George P. Stiles

George P. Stiles (1814 – September 1, 1885) was a justice of the Supreme Court of the Utah Territory from 1854 to 1857.

In the 1840s, Stiles had been a prominent Mormon, and had been among the advisers who encouraged Joseph Smith to destroy the press of the anti-polygamy newspaper, the Espositor, in 1844.[1][2] This act led to Smith's arrest, and his murder while in custody.[1][2] Stiles later became an apostate from that group, and was excommunicated by them, setting up a significant conflict when Stiles was later appointed by President Franklin Pierce to the territorial supreme court in Utah.[1][2][3]

Stiles began his travel to Carson Valley in the Spring of 1854, in the company of Orson Hyde and United States Marshal Heywood, the three arriving there in June.[4] Upon arriving in Utah, Stiles succeeded Associate Justice Zerubbabel Snow, whose term of office expired in 1854. Stiles, Hyde, and Heywood "were empowered by the Utah Legislature to meet with a similar commission from California, and establish in the Carson Valley region the boundary line between that State and this Territory".[4] Once this was done, the three organized Carson County.[4]

Stiles clashed with the Mormon population,[3] seeking to dismantle legal structures that they had erected to avoid scrutiny from the federal government.[2] On December 29, 1856, amidst a conflict with Mormon lawyers, Stiles "had his office raided and certain of his personal papers burned".[5][2] In 1857, Stiles returned to Washington, D.C., and informed the government their that the Mormon population of Utah was effectively in a state of rebellion.[5]

A genealogist of the Stiles family suggests that he "was probably the Geo. P. Stiles who bore a good record as First Lieutenant of the Thirty-first Ohio Volunteer Regiment, from August, 1861, to Dec. 15, 1864", during the American Civil War.[6] After the war, Stiles "held an office in one of the Governmental Departments, at Washington, D. C.", before eventually moving to Belton, Texas, where he died.[6]

Personal life

Stiles married J. K. Hollister of New York, with whom he had four children.[6]

References
  1. Michael Schelling Durham, Desert Between the Mountains: Mormons, Miners, Padres, Mountain Men, and the Opening of the Great Basin, 1772-1869 (1997), p. 204.
  2. Norman F. Furniss, Mormon Conflict: 1850-1859 (2005), p. 57-59.
  3. William Nester, The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876 (2014), p. 82.
  4. Orson Ferguson Whitney, History of Utah (1892), p. 541.
  5. Utah State Institute of Fine Arts, Utah: A Guide to the State (1941), p. 69.
  6. Henry Reed Stiles, The Stiles Family in America: Genealogies of the Connecticut Family (1895), p. 454.
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