The Smith party stayed in the Salt Lake Valley for approximately two years. During this time, Utah Territory was being organized as an American possession. Slavery was not prohibited in Utah Territory under the federal Compromise of 1850, though Brigham Young had warned the Mississippi Saints that slavery was legally precarious there. Smith kept his enslaved people in Utah regardless.
## From Utah to California, Again Without Choice
In 1851, Brigham Young called the Mississippi Saints to settle in San Bernardino, California. Smith organized his household and joined a larger wagon train of approximately 150 vehicles for the journey south and west. Biddy Mason, her daughters, and the other enslaved members of the household went with them.
California had been admitted to the Union as a free state in 1850 under the Compromise of 1850. Its first constitution, ratified in 1849, prohibited slavery. This was a matter of public knowledge, and indeed the information had reached Biddy Mason during the journey or shortly after arriving. Sources indicate that she encountered free Black people during the westward journey and in California who told her about the state’s legal status and encouraged her to challenge her situation.
That she was now enslaved in a free state was legally anomalous. The question of whether enslaved people could be held in free states was not yet resolved by the federal courts — that resolution would come in the disastrous *Dred Scott* decision of 1857, which held that enslaved people had no rights the law was bound to respect. In 1851, the status of enslaved people brought into California by their enslavers and held there was contested, and some enslaved people in similar situations had already petitioned successfully for freedom.