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Anthony W. Ivins was a frontiersman, a man of letters, a superb administrator, and a boundless advocate of the Latter-day Saints in Mexico long before he became an apostle and a counselor to President Heber J. Grant.[*] He was four times a missionary and explorer for the Church—serving three missions to Mexico and one to the American Southwest—and was a respected rancher, businessman, and politician in Utah Territory. His legendary career on horses with a rifle in hand hunting wildlife for sustenance and protecting his and others’ cattle herds from predators both animal and human is colorful as well as captivating. Indeed, one observer has called him the last of the “Cowboy Apostles.”[1]

Anthony W. Ivins (right), at about age twelve, ca. 1864. Use by permission of Utah State Historical Society, all rights reserved.

One may justifiably be surprised to learn that Ivins, with a life full to overflowing, found time not only to be a reader and writer of books but also a promoter of historical and literary knowledge. At age twenty he founded the St. George Historical Society and in his mature years edited at least thirty-two issues of the Utah Genealogical and Historical Magazine. In the meantime he became a self-educated lawyer.

So many talents and interests bundled in one human being made Ivins a pronounced historical figure in the Church. Fittingly, a dedication found in the 1931 yearbook of the Utah Agricultural College (now Utah State University) eloquently makes the point:

To Anthony W. Ivins, President of the Board of Trustees: Friend equally of the Indian and of royalty, of the toiler and the captain of industry; a frontiersman who became modern, yet unspoiled by modernism in thought and in living; with the heart of a child, yet as hard as steel under stress of worthy necessity; without diplomas, yet finely educated; patriot, but loyal only to truth, and thus exemplar of the greater Americanism: We affectionately dedicate this volume.[2]

A fair amount of Ivins’s reputation as a legendary frontier horseman, cattleman, marksman, administrator, and lover of the written word was associated with his several forays into Mexico on behalf of the Church. At Brigham Young’s request in 1875, the twenty-three-year-old, whose parents had helped colonize Utah Territory’s southern St. George, joined six other men on the Church’s first prolonged expedition into Mexico, traveling some twenty-five hundred miles by horseback over a ten-month period to help transport to Chihuahua City fifteen hundred copies of excerpts translated from the Book of Mormon (Trozos Selectos del Libro de Mormón). They were also looking for places where the Latter-day Saints could colonize in the event that politically hostile US federal agents (e.g., the army, judges, courts, marshals, political appointees) forced them from their homes in the Utah and Arizona territories. Previously claimed by Mexico, these areas, though ceded to the United States in 1848 along with other adjacent land by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, were still not states in the US federation at this time. Yet through its Republican representatives, the US government had chosen to exercise federal authority over the newly acquired land by raising a heavy hand against the Latter-day Saints living there.

On his 1875–76 journey through Arizona and into Chihuahua, Ivins provisioned the missionary party with wildlife for sustenance. He also began to write his finely detailed letters, diaries, journals, and notebooks spanning from 1875 to the winter of his life in 1932, two years before he died of congestive heart failure at age eighty-two. Many of these writings are contained in more than 150 folders in the archives of the Utah State Historical Society.[3]

In 1877, a year following his return home to southern Utah Territory from his first mission to Mexico, Ivins, along with Erastus Beaman Snow, his future brother-in-law, was called on a yearlong mission to Native Americans in New Mexico. Of necessity they traveled on horseback, Ivins’s preferred means of conveyance.

Marriage and Children

Returning home following his mission, “Tony” (as he was called) wasted no time in convincing his childhood sweetheart, Elizabeth Ashby Snow, to marry him. The happy event occurred in the Endowment House in Salt Lake City on November 9, 1878. It is doubtful that Ivins made the weeklong journey with her from St. George to Salt Lake City on horseback—it was not the custom for a young bride-to-be to make an arduously long trip that way—but odds are that he had his saddle horse tethered to the horse-drawn buggy that transported them and family chaperones to the marriage. Tony was twenty-six, Elizabeth twenty-four.

As was the cus­tom in those days, Anthony and Elizabeth soon got their family of nine children started.[4] Their first, also named Anthony W., was born in 1879 but died of pneumonia in February the following year.[5] Their second, Antoine R., who as an adult also spent much time in Mexico and became a member of the Church’s First Quorum of the Seventy, came along in May of 1881. Anna L. (named after Anthony’s mother) soon followed, but Ivins was unlikely around for the birth, he having been called on yet another mission (his third), this time to the very heart of central Mexico, where he arrived in 1882. One must surely marvel at Elizabeth, who sacrificed her own needs as she sent her young husband on what they considered the Lord’s errand.

Another Mission to Mexico

Leaving his little family in their small house near St. George under the watchful care of his wife’s mother (Elizabeth Rebecca Ashby Snow) could not have been easy for Ivins,[6] especially because his leaving almost smacked of neglect. Before bidding a tearful goodbye to his pregnant wife and year-old son, Ivins resigned his elected positions as prosecuting attorney of Washington County and member of the St. George City Council. The thirty-year-old was also released as a member of the St. George Stake’s high council.

Frontiersman, cattleman, and social innovator, Anthony W. Ivins was called on a second mission to Mexico. Photo ca. 1881 used by permission of Utah State Historical Society, all rights reserved.

However prominent both poli­tical­ly and ecclesiastically Ivins was in St. George, he was, after all, still a young man who had not lived long enough to accumulate properties and savings with which he could finance a mission. His mother-in-law would take care of his wife and child with whatever assistance his father-in-law, Apostle Erastus Fairbanks Snow, could give, although Apostle Snow was in Salt Lake City frequently, and when not there, then nearly constantly on the road directing Latter-day Saint colonization in Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico.

The financial, physical, and emotional support of his wife’s fam­ily would help satisfy some of Ivins’s many pres­sing concerns. How­ever, all that help notwithstanding, he still had to finance his mission. How? With the collaboration of some of his stage-actor friends as well as confidants in the St. George Historical Society he had founded ten years earlier, Ivins decided to play a leading romantic role in a stage-play benefit performance. He was a recognized actor in the popular plays and skits that preceded movie theaters, and he joined with Josephine Snow, perhaps his wife’s sister, in a romantic performance of The False Friend. It netted him $109.95 for his mission. Additional contributions of $56.25 from other sources in Utah Territory,[7] along with help in kind from Latter-day Saints in Mexico, made it possible for Ivins to spend two years preaching the gospel in and around Mexico City.

A year after arriving in Mexico, Ivins was set apart as mission president, replacing August H. F. Wilcken, a European immigrant schooled in Spanish who had made considerable efforts to translate Church literature for use in Mexico. Wilcken was the successor to Apostle Moses Thatcher, and Ivins, skilled in the Spanish language himself, was able to follow up with a persuasive leadership role in the Mexican Mission.

As president, Ivins implemented a then radical but now commonplace decision to give principal leadership positions to the local members. He reasoned that if the Church was to grow in Mexico it could not depend only on foreign missionaries to lead the branches. Besides, local people would in time become better, or at least certainly more durable and stable, shepherds to lead branches and districts into the future. Thus during Ivins’s administration “quite a number of native elders were pressed into service, and the work of preaching the gospel and spreading the truth was vigorously pushed.”[8] Among those missionaries were Lino Zárate, Julián Rojas, and Elder Candanosa. More people joined the Church as a result.

Resuming Ranching and Civic Life

Following his second mission to Mexico, the thirty-two-year-old Ivins returned to his home in St. George, Utah Territory, in 1884 to a happy reunion with his wife Elizabeth, his four-year-old son Antoine R., and the nearly two-year-old daughter he most likely had never seen.

Ivins immediately settled down to what would have occupied much of his time beyond his personal and family life had he not been called on multiple missions: becoming active in politics once again by organizing the “Sagebrush Democrats.” This was an effort to move local politics away from Mormon versus anti-Mormon parties to affiliations along emerging national lines. He acquired cattle ranching and grazing lands for the livestock he began to acquire and became part owner of the Kaibab Cattle Company as well as manager of the Mojave Land and Cattle Company, a joint stock venture (these two companies became the largest in what then was called the Arizona Strip, just south of St. George). Latter-day Saint pioneers led by Jacob Hamblin had first settled the Arizona Strip. At the time it was a cattleman’s paradise with large, grassy meadows in the valleys and, up on the high Kaibab Plateau, plenty of summer forage. Ivins began to prosper economically. His family continued to grow and develop educationally and spiritually.

Anthony W. Ivins residence in St. George, Utah, ca. 1900. Used by permission of Utah State Historical Society, all rights reserved.

Anthony W. Ivins at age thirty-five, about the time he was expanding his cattle operations in the Arizona Strip. Used by permission of Utah State Historical Society, all rights reserved.

Ivins maintained his interests in history and acting through continued affiliation with the St. George Historical Society and local acting companies. People would walk or otherwise travel many miles to participate in or witness the region’s stage plays, just as they did at the time in almost all the Church’s settlements in the Utah and Arizona territories.[9]

Through it all, Ivins protected and befriended the Native Americans under his jurisdiction in whatever capacity. Indeed, in 1932, two years before he would die, Native Americans from southern Utah sent him a message in elegant beadwork on a leather vest that read, “Tony Ivins, he no cheat.”[10]

Although always maintaining a home in St. George, Ivins apparently took up at least temporary residence in the new Arizona land of opportunity, where in his spare time he accepted an appointment as Mohave County assessor.

In St. George and the Arizona Strip, Ivins continued to nurture his growing family and to prosper politically and economically. By 1895 he was comfortably placed and the Sagebrush Democrats were ready to offer him their slate as candidate for the governorship of Utah. He was forty-three. Then the letter from Church president Wilford Woodruff arrived.

President Woodruff’s Letter

That letter from President Woodruff altered the course of Ivins’s life: There were problems in the Latter-day Saint colonies in the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora. Would he mind accepting a call as the president of a newly created Juárez stake there and move to Mexico with his family?[11]

Ivins was naturally reluctant to make such a move: He had his ranching and other business interests around St. George and the Arizona Strip; he had a bright future in politics, which interested him a great deal; his family was comfortably settled in St. George, and his children were doing well in school; he had a warmhearted affection for the people of St. George and nearby Native American communities; his aging parents were declining in health and needed assistance; the move would subject his family and him to considerable economic loss and personal hardship. This initial reluctance notwithstanding, Ivins accepted the call and noted, “I immediately com­menced to make preparation to dispose of my property and go to Mexico.”[12] The record does not say what his wife and children thought of this, but they went with him.

For the ensuing twelve years, Ivins functioned as president of the Juárez Stake and vice-president and general manager of the Mexican Colonization and Agricultural Company, the original landholding entity for properties in the various Latter-day Saint colonies in Chihuahua and Sonora. In these capacities he was, if not the final word, then certainly a decision maker of overarching importance in the religious, economic, and political life of the colonies. Under his watchful eye, the English-speaking Latter-day Saints in northern Mexico prospered.

Elizabeth Ashby Snow Ivins. Used by permission of Utah State Historical Society, all rights reserved.

Within five years following the creation of the Juarez Stake, Ivins had accomplished much of what recently deceased Wilford Woodruff had called him to do. By 1901 he had also successfully engineered a plan to reengage the Latter-day Saints in and around Mexico City who had been abandoned by American missionaries and leadership for a dozen years. Following several presentations to Church authorities in Salt Lake City about the matter, in 1901 he convinced them to implement a rescue plan. Under Ivins’s jurisdiction as president of the Juárez Stake in Mexico, Ammon M. Tenney, who had been with Anthony Ivins on the first segment of their mission to Mexico in 1876, would leave to serve a mission in central Mexico to see what could be done.

Reopening the Mexican Mission in 1901

The Church gave a great deal of importance to Tenney’s mission, just as it had beforehand in 1879 when Apostle Moses Thatcher headed an official Church presence in Mexico City and environs. Thus Apostle John Henry Smith and President Anthony W. Ivins were assigned to accompany Ammon Tenney to Mexico City to investigate the status of the Church there after the long absence that political difficulties with the US federal government in Utah and Arizona had occasioned. Ivins, having been with the original group that distributed the Trozos Selectos del Libro de Mormón in northern Mexico in 1876, having preached the gospel in central Mexico in 1882–84, and having been president of the mission in 1884, was eager to see his old friends and acquaintances.

The Ivins home in Colonia Juárez, ca. 1905. Used by permission of Utah State Historical Society, all rights reserved.

The missionaries spent a few weeks speaking with members, visiting Mexican president Porfirio Díaz, and assessing the political climate for the Church in Mexico. They were encouraged when Díaz asked Apostle Smith to give his warmest regards to President Lorenzo Snow and, as an aside, complimented Ivins on his command of the Spanish language.[13] It was a momentous visit and sufficiently impressive to the colonists in Chihuahua that at least one family named their child after Díaz (Thomas Patrick Porfirio Díaz Brown, 1907–78).[14] Afterward, Ammon M. Tenney spent the next year looking up old members, organizing branches, preaching the gospel, and baptizing new converts.

Call to the Apostleship

After Ivins left Mexico in 1907 to become a member of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, and even after becoming a counselor to President Heber J. Grant in 1921, he maintained a continuing interest in the Mexican Saints. This was true not only for the colonies in Chihuahua and Sonora (which he had guided to a new prosperity lasting until civil war forced out almost all Anglo-European colonists in 1912) but also for the Latter-day Saints in Central Mexico.

Having such a vigorous and competent ad­vocate in the high­est councils of the Church bode well for the Latter-day Saints in Mexico. Because of his extensive activities in Mexico since 1876, his initiatives in 1901 to reopen the Mexican Mission, and his continuing advocacy for them for more than thirty years thereafter, the Saints in Mexico have justifiably called him a loyal friend.

Anthony W. Ivins was a man of abundant talent, energy, and natural abilities. Had he pursued his land and cattle interests for a lifetime, there is little doubt he would have become a wealthy man. Had he followed his interests in politics, there is little skepticism—he being so popular and well thought of—that he would have contributed mightily to enlightened politics in the Utah Territory and perhaps nationally. Had he pursued his interests in drama and history, he well may have become a noted historian, although probably not a rich one. In any event, the Church’s calls charted Ivins on a different path. As he engaged his talents and energy in what he deemed to be the Lord’s work, he became wealthy in service rather than in money and thereby influenced for good the lives of hundreds of thousands, including the Latter-day Saints in Mexico. Anthony W. Ivins became a grand example that many Mexican Saints consider worthy of emulation, one captured by a magnificent aphorism: “I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded” (1 Nephi 3:7). Great Latter-day Saints do that. With hardly a moment’s hesitation, Anthony W. Ivins accepted the Church’s requests. With nary a recorded complaint this author has seen, Elizabeth sustained him in his callings and in his life’s work.

Notes

[*] The following people contributed to this vignette with their thoughtful critiques: Eileen Roundy-Tullis, Sharman Gill, and Richard Thomas.

[1] Elizabeth O. Anderson, ed., Cowboy Apostle: The Diaries of Anthony W. Ivins, 1875–1932 (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2013).

[2] As cited in “Biography: Anthony Woodward Ivins,” transcribed by W. David Samuelsen for the USGenWeb Archives Project, http://files.usgwarchives.net/ut/state/bios/alter/i/ivins-anthonywoodward.txt, final paragraph. The yearbook’s dedication page can be viewed at https://digital.lib.usu.edu/digital/collection/buzzer/id/4382.

[3] A sample of his letters written while Ivins was on the trail to Mexico is illustrative: “We are camped about 2 miles above Camp Verde, a military post that was organized or located during the Apache war and where several hundred soldiers are now laying round doing nothing. We have been about 2 weeks coming from the Moquis villages. From the time we left the Oriba village we have traveled without a guide through a country where there was very little and a good deal of the time no signs of a trail.” Anthony W. Ivins, Rio Verde, Arizona, to unidentified recipient, November 18, 1875, Church History Library, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[4] Anthony W., Antoine R., Anna L., Florence, Leah, Heber Grant, Stanley S., Augusta, and Fulvia. Biography of Anthony Woodward Ivins, transcribed by W. David Samuelsen, http://files.usgwarchives.net/ut/state/bios/alter/i/ivins-anthonywoodward.txt, 9.

[5] Elizabeth Rebecca Ashby Snow, St. George, Utah, to her husband, Erastus Snow, Salt Lake City, February 13, 1880, Church History Library.

[6] Elizabeth Rebecca Ashby Snow to Erastus Snow, February 13, 1880.

[7] See “History of Anthony W. Ivins, Utah,” OnlineUtah.com, www.onlineutah.com/ivins_anthony_w_history_08.shtml.

[8] Rey L. Pratt, “History of the Mexican Mission,” Improvement Era, April 1912, 489.

[9] See generally Charles Metten, “Drama,” Encyclopedia of Mormonism, ed. Daniel H. Ludlow (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 1:428–29, https://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Drama.

[10] Quoted from https://onlineutah.us/ivins_anthony_w_history_07.shtml.

[11] The stake was created in December 1895 by Apostles Francis M. Lyman and George Teasdale with Anthony W. Ivins as president and Henry Eyring and Helaman Pratt as counselors.

[12] As reported in “History of Anthony W. Ivins, Utah,” https://onlineutah.us/ivins_anthony_w_history_05.shtml.

[13] Porfirio Díaz reportedly said, “[You] speak Spanish as well as a Castilian.” As reported in “History of Anthony W. Ivins, Utah,” https://onlineutah.us/ivins_anthony_w_history_03.shtml.

[14] “Orson Pratt Brown’s Wives and 35 Children,” http://www.orsonprattbrown.org/jane-thomas.html.