What Happened when Mormons Came to Mine and Build Peru?

Daffodils and forsythia bloomed with abandon as April conference ended. Soon will come lilacs and high spring, and the Church just released its membership statistics. Growth and eternal progress are the stories people love, but in Mormonism there are many others, like the gaps in the garden of bulbs planted that did not come up, the missing blooms in a field of sunshine yellow. 

As the Brethren spoke in their dry, yet captivating, voices retelling their versions of the gospel one more time, always old and yet ever new, I was poking around documents from more than 100 years ago and stumbled on one of those fields with missing blooms. 

Peru is a success story for the LDS Church. Bright eyed members and white chapels, needles pointing upwards, abound. You can hardly miss them. Such was not the case at the beginning of the twentieth century. South America seemed eclipsed by the story of Parley Pratt’s miscalculation and failure in Valparaiso, Chile. The Church had not even arrived in Argentina and Brazil in the persons of German, immigrant members. 

Yet something changed, something major. The War of the Pacific had ended and international entrepreneurs turned their eyes southward after extracting what they could from the US West as well as Mexico.  They were looking for the new, the boom that could bring stellar returns, a shining El Dorado.

In this case, it was an India-born Mormon a product of the Hindustan mission and the hotbed of Calcutta. He came to Utah while still a boy, a decade after the first wagons stumbled out of Emigration Canyon. While many Mormons were building towns, communities, wards, and farms, a church of rural village life, this man worked as a cattleman, a railway man, and a merchant as he accumulated capital. He subsequently expanded and entered mining, the third leg of the cattle, railway triangle.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, this Utahn, baptized and married in the temple with a public and prominent LDS wife, set his sights on Peru.The famous silver mines around Pasco were going out of production following the War of the Pacific and changes in costs of production and the Utahn smelled copper, a critical mineral for industrial advance and something that was beginning to be looked at outside Salt Lake. 

Joining with others to produce the immense capital necessary, this Utahn, Alfred McCune, obtained the mines and planned not only massive mining but also an engineering marvel of a railroad to make it feasible to get the mineral to port in an economic fashion. 

McCune said in 1902 that he would be hiring lots of Americans. “Thirty Americans miners and men are now employed and quite a large number more will be sent down.” (Arizona Republic,  27 April, 1902 Page 3.)  By 1906 the Deseret News reports “It is known there are a good many  Utahns in South America, most of them being in Peru.”  It continues “A large number of young Americans are scattered up and down the South American coast cities and in the interior of the country where they have gone in quest of fame and fortune, but most of those from Utah are, as stated, in Peru” (Deseret Evening News, 22 Aug 1906, page 1). 

(The Town of Cerro de Pasco, Peru, ca 1907. Source: https://familysearch.org/photos/images/19234865) 

Of all these Utahns, many of whom were undoubtedly Latter-day Saint, I know of just four besides McCune and his family.  McCune was argued to not be actively LDS although his commitment to the Church is enshrined in his mansion that sits, resplendent in red sandstone majesty, on capitol hill. His wife, Elizabeth Ann Claridge McCune, was known for her activity and commitment to the LDS Church. A few years after living with her children and husband in Peru she was named to the General Board of the Relief Society. 

The other four include a fascinating mixture. George Chauncy Spillsbury from Toquerville worked as a tutor for the McCunes and, after they left he worked for the Cerro de Pasco Mining Company and became the mayor of the company town. He was known for his commitment to the Church, having translated portions of the Book of Mormon into his mission language, Samoan. Following his return to the US he served as stake Sunday school president, a counselor in the stake presidency, and was an ordained temple worker. 

The second member in Peru was Spillsbury’s wife, who he met in Cerro de Pasco and brought into the Church, Dorothy May Gregory Spillsbury. They were married in the temple on a trip home before returning to Peru. (https://familysearch.org/photos/stories/1014541)

The third was Victor V. Morris from a prominent Salt Lake family who worked on the railroad before marrying a local woman and staying in Peru.  Morris opened the Morris Bar, a prominent Lima establishment. He has passed to history for his importance in the development of the Peruvian national alcoholic beverage, the Pisco Sour. Morris’ maternal grandfather had been a missionary in Calcutta and had, probably, known the McCune family there, given the ties among missionaries and the members of their branches. 

From Peru, Morris sent a substantial sum of money in his mother's name for the building of a monument to the Mormon Batallion. She was the daughter of a Batallion member. (Ogden Standard Examiner, Wed, August 13, 1919).

The final person was Morris’ younger brother, Sidney Hooper Morris, who had an engineering degree from the University of Utah and worked for the mining company on its railway line.  Later he returned and worked as  the chief engineer at the Casapalca Mine from 1917-1922. (http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=133137071) 

There were more, undoubtedly more, I just have not found them yet. Nonetheless, unlike later movements of Latter-day Saints into the country, this did not lead to Mormon growth, although much later, in the fifties Americans residing at Cerro de Pasco along with others on the coast were instrumental in founding the Church in Peru. 

The Cerro de Pasco enterprise requires research as part of Mormon history, but for now I think we can say a few things about why little may have happened in these early days of the twentieth century. 

J.E. Hogan who had been a dispatcher for the Salt Lake Route in Utah reported to the Salt Lake Herald in 1907 : “The best men obtainable in the various lines were hired in the states and sent to Peru to push the work to completion, but upon their arrival so many discouraging conditions were presented that but few had much heart to go ahead with the work.” (Salt Lake Herald, 29 Sept 1907, page 30).  

Furthermore, open meetings of non-Catholic faiths were yet to be tolerated. On this, Frederic J. Haskin opined,  “If foreigners come into the country to open up its resources, they will bring with them their religion, whatever it may be, and they will want to practice it. … Peru and the rest of the South American countries will come out of the woods on this religious question if they are given their time for it.” (The Salt Lake Herald, Feb 28,1904, Page24 ).

Cerro de Pasco transformed Peru´s economy and society. It’s relationship to the growth of the faith of its founder and some of its employees in the process is yet to be fully researched and written. 

As a result it looks like a flowerless field, but who knows.