14 Post-Manifesto Polygamy

If the Mormons want to build a canal and irrigate the land down lower on the river I will relinquish both land and water to them, for if they will do this I know they are the kind of people who will do what they agree to do. . . . Now my dream will be realized, for I have thought that I should live to see this country developed into a great agricultural region and now the Mormons will fulfill my dream.

While Cody’s approval of the project served his own dream, it also facilitated LDS expansion and settlement into the Bighorn Basin. With Cody’s backing and the support of Wyoming’s governor, DeForest Richards, the Big Horn Basin Colonization Company met April 6, 1900, with Elder Franklin S. Richards, attorney for the church, who drew up the articles of incorporation. The company was organized as follows: Abraham Owen Woodruff, president; Byron Sessions, vice president and head of canal project; Charles Kingston, secretary; Charles A. Welsh, treasurer; and Jesse W. Crosby, Brigham L. Tippets, William B. Graham, Hyrum K. North, and Charles A. Welch as board members. After the organization of the company, recruitment began in earnest through personal contacts and Deseret News advertisements. Settlers began to arrive in the Bighorn Basin in May of 1900. Owen dedicated the land and the canal on May 28, 1900, promising the settlers, “If you keep the commandments of the Lord this shall be a land of Zion unto you and your children.”

He organized the first stake in May 1901 with Byron Sessions as the stake president. As Kurt Graham notes in his thesis, “The Mormon Migration to Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin in 1900,”

The three [Sessions, Crosby, and Welch] shared general supervision of the spiritual activities of all the Mormons in the area and were influential in all of the matters until they were released from their church positions in 1910. All three were men of influence before coming to the Big Horn Basin, and they had more in common than the leadership of the stake. They were three of the wealthier individuals to migrate to the Basin, and like their esteemed leader Apostle Woodruff, all three were polygamists. Crosby and Welch both had their second wives join them once they were established in Cowley, and Sessions entered into a plural marriage after he had settled in the Basin.

Although the local stake leadership was comprised of polygamists, the LDS communities in northern Wyoming were primarily monogamous.