by James W. Ure
Yet many descendants involved in the monument project didn't learn of the discovery until the St. George Spectrum newspaper broke the story Aug. 13, 10 days after the backhoe unearthed the remains. Failing to get answers from state officials whom Loving had told not to talk, many descendants bitterly wondered what was really going on.
Burr Fancher, who had supported the monument reconstruction, was incensed. In an e-mail message circulated to several other descendants, he said Loving was a “lackey in the employ of the Mormon Church and caters to Hinckley's every whim.”
The news also triggered a flood of requests to BYU and the state from people wanting to know if their family roots could be traced to Mountain Meadows. On Aug. 22, the Utah Attorney General's Office informed state antiquities officials: “Generally, next of kin is privileged in advancing the burial rights of the deceased absent a compelling state interest.”
Loving was telling BYU and state officials the families wanted the remains buried Sept. 10 in a private ceremony at Mountain Meadows. But new claims of affiliation complicated matters.
“I went into this blindly and naively assuming the Mountain Meadows Association spoke as a unified voice on behalf of all the descendants and that turned out to be wrong,” Baker says today. “On one hand I had descendants demanding I test for DNA, and on the other I had descendants saying they were going to sue my pants off if I did.”
By now it was clear scientists would not be able to complete even the baseline scientific analysis in time for the scheduled Sept. 10 reburial ceremony. After a tense meeting with Loving, Jones agreed to a compromise. The examination and segregation of the “long bones” would probably be finished by Sept. 10, and those bones would be placed in the ground at the ceremony. The skulls would require more time, but once that analysis was complete, the cranial material would then be reburied.
Loving says he was “forced to accept” the compromise, but immediately launched an end run. He contacted Dixie Leavitt, the governor's father and a former state senator who played a leading role in the 1990 dedication of another monument overlooking the killing field. Loving warned Dixie Leavitt that unless all the bones were reburied on Sept. 10, there would be an uproar during Hinckley's dedication ceremony.
“I don't recall exactly what I said, but ‘disturbance’ sounds like a pretty good word,” Loving says today.
“I received a call today from my Father (sic) who has been rather involved with the people from Arkansas who are planning to hold a burial and memorial service,” Gov. Leavitt wrote in a Sept. 6 e-mail to Wilson Martin, the division's director of cultural preservation and Jones’ boss. “Apparently, the State Archaeologist is insisting that some portion of the remains be held from the burial for study. It is apparently causing a lot of angst amongst the family members.”
Gov. Leavitt responded to The Tribune's questions about his intercession through his press secretary, Vicki Varela. She said the governor “did not feel that it was appropriate for the bones to be dissected and studied in a manner that would prolong the discomfort.”
Leavitt did not speak to any descendants or family members “other than being notified by his father that there was some risk a respectful event may turn into something of a discomfort for the participants,” said Varela.
Asked if Leavitt understood there was a state law requiring such study, Varela answered: “I don't think he was knowledgeable of all the details.” She said as the CEO of the state, the governor believed “we should find a way to create minimal interference.”
Church History Museum director Leonard says it was the decision of the MMA, not the church, to seek an executive exception to the scientific study requirements.
“We were aware of the political implications and the emotional implications of this issue,” says Leonard. “In hindsight, it is fair to say that the governor's directive to bury those remains not completely analyzed was a humane response to conflicting needs.”
Evans drew up a new state antiquities permit for BYU, removing the previous requirement of analysis “in toto” and replacing it with a new requirement that BYU “shall reinter, by Sept. 10, 1999, all human remains into the prepared burial vaults, near the place of discovery.”
Jones, in a memo to the division files Sept. 9, noted his professional objections.
“To rebury the remains at this point would constitute, in the opinion of the Antiquities Section, a violation of professional, scientific and ethical responsibilities,” Jones wrote. “It also might indeed be seen as demonstrating disrespect for the victims, to bury them once again with bones of many individuals mixed and jumbled, as they were originally disrespectfully interred, in a mass grave of murder victims.”
But Evans also included a notation on the new permit that could lead to another re-opening of the massacre grave.
“Since the remains have been interred in a concrete vault, it is possible that further evaluation can take place if all the parties agree, or if a court so orders at some future date,” Evans says today. “This is a matter for the family members and the landowner to address, not one the Division of State History expects to be involved in.”
Early on the morning of Sept. 10, Baker picked up the remains from the U. and drove them to a St. George mortuary. There, the unsegregated bones and skulls of at least 29 people were placed inside four wooden ossuaries and later reburied at the rebuilt monument.
On Sept. 29, Baker sent letters of thanks to Division of History officials explaining how many family members at the memorial service appreciated that all the remains were reinterred. “This certainly represents the positive side of Governor Leavitt's action to intercede on the reburial issue,” he wrote. At the same time, Baker said he was professionally conflicted by the precedent set with the political decisions.
“The state and its people benefited from this absolutely unique opportunity to, in some small way, try and make amends for the tragic events that transpired there so long ago,” Baker wrote in a letter to Jones. “That certainly counts for something. I just hope that some of the other consequences we were all concerned about in connection with the action to rebury do not come back to cause us grief in the future.” Again, those would prove fateful words.
Voices of the Dead—Monday, March 13, 2000.2
By Christopher Smith
© 2000, the Salt Lake Tribune, with permission
University of Utah forensic anthropologist Shannon Novak is piecing together the bones from the Mountain Meadows excavation.
“The truth ends up in sharper focus” in the tug-of-war between the LDS Church, the anthropologists, surviving families of the dead Fancher party and the public as represented by The Tribune.
There is little widespread public knowledge of a crime of civil terrorism that pales in modern U.S. history only to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The slaughter of an estimated 120 white civilians by a cabal of Mormon zealots and Indians is never mentioned in school history textbooks and is not even listed as a “point of interest” on Utah's official highway map. Until recent additions, the interpretive signs at Mountain Meadows were so vague as to how the Arkansas emigrants died that they became a source of national ridicule.
The Tribune and archeologists believe the full truth has never been told. New findings come to light:
For instance, written accounts generally claim the women and older children were beaten or bludgeoned to death by Indians using crude weapons, while Mormon militiamen killed adult males by shooting them in the back of the head. However, Novak's partial reconstruction of approximately 20 different skulls of Mountain Meadows victims show:
—At least five adults had gunshot exit wounds in the posterior area of the cranium—a clear indication some were shot while facing their killers. One victim's skull displays a close-range bullet entrance wound to the forehead;
—Women also were shot in the head at close range. A palate of a female victim exhibits possible evidence of gunshot trauma to the face, based on a preliminary examination of b
roken teeth;
—At least one youngster, believed to be about 10 to 12 years old, was killed by a gunshot to the top of the head.
Other findings by Novak from the commingled partial remains of at least 29 individuals—a count based on the number of right femurs in the hundreds of pieces of bone recovered from the gravesite—back up the historical record;
—Five skulls with gunshot entrance wounds in the back of the cranium have no “beveling,” or flaking of bone, on the exterior of the skull. This indicates the victims were executed with the gun barrel pointing directly into the head, not at an angle, and at very close range;
—Two young adults and three children—one believed to be about 3 years old judging by tooth development—were killed by blunt-force trauma to the head. Although written records recount that children under the age of 8 were spared, historians believe some babes-in-arms were murdered along with their mothers;
—Virtually all of the “post-cranial” (from the head down) bones displayed extensive carnivore damage, confirming written accounts that bodies were left on the killing field to be gnawed by wolves and coyotes.
Assisted by graduate student Derinna Kopp and other U. Department of Anthropology volunteers, Novak's team took photographs, made measurements, wrote notes and drew diagrams of the bones, all part of the standard data collection required by law.
“I treated this as if it were a recent homicide, conducting the analysis scientifically but with great respect,” says Novak. “I'm always extremely conservative in my conclusions. I will only present what I can verify in a court of law.”
Beyond the cause of death, Novak was able to discern something about the constitution of the emigrants.
“These were big, strong, robust men, very heavy boned,” she says. “We found tobacco staining on teeth, which is helpful in indicating males, and lots of cavities, indicating they had a diet heavy on carbohydrates.”
There came a point in the reconstruction where the disparate pieces of bones slowly began to morph into individuals, each with distinct characteristics. One victim had broken an arm and clavicle that had healed improperly. One male had likely been in a brawl that left a healed blunt wound on the back of his head. One youngster's remains all had a distinctive reddish tint; as scientists inventoried the bones they would note another part of “red boy.”
“We were at the stage when we were distinguishing them as people, where you were getting to know each one,” says Novak. “We could have started to match people up. You would never have gotten complete individuals, but given a little more time, we could have done a lot more.”
But time was up. Novak had concentrated her initial work on the “long bones,” as part of an agreement reached between the Division of History, Mountain Meadows Association and Brigham Young University. Those post-cranial remains would be re-interred during a Sept. 10 memorial. Because the reconstruction of the skulls would not be finished by then, the agreement allowed Novak until spring—about six months—to do the studies required by state law.
It was late on Sept. 8 that she learned that Division of History Director Max Evans had overruled Jones and re-wrote BYU's antiquities permit, changing the standard requirement for analysis “in toto” to require reburial of all remains on Sept. 10. When BYU asked to pick up the cranial bones on Sept. 9, Novak deferred, saying she had until the next day according to the amended permit.
“It was the only stand I could make because they had changed the rules in the middle of the process with no notice whatsoever,” she says. “We worked through the night to get as much done as we could. This data had to be gathered.”
BYU archaeologist Shane Baker picked up the remains from Novak early on the morning of Sept. 10, drove them to a St. George mortuary where they were placed in four small wooden ossuaries and then reburied later that day at the newly finished monument.
The dead would say no more. Their remains should never have been queried in the first place, says Weber State historian Sessions.
“This idea of Shannon Novak needing six months to mess around with the cranial stuff, well, I know something about that science and that's a fraud,” says the Mountain Meadows Association president, who adds he consulted his WSU colleagues about the time needed for such studies. “I really disagree with anyone who says we should have kept the bones out of the ground longer to determine what happened at Mountain Meadows. The documentary evidence is overwhelming. Whether or not little kids were shot in the head or mashed with rocks makes no difference. They were killed.”
But other historians, searching for more information about an event cloaked in secrecy for generations, see value in the empirical evidence that forensic anthropology can offer. On Feb. 15, BYU's Baker made an informal presentation of his own photographs and research on the Mountain Meadows remains to the Westerners, an exclusive group of professional and amateur historians who meet monthly. As Baker flashed color slides of the bones on the screen, the men were visibly moved.
“I've dealt with this awful tale on a daily basis for five years, but I found seeing the photos of the remains of the victims profoundly disturbing,” says Will Bagley, whose forthcoming book on the massacre, Blood of the Prophets [Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows], won the Utah Arts Council publication prize. “It drove home the horror.”
But would it convince those who still believe the killing was done solely by Indians, or was part of an anti-Mormon conspiracy or the work of a single, renegade apostate?
“My own father believed John D. Lee was the one behind it all and if you think you were going to convince him any differently with empirical proof, forget it,” says David Bigler, author of Forgotten Kingdom and former member of the Utah Board of State History. “People want to have the truth, they want it with a capital T and they don't like to have people upset that truth. True believers don't want to think the truth has changed.”
And according to the leader of the modern Mormon church, the truth has already been told about Mountain Meadows.
The Dilemma of Blame—Tuesday, March 13, 20003
BY Christopher Smith
Tribune reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack contributed to this story.
© 2000, the Salt Lake Tribune, with permission
MOUNTAIN MEADOWS—As LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley delivered words of reconciliation at the Sept. 11, 1999, dedication of a rebuilt monument to emigrants slaughtered by Mormon militiamen and their Indian allies 142 years earlier, he added a legal disclaimer.
“That which we have done here must never be construed as an acknowledgment of the part of the church of any complicity in the occurrences of that fateful day,” Hinckley said. The line was inserted into his speech on the advice of attorneys for the Corporation of the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The statement, seemingly out of sync with Hinckley's desire to bring healing to nearly one hundred fifty years of bitterness, caused some in attendance to wonder if any progress had really been made at all. If the Mormon Church leadership of 1857 was not at least partially to blame for the one hundred twenty people slain at Mountain Meadows, then whom should history hold responsible?
“Well, I would place blame on the local people,” Hinckley told The Salt Lake Tribune in a subsequent interview Feb. 23. “I've never thought for one minute—and I've read the history of that tragic episode—that Brigham Young had anything to do with it. It was a local decision and it was tragic. We can't understand it in this time.”
For families of the slain emigrants and descendants of LDS pioneer John D. Lee—the one participant convicted and executed for the crime—Hinckley's delineation of the church's position on Mountain Meadows compounded many of the misgivings they had about the entire chain of events during the summer.
First, a church contractor's backhoe accidentally exhumed the bones of at least 29 victims Aug. 3 while digging at the grave, even though the church had pledged not to disturb the ground. That was followed by a failed attem
pt at secrecy, leading to wild speculation and a schism among descendants.
There was a heated debate over whether a state law requiring forensic analysis of the bones should be obeyed, with Gov. Mike Leavitt finally intervening to prematurely terminate the study and ensure that all bones be reburied before the dedication. New forensic anthropology studies done on the bones before reinterment provided the first graphic evidence of the brutality, and a new, unwanted reminder of the horror.
Now, those who had hoped to hear some sort of apology on behalf of the modern Mormon Church from the man who had done more than any of his predecessors to salve the wounds, were left feeling they had come up short.
“What we've felt would put this resentment to rest would be an official apology from the church,” says Scott Fancher of the Mountain Meadows Monument Foundation in Arkansas, a group of direct descendants of the victims. “Not an admission of guilt, but an acknowledgement of neglect and of intentional obscuring of the truth.”
Others closely involved in Hinckley's participation in the new monument project believe the LDS Church went as far as it's ever going to go in addressing the uncomfortable details of the massacre.
“You're not going to get an apology for several reasons, one of which is that as soon as you say you're sorry, here come the wrongful-death lawsuits,” says Gene Sessions, president of the Mountain Meadows Association, the organization that partnered with Hinckley on the project.
“If President Hinckley ever contemplated he was going to open this can of worms he never would have bothered to do this, because it asks embarrassing questions. It raises the old question of whether Brigham Young ordered the massacre and whether Mormons do terrible things because they think their leaders want them to do terrible things.”
Noted Mormon writer Levi Peterson has tried to explain the difficulty that Mormons and their church face in confronting the atrocity of Mountain Meadows.
“If good Mormons committed the massacre, if prayerful leaders ordered it, if apostles and a prophet knew about it and later sacrificed John D. Lee, then the sainthood of even the modern church seems tainted,” he has written. “Where is the moral superiority of Mormonism, where is the assurance that God has made Mormons his new chosen people?”