

Racist stereotypes suffuse First Trail. Monstery uses an anti-Semitic slur as early as page 4. The Scotts and California Joe are described as healthy, vigorous white people, in contrast to the mixed-race Gabelles, the “savage” Native Americans (page 2), and the duplicitous Mormons. The one Native American character with dialogue speaks in broken English, and the Native Americans have no agency in the plot, instead obeying the Mormons’ commands. Monstery presents the Mormons as racial and ethnic others by describing Fox’s Destroyer uniform as “Mexican” and calling two of the Mormon Angels “savage-looking” (page 8). Through the use of “savage,” Monstery positions both Mormons and Native Americans as threats to California Joe, a rustic yet civilized American.

Monstery complicates his racist messaging slightly: The Scotts are foolish and easily manipulated. At one point, the narrator calls the Scotts “ignorant crackers” (page 7). It is Pierre Gabelle, a Creole man, who recognizes the danger of the Scotts’ conversion and warns Joe. In this way, a person of color is the most alert character. Yet Gabelle and his family disappear from the narrative, as Joe and Alice leave them in Salt Lake. By letting only Joe and Alice escape, Monstery reinforces his racial hierarchy — resourceful whites like Joe at the top, gullible whites below them, Creoles (and, by implication, Black Americans) below them, and alien figures like Native Americans, Mormons, Mexicans, and Alice’s Asian servant at the bottom.

California Joe’s First Trail was published in Beadle’s Half Dime Library no. 376 on October 7, 1884. It was later reprinted in Beadle’s Pocket Library no. 351 (1890) under the title Rocky Mountain Joe; or Deacon Simplicity on the War-Path. A sequel to the novel, California Joe's War Trail; or, The Minnesota Massacre, appeared in Beadle's Half Dime Library no. 395 on February 17, 1885. That novel takes place twelve years after the events of California Joe's First Trail and deals with the Dakota War of 1862.