The Battalion’s Wages: ‘The Temporal Salvation of Israel’ — How Government Pay Funded the Westward Migration of the Saints (1846–47)

When the United States government asked the Latter-day Saints to contribute 500 men to serve in the Mexican-American War in 1846, many members reacted with bitterness. The government had failed to protect the Saints through years of mob violence in Missouri and Illinois, forcing them to flee their homes and abandon their temple. Now it was asking their young men to serve.

Brigham Young saw it differently. He understood immediately what the arrangement provided: cash.

The Saints were destitute. They had been expelled from Nauvoo in the dead of winter with little more than what their wagons could carry. Scattered across Iowa, hundreds of families were struggling to earn enough to outfit themselves for the journey west. Without money, the trek to the Great Basin could not happen.

The government was offering to pay each Battalion soldier regular U.S. Army wages: approximately $7 per month for privates, more for officers, plus a $42 clothing allowance paid at enlistment. The total value of the Battalion's twelve months of service ran to tens of thousands of dollars.

Most soldiers sent the bulk of their pay home immediately. The clothing allowances were sent back in lump sums. Families used the money to purchase wagons, oxen, provisions, and equipment. Battalion officers sent funds directly to Church leaders to distribute to the neediest families.

Brigham Young later called the Mormon Battalion 'the temporal salvation of Israel.' It was not rhetoric. Without the Battalion's wages, the 1847 pioneer company likely could not have been outfitted as fully and promptly as it was.

For Latter-day Saints, the financial story of the Battalion is itself a miracle of provision: the same government that had stood aside during years of persecution became, in the end, the instrument through which God funded the founding of Zion in the West.