CEDAR CITY, Utah — On Memorial Day weekend, some 85 Mormon history enthusiasts paused at the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre to remember what may be the most troubling event in the Church's turbulent 19th century past — troubling because it involved Church members not as victims but as perpetrators of atrocities that claimed the lives of at least 120 men, women and children.
Richard E. Turley Jr., managing director of the Family and Church History Department, and Ronald W. Walker, BYU Church history professor, led the May 27-28 bus tour from Salt Lake City to the site. The event capped the 2007 Mormon History Association Conference, held this year in the Utah capital. The association is a non-denominational group that includes participation from Church members.
Brother Turley and Brother Walker, along with Glen M. Leonard, recently retired director of the Museum of Church History and Art, are co-authors of a long-awaited book, Massacre at Mountain Meadows, which will be published by Oxford University Press.
This is the sesquicentennial year of the massacre, which occurred Sept. 11, 1857.
On that day in 1999, President Gordon B. Hinckley dedicated a monument at the Mountain Meadows grave site, a memorial designed and erected with the cooperation of the Mountain Meadows Association (which included descendants of the victims) and others. An informational marker on a hill east of the monument gives a brief account of the event:
"Led by Captains John T. Baker and Alexander Fancher, a California-bound wagon train from Arkansas camped in this valley in the late summer of 1857 during the time of the so-called Utah War. In the early morning hours of September 7th, a party of local Mormon settlers and Indians attacked and laid siege to the encampment.... A contingent of territorial militia joined the attackers. This Iron County Militia consisted of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) acting on orders from their local religious leaders and military commanders headquartered thirty-five miles to the north in Cedar City. Complex animosities and political issues intertwined with religious beliefs motivated the Mormons, but the exact causes and circumstances fostering the sad events that ensued over the next five days at Mountain Meadows still defy any clear or simple explanation."
The marker text goes on to recount that during the siege, emigrant men were killed in fighting or while trying to escape and that 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. When they were out of the corral, some more than a mile up the valley, they were without warning attacked by their supposed benefactors. Seventeen children age 6 and under were allowed to live, and they were eventually returned to Arkansas.
Speaking May 28, Memorial Day, on a hill overlooking the meadows, where stands a monument erected by the state of Utah in 1990, Brother Turley pointed out the geography of the valley, now mostly overtaken by sagebrush but in the 1850s a lush land with wind-swept grasses. He said the grazing rights at the time were held by Jacob Hamblin (not a party to the massacre), who presided over the Church's mission to the area's Paiute Indians, and that the emigrants had obtained permission from Jacob Hamblin to graze their cattle in the meadows.
"They were not expecting an attack," Brother Turley said, otherwise they would have arranged themselves into a wagon fort with a heavy guard.
In the initial attack, Isaac Haight, a stake president and militia leader in Cedar City, endeavored to incite Paiute Indians to attack the emigrant train because he had been denied permission by militia commander William Dame to use white men. The plan faltered, Brother Turley said, "in part because this was not the Paiutes' fight. They're promised some horses and guns, but they quickly withdraw."
The intent from the start was to blame the attack on the Indians, "but it was quickly determined that it was impossible to have it happen that way," he said, "so they brought in white men to finish up the job."
"After the initial attack, the emigrants pulled their wagons into a tight circle," he said.
The defensive action made them fairly invincible, Brother Turley explained, and they were able to drive off attackers. Running low on ammunition and being cut off from access to water, he said, "may have been a factor in their decision to accept what, in many ways, was a very bizarre set of terms for leaving the emigrant encampment."
Four days later, militia men marched down to about a half-mile from the encampment and were standing in a line, he said. John D. Lee (the only man ever tried and executed for his role in the massacre) went into the camp under a white flag to negotiate the terms under which the emigrants would be allowed to leave.
"He said, in effect: 'I've come to save you. You've been under attack by Indians. We've negotiated with them. They're angry at you, especially your men who've fired back at them and brought casualties to them. They're not angry at the women and children.'"
The terms were that the emigrants, supposedly to avoid a sign of aggression to the Indians, would put all their weapons in militia wagons, then load in wounded and younger children, and the militia would drive the wagons out first at the head of the line. Next, the women and older children would follow. Finally, the men would emerge, and each unarmed emigrant man, supposedly for protection, would line up next to an armed militia man.
"Those terms were not agreed to easily," Brother Turley noted. "The emigrants were suspicious. They already thought there was white participation. But if you look at it from their perspective and ask, 'What choices did they have?' you can see why they ultimately capitulated to the terms."
They proceeded north toward Jacob Hamblin's ranch house. When the women were on the east side of present-day Highway 18 and the men on the west, John Higbee gave the order "Halt!" At that pre-arranged signal, each militia man turned to the emigrant man on his left and shot him at close range, Brother Turley said.
It was anticipated that some of the captors might run, so horsemen were situated whose role was to herd the escaping emigrants so they could be butchered, he said.
He added that white men did most of the killing and that later, the numbers of Indians involved was exaggerated. "Phillip Klingensmith said that after he fired his piece at a man, a woman came running toward the men, and one of the men near him shot and killed the woman."
Once the firing began, he said, people started running, and they were being chased down and attacked. "Just a horrendous atrocity," he exclaimed.
Children took cover, Brother Turley said. "There were two Dunlap sisters who were grabbed by the hand by some Indians, who took them to the Indian encampment. John D. Lee later came down and essentially said, 'What are you doing with them?' And they said, 'They were too pretty to kill.' And John D. Lee said, 'They're too old to live."' The young women soon fell as two more victims of the massacre.
Speaking the previous evening on the campus of Southern Utah University, where the tour members had gathered for dinner, Brother Turley's fellow author, Brother Walker, read portions from the upcoming book.
He thus laid out a scenario in which the Cedar City residents were caught up in a militant spirit fueled by memory of relatively recent wrongs against the Latter-day Saints while they were in Missouri and Illinois and by fear of the rumored approach of federal army troops toward the territory.
Other news came of an advancing emigrant train. "After the massacre, the participants and their neighbors, trying to explain what had happened, told stories of what they had heard about the Fancher train before its arrival," Brother Walker read. "They said the company included some of the saints' former persecutors from Missouri and Illinois, who abused Mormon settlers and the Indians along the trail, and intentionally poisoned an ox in some springs at Corn Creek."
The charges are difficult to sustain because of a scarcity of surviving contemporaneous records, Brother Walker noted.
"Their suspicions heightened by rumors, residents were looking for trouble the moment the Fancher train reached Cedar City," he said, "probably on Sept. 3. They arrived around noon and stayed only a little over an hour. But that was enough to cement the opinions the settlers had already begun forming of the emigrants.... Apparently it had not occurred to the settlers that at least some of the rumors could have been about companies behind the Fancher train. Almost certainly this is the case, that it reflected some of the Missouri parties that were traveling behind Baker-Fancher."
Some of the emigrant men, inebriated from sagebrush whiskey purchased in town, and angered over the unavailability of needed goods and exorbitant prices, reportedly became verbally abusive, Brother Walker recounted. One man claimed to have the gun that killed Joseph Smith, and they threatened to join with the federal troops in killing Mormons.
"If these things transpired," Brother Walker said, "they were certainly taunts and boasts of men who had drunk a little too much of the sagebrush whiskey." He added that one man said the company was a mixed class, and that he remembered hearing Captain Fancher rebuke the boastful ones of the company for making the threats.
The final offense occurred as the emigrants were leaving, he read. "When 63-year-old Barbara Morris attempted to cross the main street that the emigrant train was taking through the fort, a loud-mouthed tall fellow addressed her in a very insulting manner, brandishing his pistol in her face and made use of the most insinuating and abusive language. Polygamy was the likely slur."
Endeavoring to defend her honor, Mormons attempted to seize the man, but his companions stood by him, and the town marshal, Elias Higbee, was forced to back down.
That afternoon or evening, community leaders met to decide what to do. "As so often happens in time of conflict, they focused not on the peaceful emigrants, who seemed to have been the majority, but upon the few trouble makers whose actions colored their view of the whole," Brother Walker said.
"The Cedar City leaders did not take kindly to being challenged and must have felt mortified that their authority had been undermined. These outsiders had defied the law, faced them down in front of their own people and refused to be arrested or fined."
Haight sought permission from militia commander William Dame in Parowan to use the militia, but Dame turned him down, Brother Walker said.
But Haight found another option, he said, in a recently pronounced policy by Brigham Young that the Mormons would no longer mediate in disputes between emigrants and Indians. Haight and other Cedar City leaders agreed to arm the Indians and send them after the Fancher company to seize their cattle. To implement the plan, Haight turned to John D. Lee.
"To sum up what happened," Brother Walker said, "emigrants come through Cedar City. There are confrontations. The local authorities hope to retaliate, to strike back at the emigrants. They are refused that option by military authorities in Parowan. And then they resort to a plan to use the Native Americans to effect a 'brush' upon the emigrants."
Events escalated from there.
Speaking to tour members on one of the buses headed back to Salt Lake City, Brother Turley said what makes the massacre extraordinarily disturbing is "the idea of good people killing good people."
He compared it to the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which U.S. soldiers committed atrocities upon villagers, and said the two incidents are "eerily similar."
"I hope we will reflect upon the fact that when we're in positions of power, the decisions we make have consequences," he said. "Sometimes those consequences can be very far reaching and have a very deep impact. In the case of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, that power led to the destruction of 120 lives, and the irreparable damage to 17 surviving children and an impact on their families that lasts, in many ways, to the present time. To those that participated in the massacre, it meant an irretrievable change in their lives and a burden that they continued to bear throughout their lives and that many of their descendants continue to bear today.
"So, while that's maybe a sober way to end a trip like this, my hope is that given the grievous nature of what happened at Mountain Meadows, we'll ponder that thought, and when we find ourselves in situations where we either are exerting power or in situations where we find ourselves compromised by power exerted on us, that we will think in advance of what we will do in those circumstances and make the right choice."
E-mail: rscott@desnews.com