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Defending Zion: George Q. Cannon and the California Mormon Newspaper Wars of 1856-1857 (Kingdom in the West: The Mormons and the American Frontier, Vol. 5)

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By the time he was 30 years of age, George Q. Cannon had been a printer's devil, a religious refugee, an 1847 Utah pioneer, a member of the great Mormon trek of 1849 across the southern Great Basin to California, a gold miner, a Mormon missionary to the Hawaiian Islands, and finally, the editor and publisher of the San Francisco "Western Standard". Compiled and edited by Roger Robin Ekins (Professor of English and Chair of the Honors Program at Butte College, Oroville, California), Defending Zion: George Q. Cannon And The California Mormon Newspaper Wars of 1856-1857 is the latest and fifth volume in The Arthur H. Clark Company's outstanding "Kingdom in the West: The Mormons and the American Frontier" series and which details the published journalistic defenses of Mormonism in the 19th Century by a capable and articulate defender in a time when the newspaper was the most potent and powerful means of mass communication and persuasion for social, political, and religious causes. Defending Zion is a welcome and invaluable contribution to Western American History Studies in general, and The Utah War episode which saw President James Buchanan launching a military expedition to Utah so costly that it almost bankrupted the United States federal government on the eve of the Civil War.