Shot in the Heart

by Mikal Gilmore

  Shortly after settling in Salt Lake, Brigham Young sent out word that all Saints in any land who could make the journey should migrate to the Great Basin, and help the church establish and populate colonies for its long-awaited empire. This was the decree that brought my mother’s final Mormon forebear, Francis Kerby, into the Utah Valley, where years later, according to one story, he would come face to face with a terrible and disillusioning reality.

  Not long ago, I found a microfilmed copy of Francis Kerby’s old handwritten journal (like so many Latter-Day Saints’ chronicles, it has been preserved in the invaluable archives of the Mormon Family History Library, in Salt Lake City). Of all our ancestors, Joseph Kerby (who was my grandmother’s grandfather, on her paternal side) left the most detailed personal record—at least, up to a certain time and place. Kerby was born in 1821, into an aristocratic family of devout, long-standing members of the Church of England, who resided on the Channel Islands, off the coast of France. In 1849, when he was twenty-eight years old, Francis and his wife, Mary LeCornu Kerby, heard the preachings of a Latter-Day Saint missionary, read the Book of Mormon, and converted to the Mormon religion. Kerby’s parents were stunned and outraged, and though they never completely severed their ties with their son, they grew distant from his concerns and would later leave him and his children little or none of their wealth. Almost immediately, Kerby went on to a fairly stellar career in the British Mormon world, and within days of his conversion, he had accepted a church leader’s suggestion and started keeping a journal of his daily and weekly activities. It is a document that is, at once, both tedious and fascinating to read. Like many Mormon journals, Kerby’s diary—which was kept from 1849 to 1893—is brimming with mundane ecclesiastical detail, and not much else. If Francis Kerby ever had an argument with his wife, or ever had a row with a neighbor—or, for that matter, ever got sick, heard a good joke, or noted a passing moment of history—he did not record it in his journal. Instead, he related page after page of church activities, including dinners with distinguished Mormons and accounts of his attendance at various LDS functions.

  On January 1, 1857, Francis Kerby and his wife and children sailed to America, and three years later they joined the last of the Mormons’ handcart expeditions to Utah (the handcarters literally walked their way across America, pushing and carrying carts that held their possessions). After his arrival in Utah, Kerby was apparently never the same man. Whereas in England he had kept a meticulous and proud list of all his ecclesiastical activities—and, in fact, had held high rank among the church’s U.K. clergy—after he got to Utah, he was less interested in keeping track of his life within the church, and seemingly less interested in church activity itself. Indeed, the final thirty-three years of his diary notations consists almost exclusively of remarks about marriages, births, and deaths. There are no long passages in those last pages about his beliefs and devotions, as there had been during his English career.

  My mother had a theory about what happened to Francis Kerby: She thought he had a crisis of faith. “He was never the same man after the Mountain Meadows Massacre happened,” she once said. “He couldn’t believe that the Mormons would have done such a thing, and after he learned the truth about it he never had the same heart for the church he had once loved.”

  THE MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE HAD TAKEN PLACE IN 1857 —the same year that Francis Kerby had arrived in America—but the roots of the tragedy reach back into Mormonism’s earlier years, when Joseph Smith began to conceive a theology that might prove as merciless and bloody as the history he had envisioned for the Book of Mormon. More particularly, the event’s proper history probably began during the Nauvoo era, when Smith first promulgated a principle that was to become: known, infamously, as Blood Atonement. Aside from the practice of polygamy, no other Mormon teaching has proven as complex or controversial as Blood Atonement. In its most widely understood sense—and in Joseph Smith’s original precept—the tenet runs like this: If you take a life, or commit any comparable ultimate sin, then your blood must be shed. Hanging or imprisonment would not suffice for punishment or restitution. The manner of death had to be one in which your blood spilled onto the ground, as an apology to God.

  In recent years, mindful of its historical image as a vengeful people, the Mormon Church has gone to pains to disavow this interpretation. The real principle of Blood Atonement, the modern theologians claim, is a matter of redemption, not vengeance. Jesus Christ atoned for the sins of the world by the shedding of his own blood; if you believed in Jesus as the Son of God, and if you followed his teachings and obeyed his laws, then you would be purged of sin through his blood. However, there are some sins that are so grave—and murder is one—that if you commit these deeds, you have placed yourself beyond the power of Christ’s atonement. The only hope for redeeming such sin is to have your own blood shed—and even that may not be enough to earn forgiveness in the next world. But for this form of Blood Atonement to be properly carried out, we must all wait for a better world when the civil and spiritual laws are administered by the same government, and such a time has not yet come.

  That’s the official account, but the legends of the West told a different story. According to some observers—including former governors and justices of the Utah territory, and a few confessors and witnesses—Blood Atonement was indeed practiced by the Mormons, and it was applied to a wider range of sins than simple murder. Some of the offending crimes that might merit death are not hard to imagine: There were numerous rumors in the mid to late 1800s about men who had strongly offended Brigham Young, or who had violated Mormon oaths of truth and secrecy, and ended up lying along some remote roadside, or buried in nameless graves, with bullets through their heads. But there were also other offenses that might invite death. Among them, according to some writers, were adultery, incest, whoredom, rape, thievery, hopeless mental illness (which in its more dramatic forms was sometimes read as a sign of demonic possession), and flagrant and persistent disobedience of one’s parents. At midnight, the stories went, a committee of Mormon elders, dressed in black, would visit the offender at his home and would lead him or her to a freshly dug grave site. Some prayers would be offered as the condemned kneeled by the grave, and then someone—perhaps the wronged husband or father, or a righteous church leader—would lean over and cut the offender’s throat, holding him or her by the head, so that the dying person’s blood would empty onto the ground.

  Did any acts of Blood Atonement ever really occur in Mormon Utah? Church historians have denied the rumors for over a century now and, indeed, there are no proven cases of Mormon authorities ever having sanctioned any acts of execution or bloodletting under the church’s auspices. But it is also true that many Danites—the Mormons’ band of secret protectors, police, and avengers—were guilty of a sizable number of shootings and murders in the Utah area, without being tried or apparently even chastised for their deeds. Obviously, given the unscrutinized and theocratic rule that the Mormons enjoyed in large parts of the Utah territory during the early years of its settlement, it is possible that executions and assassinations may have been conducted with such ironclad and sacred secrecy that history may never retrieve the truth. As Wallace Stegner wrote in Mormon Country: “[I]t would be bad history to pretend that there were no holy murders in Utah …, that there was no saving the souls of sinners by the shedding of blood …, and that there were no mysterious disappearances of apostates and offensive Gentiles.”

  The legends of Blood Atonement also served both a mythic and moral purpose. On one level, the spread of these stories illustrated two harsh facts. To the extent that the stories were spread by anti-Mormons, they illustrated how America regarded the Saints as demons who had turned their religion into a system of ritualistic outrages. To the extent that the stories were perpetuated by Mormons themselves, they demonstrated how the bitterness of their history had turned them into a hard people, and how that hardness and meanness had now spilled over into the land that they were settling. In
addition, the rumors about Blood Atonement helped the Mormons keep their own people in line. My mother recalled hearing terror tales about old Utah’s secret Danites and their midnight deeds for years. She also remembered that these fables were often told to children, in tones that implied that maybe the Danites and their rites of Blood Atonement weren’t altogether banished in early twentieth-century Utah.

  But the Mountain Meadows Massacre was not a myth and it was not a rumor. It happened, and its horror has been well-documented, even confessed to. Briefly, here is what took place:

  In September 1857, a wagon train of Arkansas emigrants, known as the Baker-Fancher party, was making its way through southern Utah, en route to California. Unfortunately, they were journeying through the region shortly after the Mormons had received word that federal troops were marching their way. The intent of these troops, Brigham Young had decided, was hostile—he had long been expecting a showdown between the Saints and the nation that had expelled them—and as a defense strategy, Young had enlisted several of the local Indian tribes to help repel the U.S. invasion.

  When the Baker-Fancher party arrived at the southern outpost of Cedar City, the Mormons in the region viewed the group with frightened suspicion: Perhaps the emigrants were, in fact, an advance party for the U.S. troops. It hardly helped matters when a few of the emigrants—later dubbed the “Missouri Wildcatters”—boasted that they had been among the militiamen who had slaughtered Joseph Smith a few years before and that, as soon as they reached California, they would raise forces to come back and help exterminate the surviving Utah Saints. The Mormons that these Missourians chose to infuriate were Mormons who remembered well what it was like to be driven from their homes by violent mobs, and they decided that these people would not leave their land to bring back new armies to kill them. They held a meeting and discussed whether to treat the emigrants—who were resting for a few days at a watering hole known as the Mountain Meadows—as enemies of war. The Mormons dispatched a messenger to Brigham Young in Salt Lake City, asking his counsel. Young replied that these visitors were definitely not a part of the federal campaign, and that they should be allowed to pass unharmed. By the time the messenger arrived back in Cedar City a few days later, nearly the entire Baker-Fancher party had been slaughtered. When Brigham Young heard about the massacre, he wept over the realization that his people could commit such an atrocity.

  The news of the Mountain Meadows Massacre spread rapidly, and soon became a chief weapon in the U.S. war against the Mormons. Finally, eighteen years after the event, the man who had been reported to have been the commander of the slaughter—a prominent Mormon named John D. Lee. also a famed member of the Danites—was arrested, and in the course of two trials, Utah and the nation began to get a better picture of what had really happened at Mountain Meadows. Lee had been the area’s Indian agent at the time, and according to the accounts of local tribesmen, he had approached them with reports that the Baker-Fancher group was poisoning the Indians’ stock and planning greater violence. Lee himself testified that it was the Indians who had felt injured by the actions of the emigrants, and that they had threatened Lee that if he did not help deliver the wagon train party to the Indians’ justice, then the Mormons would be endangered as a result. In any event, shortly after the messenger had left to consult Brigham Young, a group of Mormons and Indians carried out an attack on the Baker-Fancher party. The battle went on for days, and as a way of ending it, Lee told the tribesmen that if they would allow the women and children to escape unharmed, the Mormons would allow the slaughter of the migrant men. The Indians, Lee said, agreed, and he then convinced the Baker-Fancher group that if its survivors would surrender, they would be allowed to leave the area. Lee marched the male emigrants out of the encampment first, and a signal was given the Indians to begin their killing. But as soon as the slaughter started, the assailants lost control, and when the bloodbath was over, over one hundred men, women, and children lay dead in the Utah dirt. Many of them had been killed with unnecessary brutality.

  Lee was found guilty for his part in the slaughter by an all-Mormon jury and was sentenced to death.

  JOHN D. LEE WOULD NOT BE THE FIRST MAN to be legally executed in the Utah territory, but no man before him and no man after him—until my brother, one hundred years later—had such a keen understanding of the meaning of Utah’s death penalty. In the early 1850s, when the Mormon-dominated territorial legislature was drafting a criminal code, it designed a punishment for first-degree murder that would specifically satisfy the doctrine of Blood Atonement: Those who were condemned to death could choose between the options of being shot to death by a firing squad or being beheaded (the latter choice was eliminated in 1888, because—not surprisingly—nobody ever opted for it). Or, for those who were a little less anxious to have their blood shed, or who might simply be non-Mormon, there was always the possibility of a non-enlightened death: a simple hanging. As it turned out, a fair amount of blood ended up getting spilled. From the late 1840s to 1977, roughly fifty men were executed in Utah: eight by hanging, one reportedly by disemboweling, two by undocumented means; the remaining thirty-nine were shot by firing squads. Obviously, several other states—notably, ones in the South—executed greater numbers of men during the same period. None, though, would put to death so many by a means that so pointedly resulted in the spilling of blood, and no other state in the Union had a capital punishment code that prescribed its methods of death according to religious doctrine.

  When Lee was given the choice of the mode of execution, he chose according to his faith: He chose to be shot.

  On March 23, 1877, Lee was taken to the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. “I do not fear death,” he said that morning. “I shall never go to a worse place than I am now in.” Then, after he denounced Brigham Young for leading the Mormons astray from the teachings of Joseph Smith, Lee added: “I have been sacrificed in a cowardly, dastardly manner. I cannot help it. It is my last word—it is so.” (Later, after hearing a report of Lee’s words, Brigham Young—in the manner of the Book of Mormon’s Lord God—cursed Lee and all his generations to come.)

  Lee sat back down on his coffin and spoke his final words: “Center my heart, boys. Don’t mangle my body.”

  The executioners obliged the request. They fired their bullets in close formation through John D. Lee’s heart, and he fell back across his coffin. His blood spilled into the Utah soil, where the blood of the massacre’s victims had spilled a generation before, and then his body was placed in the wooden casket and given to his family for burial.

  The whole affair had been another violent turning point in the Mormon world. The massacre had been disgraceful, and so was the way that Lee was used to relieve the Mormon structure of its culpability in the matter. (Eighty-four years later, the church finally cleared Lee’s name and reinstated him to full membership, with restoration of his former blessings.)

  After Mountain Meadows, Mormons had to face that murder was everywhere in God’s promised lands—in the America forsaken, and the kingdom to come. The blood would not stop spilling, and now the chosen people found its stain on their own hands.

  THESE WERE THE LEGENDS THAT MY MOTHER HEARD growing up in Mormon Utah, and they were part of the inheritance that she passed along to us. And then there were the stories of her own family.

  MY MOTHER’S MOTHER, MELISSA KERBY, WAS THE GRANDDAUGHTER of Francis Kerby and the great-granddaughter of Emanuel Masters Murphy. By the time of Melissa’s generation, both the Murphy and Kerby clans had settled into the Provo region of Utah, about fifty miles south of Salt Lake City. Provo was the second city that Brigham Young ordered organized in the region in the late 1840s and, more than most Mormon Utah colonies, it had a violent history. It was named after a man named Etienne Provost, whose exploration party had been slaughtered by the Snake Indians on the Jordan River, many years before. In its first decade or so, Provo saw a fair amount of battles with local Indians over land use and cattle grazing—though it was the In
dians, more often than not, who paid with their lives for these skirmishes.

  Utah’s first recorded execution—an unofficial one—took place in the Provo area. A bold and nasty-tempered Ute Indian named Patsowits (or Pat Souette, as the Mormons spelled it) had killed a local settler in 1850 and then went on to kill several of the Mormons’ cattle and horses. He also threatened to kill a local chief for acquiescing to the Mormons’ land-grab. He was captured by two Ute Indians. Anxious to improve relations with the new settlers, the Utes turned Patsowits over to local Mormon authorities, who, in a particularly novel twist on Blood Atonement and frontier justice, disemboweled the Indian, then filled his abdomen with rocks and tossed him into a lake.