John Pershing

John Joseph Pershing (1860-1929) was a general in the United States Army during the Great War. He commanded US forces in eastern Kentucky. He managed his campaign well, but was upstaged by the commander in western Kentucky, George Armstrong Custer, who was the bitterest of Pershing's rivals.

After the war, Pershing commanded US garrisons in Utah. During this assignment, he worked with Custer's former adjutant, Abner Dowling, as his second-in-command. Despite Dowling's prior association with Custer, he and Pershing found they were able to work quite well together--as Custer himself had found when stationed in Utah over forty years earlier, during the Second Mexican War, as second-in-command to John Pope, a rival of Custer's old superior, George McClellan. To the surprise of both men, at a dinner event in Custer's honor, Pershing and Dowling each shed tears of sympathy for Custer and the humiliation he endured in forced-retirement.

Pershing was killed by a Mormon sniper in Salt Lake City in 1929 in the aftermath of the stock market crash, dramatically underscoring his unfinished thought that Utah was not ready for normalization. He was succeeded as commander of the Utah garrison by Dowling, the next senior officer in the state.