No Mormonism ?

[Melvin Loh]

I don't mean to offend any religious sensibilities here, but WI Joseph Smith was exposed unequivocally as a fraud either in 1821 when he 1st had his 'revelation' in upstate NY, or when he was in Nauvoo, Illinois, during the 1830s ? Would there be no Mormon denomination and Church of LDS today, or would they just become a relatively smaller scale cult along the lines of the Branch Davidians at Waco or the Ppl's Temple ? What'd hist and life be like without the Mormons ?

Again, no offence intended whatsoever.

 

[DuQuense]

Others

IIRC there were several Cult of simular types running around in the same time Frame. the LDS were just the most sucessful [ The Gods smilied on them]. If the LDS were out of the picture, Perhaps one of the Others.....

 

[David Howery]

The big difference would be the settlement of Utah. The Mormons specifically set out to settle this area and worked like dogs to irrigate it and make a living there. How might Utah have been settled without the Mormons? Although there are more areas suitable for agriculture than you might think there, a big part of the state is typical desert. Even today, most of the population is concentrated in the more fertile areas. Without the Mormons, I wonder if large parts of the state would be reservations, as settlement of the region would have been a lot slower....

 

[wkwillis]

Utah

Utah was on the transcontinental railroad route. The area would have been settled for the irrigation potential, coal for the railroad, potash from the Great Salt Lake for agriculture, and copper mines. It would still have a city there. It might have been considered a usefull dumping grounds for ethnically cleansed Indians if it was empty, though...
Another effect is that a substantial proportion of the US army was in Utah when the civil war was starting. If that part of the army was still on the railnet in 1861, some of the close shaves like Norfolk Navy Yard and Harper's Ferry Arsenal might have wound up in the Union, leading to a slightly more successfull first year for the Union in the civil war and a slightly shorter war as the successes built on themselves as civil war successes tend to do.