by James W. Ure
After half an hour, John Higbee fired a shot and shouted, “Halt! Do your duty!”39 At the command the escorts turned and shot down the men. The women and children were ridden down by Indians and Mormons painted and dressed as Indians.
Nancy Huff, a member of the Fancher party and four years old at the time, recalled that “[Captain Jack Baker] had me in his arms when he was shot down, and fell dead. I saw my mother shot in the forehead and fall dead. The women and children screamed and clung together. Some of the young women begged the assassins after they had run out on us not to kill them, but they had no mercy on them, clubbing their guns and beating out their brains.”40
Bloodlust took over. Two girls were shot down as they were pulled from the arms of an Indian shaman trying to save them. A militiaman was ordered to kill a wounded woman recovering consciousness. Another Mormon was alleged to hear militiaman William Stewart boast the he took the “d—d Gentile babies by the heels and cracked their skulls over the wagon tires.”41 Others said this crime was committed by George Adair, who in “his drunken revels…would laugh and attempt to imitate the pitiful, crushing sound of the skull bones as they struck the iron bands of the wagon hubs.”42
A Paiute eyewitness told how the children begged for mercy. William Stewart, catching girls by the hair, would throw them to the ground and place his foot upon their bodies and cut their throats. Witnesses claimed John D. Lee shot down men and women, but Lee later claimed he saved the lives of several children. Throats of men, women, and children were cut in accordance with Mormon custom of blood atonement. Some were scalped.43
Mormon elder James Gemmell said that “a few small children were not killed at once, but on consultation it was agreed they could tell too much after they grew up. They were then slain.”44
Survivor Nancy Huff recalled that in the aftermath there were eighteen children still alive. “[O]ne girl, some ten or twelve years old, they said was too big and could tell, so they killed her, leaving seventeen.”45 Huff said John Willis shot the girl “after we were gathered up.” This public execution demonstrated to the surviving children “the consequences of knowing too much,” as Bagley wrote in his history of the massacre.46
There may have been rape, although in Juanita Brooks's history she doubts this, due to Mormonism's condemnation of sex outside of marriage, further reinforced by the Reformation. But in some accounts rape was an implied part of the massacre. An army report claimed Lee took “a beautiful young lady away to a secluded spot. There she implored him for more than life. She, too, was found dead. Her throat had been cut from ear-to-ear.”47
Gemmell heard that two pretty little girls survived the slaughter “and the killers told them that if they would strip naked and dance nude upon the green sward they would spare their lives. The little Girls did so, but a little after were put to death.”48 He also claimed he saw “indignities that were perpetrated upon three persons after which they were shot. But they are too shocking to put on paper.”49 Rape cannot be entirely discounted, but there are many lurid and apocryphal stories about every aspect of early Mormonism.
Sorting truth from fiction in the Mountain Meadows incident is a tricky business. On one hand the only survivors of the Fancher party were children. Yet the tales told by the murderers are disingenuous.
Said Bagley, “The standard accounts skillfully distorted the truth to shift blame to the Indians for the most horrible crimes, particularly the murder of the women and children.”50 But participant Nephi Johnson confessed forty years later that “white men did most of the killing.”51
The final murders were over quickly, perhaps in less than five minutes. Lee reported seeing the corpses of six or seven women, “stripped perfectly naked…all of their clothing…torn from their bodies,” claiming the Indians had taken the clothing from the dead.52 Fifteen months later, however, Paiutes visited by H. L. Halleck while passing through southern Utah claimed the women came from a nearby settlement and stripped off the clothes.53
The corpses of women and children were scattered along the road for some distance. Lee counted ten children ranging from ten to sixteen years old killed close to each other. Higbee looted corpses, picking up a little money and a few watches.54
Later, many of the killers would claim they tried to protect the children, seventeen of whom survived, all young enough that they were not considered a threat to the Mormon version of the massacre. Rebecca Dunlap later said that not one was over six years of age.55
Christopher “Kit” Carson Fancher said two years after the attack, “My father was killed by Indians; when they washed their faces they were white men.”56
The day after the massacre, Mormon officials from Cedar City arrived at the site to see more than a hundred corpses. Colonel William Dame was especially shocked by the carnage, men, women, and children who lay in grotesque positions. Dame said he would have to “publish it,” according to Lee, who stood next to the shaken colonel.57
Remonstrations and denials started flying, with Haight saying to Dame, “You know you counselled it and ordered me to have them used up.”58 Dame looked uneasy and fearful, according to Lee. Haight continued to address Dame: “Nothing has been done except by your orders and it is too late in the day for you to order things done and then go back on it.”59
When Dame recovered he said, “I thought they were nearly all killed by the Indians…. I did not think that there were so many women and children or I would not have had anything to do with it.”60 This infuriated Haight. “You throw the blame of this thing on me and I will be revenged on you, if I have to meet you in hell to get it.”61
Some accounts say bodies were left unburied for some time. Bagley said the Mormon militia sought a haphazard burial, including dumping some bodies in a wash. The weather and the animals soon uncovered the remains.62
After the completion of the grisly business, the Mormon leaders gathered the men, praising God for delivering their enemies. The Indians did it, not the Mormons, and that was part of the oath that every man in the party swore. Stake President Haight led the oath. With right arms raised, the murderers swore to never discuss the killings, even among themselves. It would be treason to the church. And they were not even to tell their wives.63
Three men from the Fancher party had escaped. Two were tracked down almost immediately and shot. A third seems to have made it almost a hundred miles to the Muddy River. He was found by Mormons who first assured him of safety, then shot him.64
The children were dispersed among southern Utah's Mormon families as alleged victims of the Indians. Two years after the massacre a US Army team arrived to take them back to relatives in Arkansas. Despite their youth, many of the children had nightmarish memories of the slaughter of the parents, sisters, and brothers.65
John D. Lee would be the scapegoat for all the Mormons involved in the massacre. He would be executed in 1876 for leading the murders, ostensibly letting Brigham Young and the other Mormon officials off the hook. A small cairn built at the site and in place until about 1930 displayed a plaque that said, in essence, “John D. Lee and 100 Indians Killed a Party of Emigrants Near This Site.” Said historian Will Bagley, “It was a calculated act of terrorism.”66
Salt Lake Tribune editor Jay Shelledy wanted to throw light on the questions that lingered, even after 143 years.
Agreement is the best weapon of defense―and the matter would be buried.
—Franz Kafka
While the Mormon militia buried the dead at Mountain Meadows, the outside world was little concerned with the so-called Utah War and the Mormons’ defiance. The American economy had crashed. Banks collapsed, bringing down traders, companies, and manufacturers. Politics went on the back burner, and President Buchanan heard little in the way of public support for his Utah War.
Nonetheless, two thousand members of the Tenth Regiment left Fort Leavenworth on July 18, 1857, two months before the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston was in command of the Utah War and warned his men t
o expect hardships. Johnston hurried west, learning his troops were green and his supply system was spotty at best. His troops were spread along the Oregon Trail from Missouri to South Pass, and they lacked any cavalry to deal with any attacks in strength. Colonel Johnston's planners devised strategies but worried they couldn't be implemented before winter came to the high plains.1
The Mormons had a defensive plan in place, but its formations were comprised of ragtag irregulars and amateur volunteers led by officers with no formal military training. What they lacked in professionalism they made up for in grit and determination. And the Mormons knew the geography where fighting might take place.2
On September 27, 1857, Commander Daniel Wells of the Nauvoo Legion left Great Salt Lake City, and his raiders burned Fort Bridger, 115 miles to the east in Wyoming, thus depriving the US troops of comfortable winter quarters.3
The ubiquitous Orrin Porter Rockwell sneaked up on an army encampment at South Pass and stampeded the army's mule herd. It turned out to be a fiasco when the mule herd turned back toward the army camp, taking with them the raiders’ horses. Rockwell and his men had dismounted after what they thought was a finished action.4 The Mormons followed the army on foot, and the next night they captured fifteen horses and rode back to the Mormon lines.
The greatest coup by the Mormons came on October 5, 1857, when guerillas led by Lot Smith captured and burned three wagon trains in the Wyoming prairies west of what is now Farson.5 The Mormon military actions, though celebrated in Mormon legend, were little more than flea bites on the US Army.
By mid-October the Nauvoo Legion had only 1,100 men under arms, although they had seven hundred men in reserve in Great Salt Lake City. On a moment's notice, another three thousand could be called upon to rush to the canyons to take defilading positions against the army.6
Johnston marched through winter storms, and after fifteen days his army plodded into the burned-out Fort Bridger. They would spend a cold, wet winter at what they called Camp Scott on Blacks Fork, two miles above Fort Bridger.7
As the year drew to a close, Brigham was ensnared in a web of political and military dilemmas. His continued defiance and Mormon military raids had refocused the enmity of Washington. A replacement governor for Brigham Young, Alfred Cumming, was waiting with Johnston at Blacks Fork, ready to take over the territory as soon as Brigham was captured and deposed. The new chief justice of the territory, Delana Eckels, had indicted Brigham and other Mormon leaders after convening a grand jury.8
Under direction of the president, Colonel Johnston and his officers relished concluding their conquest of Utah and imposing the strictest possible punishment. There was talk of opening a second front, starting on the Pacific Coast.9
The Mormons were now isolated. They received no mail. They had bought out and sent away the gentile merchants. They had lost their political allies in Congress. Only the winter lay between the Mormons and certain disaster.
So much was happening that autumn of 1857.
Within a few days of the massacre at Mountain Meadows, the “authorized fiction,” as historian Will Bagley put it, was cemented into place by Brigham and the church leaders.10
Mormon Indian agent George W. Armstrong waited to report the massacre until after he could confer with John D. Lee. The report Armstrong filed paraphrased Lee something like this: The emigrants poisoned a cow (not a spring, as in previous versions) that caused the death of four natives and made many more ill. The Indians met and decided to take revenge on the wagon train that poisoned the cow. They followed the wagon train to a place called Mountain Meadows where they attacked the camp and after a desperate fight killed fifty-seven men and nine women.11
As Bagley put it, “Thus the first official comment on the subject in federal records blandly passed off the largest act of violence ever to take place on the overland trails—an event that would have triggered immediate retaliation anywhere else in the West—as the fault of the victims.”12
In the Mormon colonies of the Great Basin, the news spread like wildfire. Mormon apostates said the church was behind the massacre, but who listened to them?13
The Los Angeles Star reported the disturbing news of the massacre on October 3, 1857, and confessed “our unwillingness to credit such a wholesale massacre.”14 A week later the Star confirmed it as “the foulest massacre which has ever been perpetrated on this route.”15 The Star blamed it on the Mormons, accepting a general belief that it had been the church's Destroying Angels who had cut throats and shot bullets into skulls. The paper reported that “the blow fell on these emigrants from Arkansas, in retribution of the death of Parley Pratt.”16 Newspapers in Los Angeles and San Francisco called for the annihilation of the Saints but warned that Mormon military power included ten thousand soldiers and fifty thousand Indians.17
Rumor was rife, and blood was high on both sides.
Meanwhile, the US Army continued its approach through Wyoming. One can imagine how threatened Brigham and his Saints must have felt. Brigham used his exhortations to draw the Saints closer together to form a defensive circle against the world. During the October conference of the church, many of the faithful wanted a revelation from Brigham on how they were going to get out of this mess.
“God will fight our battles,” was his response.18 Outside observers believed Brigham and the Saints would bolt from Utah and head for Sonora, Mexico, Central America, or even Russian Alaska.19
Brigham's official report on January 6, 1858, to James Denver, commissioner of Indian Affairs, reads, “Capt. Fancher & Co. fell victim to the Indians’ wrath near Mountain Meadows.”20
“Lamentable as this case truly is,” wrote Brigham, “it is only the natural consequences of that fatal policy which treats the Indians like the wolves or other ferocious beasts.”21 Brigham claimed he had tried for years to persuade emigrants not to follow such a suicidal policy and his people had frequently risked their own safety to help travelers.22
He then submitted his financial statements for payment. “In an audacious fraud, Young billed the government twenty-two hundred dollars for charges from Indian Farmer [John D.] Lee that included items obviously looted from the Fancher party, a bold if ill-considered expression of his contempt for the government.”23
His accounts for the last quarter billed the government nearly $4,000 for goods distributed at Mountain Meadows to the Paiute Indians. “If white men in their boasted enlightenment suffer themselves to act thus unwisely and fiendishly towards the red men, what can they expect?” the prophet asked.24
The imminent war with the federal government seemed insoluble. But Brigham and the Mormons still had one ally in Washington: a gentile lawyer and friend to the Mormons, Thomas L. Kane. President Buchanan at first resisted Kane's offer to go to Utah and see if he couldn't make peace with Brigham. Finally winning the president over, Kane took a ship around the horn and made it to Great Salt Lake City on February 25, 1858. Kane brought with him news that he believed the president, under political pressure and strain of the economic collapse, wanted to end the embarrassing and costly Utah campaign.25
Kane cleverly wrote the president and described a nonexistent division between Mormon warmongers on one hand and Brigham on the other. Ignoring years of fiery rhetoric, Kane described Brigham as a peacemaker who had prevented his rabid war faction from attacking the army. In turn, Kane asked Brigham to join the charade and extend a palm of peace by offering to send provisions to the army. Kane slyly told Brigham that the president had offered an apology and spoke of a possible pardon. He was taking considerable license with an earlier conversation with the president. Brigham didn't much like it, since it would mean that blue coat soldiers would be garrisoned in Utah.26
Kane undertook part II of his diplomacy: an attempt to create a rift between incoming governor Alfred Cumming and the colonel Albert Sidney Johnston. They were together at the encampment on Blacks Fork. Kane's tactics included letters clashing with Johnston at every turn, and letters of conciliation and goodwill towar
d Cumming. Essentially, he was lying to both men. Kane's tactics didn't work; Johnston announced he expected to move his troops into Great Salt Lake City.27
Brigham now publicly announced that he would not fight the army after all. He declared military resistance futile and “not worth a single Mormon life.”28 Instead, the Mormons would retreat from Great Salt Lake City, and, as Brigham had threatened, they would leave Utah towns torched and empty. For Johnston and Cumming there would be nothing left to govern and no way to buy local supplies.
The Mormons began to evacuate Great Salt Lake City on the first of April. Wagons and families headed south, congesting the roads.29
About this time the new governor, Cumming, accepted an invitation from Brigham (via Kane) to visit privately with Brigham in Salt Lake. Cumming figured he could save lives on both sides if he reached some kind of détente with Brigham. Escorted by Kane and some of the Nauvoo Legion, Cumming traveled down Echo Canyon, a site where Mormons had constructed a series of defensive defiles.30
Arriving in Salt Lake, Brigham and his aides sized up Cumming: “corpulent, alcoholic, and of limited intelligence and morals.”31 While Brigham was most cordial, he had instructed his counselors to treat Cumming frostily. Good cop, bad cop.
Brigham invited Cumming to speak to a congregation of Saints on April 25, 1858. He did little better than the inept Brocchus had done seven years earlier.
Cumming promised not to interfere with the Mormon “social habits” and then offered to help anyone leave the territory who was being held against his or her will. He was appealing to what he assumed must be the many unhappy polygamous wives.32
Brigham's wife, Augusta Adams Young, stood up and declared she had “known nothing but liberty since I have been here.”33 In truth and in private, “she had repeatedly demanded freedom from what she considered Young's neglect.”34