17 Feb 2026 A Conversation with Kerry William Bate

Kerry William Bate joins us today to answer a few questions about his new biography The Life and Times of John Steele, Mormon Kingdom Builder. Bate carefully documents Steele’s conversion to Mormonism and his deep involvement with the early days of Utah’s Mormon history, including with the Mountain Meadows Massacre and the displacement of Native nations.

Bate’s work has appeared in Utah Historical Quarterly, Oral History Review, American Genealogist, Utah Holiday, Sunstone, and Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.  He has authored or co-authored four books, including The Women: A Family Story.

In your Acknowledgments section, you wrote that you initially recoiled from writing a biography of Steele because of “brutal letters to his wife Catherine,” about whom you’d been writing a biography. How did you overcome or address your initial dislike of Steele to write several hundred pages about the man’s life and legacy?

Writing about Catherine in The Women: A Family Story exposed me to so much about John Steele that I began to realize how complex he was, and I was drawn to the wide range of his sometimes surprising interests, including hypnotism, folk medicine, and numerology. Because his life was contemporary with the settling of Utah (he was the father of the first Mormon born in the Valley), his story is often the story of the Territory, including expanding settlements, missionary work, conflicts with Native peoples, creating home industry (contracting, fruit raising, iron and silver extraction), the “Reformation,” and how Utah handled dissent and the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

You had the opportunity to access the personal papers of Steele for this project. For budding authors who might use similar resources, what were some of the challenges and benefits to using resources not found in archives or already digitized?

The biggest challenge with personal papers is finding them. That may be remedied in part through FamilySearch and, probably to a lesser extent, Ancestry.com. Then they must be deciphered and dated. The Steele papers are of various kinds and in many different hands. Dating was especially challenging with so-called Black Hawk War penciled telegrams. Archived and digitized resources are marvelous aids in dating; in the case of these telegrams, the Utah Militia records were best. Private sources allow the author to explain the background, yet the subjects can speak for themselves, ensuring both context and authenticity. In addition, these papers include almost all the documentation of Steele’s occult practices, like leechdoms, starcraft, wort-cunning, and fate.

You document how Steele lived through and was part of many definitive events within and affecting the LDS Church and the US. What influence did Steele have during these events?

Steele carried out the plans and the wishes of the hierarchy as a Stake Counselor, probate judge, explorer, and holder of other offices. His report to John C. Fremont determined the final leg of that explorer’s Fifth Expedition, and the subsequent railroad line. He identified dozens of Mormon settlement sites, especially where Native peoples were farming, and he did missionary service to and led warfare against Native Americans.

Steele was a “thrasher” in his dogged pursuit of a utopian society. How did you come to make sense of Steele’s wielding of coercion, sometimes by violent means, to that end? To what extent was Steele representative or singular in his approach to a Mormon Kingdom?

The great challenge of this movement was balancing communalism and dissent. The shared utopian vision and perception of the enemy—often identified as a tool of Satan—strengthened the communalism that built the Mormon West by making the dams, canals, laterals, roads, railroads and gardens, farms, orchards, and corralling and raising livestock, herding the sheep, and holding the quilting bees. Dissidents played a large role in Mormonism; they were sometimes those who led persecution, including the murders of the Smith brothers. 

Apostle Amasa M. Lyman warned Steele and others the day before they entered Salt Lake Valley, “now we will be troubled with Devils in our own midst.” But it was the ruthless suppression of dissidents in Cedar City during the 1853 “cattle rebellion” that drove out more than two dozen families, including Nauvoo Legion Major Matthew Carruthers. These people had the courage to dissent. Four years later they were not available to challenge the massacre at Mountain Meadows. Major Steele, as “thrasher,” stood by with troops to quash the Cedar City mutiny, and afterward he jeered at them from the pulpit and cheered their expulsion. He wasn’t alone: James A. Little was with him to suppress the Cedar City disorder, and suppression of dissent was typical of his society at the time. Yet this laid the groundwork for the most abhorrent crime in Mormon history.

Please comment on Steele’s attitudes towards and relationship with the Native American residents in the region.

Steele had a European curiosity about Native Americans, as demonstrated as early as 1846 when he detailed in his journal a council with the Meskwaki (Fox). This was considerably amplified by settling Native lands in Salt Lake City, Parowan, and Las Vegas as well as extensive explorations throughout Southwestern Utah and parts of Nevada and Arizona, and identifying dozens of places, especially Indian farms, for future Mormon settlement. He wrote one of the first Southern Utah Paiute dictionaries, served proselytizing missions to those people and the Hopi, and organized troops to fight the Navajo. He was a major in the Nauvoo Legion and played an outsize role in warfare against the people he tried to convert, and in the case of the “Black Hawk War,” initially misidentified the enemy. His attitude toward Native peoples seems Brigham Young-like: a hope for redemption and whiteness if they lived like European farmers, combined with brutal aggression. Like most European intruders, his role had a genocidal result for Native Americans—either overtly, through warfare and displacement, or subtly, by causing starvation and spreading European diseases.

Comment on the intended place and impact of your biography on Mormon studies. How do you feel an understanding of Steele’s life shifts or revises what scholars know about nineteenth-century Mormonism?

This biography takes seriously the Utopian aspirations of Mormonism, and Steele’s story explains the religion’s appeal to British radicals, Chartists, and Owenite socialists. I believe I have developed a new—I would hope, deeper—view of the background of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Instead of locating it in “who ordered it,” I discuss why the Massacre wasn’t resisted.

Aside from an understanding of Steele’s life and times, what do you hope readers take away from your book?

I hope readers will respect the sacrifice and ideals that drove the development of the Mormon Kingdom while also understanding movements without room for dissent can be oblivious to damage and sometimes produce catastrophe.