Lewis Samuel Hills (1836-1915) and Louis Edwin Granger (1840-1899) on the surface lived parallel lives: both men were born in Massachusetts. Both men moved to the Utah territory: Lewis in 1862, Louis by late 1871. Both married the first daughters from polygamous Mormon families. Both nominally opposed polygamous relationships.
Most biographies of Lewis Samuel start with his arrival in Utah in 1862. He was an orphan - his father died the year he was born, his mother died when he was 4 years old. He was the youngest of four surviving children: Julia, Oliver, Harvey and Lewis. Oliver drowned in 1846 at the age of 18. Julia, Harvey, and Lewis moved west arriving in Iowa by 1860. Lewis may have filed a patent for land in Iowa as early as 1856. He worked for a time in the Land Office in Council Bluffs. He traveled to Utah with his brother, sister in law and niece. There is speculation he and his brother were dodging the draft. While this may have been the out come - Lewis was in Utah during the remainder of the war; Harvey was in Oregon. This may or may not have factored into their decision to leave. The draft was not instituted until 1863. Lewis integrated into the Mormon community: he joined the LDS Church, married the daughter of Robert Taylor Burton, the Presiding Bishop and became a leader in the local business community eventually becoming the president of one of the local banks. The family's internal story is he stopped going to Church when Brigham Young pressured him to take a second wife. His wife vetoed the idea. By all accounts the two men still had an amicable working relationship after than. After the death of his son, Lewis endorsed the life insurance company in ads in the local newspapers. He had enough clout by the end of his life, that he attempted a run at Utah's seat in the House of Representatives as a Gold Democrat. He did not win but was endorsed by the business community.
In 1862, Louis Edwin Granger was already serving in the Union Army. He would go on to fight at Antietam and Fredericksburg before joining a Colored Unit as an officer in Louisiana where he participated in the Red River Campaign. In New Orleans he married his first wife, Caroline Pearson, the daughter of a Massachusetts lawyer who had moved south for his wife's health. After the war Louis served in the regular Army in North Carolina. He left the Army under a cloud - he was sentenced by a court martial to serve time at Dry Tortugas for selling is pay check to two different individuals. I suspect he avoided serving time by reimbursing the Army. Before he arrived in Utah, he had married, divorced, married again; possibly fought another insurrection; and been arrest for passing bad checks. He likely arrived in Utah with the objective of getting rich in mines west of Salt Lake. He married his third wife, Miriam Vilate Decker, the eldest daughter of Charles Franklin Decker and the granddaughter of Brigham Young. When he was not successful in the mines, he move to San Francisco where he made several attempts to win fortune and fame: he started a periodical using the same name as a publication on the other side of town. He registered several deeds for mines that were likely already played out. He attempted to write plays including an sordid expose of the Mormon community that was largely panned. When his wife had enough she returned to Salt Lake, divorced him and remarried. Louis would marry three other women. There is no evidence for a divorce from his second wife and he was in the middle of a divorce from his fourth wife when he married the sixth. He had several more run ins with the law sketchy business practices: selling goods for a company that had fired him, selling stock for a company he did not own. There are ads warning about his business practices in at least two languages - English and German, and multiple locations.
I speculate the differences in the two men's lives were largely caused by the how they experienced the Slaveholders Rebellion. Louis Granger was directly engaged in the conflict and his later instability may have been caused by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Lewis Hills avoided the conflict.
