Because Harding proved to be unpopular with the territory's Mormon leaders and citizens, he remained at Salt Lake City for less than a year before President Abraham Lincoln appointed him to the judgeship at Denver.

Harding spent idle time at his law office studying Roman and Greek classics, as well as William Shakespeare's works.

[5] In the fall of 1828, Harding took a steamboat from Louisville, Kentucky, to New Orleans, Louisiana, partly to claim personal property of behalf of a client, but also to consider opportunities to establish a law practice in the South.

Unable to find employment as a lawyer, he returned to Indiana in the spring of 1829, working his way back home as a clerk on the steamboat Belvedere along the Mississippi River.

[7] Shortly after his return to Indiana in 1829, Harding left for an extended trip to the East, where he spent the summer in Palmyra, New York.

[8] In addition, nearly sixty years earlier, in 1829, he and Harris listened as Cowdery read from a few of the yet unpublished manuscripts of the Book of Mormon in the candlelight of Joseph Smith Sr.'s log home.

Harding also recalled that he had been given the first sheet of the freshly-printed Book of Mormon title page, which he gave to a saint named Robert Campbell, who later donated it [9] to the LDS Church at Salt Lake City.

[21][22] At the recommendation of Indiana politicians Schuyler Colfax and George Washington Julian, Abraham Lincoln appointed Harding governor of the Utah Territory in 1862.

[23] Harding began his overland journey west in May and arrived at Salt Lake City to assume his new duties on July 7, 1862.

[citation needed] In his first message to the territorial legislature In December 1862, Harding defended an anti-polygamy act recently passed in the U.S. Congress and described his intention to challenge Mormon dominance in Utah.

Harding's relations with the Mormons further declined after he approved of efforts to limit the jurisdiction of the Mormon-controlled probate courts and to transfer control of the militia to the territorial governor.

[25][26] Lincoln appointed Harding to serve as Chief Justice of the Colorado Territory's Supreme Court in July 1863,[27] and remained in that position until May 1865.