"...the execution of Richard Whitehead Young by firing squad (at his request, rather than hanging) on November 11, 1917 coincided with the verdict handed down by military tribunal against Browning and several of his closest collaborators on November 14; of the "Browning Seven," only Browning was spared the gallows due to his company's considerable contributions to the American war cause, sentenced to life imprisonment in Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas, where he would die seven years later in 1924. The sensational case - of one of the Army's most important arms suppliers simultaneously skimming weapons, ammunition and money for Fundamentalist Mormon insurgents - and its conclusion marked the denouement of the Third Resistance even more so than the capture and killing of Young; a year to the day after the armistice with the Confederacy, the last conflict on American soil was over.
Fundamentalism was beaten in the field but victorious in the hearts of its adherents; the successfully sustained insurgency within American borders even as the Federals visited industrial death upon the Confederacy was taken even further as a show of godly force, and many of the conservative Mormons who had joined the insurgency skeptical of Fundamentalist theological doctrine exited it convinced, especially after Browning's group was tried not in civilian court but as traitors before a US Army magistrate judge, leading them to the not-unreasonable conclusion that the verdict was pre-determined. In their view William King and Heber Grant may have been, formally, political rivals in the temporal sense, but they represented a supine establishment Mormonism that had utterly surrendered to the United States, and the rejection of this settlement came to fuel the Fundamentalist exodus from formal church structures and, indeed, the United States wholesale.
The defeat of Young's Central Insurgency in Utah and western Colorado in 1917 left Cowley's ideologically zealous Northern Insurgency cut off in Idaho and Montana from the larger, concentrated group in the Arizona-Mexico frontier country, and it split in two not long thereafter. Cowley, Charles Zitting and Les Broadbent gathered together about three thousand of their remaining fighters, approximately four-fifths of the Northern Insurgency by late 1917, and chose "the Southern Exodus," as they termed it, electing to make their way to Mexico as quickly as possible; Musser, the more ideological deputy to Cowley, instead elected to remain, with six hundred or so men and their wives and children, marching north to a vast territory along the Alberta-Montana border and eventually formed, near the edge of what is today the Wateron Lakes-Glacier bi-national park area, what came to be known as the Alberta Stakes - the most zealous colonies of Fundamentalist Mormonism, broken off not only from the Mainline LDS Church authority but the Fundamentalist Church as well.
Cowley's Exodus, however, came to become hugely formative to Fundamentalist mythology. His three thousand insurgents and their families had to march through hostile, Army-controlled territory in Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and the Arizona Territory from late 1917 into early 1918, a grueling trek due to wintry conditions and meagre rations; as many as a third of the men, women and children who set off on the trek perished on route, even as they successfully avoided a direct confrontation with the Army and evaded patrols to the point that there was almost something divine about their passage. They were not just like Young's trekkers from the Midwest to the Great Salt Lake, or the Fundamentalists who had fled to Mexico after the 1890s - they were the Jews in the deserts of Sinai, and Cowley was their Moses. With the death of Taylor in Sonora in October 1916 of stomach cancer and Woolley's disinterest in political leadership, Cowley was now the undisputed master of a concentrated community of Fundamentalist colonias in Sonora and Chihuahua upon his arrival in early March 1918, and though Woolley was elected Prophet, Cowley was the one who held power in the "True Quorum."
The arrival of Cowley's hardened fighters integrated them with a robust, experienced community of insurgents in Mexico who had already served some use to Mexican authorities, and the consolidation of FLDS control of the areas around Agua Prieta was rapid. The Prime Minister of Mexico since late 1915, Bernardo Reyes, was a former general who had come to prominence as a young officer fighting the Revolt of the Caudillos, a severe civil war in much of northern Mexico in the early 1880s that had threatened the Empire's foundation and persuaded Reyes that independent thinking across the poorer, more isolated north threatened Mexico City's authority; this line of thinking had become further entrenched as it was conservative landowners in the Rio Bravo Valley who had been most eager to go to war against the United States, and the most successful thorn in the Mexican Army's side during the war had not been John Pershing but rather Pancho Villa's bandits.
The use of Mormons as Mexican Army auxiliaries in the war had left Taylor's proteges with excellent relationships with Mexican authorities, and after Villa's defeat at Chihuahua and his flight to exile in California, Reyes had turned a blind eye to Mormons being used as his catspaws to mop up the remnants of his considerable list of enemies along what was now the border with the United States. As such, by early 1918, scattered bands of Fundamentalist Mormons controlled much of the border country, and Cowley's arrival helped organize and unite them into a more cohesive group. Colonias across Sonora sprung up as Fundamentalists and even just theologically conservative Mormons rejecting peace with the Federals flowed south, their exodus not discouraged by the government. Names like Smithsburg, Youngstown, New Nauvoo, New Jerusalem were given to large settlements, where polygamous families quickly flourished and, with the tacit support of Mexico, quickly cemented themselves as Reyismo's strongest ally in the North, to the great chagrin of the Catholic establishment that had already been defeated by the North's frequent wars.
The Third Resistance thus ended in the United States, but unlike the Second Resistance, it was almost certainly not a decisive defeat for political anti-Federal Mormonism. The Church in Utah and Idaho was badly riven between moderates seen as sellouts to Federal authority and conservatives viewed as cranks sympathetic to apostate Fundamentalists; Fundamentalism, meanwhile, had found its new heartland in the hills of Mexico, where their colonias were romanticized to impoverished Mormons in Utah chafing at Federal rule by the military or, upon achieving statehood in 1922, the machine of Boss King. Cowley's colonists became not just the hammer of Mexican national authority in the wild deserts of the North, either; they quickly established themselves as the backbone of the vast smuggling network that quickly penetrated Arizona and California and, out of reach of Federal authority, built a state-within-a-state within Mexico where they were unequivocally in ascendance..."
- Soldiers of God: The Long Mormon War with the United States