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Charles Brewer did not live in Utah for more than a few years but he had an outsized impact on the state.
The U.S. Army surgeon made enough of an impression on James Simpson in 1859 that the overland surveyor named a remote spring in Tooele County after Brewer not long after he publicized one of the first accounts of the Mountain Meadows Massacre site, where 120 California-bound immigrants from Arkansas were killed by a Mormon militia two years earlier.
But the term “Brewers Spring” never made it beyond Simpson’s report, an oversight that Duane Carling is trying to correct. Brewer is credited with saving the life of Carling’s ancestor, a Utah rancher named Howard Orson Spencer. Now Carling, a retired Farmington engineer, would like to see the surgeon honored by having Brewers Spring appear on the U.S. Geological Survey’s official maps.
But Carling never thought such a simple task could be so hard. Months after starting the process he has made little progress, he said, thanks to resistance from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which owns the land where the spring is located several miles southwest of Fairfield.
“I thought it would be a slam dunk,” Carling said. “It’s something that needs to be done, in my humble opinion. Rational people I think would agree, but they have their nose in a joint and they’re not going to do it.”
Without property owners’ blessings, it is nearly impossible to get a new name attached to a geographical feature under the rules applied by the U.S. Board of Geographic Names.
(Christopher Cherrington | The Salt Lake Tribune)
The hang-up, according to Carling, is Brewer’s participation in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy and in the initial burial of the Mountain Meadows victims.
More than a million Southerners served in Confederate forces during the Civil War and Brewer did not participate in the killing at Mountain Meadows, only its cleanup. Yet those were the reasons provided by church real estate official Ric Horgan, to explain why the church would not sign off on naming the spring after Brewer.
“Dr. Brewer is not someone the Church wants to be associated with, due to his association with Mountain Meadows and the Confederate Army,” Brewer said Horgan told him.
Church officials declined an opportunity to comment.
Army comes to Utah
The story begins in late 1858 when the federal government ordered a large Army detachment to Utah to maintain an armed federal presence in the theocratic territory led by LDS Church President Brigham Young. The troops were garrisoned at what became known as Camp Floyd, west of Utah Lake, named for then-Secretary of War John Floyd, a former Virginia governor who later served as a Confederate general.
A native of Annapolis, Maryland, Brewer had joined the Army as an assistant surgeon in 1856 and soon deployed to the Utah Territory where he was based at Camp Floyd.
In May of 1859, just weeks after saving Howard Spencer’s life, Brewer was among the Army detail that conducted the initial assessment of the Mountain Meadows massacre site, where they found corpses of men, women and children dismembered by wild animals and scattered about.
No one had buried the dead before the arrival of the U.S. Army nearly two years later. Brewer published one of the first accounts of the massacre, affixing blame on Mormons, in an August 1859 article in Harper’s Weekly.
Around that time, Simpson and his survey team were heading into Utah from Genoa, Nevada, on their way back to Camp Floyd after marking a route for the Pony Express on the outbound trip along a more northerly path, according to Utah historian Jesse Petersen.
Simpson “put a name on just about everything he ran into on that expedition. That was part of his assignment, to give names to the landscape features. A lot of those names are still in existence and probably more of them are not,” Petersen said. “He named a lot of places after his military acquaintances, people he knew at Camp Floyd.”
In his survey report, Simpson describes coming upon a spring on Aug. 3, 1859, which he named after Brewer. While few notice springs on the landscape these days, in Simpson’s time, they were crucial waypoints for anyone traveling across the West’s wide open empty spaces, Petersen said.
Brewer saved Spencer’s life earlier in 1859 following a dispute over livestock grazing in Rush Valley that turned violent. While evicting Spencer and his cowboys from rangelands claimed by federal authorities, Army Sgt. Ralph Pike crushed Spencer’s skull with a musket butt.
The attack left him with a head injury that seemed unsurvivable, but medical aid later rendered by Brewer likely saved Spencer, who would go on to live a long life. The young rancher happened to be the son of the founding chancellor of University of Utah, Orson Spencer, who had died a few years earlier.
This incident and its contentious aftermath, including Brewer’s role in administering life-saving medical attention, is documented in the 1998 book “In Another Time” by the late Salt Lake Tribune reporter Harold Schindler.
Known as the “Spencer-Pike Affair,” the incident garnered widespread attention at the time, not to mention condemnation from Utah leaders. The following year, Pike was fatally gunned down in broad daylight on Salt Lake City’s Main Street while he was in town facing criminal charges for the attack. Spencer himself was believed to be the shooter, but a jury acquitted him of Pike’s murder years later.
When Southern states began seceding following Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration as president in 1861, Brewer was among thousands of officers who resigned their commissions with the U.S. Army, according to a bio posted on Findagrave.com.
Although Brewer’s home state remained loyal to the Union, Brewer chose to fight for the Confederacy and for a time served on Gen. Robert E. Lee’s staff, according to a 1956 account published in the Kansas Historical Quarterly. Brewer survived America’s bloodiest war and died in 1909 in New Jersey, where he served as postmaster for the city of Vineland and a physician for the state prison.
While few in Utah know of Brewer today, Howard Spencer’s descendants owe a debt of gratitude to the Army medic who happened to be at the right place and right time in Utah to prevent Spencer’s early death. Duane Carling thinks getting a name on the map is the least he can do.
