This is an archived copy of a post written by Conflict Of Justice (conflictofjustice.com). Used with permission: Conflict Of Justice may not agree with any alterations made.
“Bringing confusion as they spoke of their God and peace while sharing sacks of flour laced with broken glass. Brigham Young said ‘You can get rid of more Indians with a sack of flour than a keg of powder.” Destroying us with what appeared to be acts of kindness.’ www.timpanogostribe.com
“Illa Chivers, Great granddaughter of Wy-ve-dah… shared the story of her family getting a sack of Flour from the Mormons, when Old James Reed saw the flour he dumped some of it on the table and brushed his glove covered hand across it exposing the broken glass fragments hidden inside. She always warned against taking food from Mormons because of this. She dedicated most of her adult life to research to help “the people”. www.timpanogostribe.com
No Evidence
I don’t find any evidence for this claim. No newspaper accounts, no official reports, no recordings, no journal entries, no letters–no evidence whatsoever. We don’t even know who wrote this website. We don’t know who heard this account, who they heard it from, where they recorded it, etc. It’s just somebody’s claim of what an ancestor supposedly told someone. I don’t find any kind of corroborating accounts for this claim, or any kind of physical or historical evidence whatsoever.
Fabricated Quote – I find no evidence for this alleged quote by Brigham Young: “You can get rid of more Indians with a sack of flour than a keg of powder.” Websites attribute this to the Rocky Mountain News. But the Rocky Mountain News wasn’t even founded until 1859, and the battle between Mormon settlers and the the Timpanogos Tribe occurred in 1849, a full decade earlier. A website called Black hawk productions attributes this quote to the time of the Black Hawk War of 1865-1872. But then they get the dates wrong of Timpanoga warrior who led his forces, Antonga Black Hawk, claiming he was born in 1835 and “his death in 1973.” He died in 1973? He lived to be 138 years old? I don’t think so. So, how can we trust this non-cited quote they attribute to Brigham Young?
I find no evidence at all for this quote. Even if it is a real quote, this is a snippet taken out of context. Was he talking about peacefully giving Indian aggressors flour to pacify them so they would go home? Or was he talking about poisoning the flour like Antimormon websites make it sound? They give no context. They give no evidence.
This is a narrative that appeals to the stories of diseased blankets that famously were traded by the US government to Native Americans. We’ve all heard about that. So it is easy for Antimormons to just make up the same kind of stories about Mormons, isn’t it? But this story has an interesting twist: broken pieces of glass. Is this something people were known to do to Native Americans, lace food with glass shards?
Urban Legend
I find zero references to early Americans feeding Native American Indians broken pieces of glass. In fact, I find zero references for anyone feeding anyone pieces of glass to get them sick, until modern times. This wasn’t a thing back then. The only reports I could find of people eating glass in the 19th century did so as a performance gimmick. I found one 19th century account of health damage resulting from eating glass: “After devouring the second lamp chimney, a probang was introduced and he vomited particles of the glass, which were slightly streaked with blood.” (Medical and Surgical Reporter, Vol. 58, 1888)
That’s it, a little bit of bleeding in the stomach was the result. And this was a person who intentionally ate large pieces of glass. The human mouth is very sensitive to objects that pass through it, and the tiniest hard objects will be felt, so it is unlikely for a person to accidentally swallow pieces of glass in something like flour. Drinking liquid perhaps but not food you chew on like bread. The glass particles would have to be smaller than the size of tiny grains of salt, and then in that case they would be so small it would be unlikely for them to snag or slash inside the digestional system. It would also be unlikely for a person to detect them just by running a gloved hand through the flour if they were so small.
The idea of mixing glass shards in food is a modern urban legend, like needles in Halloween candy. Snopes tackled the subject of whether it is truly deadly: “The glass would have to be very finely ground, or the victim would notice it as he ate. As we chew, we sense even tiny pieces of gravel, sand, glass, gristle, and so forth. Salt dissolves but glass doesn’t, so the food would seem gritty unless the glass was ground into a powder. But very fine glass is unlikely to cause any lethal damage to the GI tract. It would be more of an irritation, with minor bleeding if any at all. If you could get the victim to eat coarser glass, such as crushed instead of ground, the glass shards would damage the stomach and intestine and could cause bleeding . .. [but] a person would know something was wrong with the food, and if not, he would go to a doctor about the bleeding. Even with coarser glass, the bleeding would probably not be massive or life-threatening but slow and lead to anemia and fatigue. The stools would become black from the blood, and the victim would see a doctor.” (Dr. D.P. Lyle, Murder and Mayhem, via Snopes.com)
They cite a 1917 article about powdered glass: “over a hundred years ago experiments in varied form were made showing that it is harmless.” What about shards of glass? Well, pointed shards can slash the stomach and intestines, and internal bleeding can be very harmful, but it is unlikely that a person would accidentally eat glass shards in a food like flour.
Just A Misunderstanding?
The flour we buy at the store today is not like the flour people worked with as recently as the 20th century. It is much finer today. If you ask your grandma, she will tell you that people had to sift flower in those days to get the hard white chunks out. Now, it comes sifted. If you take wheat and grind it down yourself, you will see how hard chunks get in there. If there is any truth to this account, it is possible that they simply mistook these chunks for pieces of glass. It makes sense when you consider that this was a society that had never used flour before and were understandably suspicious of the people who were freely giving it away to them, as they had just fought a battle against them. It also might make sense if the people were getting sick from the flour, as this was something they had never consumed before. This oral account does not say in what way they were getting sick, whether it was intestinal bleeding or just stomach cramps from eating a foreign food. Maybe this foreign food just didn’t agree with their stomachs and they mistook the chunks in flour for tiny pieces of glass.
One final thing to consider is the possibility that this was the result of a nervous hysteria because they were worried about Mormons giving them free food to get them dependent on it. A classic case of this is the Nestle Infant Formula scandal when the Nestle company got African mothers to replace breastfeeding with their formula milk that they were handing out free and then profited from it. Maybe the Timpanogo leaders were worried that Mormon settlers were trying to get their people hooked to a foreign food source that they had complete control over? This is an understable worry and a good motive for an urban legend such as this to pop up.
With serious historical accusations flying around all the time, it is unfortunate that this Timpanogos Tribe website is throwing around this accusation. It is a product of old hostility and deep-rooted resentment between both sides that we don’t need to perpetuate today, and there are hostile Antimormons today who use it as fodder in their bigoted attacks against the Church. If there is any evidence, please let’s make it a matter of record and study it. But otherwise let us work towards a more peaceful, cooperative, and truthful future.