Oh What a Slaughter Read online

  In fact, the Mormons never had to fight the army: the differences of opinion between the U.S. government and the Mormon authorities were mostly worked out in negotiations. The army did come on to Utah in 1858, but the Utah War, so called, was a big fizzle, an outcome only known long after the Fancher party had been reduced to the condition of a meat shop.

  It was, though, the immigrants’ misfortune to arrive in wild, lawless southwestern Utah just at a time when the Mormons were most highly stressed. It was only a day or two before the massacre that Brigham Young realized he would not soon be under attack.

  Despite this element of relief, the Mormons remained stirred up. Even so, the Fancher party, had it just kept moving, might have passed through Mormon territory unmolested and gone on to the promised land of California, but for the temptation of that tall, waving grass. By stopping to let their cattle graze they made themselves an irresistible target, both to Indians and Mormons.

  Six days after the massacre Brigham Young penned an entry in his diary about the likely behavior of the Indians:

  A spirit seems to be taking possession of the Indians to assist Israel [the Mormons]. I can hardly restrain them from exterminating the Americans.

  In fact, he didn’t restrain them, and yet the very day before the massacre Young claimed to have dispatched a letter by fast courier to Elder Isaac Haight, the leader of the southern Mormons. The letter read in part:

  We do not expect that any part of the Army will be able to reach here this fall … they are now at or near Laramie. … So you see that the Lord has answered our prayers, and again thwarted the blow which was aimed at our heads. In regard to the emigration trains passing through our settlements, we must not interfere with them until they are first notified to keep away. You must not meddle with them. The Indians we expect will do as they please, but you should try and preserve good feelings with them. There are no other trains going through that I know of. If those who are there will leave, let them go in peace.

  That seems plain enough, and yet little in this history is exactly as it seems. The provenance of this letter, as Caroline Fraser has pointed out, is uncertain. In the best of circumstances it would have arrived in the south too late to save the Fancher party, but whether it was delivered at all is an open question. The Mormons are among the world’s most efficient record-keepers, and yet the original of this letter is lost. Brigham Young admits this in a deposition given in 1875. A copy, sworn to and notarized by Nephi W. Clayton, turned up in a church letter book in 1884; but Hamilton Gray Park, one of Brigham Young’s assistants, made a note claiming that the letter was in answer to a plea from the south for instructions as to what to do about the Fancher party.

  The request for instruction and Brigham Young’s answer were both entrusted to the courier James Haslem, who sped from the south to Salt Lake City and then back to the south, a distance said by some to be a round-trip of 496 miles, which he made in one hundred hours. Assuming that relays of horses were made available that does not seem especially fast to me, although Young had pleaded with the courier to ride night and day, insisting to Haslem that “that company [the Fancher party] must be protected from the Indians if it takes every LD Saint in Iron County to do it.”

  There are problems in regard to Brigham Young’s letter and Hamilton Gray Park’s memo about it that historians have so far not convincingly explained.

  Was Brigham Young, relieved of the immediate threat of attack by the U.S. Army, sincere in his desire to save the Fancher party? Though the army was delayed, it was still coming; might it be that he wanted to be careful not to give them a new excuse to invade? However cynical he may have been about the immigrants themselves, he might not, at this juncture, have wanted to throw fuel on a smoldering fire.

  Of course it’s possible that this famous letter might not have been the only message he dispatched to the south. The nice letter may have been intended as cover in case things went wrong.

  In an army report made by Major James H. Carleton (the same officer, who, just a few years later, commanded Kit Carson to go round up the Navaho), it was stated that the Paiute chiefs claimed that letters ordering the destruction of the emigrant train came from Brigham Young. The copious and meticulous Mormon archives are absent any such letters.

  Where one stands on the several vexed questions having to do with the Mormon leader’s involvement in the destruction of the Fancher party finally depends on what one believes about Brigham Young himself. The letter of September 10 instructing Elder Haight not to meddle with the immigrants could be shrewd political disinformation, something he could show to the army to prove his good intentions, if that became necessary. All his urgings to the fast rider, Haslem, could have sprung from the same motive. He wanted to appear to be doing his best to save the immigrants. Did he know that Haslem couldn’t possibly get there in time?

  On the other hand, once told of the massacre, not long after it happened, Brigham Young is said to have had the immediate and uncomfortable intuition that this massacre was something that would haunt the Mormon church forever—which, so far, it has.

  He had this intuition, and then, for eighteen years, did his best to stonewall—and his best, considering his lofty position, was pretty good. Though he was told in some detail by Jacob Hamlin and John Doyle Lee what had happened at Mountain Meadows, he publicly insisted, for nearly two decades, that the Indians had done it, not the Mormons. It was only in 1875, in a deposition, that he finally admitted when he knew what he knew. It is clear that he used the power of his position as church leader to keep the truth from coming out, a practice that has been followed by many church leaders since.

  Brigham Young had been aware of the Fancher party for some time. Had he wished, he would not have needed to wait until the last minute to instruct Elder Haight not to molest them.

  The corresponding question that might be asked is whether Elder Haight and the Mormons of remote southern Utah would have executed all these travelers without the explicit approval of Brigham Young and the other Mormon authorities in Salt Lake City.

  My own feeling about this is that the Iron County Mormons were raring to go for the immigrants. No doubt they would have welcomed a go-ahead from Brigham Young, but Salt Lake City was a long way off; the Iron County Mormons were in a mood to kill, and kill they did, on that plain with the seductive grass.

  Doctrinally, in the eyes of the Mormon leaders, the majority of the immigrants—that is, the adults—were not innocents. They were, in Mormon terms, gentiles, enemies of the faith, perfect candidates for the enactment of blood atonement.

  The council of elders held in southern Utah before the attack contained few if any moderate voices. What the elders seemed mainly to concern themselves with was rounding up enough Indian allies to help them at their bloody task. This proved not hard to accomplish—the sight of all those cattle was enough to tempt the Paiutes. Once the Fancher party paused to graze their herds, the stage was set; the Mormons and the Indians were ready.

  Early on the morning of September 7, while the immigrants were at breakfast, the firing began.

  Mountain Meadows (II)

  The Fancher party, as I have said, was no pushover. Once bullets started whizzing into the breakfasting camp the wagons were immediately circled. Soon formidable breastworks were constructed. Had the party been camped a little closer to a nearby spring, so as to have an adequate water supply, they might have mounted a lengthy siege. The Paiutes did not like long battles, preferring to overcome their enemies in a wild rush or else pick them off one by one over a long stretch of time.

  Though several immigrants were killed in the initial attack, the immigrants held off this first assault. They had not made it all the way from Arkansas to fold at the first sign of trouble. Also, they were not long in observing that a number of the “Indians” who were attacking them showed patches of white skin underneath their war paint. The attacking party probably numbered about 250 strong: two hundred Indians and perhaps fifty white people. They
were not strong enough to overrun the barricade of wagons and breastworks. Butchering and booty-gathering were obviously going to take some time. Council had to be taken and taken quickly. The battle took place on an established trail. Other immigrants might show up, and, even if they didn’t, the Paiutes might tire of the siege and drift off to other pursuits.

  The immigrants, of course, soon recognized that they were in a bad situation, in a remote and pitiless place. When night fell they sent scouts to the west, hoping that they might slip through to California quickly and bring help.

  None of these scouts made it through. A statement the leaders had composed, describing the desperate situation, was lost with the scouts.

  The Mormons were by then fully determined to eliminate the immigrants, but how? A long siege was out of the question; their allies the Paiutes would run off as many cattle as possible and then vamoose. Soldiers might show up along this much used route; soldiers, or merely other travelers.

  After some praying and much discussion, the Mormons concluded that the best strategy would be to decoy the immigrants with a promise of safe passage. They would be told that if only they would disarm they would be allowed to proceed in peace. The arrangement would be for each male immigrant to hand over his weapons and then walk out with a Mormon escort. The women and children could walk ahead.

  Here one has to step back and attempt to understand why the leaders of the Fancher party fell for this transparent ruse. They were not fools; they had come a long way through dangerous country. Why would they simply take the word of these white men, some of whom had been shooting at them over the course of three days? White men, moreover, who had taken the trouble to paint themselves up like Indians? That in itself should have registered as a bad sign; perhaps it did. The Fancher party had no reason at all to trust either the Indians or the Mormons. They knew quite well that the latter hated them, because of where they came from and because they were gentiles.

  Were there not those in the party who questioned the wisdom of unilateral disarmament while surrounded by their foes? Did no one manage to foresee what was coming?

  The question can’t be answered—not with any certainty. Either the Mormon negotiators were exceptionally persuasive, or the immigrants felt their position to be so hopeless that they would grasp at any straw. Perhaps the members of the Fancher party simply could not believe that white men would massacre them and their women and children. Also, they may have had no clear idea as to how large a force they were in conflict with.

  Seventeen young children survived this massacre, but none of the men who made the decision to disarm was spared. Any opinion one might have about the decision-making would only be guesswork; but, still, the ease and speed with which they accepted the Mormon offer seems inexplicable. The siege was only in its fourth day. The fate of the scouts dispatched to California was not yet known.

  Perhaps crucially, they could not reach the nearby spring without exposing themselves to rifle fire: perhaps it was thirst that tipped the balance.

  What we now know is that on the morning of September 11, after a not especially prolonged parley, wagons were brought forward in one of which the armed immigrants were to stack their weapons. This they meekly did. Then the menfolk of the Fancher party were marched out, each man with an armed Mormon by his side. The women and children were somewhat ahead of the men, having marched out first. The Indians remained in hiding.

  These women, having lived under conditions of terror for four days, were likely not free of fears about what would happen if the Indians were allowed to have their way. Perhaps, like the men, they reposed their hopes in Mormon decency. The historian J. P. Dunn suggests that they had even begun to perk up—it’s not clear to me how he could know this. He thought, from what reports I don’t know, that the womenfolk had begun to regain their confidence; if so, they didn’t regain it for long.

  Suddenly Major High Higbee, the military man who devised the Mormon battle plan, appeared on a ridge ahead of them. Major Higbee waved his arms and shouted something like Do-Your-Duty, whereupon the Mormon escorts immediately shot down the men they had been escorting. The few who failed to die immediately had their throats cut, so that, Dunn suggests, the atoning blood could flow more freely. (For whatever reason, a great many throats were cut during the massacre.)

  According to Dunn, the Indians then fell on the women and children—they had been assigned the job of killing these tender ones, presumably to avoid the possibility of some Mormon shedding innocent blood. A baby had already been killed by the same bullet that cut down his father, who was carrying him at the time, a death that threw an instant taint over the whole gory enterprise.

  The long-held view that the Indians took care of the women and kids received a severe challenge with the discovery of the mass grave at the massacre site in 1999. When those bones were uncovered the Mormon authorities must have felt at least briefly that the place was cursed. Thanks to the abundance of Native American remains in Utah, there were laws on the books protecting just such a discovery. With the help of the then governor, Mike Leavitt, a descendant of a massacre participant, and, of course, the Mormon hierarchy, these laws were eventually evaded, but not before a dedicated team of forensic scientists had had some time to work—and did they work, eighteen hours at a stretch; they were well aware that the powers that be would soon succeed in having those telltale bones reburied.

  This, of course, is exactly what happened, but in fact the scientists still prevailed, assembling parts of twenty-eight individuals and piecing together eighteen skulls.

  It was the skulls that cast most doubt on the old belief that the Indians had done most of the killing. Most of the males whose skulls were reassembled died of gunshots fired at very close range—the females, in most cases, had been bludgeoned. The close-range executions by pistol shot suggested white behavior rather than Paiute behavior. The Paiutes had long claimed the Mormons did the lion’s share of the killing. Thus what had begun as an attempt to landscape the monument site had blown up in the Mormons’ faces. The Paiutes were not entirely exonerated but the notion that they had more or less been slackers at this massacre gained currency again.

  Whichever group, Mormons or Indians, accounted for the largest share of the dead did nothing to lessen the horror of what had occurred that September day. Terrible violence occurred, a terror in the desert. Many of the women were quickly dispatched but some children fled. Two young girls hid in some bushes, only to be spotted, dragged out, raped, and killed. One of them pled for her life but John Doyle Lee, the man eventually executed for his role in the massacre, cut her throat anyway. (Lee maintained that he killed no one, but various witnesses said otherwise.)

  Seventeen children—innocents in Mormon terms, which meant that they were seven years old and under, were spared and, at first, divided among Mormon families. Most of them were eventually retrieved and sent back to Arkansas—twenty years later their testimony came back to haunt the perpetrators.

  John Doyle Lee, Philip Klingensmith (a Mormon bishop), and Jacob Hamlin all insist that they reported the massacre to Brigham Young as soon as it was practicable to do so. The prophet seems much shocked by the killing of women and children, but he then made this remarkable statement about that grisly aspect of the affair:

  I have made that matter a subject of prayer. I went right to God with it, and asked him to take the horrid vision from my sight, if it was a righteous thing that my people have done in killing those people at Mountain Meadows. God answered me, and at once the vision was removed. I had evidence from God that he had over-ruled it all for good, and the action was a righteous one, and well intended.

  Brigham Young evidently spoke those words to John Doyle Lee, and went on to say that he had heard from Mormons who took part in the killing with Lee, concluding that “we will look into that.”

  He certainly did look into it, firmly insisting for the next eighteen years that the Mormons had no part in the massacre; it was not until he gave his depositi
on in 1875 that he admitted to being an accessory after the fact. When he finaly got around to visiting southern Utah he even ordered the destruction of a cross that had been erected at the site of the killings. (The Mormons have had extremely bad luck with monuments on that site—if you count the first crude cross, the present monument is, I believe, the fourth to be erected; perhaps the reason for the bad luck is that—except for that cross—all have been dishonest, erring, always, by omission.)

  The Mormon God was certainly a most forgiving deity to so easily cleanse the record of all those women and children, hacked and bashed to death in that remote meadow. Enough gentile blood soaked into the ground that day to atone for a hundred Parley Pratts.

  Once the killing was done, the fun part—the looting and divvying up of the immigrants’ considerable property—could begin. Six hundred cattle were a fine prize in themselves; John Lee may have gotten as many as two hundred of them. By Arkansas estimates the Fancher goods were worth $100,000; the Mormon reckoning was $70,000. John Lee, who seems to have been the treasurer of the local Mormon polity, actually charged the government $1,500 for property allotted to the Indians.

  The bodies of the dead were quickly stripped and searched. Ears were out off, that being the quickest way to get earrings. Fingers were lopped off and rings removed. According to Dunn, all the bloody clothing was for a time piled in the back room of an office in Cedar City, where it soon grew fragrant. It seems that the clothes were referred to locally as relics of “the Siege of Sevastapol,” a somewhat surreal touch. Writing in 1886, Dunn suggested that some of the Fancher jewelry was still being worn by Mormon matrons.

  As I have several times said, massacres will out, and this one did in spades. Brigham Young’s efforts to contain the news did not succeed. The pile of naked, cut-up bodies—in effect a meat mountain—was soon discovered by a party of men passing through the same grassy meadow. Here is one account of what the travelers found, in testimony later given on the witness stand: