by Jon Krakauer
The first report of any kind that Dunn and the Howland brothers had been killed by Indians was the mysterious telegram alluded to in the Deseret News story. The telegram had been sent anonymously to Mormon Apostle Erastus Snow in St. George on the evening of September 7, 1869, shortly after Powell had passed through town and asked the local Saints to keep a sharp eye out for the missing members of his team. The telegram read:
Powell's three men killed by three She-bits, five days ago, one Indian's day journey from Washington. Indians report that they were found in an exhausted state, fed by the She-bits, and put on the trail leading to Washington; after which they saw a squaw gathering seed and shot her, whereupon, the She-bits followed up and killed all three. Two of the She-bits who killed the men are in the Washington Indian camp with two of the guns. Indian George has gone to secure what papers and property there is left.
Jack Sumner—one of the expedition members who'd emerged safely from the Grand Canyon with Major Powell, and a close pal of William Dunn and the Howland brothers—didn't see eye to eye with Powell on most matters, but he shared the major's skepticism that Indians had killed their companions. The night after separating, the men who had stayed on the river with Powell had speculated around their campfire about “the fate of the three men left above.” According to Sumner, everyone else in Powell's group “seemed to think the red bellies would surely get them. But I could not believe that the reds would get them, as I had trained Dunn for two years in how to avoid a surprise, and I did not think the red devils would make open attack on three armed men. But I did have some misgiving that they would not escape the double-dyed white devils that infested that part of the country. Grapevine reports convinced me later that that was their fate.”
Sumner was of course talking about the Mormons of southern Utah. He knew all about the Mountain Meadows massacre and the Mormons' continuing insistence that Indians alone had been responsible for the murder of the Arkansans, despite ample evidence to the contrary. When Sumner heard the Mormons claiming that Indians had killed his friends, he was skeptical. Later he reported, “I saw some years afterwards the silver watch I had given Howland” during a drunken brawl with some white men, one of whom “had a watch and boasted how he came by it. . . . Such evidence is not conclusive, but all of it was enough to convince me that the Indians were not at the head of the murder, if they had anything to do with it.”
A year after emerging from the Grand Canyon and departing Utah for his home in Chicago, Major Powell—now an international celebrity—returned to the region to conduct further explorations of the Colorado River and its tributaries. In the interim, he had been contacted by the Howland brothers' family, who implored him to find out what had really happened to Oramel and Seneca. Toward these ends Powell sought the assistance of Brigham Young, who volunteered his main man in southern Utah, Jacob Hamblin, Indian missionary extraordinaire, to serve as Powell's guide.
On September 5, Powell rendezvoused in Parowan with Brigham, Hamblin, and approximately forty local Saints—including two of the leading perpetrators of the slaughter at Mountain Meadows: William Dame and John D. Lee. The entire group accompanied Powell as far as the Mormon outpost of Pipe Spring, where Powell and Hamblin bid farewell to Brigham and the other Saints and headed south across the Arizona Strip with an escort of Kaibab Indians. On the evening of September 19, just northeast of Mount Dellenbaugh, Hamblin arranged a parley between Powell and members of the Shivwit tribe who had supposedly killed his men.
According to Powell's account of the meeting, the Shivwit chief—relying on Hamblin to translate for him—freely confessed that “we killed three white men.” Another member of the tribe then explained (outside of Powell's hearing) that Dunn and the Howland brothers had stumbled into the Shivwits' village
almost starved and exhausted with fatigue. They were supplied with food and put on their way to the settlements. Shortly after they had left, an Indian from the east side of the Colorado arrived at their village and told them about a number of miners having killed a squaw in a drunken brawl, and no doubt these were the men. . . . In this way he worked them into a great rage. They followed, surrounded the men in ambush, and filled them full of arrows.
The murders had resulted from a terrible misapprehension, in other words. Powell forgave the Shivwits and made no effort to punish them or take revenge.
Over the years, a handful of voices persisted in challenging this version of the tragedy, most prominently those of Dunn's friend Jack Sumner and a grizzled Colorado River guide named Otis “Dock” Marston, who claimed he had heard from a Mormon privy to confidential information that “it was the Mormons that shot these men.” But Sumner, Marston, and the other skeptics were roundly dismissed by the majority of historians and scholars, Mormon and Gentile alike, including such eminences as Wallace Stegner. Then, in 1980, a former dean of the college of science at Southern Utah University, a Latter-day Saint named Wesley P. Larsen, came across a letter that had been squirreled away for ninety-seven years in an old trunk in the hamlet of Toquerville. Dated February 17, 1883, the letter suggested that Dunn and the Howlands had been killed in Toquerville—inside the LDS ward house, no less—by one of the local Saints.
The letter was written to John Steele—a highly respected judge and ecclesiastical leader, as well as Toquerville's preeminent doctor and bootmaker—by William Leany, Steele's friend of thirty-seven years. Leany had been a faultless Saint (he had once even been a trusted bodyguard to Brigham Young) until the volatile, hate-soaked summer of 1857, immediately prior to the Mountain Meadows massacre, when he'd committed the unforgivable sin of providing food to a Gentile member of the Fancher wagon train as it passed through Parowan. The Gentile in question was William Aden, the nineteen-year-old artist from Tennessee who would be shot a week later trying to summon help for the besieged Arkansans.
Aden was the son of a doctor who years earlier had saved Leany from the clutches of an anti-Mormon mob that threatened to do him mortal harm in the town of Paris, Tennessee, where Leany was serving as a missionary. Following his rescue, Leany was taken to the Aden residence, where he met young William. Recognizing the Aden boy when the Fancher party stopped for the night in Parowan, Leany invited him into his home, gave him dinner, and then sent Aden away with some onions from his garden. Upon learning of this treasonous act, William Dame dispatched a thug to Leany's house, who pried a post from Leany's fence and clubbed him in the side of the head with it, fracturing his skull and nearly killing him.
In 1883, when he wrote the long, rambling letter discovered by Professor Larsen, Leany was sixty-eight years old. The correspondence to Judge Steele was apparently prompted by a suggestion from the judge that before he passed into the hereafter, Leany might want to repent for certain sins some of the Toquerville brethren had accused him of committing. Leany replied angrily that “God shall bear me witness that I am clean of all of which they accuse me & they guilty of all that I accuse them & much more.”
What Leany accused his fellow Saints of, the letter revealed, was “thieving whoredom murder and Suicide & like abominations.” He reminded Steele, moreover, that “you are far from ignorant of these deeds of blood from the day the picket fence was broke on my head to the day those three were murdered in our ward & the murderer killed to stop the shedding of more blood.” Five paragraphs later, Leany made another allusion to “the killing the three in one room of our own ward.”
Baffled and intrigued by these provocative references to murder, Wesley Larsen deduced from historical records that the killings alluded to by Leany had occurred in 1869. Then he determined that only three men had been murdered that year in southern Utah: William Dunn and the Howland brothers. But why would the good Saints of Toquerville want to take the lives of three wayward explorers?
Toquerville was founded in 1858, a year after the Mountain Meadows massacre, and most of the first families to settle there were headed by men who had participated in the slaughter. Many of these same men were living in
Toquerville in 1869 when Powell floated down the Grand Canyon. The year prior to Powell's expedition, Ulysses S. Grant had been elected president, and his administration had made it a priority to capture the perpetrators of the massacre and bring them to justice. Even before this new dragnet, moreover, a $5,000 bounty had been placed on the heads of Isaac Haight, John Higbee, and John D. Lee. By the time Dunn and the Howlands decided to abandon Powell's expedition and walk to the Mormon settlements, many of Toquerville's leading citizens were living in constant fear of arrest.
The climate of paranoia that pervaded the region was at a particularly high pitch in the summer of 1869 thanks to Brigham Young, who had made a trip through southern Utah that season stoking hatred for the Gentiles. Cautioning that federal troops were about to launch a new invasion of Deseret, Brigham ordered sentries to stand watch at strategic points along the territory's southern border. This was the volatile atmosphere that awaited Dunn and the Howlands as they walked north from Mount Dellenbaugh toward the Mormon settlements.
Larsen speculates that somewhere on the Shivwits Plateau they encountered one or more Mountain Meadows fugitives, who assumed that Powell's men must be federal agents or bounty hunters; their preposterous claim to be harmless explorers who had just completed the first descent of the Grand Canyon—which was known by everyone in Utah to be completely impassable—would only have confirmed their treacherous intentions in the eyes of the Saints. So (according to this scenario) the Mormons hauled Dunn and the Howlands into Toquerville, where they were tried by a kangaroo court and summarily executed.
Within a few days of this presumed lynching, Major Powell happened to turn up in St. George, asking the good people of the southern settlements to keep an eye out for his missing men, and the Saints of Toquerville realized they'd committed a serious mistake. Magnifying their blunder, Powell was a friend and vocal admirer of the Mormons, in sharp contrast to almost all other agents of the Gentile government in Washington. In a rising panic over what they'd done, the Toquerville residents sent a bogus telegram to Apostle Erastus Snow, blaming the murders on their usual whipping boys, the Indians. Five months later, these same Saints killed the unfortunate fellow who had volunteered to carry out the executions, electing to sacrifice the executioner in order “to stop the shedding of more blood,” as Leany's letter described it. Then, just as they had done in the wake of Mountain Meadows, the conspirators swore an oath to say nothing about the abominable deed to anyone.
Larsen theorizes that this last victim, the presumed executioner, may have been a Mormon named Eli N. Pace. “I understand that Pace had three wives,” says Dr. Larsen, “one of whom was the daughter of John D. Lee. It seems possible that Pace killed Powell's men because he thought they were bounty hunters closing in on his father-in-law, who had a $5,000 reward on his head at the time.” Adding weight to Larsen's conjecture is the fact that Eli Pace died on January 29, 1870, “under very mysterious circumstances”: an inquest conducted by local Mormons determined that Pace had committed suicide, but his family took strenuous issue with this finding and demanded another, more rigorous investigation. The second inquest, presided over by Erastus Snow himself and weighed by a three-man jury that included Isaac Haight, corroborated the initial finding—to the surprise of absolutely nobody beyond Pace's immediate family. The matter was pronounced closed by the LDS Church and the local judiciary, which were one and the
same.
Larsen's hypothesis that Dunn and the Howland brothers were killed by Mormons, rather than Shivwits, has been disparaged by most historians, as have all previous suggestions that the Indians weren't responsible. The majority view is based almost entirely on accounts by both Jacob Hamblin and Major John Wesley Powell that describe, with convincing detail, how the Shivwits freely confessed to murdering Powell's men. But such accounts, it turns out, should be taken with a large grain of salt.
Hamblin enjoyed a reputation of unimpeachable integrity among the Saints of southern Utah, who called him “Honest Jake.” The historical record plainly shows, however, that Hamblin had no compunction about “lying for the Lord” when he thought it would advance the goals of the Kingdom of God. Indeed, the record also shows that Hamblin was quite willing to lie through his teeth simply to enrich himself. It's worth noting that John D. Lee had his own nicknames for Hamblin: “Dirty Fingered Jake” and “the fiend of Hell.”
In September 1857, immediately following the Mountain Meadows massacre, Hamblin orchestrated the shakedown and robbery of the William Dukes wagon train, among the first parties of emigrants to travel through southern Utah after the slaughter. Despite paying Mormon guides $1,815 to be escorted safely through the region, the Dukes party was attacked by a band of Paiutes, who let the emigrants escape to California but stole everything they had of any value, including more than three hundred head of cattle. The emigrants noticed, moreover, that many of the marauding “Indians” had blue eyes, curly hair, and splotches of white skin at the corners of their eyes and behind their ears. In actuality, the thieves had been led by Mormons who had painted their faces to resemble Paiutes, according to the instructions of Jacob Hamblin (which was, of course, the same ruse employed by the Saints during the Mountain Meadows massacre, and on numerous other occasions).
The Paiutes were given a few of the stolen cattle as payment for their supporting role in the shakedown, but Hamblin kept the bulk of the plunder for himself, professing to be safeguarding the large and very valuable herd of livestock for the Dukes party until the emigrants were able to return to Utah and take possession of them. But when William Dukes called Hamblin's bluff and recruited a brave soul to reclaim the rustled cattle, Hamblin hid most of the animals in the mountains for three weeks, until the representative for the emigrants finally gave up in frustration and departed, nearly empty-handed.
Although Hamblin was absent from the Mountain Meadow when the Fancher train was attacked, and thus did not directly participate in the massacre, after the fact he brazenly lied about what he knew about it in order to protect the LDS Church. Thus, when Hamblin reported that the Shivwits admitted to killing Major Powell's men in 1869, there is little reason to trust his word. John Wesley Powell, however, was also present when the Indians made their confession, and he corroborated Hamblin's version of the event. But did Powell understand what the Shivwits were saying? Or was he simply parroting Hamblin's translation?
In A River Running West, his excellent biography of Powell, Donald Worster—a distinguished professor at the University of Kansas—speculates that Powell was sufficiently fluent in the Numic dialects spoken by the Southern Paiute tribes to have known whether Hamblin was translating accurately. If Hamblin fabricated the confession, Worster argues, he had to have done it “without Powell suspecting, and that fabrication had to have been part of a well-orchestrated conspiracy directed from above. None of these hypotheses seem plausible.”
Wesley Larsen, not surprisingly, begs to differ with Worster and the majority who share his view. A devout Mormon, Larsen has no trouble believing that a fabrication could have been part of “a well-orchestrated conspiracy directed from above”; the Saints' tenure in Utah is rife with such conspiracies. Moreover, Larsen points out that “Powell certainly wasn't fluent in the Paiute language. The Shivwit dialect was sufficiently different that they had trouble making themselves understood even to other tribes in the area. . . . Powell would only have understood what Hamblin translated for him, which is of course why Hamblin was translating in the first place.”
And Powell's colorful retelling of his momentous parley with the Shivwits must itself be regarded with a healthy dose of skepticism. The best-selling book by Powell from which the account is drawn, The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons, is universally acknowledged to include numerous embellishments, as well as the omission of many pertinent events. In his book, Powell even conflates anecdotes drawn from three different visits to Utah Territory—the original 1869 expedition, the 1870 excursion in which he met with the Shivwits, a
nd an extended exploration of the Colorado Plateau conducted from 1871 through 1873; striving for a more dramatic narrative, he shamelessly presents events from 1872 as having occurred in 1870.*
Perhaps the greatest reason to doubt the accepted version of what happened to Powell's men is that it simply doesn't stand the test of common sense. Both Mormonee and Mericats were typically quick to avenge Indian depredations, yet nobody ever attempted to punish the Shivwits who'd allegedly killed Dunn and the Howlands—no real effort was even made to recover their valuable guns, scientific instruments, or papers from the Indians. This despite the fact that the telegram sent by an anonymous Saint on September 7, 1869, which first reported the murders, also stated that “two of the She-bits who killed the men are in the Washington Indian camp with two of the guns.” The Washington Indian Camp was less than ten miles from St. George, but no Saints ever made the short trip up the hill to arrest the alleged perpetrators, or even to ask them where they had left the bodies of Powell's men.
Curiously, the telegram included no mention of who had composed it or from where it was sent; Larsen points out that it very well could have originated in Toquerville, where a telegraph office was situated in the same ward house in which the murders were alleged to have occurred. “It seems strange,” he adds, “that after Apostle Snow received the telegram, none of the locals tried to bring the Indians to justice. I've never heard of Indians being left alone after committing a deed like that during this period of Utah's history.”*