Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

by Timothy Egan

  YOUNG NEVER had to use his army. He razed the largely empty forts of Bridger and Supply, and raided some supply trains. The troops sent West by Buchanan were stalled well east of the Wasatch Range, forced to spend the winter some distance from Utah. In the meantime, the Mountain Meadows coverup became more elaborate, A government investigator heard plenty of rumors but could find no one to talk, nor written evidence of Mormon complicity. The Utah War was effectively over. Buchanan’s attention was drawn to the South and slavery. The Nauvoo Legion, the Sons of Dan, the Indian allies dubbed the “battle axe of the lord”—all had been marshaled, as it turned out, for a single mass murder of a group of unarmed civilians. Young’s reputation was intact. When Horace Greeley visited him in 1859, he found him pleasant and direct, “with no air of sanctimony or fanaticism.” Wrote Greeley, the most influential journalist of his day: “He is a portly, frank, good-natured, rather thick-set man, seeming to enjoy life, and to be in no particular hurry to get to heaven.”

  A few years later, Young let out, in so many words, that he had kicked a little Gentile butt. Though the federal government had sent numerous officials and another battalion of soldiers to keep watch over the Mormons, Young’s invisible government held. Mark Twain found Young in complete control of Utah in 1861. “They maintain the semblance of a republican form of government,” wrote Twain. “But the truth is that Utah is an absolute monarchy and Brigham Young is king.” The king stopped in the Mountain Meadows on a tour of the southern towns, pausing to read a makeshift monument that federal troops had erected in the brown grass. “Vengeance is mine saith the Lord, and I will repay,” were the words on a little wooden cross planted in a rockpile above the massacre site. “Vengeance is mine” Young said aloud. “And I have taken a little.” He ordered the monument removed. It was.

  THE HOUSE in St. George, with It’s white picket fence, red-tiled porch, and chorus of flowers responding to the baton of spring, is everything the Mountain Meadows is not. Full of life and well-tended, it is that best of all monuments, the kind that allows you to sit and walk and share the same views as that of the Great Man. The clapboard sign out front identifies it as the winter home of Brigham Young. The carpenter from Vermont was definitely not following the Order of Enoch when he built this two-story sandstone and adobe manse, trimmed in white and stuffed with fine period pieces. So be it; he was the empire-builder and deserved his southern palace. For the ten million members of the Mormon church, this is something like Jefferson’s Monticello. Selected thoughts are on display near rocking chairs or in reading rooms.

  “And here… here is the master bedroom where Brigham and his wife slept,” says the church elder who is leading a dozen of us through the house. Our guide is a pleasant older man with reddish hair and a thick three-piece suit, heavy for a warm day in Utah’s Dixie. I am on my best behavior, listening with due respect. No quips, jokes, or inappropriate questions. In the garden, I had spent about half an hour asking how cotton is grown and picked, receiving a detailed lecture on the ways in which the Saints made their clothes from the fur-balled fiber sprouting in the backyard. Not a bad red wine was made from the grapes of southern Utah as well, though the Saints, of course, never partook. Inside, I was fascinated by the wood trim; blond and aged, with fine grain lines.

  “Its oak, isn’t it?” I asked the elder. “Where did they get oak trim in southern Utah?” His face lit up.

  “Look closer. It’s not really oak. It’s pine. They used a quill to paint grain lines on the wood, so that it just looks like oak.” He was beaming now, after we had been led upstairs. Out the window, I could see the St. George Temple, selected by Brigham as the first to be completed in Utah. It is unbelievably white—bleached and polished like a beauty queen’s smile. It glows amidst the sprawl of St. George, a town pushing itself out among the red dirt and mesas at a pace that will soon make it as unrecognizable as any other strip-mall town given over to Target and Wal-Mart. The temple, not open to Gentiles, is where Mormons are sealed to each other for eternity and where the dead are given the proper anointment to get into heaven. I could have spent an hour in one of Brigham’s favorite chairs staring out the window, but then we were in the master bedroom, and my curiosity ran wild. As homey and settled as the room appeared to be, I could not help but think about the sexual acrobatics, the variety and jealousies, the passions and explanations, that must have gone on in that bed. Was it crowded at times? Or did Brigham mostly brood alone in his later years, as some records indicate?

  “Where did the other wives stay?” I ask.

  “Excuse me?” says the elder.

  “Yeah. While he was sleeping with one, were the other babes … on deck, in another room?” a kid, about eighteen, asks by way of follow-up. I am glad it is him, not me. The elder blushes.

  “Brigham had only his dear wife in this house most of the time.”

  “But he was married to dozens of women,” I say.

  “Most of those marriages, they were symbolic more than anything else,” says the elder. “Marriage was a way for women to be sealed. It was a ceremonial procedure.”

  Historical face-lifts are common at the shrines of any religion or nation. But Brigham had sex and plenty of it, with a different woman every night of the month, sometimes. He had a row of houses in Salt Lake where he kept his harem. He complained about the demands of servicing them. He was short and stout, as Greeley has described him, about 250 pounds or more in his later years, but he preferred thin-waisted brides. The man fathered fifty-six children, according to church records. His descendants could fill a football stadium, and one of them, Steve Young, the NFL quarterback, would give them something to cheer about. All of this did not happen through symbolic sealing alone. But the Mormons, because they have been embarrassed about polygamy for so long, because it is something that Joseph Smith, and Brigham himself, had said came from a direct “call” from God, now treat this extraordinary diversion from the mainstream of Western society as some sort of minor symbolic ritual. Rosy-cheeked nineteen-year-old girls hand out pamphlets in Temple Square, beneath the big statue of kindly Brigham, wherein it is explained in a virtual footnote that, “As did many prophets and patriarchs of Old Testament times, Brigham Young had more than one wife.”

  Yes, twenty-seven wives, to be exact. And Brigham, unlike his modern followers, did not keep this a secret. He preached of It’s virtues. He defied Washington and polite society every time he reminded an audience about his “duties,” as he called his bedmates. It was not to learn about desert irrigation that the great sex pioneer of the nineteenth century, Sir Richard Burton, came all the way across the Atlantic and trudged the length of America to see firsthand this society of sanctioned promiscuity. The West of possibility, the West of shaking off the old, was taking root in the Great Basin. Burton had explored unknown reaches of Africa, had endured countless adventures, had seen communities that no other European had ever laid eyes on, but he was fascinated by this new civilization where a man could sleep with many women and not go to jail or hell for it. He saw polygamy as something that sprang naturally from the Western landscape.

  “In Paris or London, the institution would, like slavery, die a natural death,” wrote Burton. “In Arabia and in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains it maintains a strong hold upon the affections of mankind.” But he noticed, also, that it was a one-way street. Women did not take multiple husbands. Men had the stamp of ownership on these wives. “Servants are rare and costly,” said Burton. “It is cheaper and more comfortable to marry them.”

  We are ushered out of Brigham’s bedroom quickly. I pause at the living room, sealed by velvet rope. I cannot take my eyes off a formal portrait of the patriarch. It hangs above an ornate coal stove, with crystal and alabaster vases on the mantel. Brigham had put on a lot more weight by this time; he is in his late seventies, and he does not look happy. He still keeps the Mennonite beard, with clean-shaven lip. He has a black suit on, white shirt, with bow tie. He is holding a cane in his left hand. His rig
ht hand is resting on a table, next to a top hat. The expression stern. He seems to be saying, “Get on with it.”

  Outside, in the desert air of St. George, I am still in search of a double-shot of espresso, but I also want to find a woman who may one day have a memorial of her own. Juanita Brooks lived in St. George all her life. She was a wife and mother, doing her duty for family, but she was also, like so many Mormons, a citizen-historian. As a girl, she lived in a one-room adobe house just across the Nevada border, a life of subsistence agriculture. She loved the outdoors and her church; in both sanctuaries, it was the mystic aspects that attracted her. She had once participated in an exorcism of spirits from the body of her dead cousin. Early on, Brooks became interested in the piece of history that happened just to the north of St. George, in the Mountain Meadows. At the time, the last witnesses to the massacre had not yet died and some of them had a conscience. Hearing of her interest, an old man approached Brooks in 1919. She was a schoolteacher, small, with crooked teeth, barely twenty-one years old. Nephie Johnson was one of the first settlers in southern Utah, a well-known pioneer living out his last days in a glow of reverence. But he had a story that he had wanted to tell for sixty-odd years. He had never opened up to the prosecutors and historians who had tried to get at the truth of Mountain Meadows. But with Brooks, he felt comfortable. “My eyes have witnessed things that my tongue has never uttered,” he said to her. “Before I die I want it written down.” She listened. And what he revealed was stunning. He told part of the story. Then he fell ill, and on his deathbed yelled out, “Blood! Blood! Blood!”

  Juanita Brooks was a student of pioneer diaries. She became known as such a methodical collector of these narratives that she was named to the federal Historical Records Survey in the 1930s and was put in charge of diaries at several major libraries. Through it all, she patched together a story quite at odds with what her church had been saying over the years. She found military records, notes, and letters, revealing precisely who had been at Mountain Meadows that week in September 1857, who had given orders, who had been told to lie. It was Brooks who found the remark by Brigham Young about getting his vengeance at the site of the massacre; it was in the diary of the man who would succeed Young as church president and prophet. But the comment—so damning it could change the consensus view of Young—was later deleted in the official Journal History of the Church.

  The Mountain Meadows story, as told by the Mormon hierarchy, largely blamed the killings on the Indians, part of a pattern of letting Utah natives bear the brunt of the blame for the crimes of the Saints. When three of John Wesley Powells men crawled out of the Grand Canyon in 1869, saying they preferred the comparative safety of Mormon settlers to the unknown danger of Colorado River rapids, they were killed while searching for whites. The church said Indians had done it, blaming the local Shivewits, and the claim went unchallenged by many historians, Wallace Stegner among them. But in the 1980s, a century-old unpublished note surfaced. It was written by William Leamey, a Mormon in good standing. The only people to die during the American exploration of the Grand Canyon, Leamey wrote, had been murdered by Saints. He had witnessed the execution of the three men at a church ward house. It had deeply troubled him ever since.

  Twenty years after the Mountain Meadows massacre, when blaming the Indians proved inadequate, one man was sacrificed by Brigham Young to the Gentile press and prosecutors. Young gave up his adopted son, John Lee.

  The Indian nickname for Lee was Nah-gaats—“crybaby.” He had a thick head of swept-back blond hair for most of his life, and had married eleven women. He had been with the Saints almost from the very start, when Joseph took his followers from Missouri to Illinois. From the mobs in the Midwest to the burgeoning empire in the Great Basin, he had seen it all, and been through it all. Never had his faith wavered. He agonized before the slaughter in Mountain Meadows. At the time, he was a major in the Nauvoo Legion. But once the deed was done, Brigham took care of him. Over the years, a number of federal investigators had kept on the case, and Lee’s name always surfaced. The story of the direct involvement of Mormon officials would not die. Lee was even offered bribes to tell the story of full church involvement in the massacre. He was too much of a Saint, he said, to ever say a bad word against his church. For a time, Lee and several other church leaders in the south had to flee, keeping a lookout on their homes from atop nearby hills. By 1870, national pressure had grown for some sort of accounting by the Saints. Young told Lee that he had to disappear, and that he would be excommunicated.

  “I am willing to bear mine, but I will not submit to carry all the blame for those who committed the massacre,” said Lee. Brigham assured him he would be taken care of. He fled south, leaving his palatial stone mansion in southern Utah to live in a shack of twigs and sod in a barren notch on the Colorado River. He opened a ferry service—Lee’s Ferry, still the jumping-off point for river trips leading to the Grand Canyon. John Wesley Powell met Lee when he came down the Colorado River in 1869. The territorial governor of Arizona, upon seeing Lees “Lonely Dell,” as it was nicknamed, said he too would take up polygamy if he had to live in such a place.

  But Lee remained steadfast in his belief that Young, despite his public statements, would always protect his adopted son. Federal prosecutors caught up with him in 1875. For a man said to be a mass murderer, he remained remarkably calm, at first. He had good reason to be: his trial was determined from the start. Tried for his role in the killings at Mountain Meadows in 1875, Lee faced a jury of eight Mormons, three Gentiles, and a fallen-away Saint. A church bishop had turned state’s evidence, detailing the plan and Lee’s part in it. At the trial’s end, the four non-Mormons all voted to convict, but the eight Saints voted not guilty. Hung jury, no verdict.

  Cries of outrage rang throughout the nation. Once again, it looked as if the Saints were in for a long period of persecution. The federal government was ordered to take control of the courts, an attempt to knock out Brigham’s invisible judicial system. As the pressure mounted, Young decided to sacrifice Lee. At the second trial, a parade of witnesses who had lost their tongues in the first proceeding suddenly were full of detail. Yes, it wasn’t all the Indians’ doing, they said. Yes, the Saints had been involved. But it was not anything the church or It’s leaders had participated in. It was all the fault of that hotheaded man over there in the box, John D. Lee. The accused himself remained confident that no court in Utah would find him guilty, despite the evidence. His jury for the second trial was all Mormons.

  But a guilty verdict was indeed what they came back with, and Lee was sentenced to die. As his execution date neared, he wrote an autobiography; it reeks of bitterness. “I have been treacherously betrayed and sacrificed in the most cowardly manner by those who should have been my friends, and whose will I have diligently striven to make my pleasure for the last thirty years at least,” he wrote. Losing his legal appeals, and facing certain death, he turned, in the last pages of his book, to those who had given him up. UI am not a traitor to my people, nor to my former friends and comrades who were with me on that dark day when the work of death was carried out in God’s name, by a lot of deluded religious fanatics. It is my duty to tell the facts as they exist, and I will do it.” And tell he did, though it did not save his life.

  On a spring day in 1877, he was led to the Mountain Meadows. There, he gave up coat and scarf, asking that they go to someone in need. Then he sat on the edge of his rough-hewn pine coffin, almost, it seemed, trying it out. He rose and delivered his final words. “I do not fear death,” he said. “I shall never go to a worse place than I am in now.” He then spoke briefly of the man he considered a father. “I have studied to make this mans will my pleasure for thirty years. See, now, what I have come to in this day. I have been sacrificed in a cowardly, dastardly manner.”

  The firing squad assembled in the desert sunlight. Last pictures were taken of Lee. He asked that the executioners not miss the target. “Center my heart, boys. Don’t mangle the b
ody.” Six months later, Brigham Young died, and so, seemingly, did the Mountain Meadows story.

  IN THE opening lines of the book that Juanita Brooks says she was born to write, she goes out of her way to assure readers that she is a faithful Saint. As such, though, she could not ignore history; the daily diaries of the Mormon Dream were just too damning. “Anyone who is interested to look up my history will find that I am, and always have been, a loyal and active member” of the church, she wrote. The problem was a collective denial. “We have tried to blot out this affair from our history. It must not be referred to, much less discussed openly.” Through the years, church authorities had discouraged Brooks, denying her access to many of the most vital documents. But she finally got inside church vaults and came away with evidence long hidden. Her book, The Mountain Meadows Massacre, was published in 1950. At first, the church tried to ignore it. But Brooks had put together an irrefutable case that the massacre was, at the least, a military mission, not a fluke of passion by a lone individual. She even printed the military logs. Upon publication, her greatest fear was that she would be excommunicated from the church. Fawn Brodie had recently published a definitive biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History. For that, she was banished from the church for life.

  The question, which remains unanswered to this day, is who gave the orders to start the killing. Brooks concluded that Brigham Young probably would have disapproved, based on a letter in which he said the emigrants should be allowed to pass through Utah. But she did not let him off the hook. She said that his preaching and fear-mongering in 1857 set up conditions that made the murders possible. “In trying to understand it, one is led to think of other mass killings throughout our age, most of them done in the name of God and in defense of religion,” she wrote. And she unearthed a letter in which Brigham said God is moving the Indians to kill the emigrants. “A spirit seems to be taking possession of the Indians to assist Israel,” Young wrote ten days before the massacre. “I can hardly restrain them from exterminating the Americans.”