History of Utah, 1540-1886 - Brigham Young University

THE CARSON SETTLEMENT. 591
By an act of the Utah legislature, approved January
17, 1854, the limits of Carson county were defined,
47 and the governor was authorized to appoint
for it a probate judge whose duty it should be to
organize the county, by dividing it into precincts,
holding an election, filling the various offices, and
locating the county seat. The choice fell on Orson
Hyde, who with Judge Styles, the United States
marshal, and an escort of thirty-five men, reached
the settlement of John Keese in June 1855, other
parties of Mormons arriving during this and the following
year. Meanwhile miners, farmers, and herdsmen
from California and the Atlantic states had settled
in the valley and elsewhere on the eastern side
of the Sierra Nevada in such numbers as to alarm
the Mormons, who now desired them to leave the
territory. This they refused to do, and some pretended
fears of a resort to force. The gentiles forti-
fied themselves, and assumed an aggressive attitude,
and for two weeks the opposing forces were encamped
almost within sight of each other, but without
coming to blows. News of the disturbance reached
the mining camps on the other side of the mountains,
and numbers prepared to go in aid of their comrades.
The aggressors now feared that they would be themselves
expelled from the country, and proposed a
truce, under which all should be allowed to remain
on their lands.
As soon as the matter became known to the
authorities, the county organization was repealed,
the probate judge recalled, and the records, which
contained several criminal indictments of a serious
readily and at high prices to emigrants who, as he says, would pay almost
any price for provisions, a small bunch of turnips selling for a dollar. Reese
lived later at S. L. City, while S. A. Kinsey, his former partner remained at
Genoa. Van Sickles' Utah Desperadoes, MS. Among the earliest settlers
were three persons named Lee, and others named Condie and Gibson. Early
Hist. Carson Valley, MS., 1. The place was first known as 'the Mormon
Btation,' Genoa being laid out in 1856. Id., 3.
« It was bounded on the north by Deseret co., east by the 11 8th meridian,
south by the boundary line of Utah, and west by California. Utah Act*
Legist, (ed. 1855), 261.