Stop the Press

by James W. Ure

  Will Bagley provided me with excellent sources and suggestions regarding the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and his book, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows, stands with Juanita Brooks's book, The Mountain Meadows Massacre, as the definitive works about that terrible event.

  The late John W. “Jack” Gallivan was generous with his time when I interviewed him in 2012, and provided me with vital information that would later become useful.

  Michael D. “Mickey” Gallivan went above and beyond the call in providing me with documents from his father and from other sources that revealed the machinations of the “other side” of this story. He has my deepest gratitude.

  Thomas Kearns McCarthey Jr. and Philip George McCarthey spoke freely with me, providing details of the procedure of the court cases in which they lost the Salt Lake Tribune. Philip has not picked up a copy of the Tribune since the family lost the paper in 2002.

  Mike Korologos and I go back to days shared at the Tribune. His historical interface with Glen Snarr was helpful in reconstructing what happened in the 1990s as the LDS Church was maneuvering to outflank the Tribune.

  Patty Henetz, you were a mighty force in keeping me on track and providing me with the benefit of your experience as a reporter covering the church for the Associated Press.

  Terry Orme, you are one of the heroes of this book. Few understand how much difficulty you faced as editor and publisher during the 2013–2016 period when the Tribune's future hung on a thread. Thank you also for your help and insights as to where the Tribune might go in the future.

  I also want to thank Eva Finkemeier for your research help and support for this project.

  James E. “Jay” Shelledy, thank you for your remembrances and insights on the relationships of many of the characters in this book. Your directness and willingness to provide certain details were refreshing.

  Ed Berkovitch, thank you for your thoughts on the philosophy that guides the leadership of the LDS Church. You are a scholar and a gentleman.

  Peggy Fletcher Stack, much of your incisive reporting influenced this book, as the endnotes show. You are a community treasure. It's a balancing act, and you perform very well.

  Pat Bagley, you've given me endless hours of pleasure with your cartoons. My wish for next year: a Pulitzer. You deserve it.

  To the late Dominic Welch, I owe this man so much for his generous thoughts and memories. His passion was still at work in his well-documented review of the events of the period 1997–2002, which was most helpful.

  Jim Woolf, thanks for your recollections. You gave the Tribune and its readers so much during your years at the newspaper and continue to provide me not only with information but also with your friendship and your editor's eye.

  Tom Harvey, Mike Carter, Paul Rolly, Carol Sisco, Dick Rosetta, Dave Jonsson, Lynn Johnson, Verdo Thomas, Craig Hansell, Shirley Jones, Connie White, Francine Giani, Ann Poore, and John Keahy: all of you made contributions to this work, and I appreciate your time and energy.

  Thanks to John Netto, who gave me sage advice and supported this work from the beginning.

  To the Utah Historical Society, many thanks for your work on my behalf.

  I owe much to my publisher, Prometheus Books. I especially want to thank Steven L. Mitchell, Hanna Etu, Jeffrey Curry, and Liz Mills.

  Special thanks for all their hard work go to Janet Rosen and Sheree Bykofsky of Sheree Bykofsky and Associates, Inc.

  To my family, my long-time friends, and cheering section, I extend my gratitude and thanks for your support.

  Many of my sources wished to remain anonymous, for obvious reasons. They provided invaluable perspective and information. You know who you are, and I have deep appreciation for your willingness to dig at the truth.

  To those I've missed in these acknowledgments, I apologize. There were so many helpful people. You cared about an institution that hopefully will continue to be “the balance wheel of Utah.”

  To better examine what the Salt Lake Tribune had written about the excavation of the Mountain Meadows Massacre site, and the details, the three full articles from March 2000 are provided below.

  BONES OF CONTENTION

  Unearthing Mountain Meadows Secrets: Backhoe at a

  S. Utah killing field rips open 142-year-old wound1

  By Christopher Smith

  Editor's Note: Mountain Meadows, southwest of Cedar City, is the site of the worst slaughter of white civilians in the history of the frontier West. Last summer, LDS Church officials descendants of the victims sought to finally close the 142-year-old wound. Together they were to build and dedicate a new monument to the 120 Arkansas emigrants who perished in unimaginable violence at the hands of Mormon settlers and Indian accomplices.

  The new memorial stands, but the wound still festers. In constructing the monument, workers uncovered remains of 29 victims, a vivid and horrific reminder of that September day in 1857. The story of those bones, and what happened to them last summer, adds another excruciating chapter to the history of a crime that many of Utah's pioneer descendants can neither confront nor explain.

  MOUNTAIN MEADOWS—After burying dozens of men, women and children murdered in a bizarre frontier conspiracy, an Army major ordered his soldiers to erect a rockpile and a carved wooden cross swearing vengeance on the perpetrators. Brevet Maj. James H. Carleton then wrote to Congress: “Perhaps the future may be judged by the past.”

  They were fated words. When a backhoe operator last summer accidentally dug up the bones buried here in 1859 by Carleton's troops, it set into motion a series of cover-ups, accusations and recriminations that continue today. It also caused a good-faith effort by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—to reconcile one of the ugliest chapters of U.S. history—to backfire.

  The Aug. 3, 1999, excavation of the remains of at least 29 of the 120 emigrants slaughtered in the Mountain Meadows massacre eventually prompted Gov. Mike Leavitt to intercede. He encouraged state officials to quickly rebury the remains, even though the basic scientific analysis required by state law was unfinished. “It would be unfortunate if this sad moment in our state's history, and the rather good-spirited attempt to put it behind us, was highlighted by controversy,” Leavitt wrote in an e-mail message to state antiquities officials shortly before LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley presided over a ceremony at Mountain Meadows.

  The widely publicized occasion was to dedicate a newly rebuilt rock cairn monument, crafted with the same stones Carleton's troops had piled defiantly in 1859. They also were the same rocks that were torn down from the grave site by one of Leavitt's own ancestors. Dudley Leavitt, himself a participant in the Sept. 11, 1857, murders, visited the cairn with LDS prophet Brigham Young a year after Carleton's troops left.

  After ridiculing the pledge of vengeance, Young lifted his right arm toward the rock pile and “in five minutes there wasn't one stone left upon another,” Dudley Leavitt would recall. “He didn't have to tell us what he wanted done. We understood.”

  The governor's intercession was one of many dramas played out last summer, all serving to underscore Mountain Meadows’ place as the Bermuda Triangle of Utah's historical and theological landscape. The end result may be another sad chapter in the massacre's legacy of bitterness, denial and suspicion.

  In retracing the latest episode, The Salt Lake Tribune conducted numerous interviews and researched documents obtained under Utah's Government Records Access and Management Act to find:

  —Co-sponsors of the monument project—the LDS Church and the Mountain Meadows Association—initially hoped to cover up the excavation, with the MMA demanding any documentation be “kept out of public view permanently.” The president of the association, Ron Loving, wrote in an Aug. 9 e-mail to the director of the Utah Division of History: “The families [descended from victims] and the LDS church will work out what we want to become public knowledge on this accidental finding.”

  —The vain effort to hide the truth gave rise t
o wild conspiracy theories among some descendants. They suspected Loving was working with the LDS Church to rewrite history by having church-owned Brigham Young University determine the exhumed victims died of disease, not murder. “I call it ‘sanitizing’ a foul deed,” Burr Fancher wrote to other descendants Aug. 24.

  —Utah Division of History Director Max Evans, over the objections of state Archaeologist Kevin Jones, personally rewrote BYU's state archaeological permit to require immediate reburial of the bones after receiving the governor's e-mail. Jones raised numerous questions over the political power play, including a concern it was “ethnocentric and racist” to rebury the bones of white emigrants without basic scientific study when similar American Indian remains are routinely subjected to such analysis before repatriation.

  —News of the excavation triggered written requests to BYU from people around the nation, seeking to determine if their ancestors were among the recovered victims. Some offered to submit to DNA testing and desired to reinter the remains in family burial plots outside of Utah. Although the Utah Attorney General's Office had advised state officials that “any and all lineal descendants of the Mountain Meadows massacre would appear to have a voice in determining the disposition of the bodies,” there is little documented evidence any of the people seeking information about family members were consulted.

  —Resentment over the discovery and of the remains has caused a schism in the descendant families, with at least one organized group asking why civil or criminal penalties were not brought against the LDS Church or the MMA for desecrating the grave. There also is confusion over who is now in charge of the MMA. While new president Gene Sessions of Weber State University says Loving was voted out of office in November in the wake of the controversy, Loving says he's still the boss: “I wasn't voted out of a damn thing. I was moved up. It was my methods and my way of doing business that got that monument done.”

  Other descendants have enlisted the support of Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in calling for federal stewardship of the emigrant mass graves scattered in Mountain Meadows, instead of having the Mormon Church own the land.

  “We're doubtful with the church in control this will ever be completely put to rest,” says Scott Fancher, president of the Mountain Meadows Monument Foundation in Arkansas. “There's a sense among some of our members it's like having Lee Harvey Oswald in charge of JFK's tomb.”

  Glen M. Leonard, director of the Museum of Church History and Art and Hinckley's personal representative in the process, said the church endeavored with the MMA to gather comment from all descendants through the association's Web page and newsletter.

  “While this was not a perfect method for reaching all members of all branches of all families, it was a practical means for the church and the association to inform most of them with interest in the grave site restoration project,” Leonard says. “We are sorry if some descendants of the emigrant families feel left out.”

  Marian Jacklin, an archaeologist with the Dixie National Forest in Cedar City who has spent years trying to navigate the emotional minefield of Mountain Meadows, says the events of last summer did not yield the desired consequences.

  “This whole episode didn't answer anything,” she says. “It just asked more questions.”

  And the question that burns in the minds of many angry descendants is: Why was a backhoe digging at a known, well-marked grave site?

  “What we understood in every correspondence, and we thought we had made perfectly clear to the church, was that under no circumstances would the remains be disturbed,” says Scott Fancher, whose organization is considering legal action over the excavation. “Never in my wildest imagination did we expect them to set a backhoe on this grave and start digging.”

  Hinckley had personally launched the effort to stabilize the decaying rock cairn—rebuilt at least 11 times since Carleton's troops placed the stones—after a visit to the site in October 1998. The 2.5 acres was deeded to the church in the 1970s after the landowner reportedly tried in vain to find descendants in Arkansas to accept the donation of land.

  Partnering with the MMA—a group of emigrant descendants, historians and interested southwestern Utah residents—LDS Church architects designed a monument with a thigh-high stone wall around the old cairn, perched on a steep stream bank.

  There are conflicting accounts of whether descendants understood the wall would require digging a trench around the grave for a concrete footing. Some MMA members, including the contractor, interpreted the “do not disturb” edict to cover the pre-construction archaeological investigation. Once the archaeologists said all clear, crews could dig the footing, they believed.

  But Scott Fancher says his branch of the family understood the wall would be “surface-mounted,” in keeping with the church's pledge not to disturb the burial ground in any way.

  Before beginning, the LDS Church had hired BYU's Office of Public Archaeology to conduct a non-invasive archaeological survey. Using ground-penetrating radar, aerial photos, metal detectors and hundreds of soil-sample tests to search for signs of bones or artifacts, a team of professionals scoured the area.

  “The archaeological evidence was 100 percent negative,” says Shane Baker, the BYU staff archaeologist who directed the study. “I went to our client, the church, and said either this is not the spot or every last shred of evidence has been erased.”

  There was speculation that bones buried beneath the cairn had been exposed to the elements and deteriorated. Or, they had been washed down the ravine, the cairn was in the wrong place or the cairn was directly on top of the bones.

  But today, Baker admits the archaeological examination at the location where the bones were eventually disturbed was not as complete as it was in other areas. The narrow spot between the cairn and streambank was not probed with radar because the trailer-like unit could not be towed near the precarious edge. Instead, Baker took soil core samples, using a bucket auger, which strained against the impacted earth.

  He again found nothing. Witnesses would later draw an analogy to a magician thrusting swords into a box containing an assistant and somehow missing the mark.

  “Shane came within inches of the remains and it is amazing that no evidence was determined,” says Kent Bylund of St. George, an association board member and adjacent Mountain Meadows landowner who served as project contractor. “I sincerely believe everything was done to ensure the area to be excavated was core sampled and thoroughly examined before excavation was permitted.”

  BYU's Baker blames the accidental discovery of bones on the restrictions placed on the investigation by the LDS Church.

  “We were not allowed to do the kind of testing we would do normally, and I was concerned the whole time we were going to hit bone,” he says. “The very fact they wouldn't let me dig with a shovel and a trowel is why a backhoe found those bones.”

  It was on the second or third scoop that more than 30 pounds of human skeletal remains clattered out of the backhoe bucket as it dug the footing trench on Aug. 3. Bylund looked on in disbelief, his heart in his throat.

  His first inclination was to put the remains back in the ground and swear the backhoe operator to secrecy. But it was impossible to unring the bell.

  “Once they were uncovered, for this new monument to go in, you really had no choice but to remove them because they were dead center in the middle of the new wall,” Baker says.

  As Baker delicately removed hundreds of pieces of bone from the exposed trench, Loving and Leonard debated what to do and who to tell.

  “My plan was to have them reburied within 48 hours of their discovery,” says Loving. The Arizona man, whose ancestor was a brother of a massacre victim, took charge, he says, “because the LDS Church considered me as the spokesman for the families in my capacity as president of the Mountain Meadows Association.”

  But other descendants more directly related to the victims are outraged the church gave Loving such authority.

  “It's offensive to a lot of people
to hear Mr. Loving say this is what the family thinks because we put the church on notice repeatedly that Mr. Loving does not speak for the family and never has,” says Scott Fancher. “We are very disappointed we did not have a voice in how the remains were treated after they were disturbed.”

  Church officials and BYU put Loving in charge and agreed with his plan to rebury within 48 hours. But that plan was foiled on Aug. 5 when Jones, the state archaeologist, informed them Utah law required a basic scientific analysis when human remains are discovered on private property. Failure to comply was a felony.

  BYU needed a state permit to legally remove the remains. And, by law, such permits require “the reporting of archaeological information at current standards of scientific rigor.”

  Although LDS officials knew the descendants would be uncomfortable with the required analysis, they agreed it was necessary, says Leonard.

  Jones issued BYU's permit Aug. 6, requiring scientists to determine as best possible, age, sex, race, stature, health condition, cause of death and, because the remains were commingled, to segregate the largest bones and skulls of each individual for proper reburial.

  Baker immediately began sorting bones with an assistant in his St. George hotel room, then transferred the remains to BYU's Provo lab and to the University of Utah's forensic anthropology lab in Salt Lake City, which BYU had subcontracted to do the required “osteological” analysis.

  Throughout, Loving demanded not a word be said to anyone about the discovery. On Aug. 9, he threatened to sue the state Division of History if Evans did not guarantee in writing the state would adhere to several conditions of secrecy, including “none of the contents of the report, in part or in whole, is released to anyone.”

  Baker of BYU maintains the secrecy was to allow time to notify family members who did not know of the accidental discovery. “To the credit of the church, they always told me they wanted everything to be open and aboveboard,” he says.