Building Fort Moore on the Fourth of July: Mormon Battalion Soldiers Celebrate Independence Day by Constructing California’s First American Fort (1847)

On April 24, 1847, Colonel Cooke ordered Mormon Battalion soldiers to construct Fort Moore in Los Angeles. The construction was completed on July 4, 1847 — Independence Day.

The moment carried a meaning the men could not miss. They were soldiers of the United States who had marched two thousand miles, fought no human enemy, built a wagon road through the wilderness, blazed the southern route that would eventually carry tens of thousands of emigrants to California, and now they were completing the first American military installation in Los Angeles — on the Fourth of July.

For the Battalion members, who had left Nauvoo under conditions of profound injustice — expelled from their homes, their prophet murdered, their rights as American citizens ignored — the assignment carried an irony they acknowledged openly. They were building American infrastructure. They were extending American sovereignty. They were doing it faithfully, without bitterness, while their families gathered in the Salt Lake Valley.

Brigham Young had told them that their march would open the way for the Saints and prove the loyalty of the Church to the United States. As the fort was dedicated on the anniversary of American independence, it was hard not to feel that both promises had been kept.

Within weeks, they were discharged. Most crossed the desert back toward Zion.