… Although “white men did most of the killing,” as participant Nephi Johnson later admitted, Utah Indian Superintendent Brigham Young informed Washington that “Capt. Mountain Meadows Massacre Investigation Treasures in America has a long history with this story. Cut off from any source of water and under continual gunfire, the emigrants fended off their assailants for five long, hellish days. The couple were married on December 30, 1893, when the groom was 74. What will happen this September 11 when another Arkansan wagon train rolls into Mountain Meadows? As history, “Massacre at Mountain Meadows” is far from perfect. (Lynch’s captain title, however, was honorary, not military.) In early May 2007 I attended a preview showing the day after the broadcast of Helen Whitney’s PBS documentary The Mormons, which included a long and powerful segment on Mountain Meadows. At the same time, Captain Lynch was leading a party of between 25 and 40 men south from Camp Floyd, where he had worked for the commissary department, to the area that would become Arizona (possibly to prospect there), when he too met Forney at Nephi. It was not retribution, which is the just application of punishment for a bad act, but revenge, which simply involves getting even and is not particular about who gets the ax. He found them“happy and contented, exceptthose who were sick” andinsisted the orphans were inbetter condition than most ofthe children in the settlementsin which they lived. It claimed Brigham Young issued orders intended to prevent the massacre and remained blissfully ignorant about what happened due to the lies of southern Utah leaders. Lynch had served under Zachary Taylor and Robert E. Lee in the Mexican War and was cited three times for bravery. As daylight broke in the remote Utah Territory valley, a volley of gunfire and a shower of arrows ripped into the wagon camp from nearby ravines and hilltops, immediately killing or wounding about a quarter of the adult males. Neither a whitewash nor an expos ,Massacre at Mountain Meadowsprovides the clearest and most accurate account of a key event in American religious history. A Case of Vengeance and Retribution, A single question lurks behind almost everything ever written about the Mountain Meadows Massacre: Did Brigham Young order it, and if so why? The surviving men of the Fancher Party leveled their lethal long rifles at their hidden, painted attackers and stopped the brief frontal assault in its tracks. As of June, the rumor mill is already working overtime with hints of possible breakthroughs on a number of contentious fronts. On September 11, 1857, some 50 to 60 local militiamen in southern Utah, aided by American Indian allies, massacred about 120 emigrants who were traveling by wagon to California. He gave their names to the attorney general, but nothing was done to bring the murderers to justice before the Civil War broke out—and nothing would be done for a dozen years. The surviving men cheered their rescuers when they fell in with their escort. Mainstream publishers released two nonfiction works in 2003 that dealt with the atrocity. For the children who survived and the families of the victims, the massacre became a deep and enduring wound. For today’s Latter-day Saints, Mountain Meadows is the most troubling event in their religion’s complicated history. “But no one professed to have any knowledge of the massacre, ” Rogers recalled, “except that they had heard itwas done by the Indians.” Jacob Hamblin sent IraHatch, a talented Indian interpreter who hadprobably killed at least one of the Arkansans himself,to guide the men to the scene of the massacre. The Mormon prophet himself viewed the murders that way. For more great articles, subscribe to Wild West magazine today! The day after visiting Mountain Meadows, Forney and his escort reached the Mormon settlement at Santa Clara, where they found 13 of the surviving children in the custody of Hamblin, who was just beginning his legendary career as a frontiersman and Indian interpreter for explorers such as John Wesley Powell. After returning to Arkansas, she was educated at the school for the blind in Little Rock and settledwith her sister Rebecca in Calhoun County. A surprising number of books, both fiction and nonfiction, have dealt with the massacre during the last five years. One of their first priorities was to locate the Mountain Meadows orphans and “use every effort to get possession” of them, as Washington had first orderedForney to do back in March. It was leaders from the nearby militia called Nauvoo Legion that staged the attack on the train of pioneers. Mountain Meadows Massacre, (September 1857), in U.S. history, slaughter of a band of Arkansas emigrants passing through Utah on their way to California. “The word ‘definitive’ is often overused,” historian Brigham D. Madsen wrote in his review of Blood of the Prophets in The Western Historical Quarterly. Forney’s conduct while visiting Lee astounded his escort, who had refused “to share the hospitality of this notorious murderer—this scourge of the desert,” Lynch swore. The desperate emigrants, Deputy U.S. Yet another battle in the ongoing war over how the story of Mountain Meadows will be told may begin soon. Patrick’s film did very well on the independent film festival circuit and garnered 11 awards, but he was unable to persuade PBS to broadcast it and his documentary found no national distributor. I believe Mountain Meadows was a calculated act of vengeance directed and carried out by Brigham Young and his top associates. After Forney arrived, the men spent three days at Santa Clara while clothing was made forthe children. “Brigham Young was not a credulous simpleton: he was not duped or hoodwinked: he was not misinformed.”. The victims, most of them from Arkansas, were on their way to California with dreams of a bright future. Painted savages—a few of whom may have been actual Indians—jumped out of the oak brush lining the trail and cut down the women and children, while Lee directed the murder of the wounded. Alfred A. Knopf published Sally Denton’s study of the killings in American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857. His study of modern polygamy and violence provoked such a strong denunciation from Richard Turley, the managing director of the LDS Church’s Family and Church History Department, that Mormon outrage helped propel the book onto bestseller lists for months. The Andrew Jenson and David H. Morris Collections, Massacre at Mountain Meadows, 1st Edition, Mountain Meadows Massacre: The Andrew Jenson and David H. Morris Collections, Mountain Meadows Massacre: Collected Legal Papers. As a group of militia men entered the camp under a white flag, they then lead the emigrants from their encampment to their death. That same month the U.S. Army established the nation’s largest military station at Camp Floyd, 40 miles from Salt Lake City. For years, relatives of the victims and friends of the site have watched in disbelief as the St. George megalopolis has begun to fill up the once-open rangeland at the Meadows with vacation homes and McMansions. None of the Mountain Meadows orphans had bleaker prospects than Sarah Dunlap, who was only 1 year old when a gunshot wound almost severed her arm during the massacre. Once he was on board, powerful southern Utah politicians co-opted the project and eventually claimed credit for the whole idea. There, the senior Mormon officer escorting the men gave an order: perhaps “Halt!” but by most accounts, “Do your duty!” A single shot rang out, and each escort turned and shot his man. The Mountain Meadows Massacre has since been hailed by historians as “the most hideous example of the human cost exacted by religious fanaticism in American history until 9/11.” The execution of John D. Lee in 1886. The first news of the worst massacre in the history of the Oregon and California trails appeared in the Los Angeles Star on October 3, 1857. A newspaper story about the association’s attempts at reconciliation among those who share the massacre’s legacy caught his attention. Leonard was also the director of the Museum of Church History and Art in Salt Lake City, Utah. The Mountain Meadows Massacre has continued to cause pain and controversy for 150 years. The wagon train made it through Utah during a period in time of violence history would later call the Utah War to rest in the area of Mountain meadows. Cut off from water and under continual gunfire,the emigrants fended off their assailants for five long, hellish days. “What an expensive and round about method for transacting what any company for the States could easily attend to at any time, and with trifling expense,” he complained. Brigham Young, while serving as both Utah’s governor and Indian superintendent in 1857, never raised a finger to find out what happened or recover the wagon train’s property from the murderers. A love story set during a tense encounter between a wagon train of settlers and a … Again and again, I’ve had people ask, “Why haven’t I ever heard about this?” Upon consideration, the atrocity’s obscurity is easier to understand: After all, such a tale of blood and sorrow had little to recommend it to those who created the legend of the West. They did spare the lives of 17 children who were younger than seven. Lee agreed to accompany Forney to Cedar City and discuss the matter of the massacre with other Mormon officials, but on the way he rode ahead and disappeared. Such an interpretation is based on an impossibility—that devout frontier Mormon authorities believed they could deceive Brigham Young. This was the worst case of mass murder by Americans on Americans until the Oklahoma City bombing. As Forney marched north, Kanosh, chief of the Pahvants, informed him that some Indians had told him there were two more children saved from the massacre than Hamblin had collected. Yet it has been all but forgotten. The orphans and their ages at the time of the massacre included the children of George and Manerva Baker: Mary Elizabeth, 5; Sarah Frances, 3, and William Twitty, 9 months; of Alexander and Eliza Fancher: Christopher “Kit” Carson, 5, and Triphenia D., 22 months; of Joseph and Matilda Miller: John Calvin, 6; Mary, 4, and Joseph, 1; of Jesse and Mary Dunlap: Rebecca J., 6; Louisa, 4, and Sarah Ann, 1; of Lorenzo Dow and Nancy Dunlap: Prudence Angeline, 5, and Georgia Ann, 18 months; of Peter and Saladia Huff: Nancy Saphrona, 4; of Pleasant and Armilda Tackitt: Emberson Milum, 4, and William Henry, 19 months; and of John Milum and Eloah Jones: Felix Marion, 18 months. Ultimately, the film dealt not only with reconciliation but—as its title reveals—the difficulty of dealing with the darker side of Mormon history. The Arkansans pulled their scattered wagons into a circle l and quickly improved their wagon fort, digging a pit to protect the women and children from stray projectiles. Born in Ireland, Lynch had been orphaned not long after his parents immigrated to Brooklyn, and he had drifted to New Orleans, where he enlisted in the frontier army. Mountain Meadows Massacre: Collected Legal Papers provides lucid access to some of history’s long-dead voices, refining our understanding of postmassacre events and making the path ahead easier for scholars. The leaders in Cedar City proved no more helpful in tracking down the stolen property. The company included about 140 men, women and children—the women and children outnumbered the able-bodied men 2-to-1. The book covers the subject of Mountain Meadow Massacre that took place in Sept 1857 where 120 white settlers of a wagon train passing through Utah were murdered by white Mormons. Neither a whitewash nor an exposé, Massacre at Mountain Meadows provides the clearest and most accurate account of a key event in American religious history. At dawn on Monday, September 7, 1857, Major John D. Lee of the Nauvoo Legion, Utah’s territorial militia, led a ragtag band of 60 or 70 Latter-day Saints, better known as Mormons, and a few Indian freebooters in an assault on a wagon train from Arkansas. They separated into three groups—the wounded and youngest children, who led the way in two wagons; the women and older children, who walked behind; and then the men, each escorted by an armed member of the Nauvoo Legion, the local militia. William C. Mitchell’s married daughter, Nancy Dunlap, had been with the so-called Fancher party, as had a married son, Charles, and an unmarried son, Joel. (The accidental discovery of their ancestors’ grave, and secretly shipping the bones to Brigham Young University for analysis, offended many of the victims’ descendants.) It did attract media attention when Spudfest, the fledgling film festival founded by actress Dawn Wells (Mary Ann of Gilligan’s Island), pulled the documentary from its lineup, claiming the film was too violent for a family-oriented event. “I am watching you,” he said in an 1855 sermon printed in the territory’s only newspaper. During that time, I’ve witnessed the dedication of two monuments—one near the highway on Dan’s Hill overlooking the killing ground, where a 1990 granite monument financed by descendants and the state of Utah honors the victims; and a second that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints raised in 1999 over the grave of the victims, whose remains were inadvertently unearthed by a backhoe during the monument’s hurried construction. 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