Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History

by Andrew Carroll

  WHEN THE MASSACHUSETTS Bay Colony hanged Mary Dyer and three other Quakers on Boston Common, the executions—albeit indefensible—were not part of a larger campaign to actively hunt down and kill Quakers wherever they lived. Only once in American history have members of a particular faith been targeted for annihilation, specifically because of their religion, by a government directive. “The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the state if necessary for the public peace—their outrages are beyond all description,” Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs proclaimed on October 27, 1838.

  Two days before Governor Boggs issued his decree, formally known as Executive Order 44, Missouri troops had skirmished with Mormon forces in Ray County, leaving three Mormons and one Missouri soldier dead. This was one Missouri soldier too many for Governor Boggs, and he declared open season on all Mormons. Taking his words to heart, the Livingston County Militia, led by Sheriff Thomas Jennings in nearby Caldwell County, descended on the Mormon settlement in northwestern Missouri that Jacob Haun had established three years earlier. Anti-Mormon sentiment had been building throughout the United States since 1830, when a twenty-four-year-old self-educated New Yorker named Joseph Smith Jr. published the Book of Mormon and laid the groundwork for what would become, officially, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (With more than fourteen million members today, Mormonism is now the largest American-born religion in the world. Early Mormons were especially hated and persecuted for engaging in “plural marriages,” and the LDS Church banned polygamy among its followers in 1890.)

  Since Haun’s Mill wasn’t in my trusty road atlas, I phoned the Caldwell County sheriff’s office for information on how to find the place, and an officer kindly gave me detailed directions and also cautioned me that the dirt roads leading out to the remote spot can be impassable following a heavy rain and dicey even after a light one. Storm showers drenched the region two days ago, but fortunately, as I drive up 71 North for about thirty miles from St. Joseph and turn onto a series of increasingly narrow and rough roads, I’m encountering only a few shallow, muddy ditches along the way.

  Finally I spy a thin vertical post that says HAUN’S MILL located just outside a large field. After parking, I walk through the thick unmowed grass and head toward a wooded area where many of the villagers had lived and which, according to more recent visitors, is supposedly haunted. It’s hard to be spooked in broad daylight, but I do find myself flinching when I pass a small puddle and half a dozen tiny frogs jump up unexpectedly and plop back into the dark water.

  Before coming here, I pored over numerous eyewitness testimonies, personal journals, affidavits, family histories, and other firsthand recollections describing what happened when Sheriff Jennings and his men invaded Haun’s Mill. Although there are discrepancies in these accounts (some villagers claim that more than two hundred Missouri militia rode into Haun’s Mill, while others put the number closer to three hundred), overall they are remarkably consistent.

  What many survivors emphasized from the start was how pleasantly warm and serene October 30, 1838, had been—up until the crack of rifle shots and the rumble of galloping horses broke the tranquility. “While I was busily engaged getting supper, and two of the brethren, Mr. Rial Ames (my husband’s brother) and Hyram Abbot, were sitting just outside the door, one cutting the other’s hair,” wrote Olive Ames in her journal (the last name is spelled Eames in other records), “they rose from the chair and remarked, ‘I see some of the brethren coming from Far West,’ when suddenly the party began firing. Then said Mr. Ames, ‘It’s the mob right on us.’ ” She continued:

  Men, women, and poor little children [began] running in every direction, not knowing what minute their lives would be taken. The mob continued firing, shooting at anyone they could see amidst the smoke. I rushed out of the house, crying, “Where are my children?” They gathered around me, then, with my babe, but one month old, in my arms, I started to hide, not knowing where to go or what to do, so frightened was I, but anxious to conceal my little ones somewhere. I soon found myself and little ones hidden away down under the bluff in a little nook by the creek.…

  Isaac Laney crossed the creek above me. The mob saw him and began firing. I saw him fall, then rise and climb the hill. He escaped death, but carried a great many wounds.

  “I made my escape by flight being shot four times through the body and once across each arm,” Laney recalled. One bullet struck his right hip. “It hit the bone just above the joint[,] glanced out through the skin and rolled down my drawer leg in to my boot.” Bloody and almost unconscious, he could hear the militia picking off defenseless villagers. “I listened at them shooting the wounded which could not escape. I was informed that one of these murderers followed old Father McBride in his retreat and cut him down with an old scythe.”

  Thomas McBride was the local justice of the peace, and his death is highlighted in almost every narrative. James McBride, in particular, vividly recalled how his father was killed: “He had been shot with his own gun, after having given it into the mobs possession. Was cut down and badly disfigured with a corn cutter, and left lying in the creek.… One of his ears was almost cut from his head—deep gashes were cut in his shoulders; and some of his fingers cut till they would almost drop from his hand.”

  Amanda Smith, a young mother who was only passing through Haun’s Mill with her family when they were caught up in the slaughter, elaborated in an affidavit how McBride’s fingers came to be severed: “His hands had been split down when he raised them in supplication for mercy.”

  Smith lost her husband at Haun’s Mill, and the fate of her children is another story that, like McBride’s, seared itself into the memories of survivors. No one was more traumatized by what happened to them than Smith herself, and in her affidavit she wrote:

  [After the shooting began] I took my little girls (my boys I could not find) and started for the woods. The mob encircled us on all sides except towards the brook. I ran down the bank, across the mill pond on a plank, up the hill into the bushes. The bullets whistled around us all the way like hail, and cut down the bushes on all sides of us. One girl (Mary Steadwell) was wounded by my side and fell over a log; her clothes hung across the log, and they shot at them expecting that they were hitting her, and our people afterwards cut out of that log twenty bullets.…

  I then came down to view the awful sight. Oh Horrible! What a sight! My husband and one son (Sardius), ten years old, lay lifeless on the ground, and another son (Alma) badly wounded, seven years old.

  In a reminiscence for family members, Smith added:

  Sardius and Alma had crawled under the bellows in the blacksmith’s shop.… Alma’s hip was shot away while thus hiding. Sardius was discovered after the massacre by the monsters who came in to despoil the bodies. In cold blood, one Glaze, of Carroll County, presented a rifle near the head of Sardius and literally blew off the upper part of it.

  Out of approximately eighty Haun’s Mill residents, eighteen men and boys were killed, and the number almost certainly would have been higher had the remaining villagers not fled deep into the woods. The militia simply ran out of people to shoot.

  Most of the survivors moved to Illinois, followed by Joseph Smith, who’d been arrested by Missouri authorities but then “broke free” from custody while being transferred from one district court to another. Smith was purportedly allowed to escape in order to spare Missouri a prolonged and disruptive trial.

  Fighting between Mormons and state militias throughout the West escalated into a kind of eye-for-an-eye vicious cycle, culminating in the Utah War of 1857–58 and one of America’s worst massacres, where the hunted became the hunters.

  In early September 1857, an estimated 150 emigrants from Arkansas who were traveling by wagon train through Mountain Meadows in the Utah Territory found themselves pinned down for days by local Mormon militia originally disguised as Paiute Indians. In exchange for safe passage out of the valley, the Arkansans agreed to give
up their weapons and leave the territory immediately, never to return. Considering that they hadn’t wanted to stay in the first place, but only to rest for a few days en route to California, they readily consented.

  On September 11, as the Arkansans were being escorted out of the valley by militia members, the commanding officers yelled to their men, “Do your duty!” Hearing the prearranged signal, the Mormons suddenly raised their rifles and began shooting the unarmed Arkansans where they stood, sparing only eighteen infants and children considered too young to be witnesses. (After leaving the parents’ bodies to rot, the Mormons took the children home to raise as their own. When the Arkansans’ remains were found two years later by U.S. Army investigators, most of the children were located and returned to relatives.) None of the Mormon militia members were punished except Colonel John Lee, who was excommunicated from the church, tried by an all-Mormon jury, and sentenced to death. Under Utah territorial law, Lee could choose whether he wanted to be hanged, beheaded, or shot, and he chose the last. Authorities brought him back to Mountain Meadows, where he was placed before a firing squad and executed.

  According to my contact at the Caldwell County sheriff’s office, a historical marker once stood at Haun’s Mill describing in detail what had occurred here, but it was repeatedly defaced and then stolen. And that one was the replacement for another sign that had also been vandalized. “Ancestors of the militiamen still live around there,” I was told. “It’s not a proud moment in local history, and the signs kept getting torn down.”

  Which is a pity because remembering places like Haun’s Mill and Mountain Meadows isn’t about casting blame or embarrassing a single community. Rather, these tributes honor the dead and, more generally, serve as reminders of how violence begets violence and that otherwise decent and reasonable men (I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt) can be stirred into a barbaric frenzy.

  Memorializing “shameful” sites can also allow for other, more positive stories to be told. On September 11, 1999, a monument was erected at Mountain Meadows that includes this inscription:

  Built by and maintained by

  The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

  out of respect for those who died and

  were buried here and in the surrounding area

  following the massacre of 1857.

  On the day the memorial was dedicated, representatives from the Mormon Church met with descendants of the murdered Arkansans and demonstrated, through words of reconciliation and their very presence together, a powerful counterpoint to what had happened 142 years earlier.

  Although no similar ceremony has taken place at Haun’s Mill, some efforts have been made to atone for the atrocities committed there as well. “In this bicentennial year,” Missouri’s governor Christopher Bond proclaimed on June 25, 1976, “we reflect on our nation’s heritage, [and] the exercise of religious freedom is without question one of the basic tenets of our free democratic republic.” On behalf of his state, Bond expressed “deep regret for the injustice and undue suffering” inflicted on the Mormons. Bond’s proclamation was among the first such apologies issued by a state, and numerous governors have since followed Missouri’s lead on such evils as slavery, segregation, and forced sterilizations.

  Bond also made certain to remedy a matter left unresolved for almost a century and a half. “I hereby rescind,” he declared, “Executive Order Number 44.”

  UNION PACIFIC MINE #6

  During all the summer and fall of 1976, China was an inferno. There was no eluding the microscopic projectiles that sought out the remotest hiding-places. The hundreds of millions of dead remained unburied and the germs multiplied themselves, and, toward the last, millions died daily of starvation.… Cannibalism, murder, and madness reigned. And so perished China.

  Not until the following February, in the coldest weather, were the first expeditions made.… They found China devastated, a howling wilderness through which wandered bands of wild dogs and desperate bandits who had survived. All survivors were put to death wherever found. And then began the great task, the sanitation of China. Five years and hundreds of millions of treasure were consumed, and then the world moved in.… It was a vast and happy intermingling of nationalities that settled down in China in 1982 and the years that followed—a tremendous and successful experiment in cross-fertilization.

  —From “The Unparalleled Invasion” (1910), a futuristic anti-Chinese story by Jack London about a American-led biological attack against China after it had tried to conquer the world through massive waves of emigration

  BY THE TIME I drive into Rock Springs, Wyoming, at about 9:30 P.M., the only sit-down restaurant open is Bonsai, specializing in Japanese and Chinese cuisine. While waiting for my steamed chicken, I ask manager Sam Ha how many Chinese residents live in the area.

  “There’s me,” he says, “my brother, one sister, my two daughters, five people from other families”—This is going to take a while, I say to myself—“and one, maybe two more.”

  “That’s all? Only ten or twelve people out of what used to be almost twenty thousand?” Ethnic populations fluctuate in any community, but this is a steep plunge considering that Rock Springs once had its own bustling Chinatown.

  He asks why I’m visiting.

  “I’m researching the 1885 riot.”

  He nods, but I don’t know if he’s being polite or if he’s truly familiar with the story of how at least two dozen Chinese immigrants were murdered here on that one day almost 140 years ago.

  The next morning, when I see local historian Bob Nelson, I recap my conversation with Sam Ha, and Bob amends the count of how many Chinese residents live in Rock Springs, but only slightly. “I’d say the number’s about fifteen or twenty, but it’s definitely nowhere near its peak in 1885.”

  Bob and I have chatted on the phone a few times, and he’s exactly as I imagined: early fifties and physically imposing with a voluble, out-sized personality to match. Even though we’ve only just met, he embraces me like an old friend, and within minutes he’s talking about his lap-band weight-reduction surgery—“I know, you don’t have to say it, I’m still fat, but you should’ve seen me before”—and then pinballs wildly from one historical topic to the next, weaving in personal anecdotes and observations, all without taking a breath. I like him immensely.

  An Illinois native, Bob moved to Wyoming in 1986 and currently runs the Rock Springs Historical Museum, now housed in a Romanesque-style sandstone building that originally served as city hall. Upon entering the museum, I’m drawn to a prominent display up front about a local meat cutter named Robert “Butch” Parker. Parker was falsely charged with stealing a drunken sheepherder’s payday coins and, after being locked up briefly, left the state in a huff, changed his last name as a tribute to an old friend, Mike Cassidy, and became a full-time outlaw.

  “Is this where Butch Cassidy was jailed?” I ask Bob, while opening the heavy steel door of an old cell.

  “No, Butch was held down the road. But a nineteen-year-old Dick Cheney spent the night here on a DWI charge,” Bob says, referring to the former vice president.

  Rock Springs grew from a remote coal-mining camp into the “home of fifty-six nationalities” when immigrants converged on the region during the 1860s and ’70s. Looking around, I’m cheered by the black-and-white photos throughout the museum of nineteenth-century Austrian blacksmiths, kilted Scotsmen, and Bosnian jazz musicians side by side with aproned barkeeps from Slovenia and AME churchgoers, among many others, reflecting a diversity equaling that of most major cities.

  Bob and I walk up to the museum’s second floor. “Here’s our main gallery,” he says as we stand in front of a bright, stately room encircled by full-sized flags from around the world—a gift from Dick Cheney, Bob informs me.

  “It’s kind of inspiring,” I say, “how Union Pacific created this tiny melting pot in the heart of America.”

  Bob quickly pops my happy little balloon with a pointed reality check: “U.P
. brought in immigrants because they were cheaper and spoke different languages, which made it harder for them to unionize against the company.”

  “Oh.”

  We head back downstairs.

  “There’s not much on the ’85 riot,” I say, spying a single glass case with some pottery shards and broken rice-wine jugs below a Harper’s Weekly illustration depicting the violence. One Chinese man is drawn with his head flung back, arms outstretched, right at the moment he’s been shot from behind.

  “No,” Bob admits, “this is all we have.”

  “It’s a pretty significant event in American history.”

  “Look, more should be done to remember it,” Bob says, “and I don’t think people would be opposed to putting up a marker or memorial. Usually the push comes from within the community that was victimized, and we just didn’t have that here. But we’re working on it.”

  On our way to Mine #6, where the riot began, Bob wants to show me the site of the first settlement in Rock Springs. As we’re about to drive onto a private lot posted with No Trespassing signs, I ask him to stop. “I can’t go in there.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have a strict no-trespassing rule.”

  “You are such a baby. Besides, I’m pretty sure I know the people who live here,” he says unconvincingly.

  Bob sees my hesitation and rolls his eyes. “Fine,” he mutters, and we begin to back out. “If, however, one day you find that you need to go onto someone’s property to research something—and trespassing usually implies criminal intent—carry a leash with you. If you’re caught, just pretend you were out looking for your dog.”