The complete truth of events surrounding the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857 will probably never be known. From the first, deliberate attempts to cover up, to excuse, to justify have blurred and confused the historical record.
Even now, says Ron Loving, president of the Mountain Meadows Association, a group of descendants of both the victims and the perpetrators as well as other interested parties, it is a hard story to tell."There is plenty of bad luck, bad choices, tragedy, atrocity, shame, misery, guilt, pain, unanswered questions, denial and wondering," he said.
Even now, historians are still trying to piece it all together.
"We'll probably never know it all," says Lawrence Coates, a history professor at Ricks College who has spent a good part of the past 10 years studying the massacre at Mountain Meadows. "One of the most significant works of the 20th century was Juanita Brooks' book in 1950, but additional research has been done to give us a more complete picture of this event. We know more about the massacre now than the people who were involved in it in 1857, because no one person saw everything that happened. Nevertheless, we just have bits and pieces, and we're still trying to put it all together."
As much as anything, the Baker-Fancher wagon train appears to have been a classic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, its members caught up in events larger than themselves, happenings that neither they nor anyone else at the time fully understood.
Events leading to the so-called "Utah War" were a factor, says Coates. But so were larger issues such as overall Indian relations and territorial rights.
"During the debates over giving Kansas and Nebraska the power to have slaves in the territories, the issue of forbidding polygamy in Utah exploded on the political stage. At the same time, Governor Brigham Young believed federal officials should select territorial appointees from the list of names he suggested, to avoid the same kind of problems the colonists had with the British appointments. Drawing upon the traditions of the American Revolution, Young asked, what could that do about it, if the territory ended up with officials who weren't good? The people could make it uncomfortable, so the officials would leave. What recourse did the territory have if those officials did leave and then spread stories about conditions in Utah? These and other big-picture issues were involved," says Coates.
When President James Buchanan decided to replace Brigham Young as governor of Utah Territory and send the new governor out with a big army commanded by Sydney Johnston, tragic events were set in motion.
"People in southern Utah knew Johnston's army was coming," said Coates. "But they also worried about an army coming from California. They had people out watching for any signs of an invasion. And Brigham Young had taken the position that this would be a slash-and-burn operation, that people would hide in the mountains and fight in case of an invasion by a hostile army. In southern Utah, they were looking for home sites in Nevada." There was no small war hysteria among the settlers.
So, it was into this already tense atmosphere that a wagon train of about 137 people, including several families from Arkansas, and headed by Capt. John Twitty Baker and Capt. Alexander Fancher, entered the territory in September 1857. They were traveling along the Old Spanish Trail on their way to the San Joaquin Valley of central California. A plaque at the monument site picks up the story from there:
"In the early morning hours of September 7, a party of local Mormon settlers and Indians attacked and laid siege to the encampment. For reasons still not fully understood, a contingent of territorial militia joined the attackers. This Iron County Militia consisted of local Latter-day Saints (Mormons) acting on orders from their local area religious leaders and military commanders headquartered 35 miles to the northeast in the settlement of Cedar City. . . .
"During the siege, 15 emigrant men were killed in the fighting or while trying to escape. Then late Friday afternoon, September 11th, the emigrants were persuaded to give up their weapons and leave their corralled wagons in exchange for a promise of safe passage to Cedar City. Under heavy guard, they made their way out of the encirclement. When they were all out of the corral and some of them more than a mile up the valley, they were suddenly and without warning attacked by their supposed benefactors. The local Indians joined in the slaughter. . . ."
At least 120 men, women and children were killed; 17 children under the age of 7 survived and were eventually returned to Arkansas.
The whys and wherefores of the massacre will never be totally understood because there are so many problems with the sources. John D. Lee gave a report to Brigham Young several days later. But Wilford Woodruff's diary account of the meeting is "filled with statements impossible to verify," says Coates. According to Woodruff, Lee placed the blame totally on the Indians by claiming they sought revenge toward the train for giving the Indians poisoned meat.
According to this source, the Indians killed all their men and then cut the throats of all the women and children, "except 8 or 10 Children which they brought & sold to the whites." Lee supposedly took some men and buried the dead. Much of this account was unlikely and inaccurate, says Coates. But, as Woodruff noted, Lee came with an "awful tale of blood." And in that, he was correct.
Had the wagon train been "damning Brigham Young and the Mormons" as the immigrants went south? Had they been claiming to have been part of the mob that killed Joseph Smith? Or, were these seeming justifications added later?
No doubt tensions existed between the two groups; for example, in some places the Mormons had refused to sell supplies to the wagon train. Some of the wagon trains that moved south at this time had trouble with Indians. But the exact cause for the tensions between the local Paiute bands, the local settlers and the Fancher-Baker wagon train is not completely known.
In helping the Indians, were the Mormons trying to placate them so the settlers would not have to fight an Indian war at the same time they may have to fight a war with the government?
Was the wagon train a victim of the prejudices of the time? If word got out that Mormons had taken the side of the Indians against other white men, would the Mormons have been in more trouble with the government and in more danger of attack by armies from California?
Those are the kinds of questions that may never be answered, says Coates.
We do know that in 1877, 20 years later, John D. Lee was executed for his part in the massacre, the only one so punished and likely given up as a sacrifice to protect the rest.
And we do know that the Mountain Meadows Massacre has been a source of pain on all sides ever since that fateful day in September 1857.
"Anyone who has thought at all about the massacre is never the same again," says Loving. "How could it happen? How did it happen? Why did it happen? And everybody who thinks about it comes away with one wish -- that it didn't happen. But it did."