After Smith's murder in 1844, Brigham Young established control and, to hold the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints together, moved west, founding Salt Lake City in 1847. It initially proved possible to reconcile Mormon ends with the lightness of federal control in the vast lands of the West. Young, indeed, became governor of the Territory of Utah, a region covering much more than modern Utah organised in 1850. But there were tensions over his bold hopes for the the state of Deseret, the Mormon term for the honeybee which Young originally envisaged as extending to include most of southern California.

Young's control depended on excluding non-Mormons, but this goal was challenged by Utah's position just south of the Oregon Trail. The hostile treatment of non-Mormons as well as the public endorsement of polygamy ("plural marriage") in 1852, a means of increasing Mormon numbers, proved incompatible with federal pretensions. The Republic Party condemned polygamy in 1856, declaring it a "barbarism" equal to slavery, and in 1857 President James Buchanan decided that the Mormons were in rebellion. This led to the replacement of Young as governor by a non-Mormon and the dispatch of troops to provide necessary support.

Presenting these federal units as a destructive force, Young prepared a withdrawal into the mountains while Mormon militia burned three of the army's supply trains. Moreover, 120 migrants en route to California were slaughtered at Mountain Meadows. War, however, was avoided as the result of an agreement in 1858, in which Young lost the governorship, the Mormons were pardoned, and the army stayed outside Salt Lake City. Conflict was also avoided in 1861 when Utah lost territory to Colorado and Nevada.

Polygamy, however, remained an issue. Lincoln attacked the notion of state sovereignty as an answer to the slavery question by asking whether Utah was to be admitted into the Union if its constitution tolerated polygamy. However, as president, Lincoln had other concerns than Utah. Polygamy remained a practice under Young, and his successor John Taylor, although it was condemned by the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act of 1862 and by the Supreme Court in 1878. Young openly violated the Morrill Act in 1863. In the event, there was an abandonment of what most non-Mormons then saw as the Church's key characteristic, in order to gain admission to the Union. Similarly, although Young had presented African slavery as a divinely ordained institution, and felt that Utah would be better off without any African Americans, black or enslaved, he had to take note of the result of the Civil War. In 1890, Wilford Woodruff, the new Church President, announced that the Church would abide by anti-polygamy laws.  Statehood followed in 1896, although the Church only began to excommunicate those who married plurally in the early 1900s. Some Mormons then formed breakaway splinter churches.

Turner, Professor of Religious Studies at George Mason University, shows how Young's determination helped provide the Church with cohesion and purpose, and gave the Mormons a clear geographical base and a vital continuity after the death of the first Prophet. However, the autocratic and exacting nature of Young's rule emerges clearly. This was a ministry ready to use intimidation and to condone violence, an element magnified in hostile reports.  It is easy to see why the Mormons, with the Society of Dan and the willingness to use force, served Arthur Conan Doyle as the evil source of malevolent violence in his first Sherlock Holmes story, "A Study in Scarlet" (1887, even if that was explicitly historical in its linkage of present murders in London to past events in Utah). Both of these books can be recommended as studies of an element of 19th-century life too easily neglected in the customary account of imperialism, secularism, industrialisation and urbanisation.