Stop the Press

by James W. Ure

  Brigham Young played a clever game, blaming the weak federal governor for not fully investigating the massacre, while continuing to cover it up with deception and outright lies about Mormon involvement.13

  On September 10, 1873, the new owners of the Tribune issued their declaration of a no-holds-barred conflict with the church.14

  To make the debt-ridden Tribune profitable they would have to break the political and economic control of the church in the community.15 The first volley fired in the paper's new offensive against the Mormons involved a Tribune reporter.

  The Mormon city council had become enraged at coverage of its meetings by the Tribune and ejected the reporter and closed their meetings to representatives of the newspaper. The new owners responded in print:

  Several long-time residents have suggested to us that we were pursuing an unwise course. “You never can disarm the hostility of the Mormons…your truckling to their abuses will never aid you. The first moment you assume the right of free speech they will come at you with their old time rancor. You must lend your hand to brush them aside, for you never can live peaceably with them.”16

  The Tribune was the voice of those who wanted federal intervention in Utah, a territory long considered a runaway by most of Congress.17 The Tribune attacked Brigham personally, calling him the “Mormon Profit” and “Fat Briggy.”18 They didn't spare his family, either. Reporting on a speech by Brigham Young's son, the Tribune wrote,

  Young Brig then made his appearance and after sundry coughs, barks, growls and scowls, proceeded to stammer forth how glad he was to meet the brothers and sisters in their new and commodious building. Brig was exceeding troubled in consequence of a belief dominant in his mind that all did not pan out as well as they ought to. He said he was “mighty liberal” himself and his personal friends and acquaintances, he knew contributed largely also. “But did every person do that?” After repeating this query about fifty times he gave his pantaloons a hitch upward, grunted and took his seat.19

  But the new Tribune owners were up against a tough adversary in Brigham Young. He had organized his people, put down schisms, and had led his band through the wilderness. He held his Mormons firm against the mining that was now surrounding them. He had made the desert blossom. Although arrested and charged with murder and sundry other crimes, he thwarted unfriendly judges at every turn, using his own Mormon courts.20

  Still, the church's hold in the territory was slipping. More gentiles were coming into the territory. Dissident members of the church may have been growing in number. The Mormons had fewer friends in Washington. The US Army was firmly ensconced. Indian depredations continued in some of the more isolated villages.

  Brigham, now old, gray, and in failing health, began a charm offensive, softening his language and his rigidity. In his heart he believed that someday the Mormons would return to their Heaven on Earth in Jackson County, Missouri, in accord with the prophesies of Joseph Smith. Realistically, they were in Utah for the foreseeable future.21

  The church was not without its defenders. President Ulysses S. Grant visited Utah Territory in 1875 to see for himself why “Mormon tyranny” had forced him to send tough federal judges and officials to Utah. He conferred with Brigham and observed a welcoming demonstration by hundreds of Mormon children. He turned to his federal appointee, Governor George W. Emery, and muttered, “I have been deceived.”22

  Charles Dickens, visiting a ship of converts to Mormonism about to depart for the United States, called them the “pick and flower” of England.23 This helped spike the mutterings that only the dregs of Europe were converting.

  To blunt attacks equating polygamous wives to slaves in the South, the Mormons had given suffrage to Utah women in 1870. Tribune biographer O. N. Malmquist called it “a public relations victory.”24

  The Tribune was unrelenting, loathing both polygamy and the Mormon tithing rate of 10 percent, claiming it was economically unsound for the community. But it was the divorce suit of Ann Eliza Young against Brigham Young in which the Salt Lake Tribune took its greatest glee.25

  Ann Eliza Webb, age twenty-three and married to James Dee, was granted a divorce at Brigham's behest. The grounds were abusive treatment. Her father, Chauncey Webb, had interceded on the young woman's behalf. After the divorce, the attractive Ann Eliza, who had appeared in a number of theatrical productions (Brigham loved the theater and attended often), moved back into the home of her parents with her two young children. She soon had new suitors. When Brigham, then age sixty-seven, was informed of the interest by one of them, he took Ann Eliza for a walk and announced his own matrimonial intentions.26

  Ann Eliza knew the Young family quite well. She was friendly with some of Brigham's daughters and wives through her visits to the Lion and Beehive Houses. Good enough. She was married to the church president in April 1868.

  Ann Eliza refused to move into the Lion House (where he kept many of his wives), so Brigham built her a cottage nearby. She moved into it with her mother.27

  Brigham spent far more time with his counselors and friends than he did with any of his wives, and Ann Eliza filed for divorce on July 28, 1873, her grounds being that Brigham treated her with emotional, physical, and financial neglect. She asked $1,000 a month alimony, $20,000 in legal fees, and $200,000 from Brigham's estate. Her bill of divorce claimed that her husband had property worth $8 million and an income exceeding $40,000 a month. Brigham countered that he owned less than $600,000 in property and that his income was less than $6,000 per month.28 He claimed that since polygamy was illegal, his marriage had no legal basis and neither did the claims of Ann Eliza. He also saw to her excommunication on October 10, 1874.

  Ann Eliza stepped onto the front pages of the Salt Lake Tribune and into the international limelight. Newspapers all over the country followed the story.

  The divorce stuttered along. A federal judge twice quashed the suit on procedural grounds. Backdoor negotiations were conducted with Ann Eliza by Brigham's brother-in-law, Hiram Clawson. His offer was a divorce and $15,000—and that she leave the territory.29

  She responded in a letter to Clawson in September agreeing to those terms as long as Brigham met them within twenty-four hours. She warned that she had “stronger inducements” to “go before the Eastern public and in person acquaint them with my wrongs.”30

  Apparently Brigham didn't deliver, and the “insubordinate rib of the Prophet,” as the Salt Lake Tribune called her, carried out her threat.31

  Ann Eliza had an offer from P. T. Barnum. However, her manager, James Pond, suggested that James Redpath's Lyceum would be a better choice.32

  With a public endorsement from an anti-Mormon judge in her purse, she trained east, stopping in Laramie, Cheyenne, and Denver. She told audiences about the secret temple endowment ceremony, provided a list of Brigham's wives, and denounced her husband's miserliness.33

  “The things which I suffered opened my eyes to the hollowness of Brigham Young's pretensions to sanctity and character, and unveiled the system of which he was head and I one of many victims,” she told her Denver audience.34 She was an overnight celebrity, filling lecture halls and earning generous fees. The newspapers loved her.

  In the spring of 1874 she arrived in Washington. George Q. Cannon, editor of the Deseret News and a church apostle, informed Brigham that Ann Eliza lobbied at the capitol every day. She mingled with congressmen. Cannon wrote, “When a drunkard and a whore unite, the product should be filthy.”35

  As a result of Ann Eliza's story, newspapers pressed Congress to pass the Poland Act.36 It would curtail the Mormon-controlled probate courts and create a process for the selection of a balance of Mormon and non-Mormon juries. It was passed and set the stage for several court battles, including one over Ann Eliza's divorce.

  Federal judge James McKean, who had long been a thorn in the side of the Mormons, decided Brigham should pay Ann Eliza $500 a month alimony. Brigham refused to pay. McKean held him in contempt and imprisoned him for one night. The churc
h president's nephew said his uncle had a good night's rest.37

  McKean was removed from office by President Grant, the Mormons claiming it was because of the unjust imprisonment of Brigham, while later writers said it was a political disagreement.38 Ann Eliza's case continued under a new federal judge, Jacob Boreman, who ordered Brigham's house arrest until he paid back alimony. Another justice reversed Boreman, and yet a third justice reduced the alimony but ordered seizure of some of Brigham's property for its payment.

  Mule stubborn, Brigham said, “I will spend the remainder of my days in prison before I will pay them one cent.”39

  The case finally went to trial in April 1877. Chief Justice Michael Shaeffer accepted Brigham's argument that his marriage to Ann Eliza was illegal and dismissed her suit.40 “The fact that Young won the case on the basis of the marriage's illegality, however, augured poorly for the future of Mormon polygamy,” wrote historian John G. Turner.41 With the passage of the Poland Act the church had been stripped of much of its influence over the territory's courts. Federal prosecutors readily pushed ahead to prosecute polygamy.

  Ann Eliza would go on to marry a Michigan lumberman and banker. She would divorce him, too. In 1875 Ann Eliza published her autobiography, Wife No. 19. In it she would write about life with Brigham and her escape from Mormonism. She would also write about the Mountain Meadows Massacre.42

  I have been sent down here by the old Boss, Brigham Young.

  —John Doyle Lee

  By the early 1870s more than fifteen years had passed since the Mountain Meadows Massacre and no one had been brought to trial. While accolades were common for whites who killed Indians during this period, and even for whites who killed blacks (the Colfax, Louisiana, slaughter of 1873), it is a tribute to Brigham's hold on his flock, the territory's politics, and his scapegoating that “a reviled religious minority who killed one hundred and twenty white, Protestant emigrants eluded prosecution for nearly two decades,” wrote John G. Turner, Brigham's biographer.1

  Now Mormons were speaking up, asking embarrassing questions.

  Historian Will Bagley believes that perhaps no one did more to expose the lies surrounding Mountain Meadows than Charles W. Wandell, who wrote under the name “Argus.”2 Converted to Mormonism in 1837, he had worked in the historian's office in Nauvoo and had served a church mission to Australia. On his way from California to Utah in 1857, he had heard rumors that white men, not Indians, had done the killing at Mountain Meadows. Rumor was the killers had been led by prominent Mormons. He saw the scattered bones at Mountain Meadows. His faith began eroding.

  Wandell was disfellowshipped from the LDS Church in 1864 for mining. (Disfellowshipment is a temporary suspension of LDS Church membership privileges, while an excommunication expels a person from the church altogether.)3

  After being disfellowshipped, Wandell moved to Nevada where Mormons circulated the story that Wandell had been at Mountain Meadows at the time of the massacre.4 To exonerate himself from the innuendo and gossip, he picked up a pen. Using the name “Argus,” in 1870–71, Wandell wrote a series of articles for the Corinne Reporter, a gentile newspaper coming out of the rough-and-tumble railroad town of Corinne. The town was established at the north end of Great Salt Lake not far from the point where the golden spike was driven to complete the railroad in 1869.

  Wandell's open letters to Brigham Young asked uncomfortable questions about the massacre. He claimed that even while camped in Salt Lake City the Fancher party was weary and footsore, and that Brigham ordered the emigrants “to leave their camp at the Jordan [River] with almost empty wagons.”5 He claimed that Eleanor McLean Pratt, widow of Parley Pratt, identified one or more members of the Fancher party and charged they had been present at Parley's murder as he ran from her irate husband, Hector.6 Wandell blamed Brigham Young's hostility toward outsiders’ wagon trains as the reason that Brigham, as territorial governor, failed to protect them.

  The Arkansans “were ordered to break up their camp and move on and it is said that written instructions were sent on before them, directing the people in the settlements to have nothing to do with them.”7 By the time they got to Mountain Meadows they had only forty days’ rations for the seventy-day journey across the desert of southern Nevada until they could resupply at San Bernardino. Wandell said that as a result they faced certain death.8

  In full dudgeon now, Wandell gave a series of lectures, including one in Salt Lake City in January 1871, to some three hundred people. The faithful Mormons in the audience did not want to believe Brigham could be responsible for such a heinous crime. Wandell refused to relent, although his articles and speeches were “a strange mix of truth and fiction, and some of his stories appear to be based on intentional falsehoods fed to him by Mormon authorities,” according to Bagley.9

  Wandell kept at it. He insistently raised questions that were stonewalled by Brigham, yet he must have touched the guilt that lay in the breasts of many of the massacre participants. The first confession by a participant was about to crack Mormondom.10

  The church was being challenged. How to meet the challenge? It would change its position, again and again. It was called “lying for the Lord.”11 When accused of complicity, Brigham repeatedly promised to support an impartial investigation. Such an investigation never came to be.

  In spite of oaths of silence among the perpetrators, rumors were seeping out. Questions were being asked. It was not outside pressure so much as devout Mormons themselves who had come to question the official story.

  Brigham Young's version said that Paiute Indians had committed a heinous attack on a wagon train, killing a hundred emigrants. That was the story the church was sticking to. As late as 1869, Brigham Young Jr. defended the original church position—it was all done by Paiute Indians. That same year, George Q. Cannon, editor of the Deseret News, who'd known the truth of the matter for at least ten years, repeated the lie in an article in December: the Arkansas company was hostile to the Indians; they poisoned an ox and the spring at Corn Creek, and ten Indians died. The Indians took revenge at Mountain Meadows. Cannon claimed that the Mormon leaders of Cedar City had heard of the massacre but arrived too late to help. Brigham and the Mormon people had always “been ready to give every aid in their power to have this occurrence rigidly examined.”12

  Brigham, equally vociferous in his defense, claimed the church would “sift the matter to its uttermost, and discover the guilty ones.”13

  By1870, most Mormons in the territory knew the truth. One convert wrote his family in Scotland saying not to believe the stories in the official church publications: “[T]here has been & is Lies told in the Millennial Star [a widely read church publication]…we was told in the Millennial Star that the Mountain Meadows Massacre was Committed by Indians but It is known by Everybody here to have been done by Mormons.” Brigham Young, he wrote, termed it “a heartless butchery but harbers [sic] the very Men that did it and there is One if Not More of them Bishops.”14

  Internal dissenters—like the Godbeites at the Salt Lake Tribune—were the ones who were kicking up a fuss; Brigham could hold the outside world at bay with disingenuous denials. He could claim that the federal government was dragging its heels in investigating the massacre.

  More information came to light through the whispers of Mormon men and women of conscience.

  As early as 1868 Mormon settler George Hicks of Harmony, a settlement not far from Mountain Meadows, wrote Brigham that while he once took comfort from Brigham's denunciation of the massacre's perpetrators, he now wondered if the church had sanctioned the murders. Hicks wrote, “Can it be possible that the Church…fellowships a Company of men whose hands have been Stained with the blood of innocent women and children?”15

  Brigham read the letter and replied, furiously suggesting that perhaps Hicks himself had participated “in the horrible deed.” In such case, Brigham said that “if you want a remedy, rope round the neck taken with a jerk would be very salutary.” In this note he told Hicks that the m
assacre “does not concern uninvolved Latter-day Saints.”16 This suggests that Brigham was coming around to a new defensive strategy that would perhaps lay the blame on a few of the brethren.17 Hicks continued to speak out and lost his church membership.18

  The church was feeling the heat of condemnation and began to alter its position in response to the critics questioning the Mormons’ role in the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

  Then came the rumor of the mysterious 1857 letter in which it was alleged that Brigham gave orders for the massacre. Charles Wandell claimed John D. Lee could produce written proof that he had simply executed orders from Brigham. Wandell also claimed Lee had been offered $5,000 by Brigham for the letter. The faithful insisted it was a forgery created by Lee to blackmail the Mormon president.19

  Now the church leadership cannily shifted the public relations spotlight—once shone on the entire church—to renegade southern Utah Mormons. Brigham was distancing himself and the church and focusing on scapegoats in a damage control effort.

  The Salt Lake Tribune noted the policy change in 1875: “For twelve years their voice was one of indignant denial that any Mormons were engaged in the affair…. [T]he Whole Mormon people changed front as suddenly as a well-drilled regiment.”20

  Brigham Young had four scapegoats to point his finger at. First was Isaac Haight, Mormon stake president, territorial legislator, and mayor of Cedar City. Haight had led the planning of the massacre. Then there was John M. Higbee, first counselor to Haight and a major in the Iron County Militia. He was the man who ordered the killing to begin. There was John Dame, the colonel and commander of the Tenth Regiment and bishop of the Parowan Ward. Dame was administratively responsible for the actions of officers and soldiers under his command. Though Dame was under the ecclesiastical direction of Haight, his religious superior was actually his military inferior, thus giving Dame more accountability and responsibility in the matters of the massacre.21