The Interpreter Foundation and Redbrick Filmworks continues to release a new episode of their not-for-profit series of mini-documentaries titled Becoming Brigham each Monday. This week, they released the following episode:

Episode 34: “Feed Them, Don’t Fight Them?”

Could the sentiments that “it’s cheaper to feed them than fight them” and “this is their home” exist at the same time in the same person who also called Native American life idle and refused to leave the lands in Utah?

This episode explores Brigham Young’s Utah Indian policy after the first bloodshed. Historian John Peterson describes how Brigham tried raising a standard of peace, with more than a hundred cattle sent to a reservation in late 1865. But Ute raids kept emptying Mormon fields and herds. When peace offerings did not stop the war, the policy shifted: villages were to “fort up,” cattle would be defended, and Captain Moroni became the model.

Brigham’s stance toward the Native Americans was complicated. He would say the Utes had as much right to call the land theirs as anyone, that they had buried their dead there, and that the Saints had taken the hunting grounds—and in the same breath insist the Saints were not intruders but were led there by providence and would not leave.

Lisa Olsen Tait’s counsel closes the moral frame: it is not the historian’s job to sort Brigham into good or evil, but to understand him in his own time and grant historical figures the charity we would all want from our own posterity.

Why this docuseries? Many people are aware of Brigham Young as a pivotal figure in American religious and frontier history, but Brigham is also often misunderstood, seen as a larger-than-life caricature rather than as a man. Who actually was Brigham as a man, a father, a husband, and a prophet? The video web series Becoming Brigham debunks fictions and provides surprising new insights into the real Brigham Young. Learn more in the article “Becoming Brigham: The Video Series Premieres.”