In the 1840s, the Mormons -- who had recently ceased to be mere heretics and had decided to by polygamous heretics, which was worse -- were possibly the most-despised White subgroup in America. Having been persecuted just about everywhere, and having seen their founder Joseph Smith murdered by a mob, their new leader Brigham Young decided to try to head for the most remote place he could think of to get away from the persecutors.

Unfortunately, the new President James K. Polk had decided he wanted to control California (he didn't really know what California was, but he wanted it), and to get there, he needed the lands in between as well. Was it the native territory of a number of First Nations tribes? Was it owned by Mexico? Who cares; that's what wars are for. Polk quickly forced the Mexican War.

As a sort of an aside, his territorial grab meant that the Mormons would no longer be able to escape the United States, so Brigham Young's idea of getting away was no longer quite as useful. But Polk offered a deal to Young (or vice versa; both sides seem to think it was their idea): Recruit a battalion of soldiers for our war with Mexico and we won't oppress you (much) as you head for some leftover place that we don't want -- i.e. the Great Salt Lake.

Young agreed to the deal, and pushed and cajoled roughly 500 Mormons to sign up for a year, under the command of a few Regular Army officers.

As it turned out, the Battalion never fought anything more determined than a herd of wild cattle (apart from a lot of arguments with their officers, who wanted to turn them into actual soldiers), and never entered the regions that are now called Mexico, though they did travel a lot of what had been Mexican territory. They did, however, march all the way from Iowa to San Diego, California, often through country that had not been explored by Europeans until then -- the longest continuous march of any unit in the war. They garrisoned California for a few months, then their service expired and they either went home or headed for San Francisco, having earned some useful cash for Young and the Mormons back home.

This was, I believe, the second substantial history of the battalion, the first being Sergeant Daniel Tyler's 1881 A Concise History of the Mormon Battalion in the Mexican War, the only history written by a veteran of the battalion. The title is false; for events that took place over barely more than a year, it's quite hefty -- mostly because Tyler was a horrible, verbose writer who wouldn't know a declarative sentence if you taped it to his eyes. This is a better read, and a lot shorter, but it has very little to add -- whole chapters consist of little more than rehashes of Tyler and the writings of Philip St. George Cooke, the battalion's commander for most of his service. (In a non-trivial irony, when the United States in effect declared war on the Mormons a dozen years later, Cooke, was one of the officers ordered to take part in the expedition.)

The other defect with this book is that it is very strongly Mormon -- Roberts was a major, if controversial and slightly schismatic, figure in Mormonism. It just isn't a balanced account. A Mormon would probably like it very much; a non-Mormon will probably feel as if the world is just a little cockeyed. As history, it is definitely one-sided, refusing (e.g.) to admit that the Mormons show little evidence that they would have been good soldiers -- they just wouldn't take discipline, at least from a gentile. There are newer books about the Mormon Battalion; if you really want to know its history, those are surely better, although this one (which is short as well as old) will probably be a lot cheaper. ( )