The Last Called Mormon Colonization

“A fascinating story of outsized personalities with grand plans and questionable schemes.”–Nova Religio

“John Gary Maxwell offers profound insight into the complexities of the Mormon Church’s efforts to preserve the practice of plural marriage through homesteading projects outside of Utah. His intriguing, well-researched history of the Big Horn Colonization Company blends dynamic historical figures, including the relatively unknown settler John D. Woodruff and the famed Buffalo Bill Cody, with the political controversy surrounding polygamy and the tremendous challenges of homesteading in one of the last frontiers of the American West.”–Jeremy Johnston, Hal and Naoma Tate Endowed Chair and Curator of Western History, Buffalo Bill Center of the West

“Exhaustively researched, full of fascinating detail, this book tells the story of the LDS church’s last ‘colony mission.’ Maxwell recounts the enormous difficulties of this mission, and the book is also an important record of post-Manifesto polygamy. An illuminating, very readable account of Mormonism’s last colony and of the final conflicted years of LDS polygamy.”–Todd Compton, author of A Frontier Life: Jacob Hamblin, Explorer and Indian Missionary

“John Gary Maxwell gives us a case study of a Mormon colonization scheme in its rich cultural, environmental, and political contexts. His account of the settling of the Bighorn Basin gives us a close look at the challenges of earning a living in the arid West and the realities of post-Manifesto polygamy.”–Jeff Nichols, professor of history, Westminster College

John Gary Maxwell is the author of several books, including Civil War Years in Utah: The Kingdom of God and the Territory That Did Not Fight, and Robert Newton Baskin and the Making of Modern Utah. A retired professor of surgery at the University of Utah and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, he now lives in Wilmington, NC. His Scottish ancestors emigrated to Utah with the 1856 Second Handcart Company. Several were called in 1900 to colonize the Bighorn Basin.