David Bigler and Will Bagley indict Brigham Young and the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for rebelling against federal authority to the point that President James Buchanan felt compelled to send one-fifth of the standing army of the United States in 1857. In this richly sourced, beautifully illustrated, and clearly written narrative of the Utah Expedition, they examine “the problems the American republic faced and the mistakes it made when it first wrestled with theocracy” (xi). Along the way, they blame Brigham Young and his henchmen for the mistreatment of U.S. officials, the intimidation of Mormon dissenters, the massacre of approximately one hundred and twenty non-Mormon emigrants at Mountain Meadows, and the near-provocation of a bloody shooting war. Eventually, Young backed down and, in return for a presidential pardon that shielded him against charges of treason, allowed the U.S. Army to march through Salt Lake City, which most church members had vacated in a show of defiance. The authors present insufficient evidence for their contention that “the Arkansas party [killed at Mountain Meadows] was a marked train in a planned operation that went forward from the time it left Great Salt Lake” (178–179). Furthermore, they do little to explain why many Latter-day Saints feared that U.S. officials and armies were the harbingers of mobs that would persecute and kill them, as had occurred in Missouri and Illinois. Nevertheless, along with the recent work of William MacKinnon, Bigler and Bagley have done a tremendous service in rescuing the Utah Expedition from its prior obscurity.