Massacre at Mountain Meadows

massacre at mountain meadows
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ronald w. walker
richard e. turley jr.
glen m. leonard
MASSACRE AT
MOUNTAIN MEADOWS
An American Tragedy
1
2008
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Walker, Ronald W. (Ronald Warren), 1939–.
Massacre at Mountain Meadows / by Ronald W. Walker,
Richard E. Turley Jr., Glen M. Leonard.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-516034-5
1. Mountain Meadows Massacre, Utah, 1857.
I. Turley, Richard E. II. Leonard, Glen M. III. Title.
F826.W23 2008
979.2'02—dc22 2008014451
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper
to the victims
Contents
Preface ix
Prologue: A Picture of Human Suffering

Mountain Meadows, May 1859 3
one Exiles from Freedom
New York to the Iowa Plains, 1830–1846 6
two Peals of Thunder
Utah, 1847–1857 20
three No More Submit to Oppression
Silver Lake, July 24, 1857 33
four Avoid All Excitement, But Be Ready
Salt Lake City to Parowan, July 24–August 8,
1857 41
five Preaching a Military Discourse
Southern Utah, August 9–21, 1857 54
six A Splendid Train
Arkansas to Utah, Emigration Season, 1857 74
seven Restless and Excited Beings
Northern Utah, July–August 1857 89
eight We Have Better Claim
Salt Lake to Fillmore, August 1857 101
nine Men Have Magnified a Natural Circumstance
Corn Creek to Parowan, Late August–Early
September 1857 116
ten Make It an Indian Massacre
Cedar City, July 24–September 5, 1857 129
eleven A Fearful Responsibility
Cedar City and Southwest, September 5–7,
1857 149
twelve Finish His Dirty Job
Parowan to Mountain Meadows, September 7–10,
1857 166
thirteen Decoyed Out and Destroyed
Mountain Meadows, September 10–11, 1857 187
fourteen Too Late to Back Water
Mountain Meadows to Cedar City, September
11–13, 1857 210
Epilogue: Under Sentence of Death
Beaver to Mountain Meadows, March 20–23,
1877 227
Acknowledgments 233
Appendix A: The Emigrants 243
Appendix B: The Emigrants’ Property 251
Appendix C: The Militiamen 255
Appendix D: The Indians 265
Abbreviations Used in Notes 271
Notes 281
Index 409
viii Contents
Preface
O
n September 11, 1857, Mormon settlers in southern Utah
used a false flag of truce to lull a group of California-bound
emigrants from their circled wagons and then slaughter them.
When the killing was over, more than one hundred butchered bodies
lay strewn across a half-mile stretch of an upland meadow. Most of the
victims were women and children.
The perpetrators were members of the Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints, aided by Indians. What did the terrible atroc-
ity say about the killers? What did it say about their church and its
leaders? Did early Mormonism possess a violent strain so deep and
volcanic that it erupted without warning? And what did the Mountain
Meadows Massacre say about religion generally? A modern age wants
to know whether people might be better off without their religious
beliefs.
While these questions can only be partly answered by any book,
they are the themes of our story. The massacre “is a ghost which will
not be laid,” said historian Juanita Brooks before publishing her path-
breaking study, The Mountain Meadows Massacre, in 1950. “Again and
again, year after year, it stalks abroad to cast its shadow across some
history, or to haunt the pages of some novel. Even books to which it is
not natural, either from point of time or location, reach out a long arm
and draw it in . . . until it has been made the most important episode
in the history of the state [of Utah], eclipsing every achievement and
staining every accomplishment.”1
Brooks may have exaggerated to make her point, but the stream of
articles and books goes on—recently expanded by television programs,
films, and websites. The past fifteen years have seen a flood of new
materials on the subject. And more are on their way. If Brooks thought
her book would exorcize the demons, she was wrong.
Why then our book? During the past two decades, descendants
of both emigrants and perpetrators have worked together at times
to memorialize the victims. These efforts have had the support of
leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, officials
of the state of Utah, and other institutions and individuals. Among
the products of this cooperation have been the construction of two
memorials at the massacre site and the placing of plaques commem-
orating the Arkansas emigrants. In 1990, at dedication ceremonies
for the first of the recent memorials, relatives of the victims joined
hands with Brigham Young University president Rex E. Lee—a
descendant of one of the most prominent participants in the massa-
cre—in a gesture of forgiveness and conciliation.2 He suggested that
in the future the Meadows should symbolize for those now living
“not only tragedy and grief, but also human dignity, mutual under-
standing, [and] a willingness to look forward and not back.”3
One participant in this ceremony, Judge Roger V. Logan Jr. of
Harrison, Arkansas—who could count some twenty victims and five
survivors among his relatives—later reminded the public that there
had to be some important looking back. “While great strides have been
made in recent years,” Logan said, “until the church shows more can-
dor about what its historians actually know about the event, true rec-
onciliation will be elusive.”4 That much seems sure: Only complete
and honest evaluation of the tragedy can bring the trust necessary for
lasting good will. Only then can there be catharsis.
Thoroughness and candor have been our ideals in writing this book,
but with so many minds already made up about the role and guilt of
participants, we are sure to disappoint some readers. We have done
our best to go where the evidence led us, which meant changing some
of our early opinions. We hope our readers will have the same spirit
of discovery—even if our findings might run against their previously
accepted ideas.
We began our book at the end of 2001 with the decision that ours
would not be primarily a response to prior historical writing—to the
arguments or conclusions of any previous author. Rather, we would
take a fresh approach based upon every primary source we could
find. That goal sent colleagues from the Family and Church History
Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and
Brigham Young University to every promising archive in the country,
x Preface
at times as they went about other duties. It also resulted in a careful
search for materials in the church’s history library and archives, as
well as in the archives of the First Presidency, the church’s highest
governing body. Church leaders supported our book by providing full
and open disclosure.
The result of our searches has been a rich body of historical
material. Local and genealogical sources yielded new information
about the emigrants who were killed. Regional and national news-
papers proved to be an important source on immigration, the Utah
War, and conditions in Utah Territory during the summer of 1857.
The extensive collections of church and militia records housed in the
Family and Church History Department and elsewhere allowed us to
reconstruct an almost daily record of events for the six weeks leading
up to the massacre.
Among the most significant discoveries in the church’s collections
were the field notes of assistant church historian Andrew Jenson,
who collected several reminiscent accounts of the massacre in 1892.
This discovery, in turn, led to the full collection of Jenson materials
in the First Presidency’s archives. In this collection, massacre insid-
ers told what happened, at times defensively but in some cases with
self-incriminating honesty. The nineteenth-century historian Orson
F. Whitney had used these materials in his History of Utah, but perhaps
because he did not cite sources, his work did not get into the historical
mainstream.5 Scholars of the massacre were unaware of its importance
or chose to ignore it.
When Jenson went to southern Utah to gather this material, the
First Presidency gave him a letter asking church members to cooperate.
“There is an opinion prevailing that all the light that can be obtained
[on the massacre] has not been thrown upon it,” the letter read. “We
are anxious to learn all that we can upon this subject, not necessarily
for publication, but that the Church may have the details in its pos-
session for the vindication of innocent parties, and that the world may
know, when the time comes, the true facts connected with it.”6 Today,
more than a century later, we are the beneficiaries of this foresight,
though Jenson did not enjoy his experience. “I . . . have been successful
in getting the desired information for the First Presidency,” he wrote
in his diary, “but it has been an unpleasant business. The information
that I received made me suffer mentally and deprived me of my sleep at
nights; and I felt tired and fatigued, both mentally and physically when
I returned home.”7 It was a reaction that we, as authors, have come to
appreciate.
Preface xi
Our interest in primary sources led us to investigate one of the
mainstays of previous writing. A close comparison of John D. Lee’s
journals, letters, and statements with his posthumously published Mor-
monism Unveiled convinced us that the book’s account of the massacre
could not always be depended upon. Almost certainly Lee’s editor or
publisher—perhaps both—introduced details into the memoir. We
disregarded this source when the cumulative effect of other sources
contradicted it.
We also sensed anomalies in the transcripts of John D. Lee’s two
trials. As we wrote, LaJean Purcell Carruth—a rare specialist in tran-
scribing nineteenth-century shorthand—worked to complete a new
transcript of the trials from original shorthand records in the church’s
archives and at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.
She found that many passages of the nineteenth-century transcripts
did not accurately reflect the original shorthand record of the trials.
Carruth also discovered important shorthand passages never previ-
ously transcribed.
The collection of material for our book became an embarrassment
of riches. We concluded, reluctantly, that too much information existed
for a single book. Besides, two narrative themes emerged. One dealt
with the story of the massacre and the other with its aftermath—one
with crime and the other with punishment. This first volume tells only
the first half of the story, leaving the second half to another day. An
exception is the epilogue, in which we touch briefly on the second half
of the story to conclude this volume.
Some may find our book to be a quiet one. In keeping with our
decision to rely on primary documents, we have avoided the tempta-
tion to argue with previous authors, except at critical points when we
concluded readers might want to know the reasons for our interpreta-
tion—and these discussions are usually confined to the endnotes. We
wanted the story itself to remain in the foreground.
Our choice of style or presentation entered into this decision. We
believed the best way to present our information was by narrating it,
largely forgoing topical or critical analysis. This decision, more than
observing a current historical fashion, was meant to appeal to a larger
audience than just scholars.
Broadly speaking, since historians and others began to tell the story
of the massacre, they have followed three main approaches. The first
two are poles apart. One approach portrays the perpetrators as good
people and the victims as evil ones who committed outrages during
their travel through central and southern Utah. Some descendants
xii Preface
of the perpetrators and several Mormon historians have adopted
this approach because it seems, on the surface, to excuse or soften
what happened. The second approach looks at the innocence of the
emigrants and the evil of their killers, who at best are described as
followers of misguided religion. Some relatives of the emigrant fami-
lies, church critics, and many non-Mormons have found this position
attractive.
Readers of our book will find little sympathy for either of these
two approaches. Each overlooks how complex human beings can be—
good and evil, after all, are widely shared human traits. Nor do these
approaches recognize how diverse the two groups were. Moreover,
each of the two polarized explanations breaks down logically. Noth-
ing that the emigrants purportedly did comes close to justifying their
murder. Their wagon company was made up mostly of young families
traveling through the territory in pursuit of their dreams. The leading
men and women among them had been substantial citizens in their
Arkansas communities and promised to make their mark in California.
Likewise, most of the killers led exemplary lives before and after the
massacre. Except for their experiences during a single, nightmarish
week in September 1857, most of them were ordinary humans with
little to distinguish them from other nineteenth-century frontiersmen.
Some in fact would have been pillars in any community.
The third main approach to understanding the massacre attempts
to navigate between the extremes of the other two. This approach is
partly a commonsense recognition that both victims and perpetrators
were decent but imperfect people whose paths crossed in a moment
of history that resulted in a terrible tragedy. Brooks’s 1950 book had
this insight, and it is one reason we admire her work, though new
information now permits a more complete and accurate telling of the
massacre.
This third approach, however, leads to a troubling question: How
could basically good people commit such a terrible atrocity? There
are no easy answers, but the professional literature dealing with nine-
teenth-century American violence offers a starting point. In the early
to mid-1800s, the United States could be a violent place, particularly
for racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. The period from 1830 to
1860 has been called “The Turbulent Era,” and indeed it was for many
Mormons.8 These men and women experienced violence in Missouri
and Illinois, and when a U.S. army marched toward Utah Territory
in 1857—the year of the massacre—they believed they were about to
become victims again. One of the bitter ironies of Mormon history is
Preface xiii
that some of the people who had long deplored the injustice of extra-
legal violence became its perpetrators. In carrying out the Mountain
Meadows Massacre, they followed a familiar step-by-step pattern used
by vigilantes elsewhere.
Scholars who have investigated violence in many cultures pro-
vide other insights based on group psychology. Episodes of violence
often begin when one people classify another as “the other,” stripping
them of any humanity and mentally transforming them into enemies.
Once this process of devaluing and demonizing occurs, stereotypes
take over, rumors circulate, and pressure builds to conform to group
action against the perceived threat. Those classified as the enemy are
often seen as the transgressors, even as steps are being taken against
them. When these tinderbox conditions exist, a single incident, small
or ordinary in usual circumstances, may spark great violence ending
in atrocity.9
The literature suggests other elements are often present when “good
people” do terrible things. Usually there is an atmosphere of author-
ity and obedience, which allows errant leaders to trump the moral
instincts of their followers. Atrocities also occur when followers do
not have clear messages about what is expected of them—when their
culture or messages from headquarters leave local leaders wondering
what they should do. Poverty increases the likelihood of problems by
raising concerns about survival.10 The conditions for mass killing—
demonizing, authority, obedience, peer pressure, ambiguity, fear, and
deprivation—all were present in southern Utah in 1857.
These concepts of American extralegal violence and the group psy-
chology common in religious and ethnic violence color much of our
thinking and writing. We are too much believers in institutional and
personal responsibility, however, to leave the massacre to historical
patterns or models. We believe errors were made by U.S. president
James Buchanan, Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders, some
of the Arkansas emigrants, some Paiutes, and most of all by settlers
in southern Utah who set aside principles of their faith to commit an
atrocity. At each point along the chain of acts and decisions—especially
in Iron and Washington Counties—a single personal choice or policy
might have brought a different result. Those who acted as they did
bear a responsibility—some a great deal more than others—though
we as authors know the presumption of judging past events without
having lived in them.
We also acknowledge an element of the unknowable. A citizen who
did not take part in the killing but lived in southern Utah in 1857 later
xiv Preface
told his son: “You would not understand if I told you. You know noth-
ing about the spirit of the times. . . . You don’t understand and you can’t
understand.”11
For too long, writing about the massacre has been characterized
by a spirit of charge and countercharge. These frames of reference
usually center on personalities and conspiracies: What was the role of
John D. Lee? Did church authorities unfairly magnify his crimes? Was
Brigham Young guilty of secretly ordering the massacre? Which of
the southern Utah leaders was most responsible? These questions, we
believe, are best answered by telling the story and letting events speak
for themselves.
It is for this reason that much of our book deals with the final days
before the mass killing. We hope that readers will see not scapegoats
but a complex event in which many people and forces had a role.
Readers should know our rules of navigation. One, we give priority
to the documents closest in time, distance, and person to the events.
Two, we believe that most testimony about the massacre—whether
Mormon or non-Mormon—contains a great deal of truth, except at
times when men and women speak of their own roles or those of close
associates and family members. Generally, the problem is omission.
Of the admonition to “tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth,”
many statements fail the first clause but honor the second. Three, for
important points in our narrative, we have sought confirmation from
multiple witnesses while also searching for witnesses with differing
viewpoints. Four, chronology and sequence are keys to our under-
standing, another reason so much of our book is devoted to the telling
of daily events. It is here that the causes of the massacre become most
clear. Five, we think context is the historian’s best friend. Readers of
our book must expect passages about setting and personality—know-
ing, too, that for every paragraph in the text, three or four often ended
up on the cutting-room floor. Finally, our method has been to compare
relevant documents to seek consistent details and general patterns.
Above all else, we look for the weight of evidence, understanding that,
inevitably, some pieces of evidence will prove to be anomalous.
The institutions with which we have been professionally associ-
ated—Brigham Young University and the Family and Church History
Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—were
generous in supporting this book, both in allowing us professional
time to research and write, and in funding the work of colleagues and
research assistants who helped with the project. Throughout, we were
given the freedom to make our own judgments and have retained full
Preface xv
editorial control over our manuscript—all the more remarkable given
the sensitivity of our topic. To the institutions and the many men and
women who have contributed to our book, we extend the usual dis-
claimer. As authors, we alone are responsible for the book’s contents.
Ronald W. Walker
Richard E. Turley Jr.
Glen M. Leonard
xvi Preface
massacre at mountain meadows
james henry carleton. Courtesy Library of Congress.
prologue
A Picture of Human Suffering

Mountain Meadows, May 1859
I
n April 1859, Brevet Major James Henry Carleton received the
orders that would mark his place in Utah history. He and his First
Dragoons were to escort Maj. Henry Prince, U.S. Army pay-
master, on the first leg of his journey from California’s Fort Tejon to
northern Utah’s Camp Floyd.1 But that was not all. “When I left Los
Angeles,” Carleton later explained, “General [N. S.] Clarke, com-
manding the department of California, directed me to bury the bones
of the victims of that terrible massacre” at the Mountain Meadows in
southern Utah.2
A three-week march through the Mojave Desert and up the lip of
the Great Basin brought Carleton and his men to the Meadows in mid
May. The necklike valley, about a mile and a half wide and six miles
long, lay a cool mile above sea level, hedged on every side by low-rising
hills. “Pathfinder” John C. Frémont had called it “las Vegas de Santa
Clara”—the Meadows of Santa Clara—when heading east from Califor-
nia during his 1844 exploring expedition. The place was “rich in bunch
grass, and fresh with numerous springs of clear water, all refreshing and
delightful to look upon,” Frémont reported.3 Nearly a decade after Fré-
mont’s expedition, a California-bound emigrant wrote admiringly of
rich, waving grass and numerous rills, adding, “These vegas are called
by the Mormons, Mountain Meadows.”4 Just days before Carleton’s
arrival, U.S. Indian superintendent Jacob Forney called the Meadows
“the most extraordinary formation west of the Rocky Mountains.”5
Yet more striking to Carleton’s eyes than the natural beauty of the
place was the carnage that now defiled it. “The scene of the massacre,
even at this late day,” he wrote, “was horrible to look upon. Women’s
hair in detached locks, and in masses, hung to the sage bushes, and
was strewn over the ground in many places. Parts of little children’s
dresses, and of female costume, dangled from the shrubbery, or lay scat-
tered about. And among these, here and there, on every hand . . . there
gleamed, bleached white by the weather, the skulls and other bones of
those who had suffered.”6
Despite repeated attempts to lay to rest the remains of the victims,
their bones—like the truth—refused to stay buried.
Superintendent Forney and his company were the first of an influx
of federal officers who toured the site in 1859, and each tried to do
something about the remains. In April, Forney’s men spent two or
three hours burying—not much more than a gesture.7 When troops
from Camp Floyd arrived in early May to rendezvous with paymaster
Prince, they too had buried bones.8
Still the work was not done. On May 20 Major Carleton and his men
scoured the ground for fragments of bodies. Jacob Hamblin, a Mormon
who lived at the north end of the Meadows, helped by showing troops
where he had interred remains the previous summer. Hamblin had
counted 120 victims then. From this spot and from ravines and clumps
of sagebrush, Carleton reported, “I gathered many of the disjointed
bones of thirty-two persons. The number could easily be told by the
number of pairs of shoulder blades, and of lower jaws, skulls and parts
of skulls.”9 A Mormon who witnessed the work said Carleton’s “wagon
was loaded with bones.”10 “A glance into the wagon,” said Carleton,
“revealed a sight which can never be forgotten.”11
The wagon’s grim load was taken to the slaughtered emigrants’ old
encampment on the south end of the Meadows, where two other bod-
ies were found in a nearby ravine. Carleton put the bones in the earth
and built a cone-shaped cairn of stones over the mass grave. The mon-
ument was some sixteen feet in diameter and twelve feet high. Rising
another dozen feet from the stones was a heavy cross hewn from red
cedarwood. On the horizontal plank of the cross, the troopers wrote
the inscription:
vengeance is mine: i will repay saith the lord.
On a slab of stone set against the northern side of the monument, the
men cut the words,
4 Massacre at Mountain Meadows

Here
120 Men, Women and Children,
were Massacred in cold Blood,
in Sept., 1857.
They were from Arkansas.12
Finally, a monument marked the victims’ final resting place. But Carle-
ton meant the monument to be more than a mausoleum. He meant it
to shame the Mormons.
Driven by what he had seen, Carleton “endeavored to learn the
circumstances” surrounding the massacre. He began penning a report
from his camp near the spot where twenty months earlier the emi-
grants battled for their lives from their wagon corral before filing out
under a false promise of protection.13
“The idea,” Carleton wrote, “of the melancholy procession of that
great number of women and children—followed at a distance by their
husbands and brothers—after all their suffering, their watching, their
anxiety, and grief, for so many gloomy days and dismal nights at the
corral, thus moving slowly and sadly on up to the point where the
Mormons and Indians lay in wait to murder them; these doomed and
unhappy people, literally going to their own funeral; the chill shadows
of night closing darkly around them, sad precursors of the approach-
ing shadows of a deeper night; brings to the mind a picture of human
suffering and wretchedness on the one hand, and of human treachery
and ferocity upon the other.”14
Carleton’s words stumbled over themselves in fury. “I would to
God,” he wrote to Clarke’s assistant adjutant general after returning
to California, “that General Clarke with an adequate force, and with
his hands unfettered by red tape, could have the management of those
damned Mormons just one summer, and that ‘I could be there to see.’
Major, it is no use to talk or split hairs about that accursed race. All
fine spun nonsense about their rights as citizens, and all knotty ques-
tions about Constitutional Rights should be solved with the sword.
Self preservation, the first law, demands that this set of ruffians go out
from amongst us as a people. . . . Give them one year, no more; and if
after that they pollute our soil by their presence make literally Children
of the Mist of them.”15
He was not the first or last to curse the Mormons.
A Picture of Human Suffering 5

chapter one
Exiles from Freedom

New York to the Iowa Plains, 1830–1846
T
he Mormons knew they were “peculiar” people. They had
no prepared liturgies, no starched clerical collars, and no
purchased pews. They accepted new scripture, including the
Book of Mormon, and considered their church “the only true and
living church upon the face of the whole earth”—the only one with
God’s authority. They gathered themselves into their own communi-
ties, where their leaders preached that they should be one people—
unified—and in those days that went for their politics, too. For them,
social, political, and religious issues mingled as easily as they did for
Puritans in seventeenth-century New England.1
The Mormons saw themselves as Christian, but in a different way.
They rejected some popular concepts about God, such as Trinitarian-
ism, and accepted living prophets and apostles like those in the Old
and New Testaments. For a time, they also practiced polygamy, much
to the scandal of other Americans. Just as Christianity emerged from
Judaism as a new covenant with God, Mormons considered themselves
part of a new dispensation—a “new and everlasting covenant.” They
were creating what one modern scholar has called “a new religious
tradition.”2
Their church was organized in upstate New York in 1830 by
twenty-four-year-old prophet Joseph Smith, who translated old
scriptural records and issued new revelations.3 Smith also spoke of
the “last days,” which eventually became part of the church’s formal
name, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Its members
called themselves Latter-day Saints, or just Saints, and outsiders began
calling them Mormons. “We rejoice that the time is at hand when,
the wicked who will not repent will be swept from the earth with the
besom of destruction and the earth become an inheritance for the poor
and the meek,” Smith wrote. “And we are led to . . . mingle our prayers
with those saints that have suffered the like treatment before us, whose
souls are under the altar crying to the Lord for vengance upon those
that dwell upon the earth.”4
Smith’s words showed how close the last days were to him, as well
as God’s justice, which often was about separating those who accepted
the new message from those who did not.5 This kind of thinking—
believers versus nonbelievers or “gentiles,” as the Mormons termed
them—followed a pattern. The categories of “good–evil, pious–
hypocrite, elect–damned” were part of the early history of Christianity,
and indeed they exist among many religious groups.6 Such categories,
however, sometimes get believers into trouble since nonbelievers do
not like being declared on the opposite side of truth.
The Mormons’ unusual beliefs and practices brought them opposi-
tion beginning in New York and Pennsylvania and continuing during
the church’s sojourn in Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, and finally the Rocky
Mountains.
The Mormons saw their troubles as religious persecution, but the
violence they experienced was also a reflection of American culture at
that time. The belief that citizens had the right to take the law into
their own hands to protest unjust conditions existed in colonial Amer-
ica, where citizens violently defied British rule and finally overthrew
it. By the time of Joseph Smith, the traditional “right of riot” was also
being used against individuals and groups.7 The people had so often
heard “that all power, government, and authority of right belong to
them,” wrote a contemporary critic of American conditions, “that they
occasionally mistake the true limit of that sovereignty, and undertake
to exercise despotic powers.”8
American cities had “labor riots, election riots, anti-abolitionist
riots, anti-Negro riots, [and] anti-Catholic riots,” wrote Richard Max-
well Brown, a leading historian of violence. Rural America likewise
had its roughnecks, bushwhackers, and night riders, who put down
anybody they strongly disliked. This “continuous and often intense
violence” was frequently aimed at unpopular minorities, whether
Exiles from Freedom 7

riot in philadelphia. Courtesy Library of Congress.
racial, ethnic, or religious.9 Some Americans reacted even to verbal

slights with quick tempers, swift blows, and deadly duels that the law
seemed unable to control.10
Contributing to the problem was poor law enforcement. During
America’s colonial era, sheriffs and constables did their best to uphold
peace, aided by local militias. But by the mid-1800s this system could
not keep pace with the rising violence that came with growing popula-
tions. Some cities reacted by establishing professional police forces,
but other Americans simply chose to maintain order by taking the law
into their own hands.11
In March 1832 an Ohio mob, led by what Joseph Smith described
as religious rivals, kidnapped him and stretched him for castration.
The vigilantes “concluded not to kill [or deform] me, but pound and
scratch me well, tear of[f] my shirt and drawers and leave me naked,”
Smith said. The men smeared hot tar on Smith’s skin and coated him
in feathers before leaving him writhing on the frozen ground with
injuries that afflicted him the rest of his life.12
The next year, Missourians who opposed Mormons moving into
their state reflected their views in a formal document signed by hun-
dreds of Jackson County citizens. They were determined “to rid our
society” of the Mormons, “ ‘peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must,’ ”
the manifesto said.

It is more than two years since the first of these fanatics, or knaves . . .
made their first appearance amongst us, . . . pretending . . . to receive
communications and revelations direct from heaven; to heal the sick
by laying on hands; and in short, to perform all the wonder working
miracles wrought by the inspired apostles and prophets of old.
. . . They have been daily increasing in numbers, and . . . were of the
very dregs of that society from which they came, . . . for . . . they brought
into our county little or no property . . . their conduct here stamps their
characters in their true colors. More than a year since, it was ascer-
tained that they had been tampering with our slaves . . . in a late number
of the Star, published in Independence by the leaders of the sect, there
is an article inviting free negroes and mulattoes from other States to
become mormons and remove and settle among us . . .
They declare openly that their God hath given them this county
of land, and that sooner or later they must and will have possession of
our lands for an inheritance . . . we believe it a duty we owe ourselves, to
our wives and children, to the cause of public morals, to remove them
from among us . . .
. . . We, therefore, agree, that [if] after timely warning, and receiv-
ing an adequate compensation for what little property they cannot take
with them, they refuse to leave us in peace, as they found us, we agree
to use such means as may be sufficient to remove them.13
Among the document’s signers were several of the community’s leading

men, including R. W. Cummins, a local Indian agent who earlier stopped
Mormon missionaries from preaching to native peoples across the border
in Indian territory—a man whose name would later raise fears among
those Saints who thought he had been appointed governor of Utah.14
The Jackson County manifesto embraced many of the cultural,
economic, religious, social, and psychological issues present when
two religious or cultural groups oppose each other. Most of the Saints
in western Missouri were northerners whose values clashed with the
southerners who made up much of the state’s population. The Mor-
mons’ religious tenets, their belief that Jackson County was their prom-
ised land, and their growing political and economic power angered
many Missourians. Rising sectional tension over slavery was another
factor, though the Mormons’ radical abolitionism and moral threats
to Missouri society were little more than wild rumors.15 Claiming the
right of self-preservation, Missourians began driving the Saints from
their communities—beating them, destroying their homes, and threat-
ening those who dared stay behind.16

During this period of violence, the Saints worried whether they
should fight to defend themselves. In August 1833 Joseph Smith
received a revelation telling his followers to “renounce war and pro-
claim peace.” This document told them not to respond to their ene-
mies till after the third or fourth provocation, and then after raising “a
standard of peace.” Even then, those who chose not to fight would be
“rewarded for th[eir] righteousness.”17 Likewise, the Book of Mormon
repeatedly cautioned that men should fight only defensive or just
wars.18 “So tenacious were they for the precepts of the gospel,” wrote
one man present during the Jackson County violence, that “up to this
time the Mormons had not so much as lifted a finger, even in their
own defence.”19
Mormon apostle Parley P. Pratt summed up his experience when
his people were driven from Jackson County in November 1833. “All
my provisions for the winter were destroyed or stolen, and my grain
left growing on the ground for my enemies to harvest. My house was
afterwards burned, and my fruit trees and improvements destroyed or
plundered.” Other Mormons also suffered. “In short, every member
of the society was driven from the county, and fields of corn were rav-
aged and destroyed; stacks of wheat burned, household goods plun-
dered, and improvements and every kind of property destroyed,” Pratt
recounted. “One of this banditti afterwards boasted . . . that, according
to their own account of the matter, the number of houses burned was
two hundred and three.”20
After being displaced yet again in 1836, the Saints relocated to
a sparsely settled part of the state, where Caldwell County was cre-
ated for them by state legislators. As they grew in number and spread
beyond its borders, however, anti-Mormon violence broke out again.21
In many cases, those who attacked the Mormons were aided by local
militia and civil officers, who cited established tradition and even patri-
otism as their authority. It “was Cruel to fight a people who had not
Broke the law,” admitted one Missouri vigilante who took part. Still,
he said, “altho we are trampling on our law and Constitution . . . we
Cant Help it . . . while we possessed the Spirit of 76.”22
The Saints appealed to Missouri governor Daniel Dunklin to pro-
tect their constitutional rights. “Public sentiment,” he replied, “may
become paramount law; and . . . it is useless to run counter to it. . . . In
this Republic, the vox populi is the vox Dei” (the voice of the people is
the voice of God).23
The majority could take the law into its own hands with impunity,
but when minorities employed the same approach or tried to fight back,

it usually backfired. In 1836, after repeated acts of extralegal violence
against the Saints, Smith decided it was time to take a stand. He
proposed that his people covenant that “if any more of our brethren
are slain or driven from their lands in Missouri by the mob that we
will give ourselves no rest until we are avenged of our enimies to the
uttermost.” The congregation replied with a resounding “hosanna and
Amen.”24
Another Mormon leader, Sidney Rigdon, used the majority’s con-
cept of vox populi in telling dissenters to leave the Saints’ communi-
ties. “When a county, or body of people have individuals among them
with whom they do not wish to associate,” said Rigdon, “and a public
expression is taken against their remaining among them and such indi-
viduals do not remove, it is the principle of republicanism itself that
gives that community a right to expel them forcibly.”25
An Independence Day speech by Rigdon in 1838 set off the final
storm. He spoke of the Mormons’ patriotism and insisted they would
“infringe on the rights of no people.” But Missourians remembered
only Rigdon’s defiant final words to any “mob” that dared come
against the Saints. “We take God and all the holy angels to witness
this day, that we warn all men in the name of Jesus Christ, to come
on us no more forever. . . . And that mob that comes on us to disturb
us; it shall be between us and them a war of extermination, for we will
follow them, till the last drop of their blood is spilled, or else they will
have to exterminate us; for we will carry the seat of war to their own
houses, and their own families, and one party or the other shall be
utterly destroyed.”26
About a month later, a riot broke out at a Daviess County polling
place. Several Mormons, including recent convert John D. Lee, used
sticks, boards, or whatever else they could find to fight off Missourians
who attacked them when they tried to exercise their right to vote. Lee
believed God was with him as he fought. “Like Sampson, when lean-
ing against the pillar,” he recounted, “I felt the power of God nerve my
arm for the fray.”27
Exaggerated reports of the riot and other skirmishes led to virtual
civil war. Some of the Saints, including Lee, responded to Missouri
vigilantes by forming bands called “Danites” that made preemptive
strikes against vigilante targets, answering violence with violence.28
Smith, who at first sanctioned the Mormon response, later recoiled
at Danite excesses.29 Even then, one historian concluded, “Mormon
marauding against non-Mormon Missourians in 1838 was mild by
comparison with the brutality of the anti-Mormon militias.”30

After attempting to defend themselves or strike back, the Saints
were soon overwhelmed by even greater anti-Mormon violence.31 On
October 27, 1838, Missouri governor Lilburn W. Boggs ordered that
the Mormons be “exterminated or driven from the state.” He called
out thousands of state militiamen to enforce his order.32 During this
final wave of Missouri violence—and even before receiving Boggs’s
order—rogue militiamen attacked the Latter-day Saint settlement of
Haun’s Mill. The militia killed seventeen Mormon men and boys and
wounded fourteen people, including a woman and a seven-year-old
boy. One ten-year-old child was dragged from his hiding place and
shot point blank in the head as he begged for his life.33
Soon Missouri militiamen arrested and imprisoned Smith, Rigdon,
and other church leaders and forced Mormons to give up their arms
and leave the state.34 While the Saints never made a full accounting
of their casualties, their various reports listed rape, gunshot wounds,
massacre of mormons at haun’s mill. Charles Mackay, The Mormons, or

Latter-day Saints (London, 1851.)

beatings, exposure, and dozens of resulting deaths.35 Before they could
leave, some were forced at bayonet point to sign deeds surrendering
their land. Their losses of real and personal property ran into the hun-
dreds of thousands of dollars, which Missourians took as wages of war.36
When the violence ended, as many as eight thousand Latter-day Saints
fled to Illinois, some in the distress of winter.37 For them, Missouri and
Missourians became bywords.
As his people suffered, Smith languished for months in a Missouri
prison dungeon. He felt the futility of the Saints’ trying to seek justice
on their own. “We can not do any thing only stand still and see the
Salvation of God,” he wrote. “He must do his own work or it must fall
to the ground we must not take it in our hands to avenge our wrongs
Vengeance is mine saith the Lord and I will repay.” As for his own
safety, Smith wrote, “I shall stand unto death God being my helper.”38
After Smith fled captivity in Missouri, the Saints established their
headquarters at Nauvoo, Illinois, where they experienced a few years
of peace. But soon the same cycle began again: a cultural clash between
themselves and their neighbors, rumors leading to attacks, vigilantes
claiming the right of majority rule and self-preservation, and Mor-
mons attempting to defend themselves or strike back before being
overwhelmed in a still larger wave of violence.39 Tensions grew after
Smith and his followers organized their own state-sanctioned militia,
the Nauvoo Legion, to defend themselves and also used the Nauvoo
city council and courts to protect Smith from Missouri’s repeated
attempts to extradite him.40
Some Illinoisans felt the Mormon prophet was setting up a theo-
cratic kingdom that would infringe upon their rights. “Let us stand
by each other, and each others rights,” declared one anti-Mormon
newspaper. “Let us watch the Mormons, expose their usurpations, and
oppressions, check their arrogance by determined resistance to their
overbearing course, and if at last, we are driven to arms, let it be the
result of an inevitable necessity.”41
Emotions boiled over in June 1844 when Mormons, under color
of law, destroyed the press of an opposition newspaper, the Nauvoo
Expositor. “We have only to state, that this is sufficient!” proclaimed an
editorial in the neighboring community of Warsaw. “War and exter-
mination is inevitable! Citizens arise, one and all!!!—Can you stand
by, and suffer such infernal devils! to rob men of their property and
rights, without avenging them. We have no time for comment, every
man will make his own. Let it be made with powder and ball!”42

Before giving himself up for arrest on charges stemming from the
paper’s destruction, Smith acquiesced to his fate. “I am going like a
lamb to the slaughter,” he said, “but I am calm as a summer’s morn-
ing.”43 Within days, a mob that included state militiamen, their faces
blackened in disguise, murdered Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum
at Carthage Jail, about twenty miles from Nauvoo. To Mormons, the
death of their beloved leaders shook heaven and earth. “Their inno-
cent blood, with the innocent blood of all the martyrs under the altar
that John [the Revelator] saw, will cry unto the Lord of Hosts, till he
avenges that blood on the Earth,” wrote John Taylor, a newspaperman
and future church president. His eyewitness account of the murders
would become a part of Mormon scripture.44
Immediately after the murders, many Carthage citizens fled, fear-
ing a Mormon attack. “The people of the county are greatly excited,
and fear the Mormons will come out and take vengeance,” Mormon
apostle Willard Richards wrote to Nauvoo from Carthage. “I have
pledged my word the Mormons will stay at home . . . and no violence
will be on their part, and say to my brethren in Nauvoo, in the name
of the Lord—be still.”45
Instead of retaliating, thousands of Latter-day Saints gathered in
Nauvoo to await the arrival of their martyred prophets’ bodies. “The
day that [the bodies of] Joseph and Hyrum were brought from Car-
thage to Nauvoo it was judged by menny . . . that there was more then
five barels of tears shead,” Mormon apostle Brigham Young wrote. “I
cannot bare to think enny thing about it.”46 The church’s newspaper
recorded that the “vast assemblage . . . with one united voice resolved to
trust to the law for a remedy of such a high handed assassination, and
when that failed to call upon God to avenge us of our wrongs!”47
When the trial of the Smiths’ killers ended without convictions,
the Saints contained their outrage, falling back on the moderation of
their scriptures and their past experience. Instead of taking vengeance
into their own hands, they began in their public meetings and temple
assemblies to call on God to avenge the blood of the prophets.48 In
doing so, they echoed a passage in the New Testament book of Revela-
tion. “I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the
word of God,” the apostle John wrote. “How long, O Lord, holy and
true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on
the earth?”49
In the face of continued violence, the Saints just moved on. “We
could fight our way clear,” a Latter-day Saint editorial said at the

death of joseph smith. Charles Mackay, The Mormons, or Latter-day Saints
(London, 1851).
time. But “we will suffer wrong rather than do wrong . . . The Gospel
whispers peace.”50
Like Missouri governor Boggs, Illinois governor Thomas Ford
wanted the Mormons out of his state, although his memoir, History
of Illinois, was full of hand-wringing over how it was done. Ford said
that even after the Mormons agreed to leave and most had crossed the
Mississippi River, “the anti-Mormons were no less anxious” to expel
those who remained behind. The final scene in Nauvoo began when
vigilantes, again styling themselves as state militiamen, began a cannon
assault on the city.51
The “siege of Nauvoo” lasted only a few days. When it was over,
vigilantes forced the remaining Saints from their homes and across the
Mississippi, violating earlier agreements. “Many of them were taken
from sick beds, hurried into the boats, and driven away by the armed
ruffians now exercising the power of government,” Governor Ford
said. “The best they could do was to erect their tents on the banks of
the river and there remain to take their chance of perishing by hunger
or by prevailing sickness. In this condition the sick, without shelter,
food, nourishment, or medicines, died by scores.”52
Even before the siege of Nauvoo, the Saints were looking to the
West where they might have their own version of majority rule—where
they could “live in peace and not be hunted down like the wild deer
on the mountains.”53 They were believers in the “Manifest Destiny”
thinking of their time—that Americans had the self-evident right to
the American West.54
Brigham Young, the senior apostle at Joseph Smith’s death, would lead
the westward exodus. Young was born on June 1, 1801, at Whitingham,
Vermont, the ninth of eleven children in a struggling household. Shortly
before his third birthday, the Young family moved to upstate New York,
where their economic challenges continued. Young remembered work-
ing in summer and winter, ill clad, “with insufficient food until my
stomach would ache.”55 Chopped logs and planted fields became his
curriculum. His most continuous days of formal schooling, by his own
account, were eleven—and that did not come until after his twenty-
second birthday. His mother died when he was fourteen, and his father,
though having the virtues of integrity, work, and love for his children,
was as stern as the Yankee countryside. With him it was “a word and a
blow,” Young remembered, “but the blow came first.” Young was on his
own at age sixteen, making his living as a laborer and craftsman.56
Young, like Smith, was a product of western New York’s “burned-over
district,” where religious emotion flowed easily.57 Although spending

brigham young, ca. 1849.
Courtesy LDS Church History
Library.
“many anxious hours” studying the “Episcopalians, Presbyterians, New

Lights, Baptists, Freewill Baptists, Wesleyan and Reformed Method-
ists,” Young found little comfort.58 His first religious profession was
Methodism, but he joined the denomination without much convic-
tion.59 By his late twenties, he was, by his own admission, “cast down,
gloomy,” “everything wearing . . . a dreary aspect.” During these years,
he remembered despising the world and “the poor miserable devils”
that ruled it. “I hated them with a perfect hatred,” he said.60
His Mormon baptism gave him a cause and lifted him out of his
depression. Within seven months after his conversion, Young had
raised up a dozen Mormon congregations in New York and surround-
ing states. His religious feeling, like the hero in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s
Progress, was “life, life, eternal life.”61
Young’s quick temper and pungent speech may have been the reason
some church members shook their heads when he was called into the
Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1835. Seeing only the unpolished
exterior, one man compared him to a half-sweet, half-sour apple and
called his selection a “disgrace to the House of Israel.”62 Yet Young’s

prayers and other devotions were as fervent as any man’s. Visitors to
his office later compared him to a retiring New England farmer or
London alderman—so different from the strong-armed image that
others fashioned upon him.63 Thomas L. Kane, a Philadelphia law-
yer and politician who became his lifelong friend, described him as
“an eccentric great man.”64 He stood about five feet ten inches, had
blue-grey eyes, a light complexion, and a strong mouth. “His lips came
together like the jaws of a bear trap,” remembered one man.65
When Young became the Mormons’ leader, he already had a record
of accomplishment. As Joseph Smith fled Ohio in 1838, Young helped
raise funds to aid him in his journey. During the Missouri expulsion
when Smith lay in prison, Young organized the Saints’ evacuation and,
despite heavy odds, kept the church together. From 1839 to 1841, he
led the Latter-day Saint apostles in a proselyting mission to Great
Britain. They and those who followed them had such success that for
the rest of the nineteenth century, nearly half of church members were
Britishers or their sons and daughters.66
After Smith’s death, as Young looked for a future home for the Saints,
everything seemed “pleasant ahead but dark to look back.”67 He wanted
to find a place requiring enough hard labor to discourage too many out-
siders from joining the Saints as co-settlers, but with enough resources
for a hardscrabble “Zion”—as the Saints would call their home.68
Mormon leaders looked at the semiarid region lying between the Sierra
Nevadas and the Rocky Mountains that explorer John C. Frémont
called the Great Basin. On the Basin’s eastern border lay the Salt Lake
Valley, which reportedly had fertile land requiring irrigation for small-
plot agriculture. The mountains were another virtue. The high peaks
and deep canyons would provide natural defenses if needed.69
The Mormons were still on the Iowa plains, the worst of their jour-
ney, when the U.S. government requested five hundred volunteers of
them for the Mexican War. Young had hoped for such an opportunity
and complied by recruiting the “Mormon Battalion.”70 Suddenly, the
likely expansion of the American Republic into the Mexican-owned
Great Basin forced the Saints to consider their future relations with
American civil leaders and magistrates. Writing to U.S. president
James K. Polk from the Omaha nation, Young explained that although
the Saints respected the American Constitution and would regard their
own U.S. territorial government “as one of the richest boons of earth,”
his people would “rather retreat to the deserts, Islands or mountain
caves th[a]n consent to be ruled by governors & judges . . . who delight
in injustices & oppressions.”71

pioneer wagon train. T. B. H. Stenhouse, The Rocky Mountain Saints
(London, 1874).
In writing to Polk, Young was looking over his shoulder to the past
tragedies of Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, where state and local officers
had often been his people’s enemies. Would the future hold more of
the past?
As the Saints were preparing to head west, they still tasted the bit-
terness of their American experience. “We owe the United States noth-
ing,” John Taylor wrote in an editorial. “We go out by force, as exiles
from freedom. The government and people owe us millions for the
destruction of life and property in Missouri and in Illinois. The blood
of our best men stains the land, and the ashes of our property will pre-
serve it till God comes out of his hiding place, and gives this nation a
hotter portion than he did Sodom and Gomorrah. ‘When they cease to
spoil they shall be spoiled,’ for the Lord hath spoken it.”72
Taylor’s quoted scripture came from Isaiah, used by the Jews many
centuries before to create their own identity as exiles.73

chapter two
Peals of Thunder
Utah, 1847–1857
T
he vanguard company of Mormon pioneers arrived in the
Salt Lake Valley in the latter part of July 1847. It was the
beginning of the largest mass migration by a single group
in nineteenth-century America.1 But moving west did not end the
Mormons’ troubles.
At first, the federal government met the Latter-day Saints half
way in their desire for self-government. In 1851 President Millard
Fillmore appointed Brigham Young governor and superintendent of
Indian affairs for Utah Territory. Washington split its other six territo-
rial appointees among Mormons and non-Mormons, and the division
between wary partisans virtually assured a clash.2 The outside appoin-
tees were hardly in Utah before they left, taking the territory’s congres-
sional appropriation of twenty-four thousand dollars with them. The
“runaways” announced the Mormons had not received them properly
and were guilty of “malicious sedition,” which reflected the deeply held
feelings on both sides. The affair became a national cause célèbre.3
There were other incidents as well. In 1853 Pahvant Indians in
central Utah killed U.S. Army Capt. John W. Gunnison and seven
members of his party who were surveying a possible route for a rail-
road to the Pacific. The following year, Washington ordered Lt. Col.
Edward J. Steptoe and his command to aid Utah officials in bringing
the killers to justice. When the case came to trial, a local jury dismissed
the charges against some of the Indians and found three others guilty
only of manslaughter. The jury believed the main ringleaders were still
at large and that the crime had been an act of retributive justice for the
killing of a Pahvant leader by Missouri emigrants going to California.
It was also true the settlers did not want to provoke the usually friendly
Pahvants. But critics reacted strongly to the verdict. They believed
the Mormons had not upheld the nation’s military honor, and rumors
spread that Mormons and Indians were conspiring behind the federal
government’s back.4
In December 1854 a soldier sparked a row between Steptoe’s
men, some Mormons, and local police. Two days later, on Christmas
Day, tensions between soldiers and citizens erupted into a “regular
melee” that injured men on both sides, including eighteen-year-old
Brigham Young Jr. The soldiers’ efforts to woo Mormon women also
offended local sensibilities. One officer tried to seduce a daughter-in-
law of Brigham Young whose husband was absent on a preaching mis-
sion. When the army left, perhaps as many as one hundred Mormon
women went with them. “Everybody has got one except the Colonel
and Major,” boasted one soldier. “The Doctor has got three—mother
and two daughters. The mother cooks for him and the daughters
sleep with him.”5 The incident outraged and embarrassed the Mor-
mons, hardening their resolve not to have troops stationed near their
communities.6
The Mormons and the federally appointed judges had one run-
ning battle after another, which, if they had not been so serious, were
almost comic in their tone. After a local man was acquitted in federal
court, the presiding judge, W. W. Drummond, reportedly threatened
him, and a Mormon-controlled grand jury in turn indicted Drum-
mond and his servant for assault “with intent to kill.” The purpose of
the trial, according to one participant, was to show Drummond “in
his proper light.”7 Later, rowdies broke into the law library of fed-
eral judge George P. Stiles, a Mormon who had been excommunicated
for “immoral conduct.” The vandals burned his law firm’s books and
papers in a privy.8
The local people also had conflicts with other U.S. appointees—
surveyors and Indian agents—as well as with ex-Mormons and gentile
merchants, a class of men Young would eventually dub “the Clique.”9
These men, whose power would grow during Utah’s territorial years,
were united by their strong opposition to Mormonism, by their
ambitions for political and economic influence in the territory, and
Peals of Thunder 21
often by their Eastern ties. After the American Civil War, this breed of
men would be recognized for their virtues and vices, and branded with
the pejorative titles of “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags.”10
The conflicts mocked Mormon hopes for a quiet society in Utah.
“The United States Judges are not here as kings or Monarchs,” Young
protested, “but as servants of the people.” Recalling how American
society had treated the Saints in Missouri and Illinois, he added, “If I
Come here & act the tyrant . . . you ought to kick me out and all officers
ought to be served in the same way.”11 Young had similar anathemas
for the federal surveyors, whose work, he believed, was sloppy and
fraudulent.12
W. M. F. Magraw, who lived briefly in Utah, had another reason
to be upset with the Mormons. Local settlers had outbid him and his
partners for a federal contract to transport mail between Indepen-
dence, Missouri, and Salt Lake City.13 Writing to President Franklin
Pierce in October 1856, Magraw claimed there was “no vestige of law
and order” in the territory and that the “so-styled ecclesiastical orga-
nization” was “despotic, dangerous and damnable.”14
Two reasons explain the strong words that passed on both
sides—besides the obvious clash of self-interest and personalities.
Two rival kingdoms or cultures were opposing each other. On one
hand, the Mormons were still determined to create a religious com-
monwealth. During the first days of their settlement, they spoke of
a “land of promise held in reserve by the hand of God” that ful-
filled the promises of Isaiah.15 Other sermons insisted on the need
for a strict Christian purity—Sabbath-keeping, honesty, and the need
for “order” and “righteousness.” Outsiders willing to obey the new
standard would be accepted, but others should go elsewhere.16 As a
symbol of their new society, members of the first pioneer party in
the Salt Lake Valley were rebaptized and reconfirmed members of
the church. “We had, as it were, entered a new world and wished to
renew our covenants and commence in newness of life,” explained
one of the men.17
The settlers called their new community “Deseret,” a Book of
Mormon name that was also meant to set it apart as the Kingdom of
God—a religious and political government, which, when fully estab-
lished, might prepare for Christ’s coming reign. “All other govern-
ments are illegal and unauthorized,” said a Mormon theoretical tract.
“Any people attempting to govern themselves by laws of their own
making, and by officers of their own appointment, are in direct rebel-
lion against the kingdom of God.”18

The Saints felt the ideals of religious theocracy most strongly during
the first years of their settlement or in times of uncertainty when they
thought the millennial days were close by. Their on-and-off hopes were
not well received, as most Americans in the mid-nineteenth century
considered theocracy an already-turned page from John Winthrop’s
Massachusetts Bay colony two hundred years before.
Another reason for the clashes in Utah was the American territo-
rial system. The famed Northwest Ordinance of 1787 required set-
tlers to gain self-government and statehood through a step-by-step
process that could be slow, particularly in the American Southwest.
Territories were virtual colonies—not unlike the colonies under Brit-
ish rule before the American Revolution—and citizens were denied
“the rights to self-government that most white males elsewhere took
for granted.” The result in one western territory after another was the
same: squabbles between the local people and the men Washington
sent west—and the feeling that the federal government was “an obtru-
sive presence.”19 Even the best appointees often lacked the one quality
westerners demanded: Their loyalties must be focused on the local
welfare, not on Washington or their own careers.20
Like others, the Saints latched on to a popular constitutional the-
ory of the time. Hoping to quiet the rising storm in Washington over
expanding slavery in the territories, politicians like presidential candi-
dates Lewis Cass and Stephen A. Douglas took the idea of neighbor-
hood majority rule and applied it to the western territories, calling
their proposal “squatter” or “popular” sovereignty. They argued “that
a community was ready for self-government from the moment it was
first settled,” and majorities in the territories—not the U.S. Congress—
should have the final say about local conditions.21
The Saints had come west hoping for local control, and popular
sovereignty fit their aspirations perfectly. If power lay with the local
people in a territory, Utah had a right to establish its theocracy and
polygamy.22 Historian Howard Lamar remarked how ordinary so
much of the Saints’ behavior was. The doctrines of the church were
“not at war with the optimistic, perfectionist, comfort-seeking society
of Jacksonian America,” he wrote. But Lamar also noticed something
different was going on in Utah, too, at least in degree. “What was
missing was a single voice of dissent, an opposition, an evidence of
popular elections.” And by 1857, some outsiders thought conditions
in Utah were out of control. “A federal court had been disrupted,”
official records were rumored to have been seized and burned, “and
public officials could honestly report that they had been unable to
Peals of Thunder 23
perform their duties. Every single function the federal government
was responsible for in a territory, outside of tax collection and defense,
had been defied.”23
For Young, confident in his religious and political authority, the
exodus of bothersome federal authorities was a virtue. “Their number
& quality [are] diminishing & becoming beautifully less,” he wrote.24
During the 1850s, as many as sixteen federal officers left their positions
in the territory in “frustration, fright, or both.”25 While each of the ter-
ritories surrounding Utah had a history of conflicts with Washington’s
appointees, none rivaled Utah’s in number or overall drama.26
The strong Mormon response may well have been a sign of inward
distress. By the mid-1850s, Mormon leaders believed their kingdom
was not going well. The harvest of converts in America and Great Brit-
ain had fallen off. The Saints faced bad weather, insect plagues, poor
crops, and near famine. Young sensed a spiritual lethargy among his
people, perhaps because of their decade-long focus on pioneering but
also because of the growing number of apostates and dissenters. Many
immigrants to Zion were proving to be indigestible chaff.27 To Young,
Mormons were not living up to the standard of their mission.28
Church leaders tried several cures, including an invitation for mem-
bers to look inward and make token pledges of their property to the
Lord. But less than half of Utah’s families made “consecrations” to
the church.29 A “home missionary” program was established in the hope
that systematic preaching might stir “the people to repentance and a
remembrance of their first love”—the gospel.30 When these programs
failed to achieve full reform, Young called for sterner measures. “Instead
of . . . smooth, beautiful, sweet . . . silk-velvet-lipped preaching,” he said,
the people needed “sermons like peals of thunder.”31
Young had precedents for his preaching. “A revival of religion in
New England meant a time when that deep spiritual undercurrent
of thought and emotion with regard to the future life . . . exhaled and
steamed up into the atmosphere which pervaded all things,” wrote
Harriet Beecher Stowe.32 The Mormons, so much like the Puritans,
had such a campaign when camped on the plains during their west-
ward migration, and their Book of Mormon chronicled the many times
when ancient American prophets were able to bring people back to
their religious devotion by strong preaching.33
These earlier revivals became patterns for the famed Mormon
Reformation of 1856–57. “There are sins that men commit,” Young
preached at the beginning, “for which they cannot receive forgive-
ness in this world, or in that which is to come, and if they had their

eyes open to see their true condition, they would be perfectly will-
ing to have their blood spilt upon the ground, that the smoke there-
of might ascend to heaven as an offering for their sins.”34 Sometimes
the reformation sermons about “blood atonement” threatened more
than “peals of thunder.” “The time has been in Israel under the law of
God,” Young said, “that if a man was found guilty of adultery, he must
have his blood shed, and that [time] is near at hand.”35
The reform shook mightily. For a time, church leaders suspended
the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, and Young remained in seclu-
sion—signs that it was no longer business as usual in Utah. “Teachers”
were dispatched into homes to “catechize” members about their sins,
and in one part of southern Utah, local church authorities told the
teachers to search church members’ private boxes and drawers to “see
that every thing is clean and pure.”36 One member remembered that
the teachers’ intrusion could be a “fearful ordeal,” resulting in embar-
rassment and false confessions.37
As the enthusiasm grew, the language of some church leaders
became especially harsh, particularly beyond Salt Lake City where dis-
tance seemed to magnify the revival. In several communities, gangs of
zealots—usually young men led both by a spirit of adventure and reli-
gious excess—engaged in acts of intimidation: “hellish murderous con-
duct,” said one victim.38 Their assaults were aimed at those considered
of weak faith or apostate, or even those who might speak against their
activity.39 In Cedar City in the southern part of the territory, church
leaders spoke of clear lines of judgment—of “blood sucking gentiles,”
pruning the “bitter branches” of disbelief, and the need to obey strictly
“those who are over us.”40
Perhaps a majority of the Saints, believing themselves in spiritual
jeopardy, searched their souls and bettered their lives. Church meet-
ings became more frequent and better attended. Items previously
taken “in hours of darkness” were returned.41 Tithing and other church
donations increased, as did polygamous marriages, another measure of
Mormon observance at the time. Every Saint wishing to be considered
a Saint received the sin-washing ordinance of rebaptism, part of the
reformation’s mercy when Young and the church seemed willing to
forgive the gravest sin if only men and women would try to do right.42
The reformation was extraordinary, and nothing in Mormon his-
tory had been like it—or would be. From Young’s perspective, the ref-
ormation accomplished a great deal of good, though the tough talk
about blood atonement and dissenters must have helped create a cli-
mate of violence in the territory, especially among those who chose to
Peals of Thunder 25
reformation catechism. Courtesy LDS Church History Library.
take license from it. As the revival proceeded, church leaders in Salt
Lake City began cautioning local leaders not to go beyond the preach-
ing of righteousness.43 Still later, word was sent to southern Utah to
“keep things perfectly quiet and let all things be done peacefully but
with firmness and let there be no excitement. Let the people be united
in their feelings and faith as well as works and keep alive the spirit of
the Reformation.”44
In the summer of 1856—shortly before the reformation’s cre-
scendo—Young sent Mormon apostles John Taylor and George A.
Smith to the nation’s capital with petitions for statehood.45 Becoming a
state would mean Utah could end its squabbles with territorial appoin-
tees. But Sen. Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, an old acquaintance and
former legislative representative of the Saints, and Utah’s territorial
delegate, John M. Bernhisel, both advised that the political winds then
blowing made it an unfavorable time to push for statehood.46
Irked at the prospect of continued colonial rule, in January 1857
the Utah legislature drafted strongly worded memorials asserting “the
right to have a voice in the selection of our rulers.”47 Young told Smith
and Bernhisel that a new batch of unfit federal appointees would be
turned out “as fast as they come let the consequences be what they
may.” The Saints were “determined to claim the right of having a voice
james buchanan. Matthew

Brady, Courtesy Library of Congress.
Peals of Thunder 27
in the selection of our officers,” Young said.48 Following instructions,
Bernhisel met with newly elected U.S. president James Buchanan and,
a few days later, presented the memorials to Jacob Thompson, the
secretary of interior. The last interview did not go well. Thompson
called Utahns’ demand for territorial officers of their own liking and
their promise to send away any others a virtual “declaration of war.”
“When you tell a man that he must do a thing,” Thompson lectured,
“it excites in him a feeling to resist.” If the Mormons “got into trouble
with the General Government,” Thompson believed, it would be their
own fault.49
The Mormon memorials did not come close to the firebrand lan-
guage of many Southern “states’ righters” before the Civil War.50 They
did, however, come at a dangerous time. “These petitions and the cab-
inet’s reaction to them were fateful,” historian William P. MacKinnon
wrote, pointing also to letters that came into the government’s hands
within two days of the memorials.51 The first was from Judge Drum-
mond, complaining that Brigham Young and the Mormons maintained
a virtual reign of terror. Drawing on the Stiles incident, he claimed
the Mormons had burned the papers, dockets, and law books of the
Utah Territorial Supreme Court, a charge that later proved untrue.
Drummond also reported that Young, “more traitorous than ever,”
was responsible for the Gunnison killings and the death of Territo-
rial Secretary Almon W. Babbitt, recently slain by Cheyenne raiders
in Nebraska Territory. Drummond’s letter appeared in the New York
Herald on March 20, the day after the administration received it.52 On
the day of its publication, Utah’s chief justice, John F. Kinney—who
was visiting Washington—presented the U.S. attorney general similar
letters from himself and Utah surveyor general David H. Burr, both
urging that a U.S. military force be sent to Utah. Thus “within two
weeks of taking office, James Buchanan and his cabinet had a collection
of stunning new inputs on Utah affairs from the territory’s truculent
legislative assembly, its chief justice, an associate supreme court justice,
and the surveyor general,” wrote MacKinnon.53
Soon many American newspapers were responding sharply to what
was going on. A letter published under the name “Veratus” in the April
29, 1857, American Journal made the outlandish claim that one hundred
thousand Mormons were poised to fight the U.S. government, aided by
two hundred thousand “spies and emissaries” and three hundred thou-
sand “savage” Indian allies. Veratus demanded that five thousand U.S.
troops be sent to Utah to put down the supposed threat.54 The New York
Tribune told its readers that Utah was full of espionage, rape, robbery,

and suicide. “Surely there never was a more atrocious and revolting tyr-
anny,” it said.55 The New York Times demanded Young be replaced by a
new territorial governor, backed by a military force “to tender the Con-
stitution with one hand, while a drawn sword is held in the other.”56
The anti-Mormon newspaper campaign assumed the worst about
conditions in the territory and was more than just a response to the
letters of Drummond and others. From the beginning of the United
States as a nation, a strain of popular culture reacted against many
minorities and outsiders with unusual virulence—“heated exaggera-
tion, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy,” said cultural histo-
rian Richard Hofstadter.57 By the middle 1850s, this strain of culture
was flowing against such widely different groups as Catholics, Jews,
Masons, and Mormons, who were viewed as threats to “the very basis
of American life—democracy, religion, and justice.” The Anti-Masonic
Party, the “Know Nothings” and their American Party, and eventually
the fast-rising Republican Party voiced some of these nativist or tradi-
tionist concerns.58
“I regret to say that within the last few months prejudice against us as
a people has greatly increased,” Bernhisel warned Young, “not only at the
seat of the Central Government, but throughout this extended Repub-
lic.” While the letters and memorials had touched a nerve, Buchanan and
Thompson in their talks with Bernhisel mentioned another complaint
against the Mormons: polygamy. The Saints’ “ ‘peculiar institution’ is
looked upon with a holy horror,” Bernhisel warned Young.59 Buchanan
had recently emerged from a presidential campaign against the Repub-
licans, who had gained political ground with their platform denounc-
ing the “twin relics of barbarism”—slavery and polygamy. Buchanan’s
Democrats, now in office, were in no mood to appear soft on the issue.
In addition, Buchanan had no wish to let the Mormons use popu-
lar sovereignty for their own purposes. If the unpopular Utahns were
allowed to use the doctrine to defend theocracy and polygamy, the
federal government would have less power to heal the slave contro-
versy and preserve the Union, just at a time when the nation was at
full pitch over the great North–South issues of the Fugitive Slave Act,
the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, and growing bloodshed in
Kansas Territory. “Public sentiment favoring both a firm assertion of
federal authority in Utah and the curbing of Brigham Young’s political
power had made some kind of response on [Buchanan’s] part almost
mandatory,” historian Kenneth Stampp concluded.60 In the process,
the new administration could send a message to would-be Southern
secessionists that rebellion would not be tolerated.
Peals of Thunder 29
George A. Smith asked the federal government to investigate con-
ditions in the territory and see for itself what was going on. He later
said he furnished the government “with sufficient testimony to satisfy
any unprejudiced mind” that his people were innocent of wrongdoing,
or at least enough to convince Washington “there were two sides to
the question.” But Washington officials were either not convinced or
felt that sympathizing with Mormons was politically unwise. Despite
his efforts, he did not gain the government’s consent to investigate
conditions in Utah.61
On May 28, 1857, two months after Bernhisel had his interviews,
the Buchanan administration declared Utah “in a state of substantial
rebellion” and issued military orders.62 Buchanan’s action went against
the advice of the nation’s chief military officer, Gen. Winfield Scott.
Scott argued that there was not enough time to recruit, supply, and
move an army safely to Utah before the winter of 1857.63 But by now
events had their own momentum and were beyond careful planning.
Mormon demands for local control, the anti-Mormon clique’s let-
ters, and a growing national repugnance for plural marriage had come
together during a time of rising nativism and sectional controversy.64
Without the instant news provided by a transcontinental telegraph
(it would not be finished for another four years), Mormon leaders got
word that things were coming to a head when Bernhisel and Smith
arrived in Salt Lake City on May 29. They came with the spring mail
coach, the first to get through the melting mountain snow, and the
two men, along with the mails, brought with them the disturbing
rumor that Washington might replace Young with a new governor,
backed by thousands of troops. Young’s four-year term had expired in
1854, and for two and a half years he had been serving on an interim
basis.65
Young, hearing Bernhisel and Smith’s news, wanted his people to be
informed. At a time when few Utahns had access to national news, he
arranged a public reading of the recently arrived anti-Mormon news-
paper editorials and the published letters of Drummond and Magraw.
The reading took four long hours. “Never did sat[a]n reign in the
hearts of men as he does now,” wrote one Saint who heard a summary
of the session.66 In a letter, Young tried to lighten the situation with
humor. “Uncle Sams ‘Puppies’ do not appear particularly affectionate
toward the ‘poor Mormons,’ ” he told one of his correspondents.67
When the next mail coach arrived on June 23, the Saints got more
bad news. Parley P. Pratt, a popular Mormon apostle, had been mur-
dered in Arkansas. Church members called Pratt their “Archer of

Paradise” and admired him for his many roles, which included those
of missionary, explorer, preacher, and writer. Pratt’s most important
book, A Voice of Warning (1837), had led to many baptisms, and its
arguments helped shape Mormon historical and theological thinking
for many years to come.68
In 1854 Parley Pratt had met Mormon convert Eleanor McLean
in San Francisco during one of his missionary tours. Another mis-
sionary described her as “intelligent” and “energetic” but also “over-
zealous.”69 For several years, her marriage with Hector McLean had
been unraveling, and her decision to become a Mormon and have
her two young sons baptized ended any hope of a reconciliation.
Hector, a hard drinker, put Eleanor “by violence” from their home
one night and later planned to confine her to a mental asylum. With-
out her knowledge, he sent their children to Eleanor’s parents in New
Orleans. Eleanor followed and tried to reclaim the children. But her
parents resisted—they, like Hector, did not want them to be Mormons.
Finally, Eleanor made her way to Salt Lake City, where she became
Pratt’s plural wife.70
In the fall of 1856, Young asked Pratt to help direct church activi-
ties in the eastern United States—but with a caution. He pointedly
told Parley to devote himself to his church duties. Eleanor was going
east at the same time in another attempt to reclaim her children, and
Young did not want the apostle to become involved. Parley obeyed—
technically. While he did not go to New Orleans, he hoped to escort
Eleanor and her children to Utah after learning she was successful in
securing them from her parents. Eleanor and Parley planned to meet
somewhere in the lower Midwest.71
By the spring of 1857, the custody battle had become a public sen-
sation. Eleanor had gotten the children, but Hector was in hot pursuit.
He had her arrested in Indian Territory, just west of Arkansas. Pratt
also was arrested on his way to meet her, and they were both brought
before a Van Buren, Arkansas, magistrate in mid-May.72
Five hundred men and women crowded the courtroom and nearby
grounds. Most wanted summary justice against the Mormon apostle,
who had committed no Arkansas crime but had violated the unwritten
law of the day giving a husband strong control over a wife.
“Gentleman, I do not rely on weapons,” Pratt said when a judge
released him early in the morning and offered him a knife and pistol
to protect himself. Soon Hector McLean and his supporters caught
up with the defenseless and fleeing Pratt twelve miles north of Van
Buren. Hector fired half a dozen bullets at his victim and stabbed
Peals of Thunder 31
him twice. He returned ten minutes later to fire another bullet into
Pratt’s neck. The Mormon apostle died of his wounds later that day.73
Hector boasted of his exploit. His accomplices included “the best
men of the place and surrounding country,” including fellow Masons
“gathered from all parts of the territory,” he said, as if the prevail-
ing custom of vigilante action excused the killing. Because Hector was
never charged with a crime and because Arkansans were involved, the
public assumed the Mormons would have their revenge. The “seeth-
ing and boiling” Mormons might attack Arkansas emigrants going
through Utah, a California editor suggested on July 9, 1857.74 The
idea would later become a stock explanation for the Mountain Mead-
ows Massacre.
Upon hearing news of Pratt’s murder, Brigham Young said little
publicly about it, and his letters belied the idea of vengeance. “The
seeing of our faithful Elders slaughtered in cold blood,” he wrote
on July 4, is “at times almost to[o] grevious to be borne, but . . . the
Spirit within me whispers, peace be still.”75 Another letter sent to
Orson Pratt, Parley’s brother, had the same plaintive quality. “I regret
very much to learn of the assassination of Bro Parley by the villain
McLane,” Young wrote. “One more good man has gone to assist Bro.
Joseph [and] Hiram [Smith],” the earlier Mormon martyrs.76 A third
letter simply invoked Providence: “the Lord’s not my will be done,” it
said.77 While deploring Pratt’s death and mourning his passing, Young
also believed that his fellow churchman had been unwise and disre-
garded counsel.78 Other Mormons were less philosophical, and Pratt’s
murder undoubtedly increased Mormon anger and the growing divi-
sion between Utahns and easterners.
One event after another had drawn borders between Utahns and
their fellow citizens. Two rival kingdoms were struggling against each
other. One was religious and local. The other was civil and national.
The issue was not just law and order, but whose law and order. Resolv-
ing the issue would embroil Utah and the federal government in a
conflict that would come to be called the Utah War—and create the
atmosphere for a massacre.

chapter three
No More Submit to Oppression

Silver Lake, July 24, 1857
T
en years had passed since July 24, 1847—the day that Brigham
Young and fellow Mormons first arrived in the Salt Lake Val-
ley. They had been celebrating the anniversary of that “Pio-
neer Day” ever since.1 By 1856 Young became aware of a crystal lake
in the mountains near the top of Big Cottonwood Canyon southeast
of Salt Lake City. That year he hosted 450 Pioneer Day guests at the
site, which became known as Silver Lake. He enjoyed the celebration
so well that at its close he proposed “that we do not dissolve” the party
“but adjourn it until the 23d day of July, 1857 . . . preparatory to cel-
ebrating the 24th.”2 Going ahead with his plans, Young sponsored the
two-day picnic again, except that this year—the tenth anniversary of
the Mormons’ arrival—everything was on a grander scale.
The Pioneer Day celebration was the kind of event Brigham Young
liked. He and his office staff created a lengthy guest list and sent out
formal invitations. Even though Young invited two thousand guests
and their families, he regretted he could not include more. “I never
know where to stop in my feelings until every Latter-day Saint is
invited,” he told a Salt Lake City congregation a few days before the
festivities. “If I were to satisfy my feelings, I would invite the whole of
you.” There was, however, one important condition. His guests must
“go, tarry, and return in harmony and peace.” He wanted order.3
brigham young picnic invitation. Courtesy Special Collections, Marriott Library,
University of Utah.
By heritage, Young was a Puritan, but contrary to that people’s
modern image, he was not puritanical, if only to help his people get
through their hardships.4 Pioneering in the American West had been
hard work, and the past two years harder still. Drought and a scourge
of crop-devouring grasshoppers and worms had led to poor harvests
and hunger.5 Salt Lake City’s bishops, charged with the public wel-
fare, took stock of each neighborhood and fed the hungry, some of
whom were found begging in the streets.6 Fortunately, crop condi-
tions had improved by the summer of ’57, providing another reason
for celebrating.7
On the afternoon of July 22, 1857, Young and his party left Salt
Lake City for the Pioneer Day celebration, traveling some seventeen
miles southeast to a mill a few miles up Big Cottonwood Canyon.
Early the next morning, they continued through the canyon toward
a campsite along Silver Lake.8 Young passed hundreds of his waiting
guests, who then followed for the final fourteen miles in some 460 car-
riages and wagons of various kinds and descriptions.9 The people were
equally diverse, with varied languages, dialects, and clothes of faded
American and European fashion—the fruits of Mormon missionary
efforts at home and abroad.10
By that night, the Latter-day Saints were dancing, fishing, and
enjoying the alpine beauty.11 At twilight, Young spoke to his guests. He
said “he had things on his mind” that he had never told them. “These
are the secret chambers of the mountains . . . calculated to ward off
the traveller on the outside from coming down in here.”12 If only the
Mormon people “would do right,” he promised, their enemies would
never drive them from their mountain valleys.13 At the end of the pro-
gram, Heber C. Kimball, one of Young’s counselors, “offered a prayer
of thanksgiving unto God for his goodness to his people, prayed for
Israel and Israel’s enemies, and renewedly dedicated and consecrated
unto God the ground” where the Saints were camped.14
The next day, July 24, the Saints’ celebration included patriotic
speeches and three cannon salutes in honor of the people’s rights, their
independence, and their leaders. Repeatedly, the partygoers also offered
“three groans” for the state of Missouri.15 The Mormons had not lost
their sense of humor, but neither had they lost their memory of the
suffering they experienced in that state. Still later the territorial militia
drilled, including a cohort of teenagers. Militia drills were a common
part of public celebrations in mid nineteenth-century America.
About noon, the idyllic charm was broken by an unexpected visit.
Five horsemen rode into camp, including Salt Lake City mayor
No More Submit to Oppression 35

picnic at big cottonwood canyon. T. B. H. Stenhouse, The Rocky Mountain
Saints (London, 1874).
Abraham O. Smoot. Several weeks earlier Smoot had been carrying

mail and looking after church business in the East. Arriving in Kan-
sas Territory, he saw streams of heavy freight wagons heading west.
They belonged to the Russell, Majors & Waddell freighting company.
When Smoot asked the company’s captains and teamsters where they
were going and why, he got only vague answers.16
Smoot hurried to the Kansas City office of William H. Russell, one
of the freighting company’s owners. Russell confirmed Smoot’s fears.
The wagons, Smoot learned, were carrying supplies for as many as
twenty-five hundred government troops just ordered to Utah. They
were to serve under a newly appointed governor and other new fed-
eral appointees to enforce U.S. law and put down a reported Mormon
rebellion.17
Besides confirming the army’s long-rumored approach, the Mor-
mon travelers learned another unsettling fact. When one of Smoot’s
associates tried to pick up the mail at nearby Independence, Mis-
souri, the postmaster waved him off. The government did not intend
to deliver “more mail for Salt Lake City at present,” he said with no
more explanation. This news meant the federal mail contract with
Utahns had been cancelled. For nervous Mormons, the cancella-
tion raised an unsettling question: Was Washington cutting Utah off
from the rest of the nation, the kind of action nations take before
launching a war?18

With news of the oncoming army and the cancelled contract,
Smoot and his associates gathered their mail station outfits and stock
and headed for home. East of Fort Laramie in present-day Wyoming,
Smoot’s party ran into fellow mail courier and frontiersman Porter
Rockwell. Rockwell, Smoot, and another courier decided to leave the
slower-moving stock for others to bring, while they made a run for Salt
Lake City. They hitched two spans of their “best animals to a small
spring wagon” and traveled the final 513 miles from Fort Laramie in
five days, arriving in Salt Lake City on July 23.19
Eleanor McLean Pratt returned to Salt Lake City with them, still
fleeing from Hector McLean, who remained intent on locking her in
an insane asylum.20 Eleanor was eager to provide vivid details of Parley’s
assassination, but the accounts of the Silver Lake picnic would not men-
tion her, perhaps because she didn’t attend or because Parley’s death had
been known in Utah for more than a month. It was old news.21
When Smoot and his fellow horsemen reached the camping grounds
near Silver Lake on July 24, they were ushered into Lt. Gen. Daniel
H. Wells’s tent, where they reported to church leaders the information
they had learned. Since spring the leaders had known an army might
come, but Smoot brought new, disturbing details that rekindled old
Mormon fears.22
The army was to be led by Gen. William S. Harney, a two-fisted
Jacksonian Indian fighter. For Mormons unsure of the army’s purpose,
the news of Harney’s appointment raised concerns of renewed violence
against them. Utah had seen soldiers before, but Harney’s leadership
suggested severe measures. “I said if General Harney came here,
I should then know the intention of [the] goverment,” wrote Brigham
Young in his journal.23
Harney was a skilled commander, but one with a reputation for vio-
lence. He had earned the title “Squaw Killer” for the massacre of eighty-
six Sioux, including women and children, at Ash Hollow, Nebraska
Territory, in 1855.24 Known for his “quick temper” and “violent nature,”
he had been court-martialed four times by the army. A civil court had
also tried him for the torture death of one of his female slaves, who he
believed had taken his keys. According to one newspaper report, “She was
lacerated and mangled in so horrid a manner that the Jury of inquest was
unable to determine whether it was done with whips or hot irons. The
general opinion was that it was done with both.”25 The trial jury acquit-
ted Harney, though his biographer did not believe justice had been done.
“White society in the 1830s cared little about the death of a slave,” he
wrote, “and the murderer proceeded with his life and military career.”26

Besides Harney’s approach, Smoot announced the suspended mail
contract, which meant the end of one of Young’s most ambitious
ventures, the Brigham Young Express or “Y.X.” Company—a fore-
runner of the Pony Express and the Ben Holladay Stagecoach line,
and a potential competitor of the Russell, Majors & Waddell freight
trains. Young had hoped the company would improve the postal
service, lower the cost of Utah’s imported goods, and aid Mormon
immigration.27
Along with this news, Smoot may have reported that the likely new
governor was named Cumming. At least one Mormon leader mistook
the name for “Cummins”—an old Missouri persecutor of the Saints
who had signed the Jackson County manifesto. The idea that R. W.
Cummins would command Utah’s civil government produced “utter
horror and detestation,” George A. Smith later said.28 As the church
leaders listened to each of Smoot’s discoveries, the gravity of the situ-
ation settled on them. Perhaps worst of all, Washington had made key
decisions affecting Utah but explained nothing to the people of the
territory—a foreboding silence.29
The men who met in Wells’s tent tried coming to grips with every-
thing Smoot told them. At the end of the meeting, the leaders agreed
on a general policy. First, the Mormons would accept the new territo-
rial appointees—but only if they “would behave themselves,” Young
said. This willingness apparently included accepting the illusory “Cum-
mins.” However, Harney and the army were different. If he crossed
South Pass—the main route into Utah and roughly the territory’s east-
ern border—there would be a fight, and “the buzards Should pick his
bones,” Young said. The Saints would “no more . . . submit to oppression
either to individuals towns Counties states or Nation.”30
That evening Daniel H. Wells spoke at the canyon celebration’s
final prayer service. Years earlier, Wells had been a politician, militia
officer, and land dealer in the Mississippi River bottoms when the
Latter-day Saints arrived in Illinois and established their headquar-
ters at Nauvoo. Sympathetic to the Saints, he played a major role in
the city’s final defense against local vigilantes, and he later accepted
the Mormon faith. Once in Utah, Wells was given command of the
territorial militia, which Utahns called the Nauvoo Legion in mem-
ory of bygone years. In January 1857, Young chose the forty-two-
year-old Wells to be his second counselor in the church’s ruling First
Presidency.31
Although Wells had many talents, he was seldom easy or impres-
sive before a crowd. He looked much like fellow Illinoisan Abraham

Lincoln, and one of his critics described him as “a lantern-jawed, long-
faced, raw-boned, loose boned, loose-jointed, shambling-gated man.”32
But on this occasion, Wells seemed transformed. Lifted up on a large
boulder to speak and pray, he spoke of liberty and rights and the need
sometimes to defend them.33 An observer that night wrote, “Our Inde-
pendence was declared as a free people by Brigham and his counselors
and . . . all . . . said Amen.”34 One man wrote a song on the spot:
Powder Bullet Sword and Gun
Boys arouse we’ll have some fun
As sure as fate the time has come
So fix your Guns for shooting.35
Ironically, while some Mormons talked about fighting the United

States and gaining their independence, American flags flew on the
peaks on each side of Silver Lake.36
From its earliest years, Mormonism had been poised on the millen-
nial cusp. Its people believed they were preparing for the end of times,
and with an army marching against them, the final years never seemed
so close.37 In the next few months, they might fight a war and witness
the inauguration of the long-promised latter-day kingdom of heaven.
daniel h. wells. Courtesy

Nelson B. Wadsworth.

That, too, might bring Mormon political independence. Was Zion, as
the Saints called their home, about to make its own way in the world?
When the evening closed, the partygoers determined not to let the
news ruin their holiday. One record of the canyon picnic said that after
the evening’s prayer service, the people resumed their “former cheer-
fulnes,” and “amusements & sports . . . continued with redoubled inter-
est.”38 Young, who liked being a contrarian, believed that Smoot’s visit
had in fact “helped the people to enjoy themselves.”39 Some of the rev-
elers continued until the early hours of the morning, and then, at 5:00
a.m., Young called them together to give instructions about breaking
their camp and to wish them a good journey back to their homes and
their ordinary lives.40
But the coming months would be anything but ordinary in Utah.

chapter four
Avoid All Excitement,

But Be Ready
Salt Lake City to Parowan,
July 24–August 8, 1857
S
moot’s news at the Big Cottonwood Canyon picnic changed
everything. Earlier when Young had heard of the newspaper out-
cry against the Saints in the East, he was not ruffled. “We have
become like the little boy that got so in the habit of being whip[p]ed
every night that he could not go to sleep without a whipping,” he said.1
Throughout the summer he had predicted that once easterners got a
close look at the Mormons’ chief accuser, Judge W. W. Drummond,
they would see that they had been “effectually humbugged.”2 In a pri-
vate aside, Young described Drummond as “vi[c]ious and brutal, whin-
ing and snappish, vain as a peacock and ignorant as a jack-ass.”3 Nothing
serious could come from such a man, he believed. In June, Young had
suggested that if an army came to Utah, it would “find nothing to
fight,” for the Mormons would not resist. “I trust in the Lord of hosts
to rule and overrule all for the good of his Saints,” he said.4
Twelve days before Smoot’s arrival, George A. Smith expressed
hope that despite the rumors, no army would be sent. Speaking before
one congregation, he reasoned, “Any wise Statesman will see that if
they [U. S. government officials] interfered with one Territory, they
would have plenty of Business in others.” Besides, the government had
enough to do without worrying about Utah.5
But Smoot’s July 24 news suddenly made the rumored prospect of a
coming army real. From the moment Young and other Mormon lead-
ers gathered together in Wells’s tent that day, their world changed.
By the time the Saints broke camp and started down the canyon, hard
words were rolling off the tongue, as only fresh anger can do: “Squaw
Killer” Harney, twenty-five hundred troops, the cancelled Mormon
mail contract, the end of the Y.X. Company, the replacement of Young
as governor, and most remarkable of all, Washington’s utter failure to
explain its intentions.6 While the church had endured many things in
its twenty-seven-year history, the Saints saw the government’s sending
an army against its own citizens as an abuse of power. For the next sev-
eral months, Utahns referred to the approaching “Utah Expedition” as
an armed “mob” and Harney as the chief mobber.7
The Saints were hardly back in their homes after the canyon picnic
when trouble broke out. Some of the returning partygoers and other
Mormons turned their anger on members of the U.S. surveyor’s office,
whom they saw as partly responsible for Washington’s decision to dis-
patch troops. On Saturday afternoon, July 25, two Mormons in Salt
Lake City used stones and clubs to give Cornelius G. Landon, a clerk
in the surveyor’s office, a “tremendous thrashing.” Landon had been
overheard telling overland emigrants what “damned rascals” the Saints
were. The emigrants, standing nearby, were horrified by the attack but
resisted their instinct to get involved.8 Landon was an excommunicated
Mormon who had been fined a month earlier for public “drunkeness &
breaking the Peace.”9 Meanwhile, he had been investigating the Saints’
military capacity, or as he put it, “prying into Mormon secrets rather
minutely.”10 On the afternoon of Landon’s thrashing, surveyor Charles
Mogo ran into a store to avoid being pelted by stones. He left the terri-
tory within the week without waiting for his family to go with him.11
Two days later, Landon met with more trouble. During the evening
of July 27 two or three dozen men surrounded the surveyor’s office
looking for Landon and another clerk, W. H. Wilson. Landon escaped
by jumping from a second-story window and hiding in a warehouse.
He later fled to California in disguise.12 Wilson was less fortunate.
The vigilantes hauled him to the Jordan River west of the city. There,
according to Wilson, his interrogators put a rope around his neck and
pressured him at gun- and knife-point “to make statements against”
the surveyor general of Utah, David H. Burr. Wilson was released the
next day unharmed.13 The identities of the men who planned and took

part in the incident never became public. Like their own tormentors
in Missouri and Illinois, the Mormons had taken action against those
who were not in their mainstream, men deemed to be enemies.
For two years the local people and the surveyors had complained
about each other. In reports sent east, the surveyors said the settlers
were meddling with Indians by cultivating a close friendship with
them. They also struck against local Mormon power by saying Utahns
obstructed their work and made “extensive depredations upon the pub-
lic lands,” including taking land for church purposes.14 “The inhuman
cruelty of this [Mormon] people is equal to their sensuality,” charged
one surveyor’s letter published in the New York Herald.15
Such accusations nettled Young. The surveyors believed “every body
except themselves were trespassers” on the domain, Young protested.
They “throw down fences, and even houses . . . graze their animals
upon the grain field, and use fence poles for fuel,” he said. If anyone
complained, the surveyors abused and insulted them, as though “no
person has any right to say a word, or make any complaint about it.”16
Young had not forgotten the double-dealing of surveyors and magis-
trates in Missouri that cost some of the Saints their land titles there.17
He also believed—probably correctly—that the Utah surveyors had
been sloppy in their work and had submitted fraudulent accounts
to Washington.18 The Mormons especially suspected Wilson—the
man who said he was taken to the Jordan River and threatened—
and they demanded he account for the government property in the
surveyor’s office.19
Young’s first sermon after the canyon celebration made clear that
the contention between the Mormon settlers and the surveyors was
part of a larger battle. By “whining, bickering, howling, grovelling,
squalling, and scratching, . . . many are striving to most egregiously
befool our Government and squander its revenue,” Young said of the
territorial officers and their allies. He also had a word for anyone who
opposed his people, including Christian ministers who, he believed,
had a role in leading or influencing some of the Missouri and Illinois
mobs. “Woe, woe to those men who come here to unlawfully meddle
with me and this people,” he warned.20
Young cited the second chapter of Daniel, a favorite Old Testament
passage for the Saints. It told of a stone, cut without hands from the
mountain, that was destined to roll forth and “never be destroyed,”
though it would be “a stone of offence to the nations of the earth.” To
Young and many Mormons, the scripture foretold their church’s role
in ushering in Christ’s latter-day kingdom.21
Avoid All Excitement, But Be Ready 43

Yet much of Young’s speech suggested that the suddenness of the
current crisis also had him seeking secure footing. He wondered how a
serious-minded government could put soldiers on the plains in the mid-
dle of the summer—too late to make a successful march into Utah unless
the Mormons helped them in. Was the crisis some kind of show to satisfy
eastern public opinion? Facing this uncertainty, Young relied on his strong
sense of providence. Would not God protect the Saints? he asked.22
On the same day as Young’s sermon, Heber C. Kimball, his plain-
spoken first counselor, framed the dilemma that faced the Mormons.
“If we will not yield to [the government’s] meanness,” he said, “they
will say we have mutinized against the President of the United States,
and then they will put us under martial law and massacre this people.”
It was a case of being damned regardless, just as had happened under
state officials in the Mormon past. Kimball ended his remarks in his
typical earthy style. “Send 2,500 troops here . . . to make a desolation
of this people!” he exclaimed. “I have wives enough to whip out the
United States for they will whip themselves.”23
The following Sunday when the Saints met again to worship,
a week’s worries seemed to have overtaken any slender hope for a
peaceful settlement. Kimball warned that the army wanted to take
Mormon women back to the States. Although he did not cite the Step-
toe incident, it had to be on his mind, chapter and verse. Kimball also
condemned the United States to a “mildew” of destruction, like one of
the Mosaic plagues of Egypt.24
When Young took the pulpit, the Final Days seemed to be closing
in. “The Lord is . . . bringing to pass the sayings of the Prophets faster
than the people are prepared to receive them,” he said. “The time must
come when there will be a separation between this kingdom and the
kingdoms of this world . . . The time must come when this kingdom
must be free and independent from all other kingdoms.” He asked the
congregation, “Are you prepared to have the thread cut to-day?”25
On many Sunday evenings, Young gathered church leaders in his
private office for a prayer meeting. Young used these occasions to build
consensus and smooth policy. When Mormon leaders met on August 2,
the same evening that Young and Kimball preached, the men were
bracing for the coming conflict. The prayer meeting became a virtual
council of war, and over the succeeding weeks Young decided how to
face the emergency.26
First, Young announced that he wanted the Saints outside of Utah
to join the main settlements in the territory. The war would put them
at great risk, and, once in Utah, they would strengthen Mormon num-

bers. During the coming months, the Mormons abandoned their mis-
sions in California and present-day Nevada. Scattered Saints in the
East were also urged to hurry to Utah.27
Second, Young spoke of his military strategy. The Mormons would
use hit-and-run, scorched-earth, and guerrilla tactics, attacking the
army’s thousand-mile line of supply. Every mile on the Great Plains
and every barrier and fissure of the Rocky Mountains would become
an ally to the mountain-toughened Mormons.28 “The US are fools to
come upon this people & so are those men who are bringing great
quantities of Goods unto us this season,” Young said, referring to the
army’s freighters. If the United States wanted to fight a war, Young
intended that “they shall furnish [us] with arms and aminition.”29
Mormon raiders would simply take them from the army.
Third, Young had a plan if Gen. Harney made it to Utah. He prom-
ised that the general would find Salt Lake City in ashes, like Moscow
after Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. Perhaps the Saints would scatter
in the mountains or find a new place to gather in some remote region
of the West. It was better to destroy their cities than to leave them
for outsiders, as had happened with Mormon towns and villages in
Missouri and Illinois. Young wanted the army to be without any kind
of succor if it got to the Great Basin—no buildings to house soldiers
and no food from village gardens—nothing but the semidesert the
Saints had found when they arrived a decade earlier.30
The last part of Young’s plan included Indians. “We shall have the
Lamanites with us,” he declared, applying a Book of Mormon term to
native people.31 Young came to believe that no successful guerrilla war
could be fought without the aid of surrounding Indian tribes. They
could gather information about the army’s movements and perhaps
help harass the troops. At all costs, they must not ally with the govern-
ment against the Mormons: that would be fatal for the kind of opera-
tion Young was planning.32
Employing Indians for warfare was not a concept unique to Young.
As historian Martin Ridge observed, “The English, the French, and
the Spanish all used Indians as allies when they waged war against each
other.”33 American military leaders also relied on Indians to help fight
their battles, as did Andrew Jackson at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend
in 1814.34
Young’s reliance on Indians, however, had a theological basis. From
the first days of their church, the Mormons believed the Indians would
have a special role to perform before the Second Coming of Christ.
They were part of the House of Israel, like the Mormons themselves,

descended from the Old Testament prophet Jacob or Israel. Mormon
scripture said that this branch or “remnant” of the chosen people would
accept the latter-day gospel, “blossom as the rose,” and perhaps even
cleanse the land of the ungodly.35 “Ye shall be among them as a lion
among the beasts of the forest, and as a young lion among the flocks
of sheep, who, if he goeth through both treadeth down and teareth in
pieces, and none can deliver,” the Book of Mormon promised.36
The Saints’ thinking in this regard was extraordinary, although
they saw themselves as defenders, not rebels. Their viewpoint took
on a sharper edge as they learned more about the makeup of the army.
They sent spies into the army camps, hoping to “see and count” what
they could.37 The soldiers, who may have seen through these disguises,
replied with stories to make the Mormons nervous. They wanted to
“scalp old Brigham,” they said, and spoke of the good times they would
have in Utah, especially with the women.38 Another rumor said the
officers were deciding whether they should hang Young “with or without
a trial.”39 A variant said Harney would “capture Brigham Young and
the twelve apostles, execute them in a summary manner, and winter in
the Temple of the Latter-day Saints.”40 To the Saints, these threats had
credibility because of their previous experiences, especially in Illinois.
There militiamen helped murder Mormon leaders at Carthage, expel
the Saints from Nauvoo, and desecrate the Nauvoo temple.41
Harney was, in fact, living up to his tough reputation and hoping to
subdue the Mormons. After receiving his military command, he made
the request that he be appointed Utah’s governor “with full powers
to declare martial law.” As long as Brigham Young lived, he told his
superiors, the Mormons would recognize no other authority, “unless
that other has the power to compel them to do so.”42
The quality of some of the troops sent to Utah also made rumors
of army violence believable. Reports circulating in the East claimed
that the “Utah Expedition” had soldiers drawn from the “wildest
and most rebellious men of the community,” as well as foreign-born
mercenaries.43 Captain John Wolcott Phelps, a West Pointer with a
distinguished military career ahead of him, said some of the men he
commanded in the Utah Expedition would not meet even the low
standards of army life in their native countries. Seven of Phelps’s eight
noncommissioned officers were foreigners, and other companies had a
similar ratio. The rank-and-file soldiers “would sell their best article of
clothing for liquor, though they have reflection enough to know that
they will suffer from bitter cold in consequence,” Phelps complained
to his diary.44

The Mormons also believed the army’s camp followers posed a
threat. Almost five hundred privately owned wagons accompanied
the army, each with its own teamsters or wagon masters. Other men
rode horses or walked, many of them strung along for adventure and
quick money. Contemporary non-Mormon accounts described these
men as “unruly,” “hot-headed Southerners,” or even the “scum of the
great Western Cities.”45 Included were legends or legends-in-making:
grizzled mountain men Jim Bridger, Jim Baker, and Tim Goodale, and
famous raiders or gunslingers of the post–Civil War era William Quant-
rill and George Shepard.46 Even if the Mormons “managed to live in
peace” with the army, concluded one Utah War historian, they “still
r[a]n the risk of collision with the civilians who accompanied it.”47
During the first week in August, convinced that war was closing
upon him, Young wrote a series of important orders. He told the Mor-
mons in San Bernardino, the largest Mormon settlement outside of
Salt Lake City, to come home.48 Elsewhere he asked his men to culti-
vate relations with Sioux and Cheyenne of the plains and to learn their
languages quietly but quickly, “for the prospect is that all Israel will be
needed to carry on the work of the last days.”49 On the day these letters
were written, Young asked Jacob Hamblin to head the church’s Indian
mission in southern Utah. “Continue the conciliatory policy toward
the Indians, which I have ever recommended,” he told Hamblin, “and
seek by works of righteousness to obtain their love and confidence,
for they must learn that they have either got to help us, or the United
States will kill us both.”50 Hamblin’s appointment began a legendary
career for the rugged but soft-spoken frontiersman, who became his
church’s leading “Indian apostle” on its southern frontier.51
Mormon leaders took other steps to ready their people for war.
On August 1, Nauvoo Legion General Daniel H. Wells signed his
“General Orders,” directed to all military district commanders
throughout the territory. Drawing on principles of the American
Revolution in which his forefathers had served, Wells wrote, “When
anarchy takes the place of orderly government, and mobocratic tyr-
anny usurps the power to rule: [the people] are left to their inalienable
right to defend themselves against all aggression upon their constitu-
tional privileges.”52
Wells wanted each military district ready on a moment’s notice to
march anywhere in the territory with arms, ammunition, transporta-
tion, and clothing for a winter campaign. Just as important was the
matter of grain, one of the few foodstuffs that stored well. Grain had
been the focus of Mormon leaders’ admonitions for years. Isolated in

the Great Basin, the Saints had been at times on the edge of starvation,
something that might be avoided, leaders said, if the people would save
their excess for times of need. The recent drought added to the worry.
Now with the army approaching, they reemphasized those admoni-
tions. “Report without delay any person in your district that disposes
of a kernel of grain to any Gentile merchant or temporary sojourner
or suffers it to go to waste,” the orders read. With the policy came a
caution: “Avoid all excitement, but Be ready.”53
Territorial Utah with its theocracy easily mixed military, civic,
and church departments, but Young, in the crisis, wanted the spiri-
tual voice to be heard. The day after Wells wrote his military orders,
Young signed a circular letter directed to presiding elders, bishops,
and stake presidents in southern Utah. Generally speaking, in the
Mormon church structure of the 1850s, presiding elders headed
small “branch” congregations, bishops oversaw larger ones called
“wards,” and stake presidents supervised areas called “stakes” that
might include several congregations. Young’s letter was similar to
Wells’s orders, though it had a spiritual dimension. He counseled the
Saints, “Prepare yourselves in all things—particularly by liveing your
religion.”54
Young directed the people to prepare everything necessary for sur-
vival if they came under siege. “Every pound of wool” was to be used
to make warm clothing, ammunition was to be saved and firearms kept
in working order, every kernel of grain was to be saved. “Those who
persist in selling grain to the gentiles, or suffer their stock to trample it
into the earth,” he wrote, “I wish you to note as such.”55
The flurry of orders put Utah on a war footing. The U.S. troops of
the Utah Expedition were moving slowly, but to the Saints their prog-
ress was relentless, like a distant drumbeat growing louder. Utahns
would not learn the full details of the approaching army’s military
orders until February 1858, and then only through government back
channels. As it turned out, the instructions were similar to those previ-
ously issued to soldiers in “Bleeding Kansas,” torn by sectional unrest.
The army, the orders said, was to subordinate itself to the executive
and judicial territorial officers appointed by the U.S. government. “In
no case will you, your officers or men, attack any body of citizens what-
ever, except on such requisition or summons, or in sheer self-defense,”
read the instructions.56 But without this information, Utah’s people
poured their fears into the uncertainty caused by reports of an oppos-
ing army and a government that seemed to accept the word of anyone
but the local citizens themselves.

By the first week of August, leaders in Salt Lake City sent couriers
throughout the territory with the militia orders, including communi-
ties situated in the north, west, and south.57 Militia brigadier general
Franklin D. Richards, a Latter-day Saint apostle, put his officers in
northern Utah on notice. “We have experienced the repeated deso-
lation of our homes,” Richards wrote. “Our prophets and brethren
have been imprisoned and murdered, & the people en masse have been
exterminated from their midst.” It was not just the suffering but the
lack of due process that upset Richards. “We have appealed to Judges
and Governors of those States for redress of our wrongs in vain, and
when we applied to the President of the United States for our rights
we were told ‘your cause is just but we can do nothing for you’ ”—words
of U.S. President Martin Van Buren when Joseph Smith had asked
for his help. “We now appeal to the God of our Fathers & Prophets
for protection against the hostilities of any Mob that shall invade our
Territory, and invoke aid of the heavens to strengthen us in defending
ourselves against further aggressions.” Richards’s letter concluded by
urging the preserving of grain. Any person giving “a Kernel of grain to
any Gentile merchant and temporary sojourner, or suffers it to go to
waste” was to be reported.58 George A. Smith would deliver a similar
message to the communities of southern Utah.
Smith was one of those Mormon leaders who had been so outspoken
during the Sabbath preaching on August 2. “If I did not talk strong,”
he later said of his remarks, “it was not because I did not feel strong.”59
He told the Saints that he believed the community was facing another
Missouri or Illinois—“the [old] constant annoyance of an approaching
enemy,” followed by persecution. Months afterward, he said the gov-
ernment seemed to be saying, “Damn you, submit to my will or I will
pierce your vitals.”60
During the prayer meeting in Young’s office when Young laid
out the Mormons’ war policy, Smith had made an important point.
If the Mormons actually defeated Harney and the federal army,
Washington would send even more soldiers. On that occasion, Young
rejected his opinion, predicting the public would turn against President
Buchanan by that time.61
With Salt Lake City preparing for the advancing army, Smith started
on a journey south early in the morning of August 3. Since returning
to Utah from his year-long trip to the East, Smith had planned to
visit a wife and child living in Parowan in southern Utah.62 But his
trip had another purpose. He was carrying the two documents that
put Utahns on military alert: Young’s letter and Wells’s general orders

george a. smith. Edward
Martin, Courtesy LDS Church
History Library.
telling church and military leaders in the settlements to conserve grain

and ammunition and prepare for a possible war. Smith delivered the
directives to church leaders as he went.63
He took the road that went through Provo, Springville, Nephi,
Fillmore, and Beaver.64 Parts of the route had been in use for longer
than anyone could remember, first as an Indian trace and later as a
white man’s pack trail. Mormons used it as they moved up and down
their string of settlements at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains, and
as the road to southern California. For them it was the main thorough-
fare for travel and news, their Camino Real or “King’s highway” made
famous in California and other parts of the old Spanish domain. The
settlers called part of the highway the “State Road,” later “State Street.”
Some overland emigrants also used it to travel to California, though
emigrant traffic on this southern route never came close to equaling
the heavy traffic of its northern counterpart, the main transcontinental
road. The latter provided the most direct route to California’s gold
fields and to the attractive San Joaquin and Sacramento River valleys,
not to mention the rising cities of Sacramento and San Francisco.65

George A. Smith was an unusual personality. Cautiously estimated
at 250 pounds on a five-foot, ten-inch frame, he was a jolly-looking
man with a sense of humor to match. Some Paiute Indians called him
Non-choko-wicher—“takes himself apart”—after they saw him remove
his glasses, his false teeth, and, most stunningly, the wig that rested
uneasily on his head. At times when preaching from the pulpit, he
would “remove his wig and mop his brow to the great amusement of
the audience.” “When my wig is off,” he quipped, “there is scarcely a
hair between me and Heaven.”66
Smith had been a Mormon apostle since 1839—at twenty-one, the
youngest man ever to occupy that office. He liked to read, especially
history, and had a prodigious memory, which may have been reasons
for his 1854 appointment as church historian and recorder at his faith’s
headquarters in Salt Lake City.67
Brigham Young often asked Smith to receive important visitors,
who usually warmed to “George A.,” as he was often called. An Irish
traveler described him as “a huge, burly man, with a Friar Tuck jovial-
ity of paunch and visage, and a roll in his bright eye which, in some
odd, undefined sort of way, suggested cakes and ale.”68 American jour-
nalist and writer George Alfred Townsend wrote after meeting him,
“Smith is one of us literary folks, a man of the stamp of Thackeray,
Peter Force and Washington Irving . . . a collaborateur, lover of tradi-
tions and family reminiscences, and a pleasing, dignified raconteur and
politician. He has no avarice, no love of war, no vindictiveness, and he
is yet a sincere, hale, immovable Mormon.”69
A first cousin of church founder Joseph Smith and an early convert
himself, George A. Smith experienced many of Mormonism’s early
difficulties: Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, and the trek west.70 In Utah he
quickly became a leading man. In the early 1850s he led a colony
of settlers to the area that would become Parowan, the first Latter-
day Saint settlement on the southern Utah frontier. He “sowed the
first wheat” there, “built the first saw and grist mill,” and during the
winter taught the first school in the open air next to a large, crack-
ling bonfire.71 His next assignment was Provo, where settlers needed
George A.’s common sense and steadying leadership.72 Soon he had
the job of overseeing all points south of the Salt Lake Valley, with the
assignment of getting families to settle these semiparched lands. Dur-
ing the 1853/54 Indian skirmishes known as the Walker War—after
Ute leader Wakara (Walker)—BrighamYoung and Daniel H. Wells
made Smith, then a colonel in the territorial militia, the military com-
mander over all militia units in southern Utah. During these months

Smith pushed himself to restore order, at times approaching physical
collapse.73
Now he was returning to Parowan, no longer as commander of
the local militia but as a man much loved by his friends and with a
great deal of influence as the “father” of southern Utah.74 When he
arrived on Saturday evening, August 8, he found the militia drilling.
Like other military districts in the territory, the Iron Military District,
headquartered at Parowan, had been reorganizing under orders previ-
ously received from Wells—a sign that the Mormons may have been
preparing for conflict as early as the winter of 1856/57.75 A few days
before Smith arrived, news of the coming U.S. Army had reached the
southern settlement. These reports relayed all the details being dis-
cussed up north, including the news of Harney’s 2,500-man force.76
It was a “mob,” southern Utah resident John M. Higbee later said,
picking up on the familiar refrain.77
According to the rumors, the troops intended to kill Brigham Young
and anyone else with “more than one wife,” meaning most of Utah’s
prominent men. The local people believed their most basic institu-
tions—their prophet, country, and religion—were in danger. To mod-
ern ears, such talk might seem wild, something no U.S. Army would
do. But the Saints had been conditioned by their past experiences, and
the southern Utah militia was on alert.78
“Delighted to behold” Smith, militia members in Parowan asked
their former district commander to make a speech.79 Hoisting himself
onto a wagon, Smith said he was pleased the settlers had caught the
“spirit of the times.” Their instructions were “to be prepared for the
worst,” including, “if necessary, to lay down our lives in defense of
the Kingdom of God.”80
On Sunday, August 9—the day after he arrived—Smith preached
twice in Parowan. He repeated the rumors circulating in Salt Lake
City when he left. The soldiers “intend to hang about 300 of the most
obnoxious Mormons,” some quickly without due process and the rest
after sham trials, he said. “More to be dreaded than the soldiers,”
however, were the civilian teamsters accompanying them, “the worst
description of men, picked up on the frontiers” and “making great cal-
culations for ‘booty and beauty.’ ”81
Smith also wanted local Saints to understand Young’s plans for
defeating the army. If Harney and his troops forced their way into Utah,
Smith explained, the Saints would flee to the mountains with their
provisions, fighting from there using guerrilla tactics. “We will haunt
them as long as they live,” Smith roared, adding with characteristic

humor, “unless they live longer than we do.” But there was no humor
about those who might try to sell goods to the invading troops. “Will
we sell them grain or forage?” Smith queried. “I say damn the man
who feeds them; I say damn the man who sympathizes with them: I
say curse the man who pours oil and water on their heads.” Smith also
preached quieter and more reassuring doctrines, proclaiming, “We
must trust in God, for if we trust in any one else, we shall find ourselves
the losers.”82 All in all, however, one local settler described his remarks
as “a regular war sermon.”83

chapter five
Preaching a Military Discourse

Southern Utah, August 9–21, 1857
E
xcept for giving a sermon in nearby Paragonah, Smith spent
the week after his arrival in Parowan resting, building a fence
around his garden, and visiting with family and “scores of
friends.”1 It had been nearly seven years since he first led a company of
pioneers to southern Utah.
From the time that Spanish and Mexican explorers of the Domin-
guez-Escalante expedition went through the region in 1776, people
had talked of the region’s rich resources.2 Parley P. Pratt and a party
of Mormon explorers dispatched by Young in 1849 reported “a hill of
the richest Iron ore,” though iron, according to Pratt, was only one
advantage. He also described acres of cedar that might provide “inex-
haustible” fuel for smelting.3
Pratt’s report delighted Young. “Iron we need, and iron we must
have,” he said, recognizing the commodity’s key role in nineteenth-
century life.4 “Nails, wire, shovels, hoes, hammers, bits, horseshoes,
stirrups, axes, chisels, blades and hundreds of other items were costly
to buy and impossible to replace without easy access to iron,” explained
one local history of the region.5
In late 1850, Young sent Smith and his party south to found
Parowan, the first of three main settlements in what became known as
the church’s “Iron Mission.”6 The second settlement was Cedar City,
ruins of fort harmony. Wally Barrus (2005).
about twenty miles south of Parowan and closer to ore and coal depos-
its. The new community was situated along the banks of hard-rushing
Coal Creek, which provided water for the iron-manufacturing process.
The new town’s name suggested yet another advantage: It was near
rich cedar forests necessary for fueling machinery and making char-
coal, another vital commodity. By 1853 Cedar City had outstripped
Parowan in population.7
By the fall of 1852 John D. Lee and more than a dozen other men
began to build the third settlement—Fort Harmony—roughly twenty
miles southwest of Cedar City on Ash Creek. With “excellent grazing
land” and nearby water, the site was deemed a good location to pasture
the settlers’ cattle. The fort could serve as a military outpost, and its
men would protect the livestock.8 The location may also have been
chosen for its view of the stunning, red-fingered cliffs to the east. Lee
had an eye for such things.
Each of the three main communities had its leading man. At Parowan,
it was William H. Dame, a town founder who had accepted one lead-
ership role after another. In 1852 church leaders asked him to serve
as a member of the high council—the twelve men who help the stake
president coordinate policy in every Mormon stake. The year before,
Parowan’s citizens elected him to serve as the town’s first mayor. He
was also chosen as a representative to the territorial assembly and at
Preaching a Military Discourse 55

various times held the offices of county recorder and surveyor.9 When
George A. Smith was asked to serve as church historian, Dame took
his place as commander of the militia district, which included south-
ern Utah’s Iron and Washington counties.10 Finally, in 1856 Young
appointed Dame to serve as the president of the Parowan Stake.11
Church leaders in Salt Lake City seemed to like Dame, although
many of his neighbors were less sure. Critics saw him as roundabout
in his dealing and uncomfortable with hard decisions. He “wished to
push off all the responsible things that were not agreeable for him to
shoulder” and would always look for and find a “loop hole.”12 Still
others passed him off as vain. “Every pulsation of his vitality” was to
preside—the kind of man who came to meetings early just to show
himself off, one man said.13
Perhaps Dame’s problem was nothing more serious than his per-
sonality. Though enjoying praise and capable of agreeable conversa-
tion, he was by nature timid and quiet. Flinty as the New Hampshire
countryside where he was born in 1819, he had neither the time nor
interest in the open ways that were so much a part of western life.
The result was that Dame had few close friends. Adding to his unusual
profile, he was a polygamist with no children.14
Still, many people credited him with honesty, kindness, and hard
work, and these good qualities became more apparent as he lived out
his life. Toward the end of his career, the Salt Lake Tribune—no friend
of the Mormons at the time—called him “a well-to-do farmer” who
had the look of a “well disposed and inoffensive” gentleman.15 A photo-
graph taken of him at middle age confirmed this judgment. It showed
him, square-set and stately, sitting outdoors with three of his wives, a
book on his lap and a hint on his face of an impassive quality.
Details of his youth are sketchy, but one document written by
Thomas Edgerly, chairman of the Farmington, New Hampshire,
Board of Selection, says a great deal. “This may certify that I have
been acquainted with the bearer Mr. William H. Dame of this town
from his childhood,” it said. “His reputation has ever stood fair so far
as has ever come to my knowledge—I believe him to be a person of
sober life and conversation, and of good moral character. He is con-
sidered a good scholar, and well qualified to teach a common English
School.” At the time, Dame was eighteen years old.16 Three years later,
at Nauvoo, he joined the Latter-day Saints and never seemed to look
back. When his mother pled for him to come home after his brother
and father died of typhoid fever, he chose to keep his hand steady on
the gospel plough—just as Jesus required.17

william h. dame and wives. Courtesy Special Collections,
Sherratt Library, Southern Utah University.
Dame’s counterpart at Cedar City was Isaac C. Haight, perhaps the

most able man in southern Utah. Born at Windham, Greene County,
New York, in 1813, he flirted with a “rigid close communion Baptist”
type of Protestantism when he was a young man. He even thought
about a future mission to the “heathen” people of the world.18 When
that enthusiasm cooled, no church interested him until he met Mor-
monism. His baptism was as dramatic as any convert’s. “Although the
cold was severe so much so that our clothes froze stiff the moment
we came out of the water yet our hearts were warm with the Spirit
of God,” he wrote.19 Feeling a growing confidence in himself and his
faith, he began to serve Latter-day Saint missionary tours.20
At Nauvoo, Haight served as a policeman, protecting the city as
well as its leader, Joseph Smith. These assignments made him a mem-
ber of the city posse that destroyed the press of the anti-Smith Nau-
voo Expositor, and he was a part of the guard that went with Joseph

and Hyrum Smith to Carthage, Illinois. Several days later, Haight
had returned and was doing sentry duty at the Nauvoo Temple when
he heard of the brothers’ murders. “My Heart Sunnk within me,” he
wrote in his diary, “and I felt to curse the purpetrators of that dark and
diabolical deed.”21
A sense of persecution took hold of him. “My mind is filled with
great anxiety about getting away,” he said as the Saints’ wagons left the
city during the evacuation. Sick with the pleurisy and unable to sell his
property, Haight had to remain for a time in Nauvoo. “My trust is in
the Lord that he will open the way for us to get away from this wicked
nation stained with the blood of the Prophets,” he said. Haight had
more troubled words once his family joined the Saints in their journey.
“We are even like the Saints of old having no abiding city,” he wrote,
“but are wanderers and Pilgrims on the Earth.” Another diary entry
was still more poignant. “Many have laid down their bodies in the
grave[,] among them . . . my little son two weeks old.”22
Once in the West, Haight was asked to go with Parley Pratt’s
1849/50 southern exploring expedition. He felt a tug when passing
through the site that later became Parowan, calling it “one of the most
lovely places in the Great Basin.”23 With such feelings, Haight might
easily have enrolled with the first settlement parties to southern Utah.
But Young wanted him for a proselyting mission to England. Dur-
ing his twenty-eight-month tour, Haight experienced English culture
firsthand. He visited such sites as Regent Park’s Zoological Gardens
and the Tower of London, and watched some Yeomanry Hussars drill.
He also viewed the pomp of the Duke of Wellington’s funeral.24
But it was his labor in the vineyard that shaped him most. He
preached to “many thousands” and took on important leadership roles.
When leaving England, he mourned the people’s poverty and the grasp
of the “power of the Tyrant.” He was given the heavy responsibility
of leading the season’s emigration from England and carrying almost
$37,000 in church tithing and emigration funds. By August 1853 he
was back in Salt Lake City, reporting his success in Brigham Young’s
office and enjoying his leader’s welcome. Five weeks later, Haight went
south to Cedar City to take charge of the Deseret Iron Company.25
A family biographer gave Haight the virtues of a brilliant mind and a
fair-spoken way that easily made him friends.26 Haight described him-
self as a person with “a light and boyant spirit” who relished amuse-
ments.27 These included music, especially hymns, and he was known
to offer his devotions with an impromptu rendition.28 John D. Lee,
his neighbor and sometime adversary, was more critical, pointing to

Haight’s pride and ambition—common enough human emotions. But
during the reformation it was Haight’s zeal that stood out. The Cedar
City leader had “almost become a terror to evil doers,” Lee wrote
admiringly in 1856.29
Haight was forty-four years old in 1857, stood five feet eleven
inches tall, and weighed around 170 pounds—a “well built man, one
who carried himself with great dignity.” Piercing eyes shown out from
his dark complexion and black hair.30 After living in southern Utah
only four years, he had a heavy concentration of titles and authority. In
addition to leading the iron company and the Cedar City Stake, he was
also mayor, legislator, and militia battalion major.31 Few men in Utah
seemed to have a brighter future.
John D. Lee—the leading man at Fort Harmony—was, like Dame
and Haight, middle-aged in 1857. He was born at Kaskaskia, Illinois,
on September 6, 1812. His father was supposedly linked to the famous
Lees of Virginia, a family tradition too thin to prove. More definite
isaac c. haight, ca.

1858. Courtesy LDS
Church History Library.

were Lee’s early years, which were filled with the social distress of a
Dickens novel. An intruder beat his mother senseless, leaving her
impaired. Lee remembered his father as “a kind-hearted, generous, noble
man” when sober, though he drank heavily and provided poorly.32
John’s mother died when he was three, and five years later his father
“went to Texas.”33 The boy was sent to his mother’s sister—“a regular
spit-fire” of a woman who believed in not sparing the rod. “I have been
knocked down and beaten . . . until I was senseless, many times,” Lee
said of her usage.34
The conditions were so harsh that young Lee even considered sui-
cide. But at the age of sixteen, he left his aunt’s home and went to work
successively as a mail courier, stage driver, Mississippi River roust-
about, farmer, store clerk, and bartender. He briefly dealt cards and
gambled professionally. But this last activity, he came to realize, had
too much chance and cheating for any long-term profit. In 1832 Lee
served in the Black Hawk War and fought at the final Battle of Bad Axe
in Wisconsin Territory. After his marriage to Agatha Ann Woolsey,
Lee established a small store and farmed in Fayette County, Illinois.
Still in his twenties, he had acquired 160 acres, good buildings, two
hundred cattle, and a thousand sheep. “I . . . had good success in all that
I undertook,” Lee said confidently.35 He found he could easily outtalk,
outtrade, and outwork almost anyone.
Born a Roman Catholic, Lee listened to Methodist, Baptist, and
Campbellite preachers but was not impressed. His feelings about reli-
gion changed, however, after he rescued two frost-bitten Mormon
missionaries from “a dreadful snowstorm,” which “set him to thinking
and searching the scriptures.” “I believed the Book of Mormon was
true,” he said, “and if so, everything but my soul’s salvation was a mat-
ter of secondary consideration.” In 1838 he and Agatha Ann gave up
their comfortable situation in Illinois to join the main body of Saints
then located in northwestern Missouri.36
During missionary tours to Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee, Lee
said he beheld heavenly visions, contested with evil spirits, and defeated
other Christian ministers with strong, inspired words. Although at first
timid and inexperienced before a congregation, he soon believed he
was transformed by a higher power. “My tongue was like the pen of
a ready writer. I scarcely knew what I was saying,” he reflected, after
speaking to a congregation for an hour and a half.37 “I grew in grace
from day to day,” he said, “and I have never seen the day that I regret-
ted taking up my cross and giving up all other things to follow and
obey Christ, my Redeemer and Friend.”38

Lee thrived in Nauvoo, building a large home and serving as the
city’s wharfmaster and as librarian of the Masonic lodge.39 He also
served as a bodyguard to Joseph Smith and, upon Smith’s death,
Brigham Young. “I became very popular among the Saints,” Lee re-
called without a blush. “I was young, strong and athletic. I could drive
ahead and work all day and stand guard half of the night, through all
kinds of weather.”40
On becoming better acquainted with Lee, Young liked what he
saw. “They are all workers,” he said of Lee and his family.41 Young
agreed to adopt Lee in a spiritual father-son relationship through a
ritual common to Mormons of the time. When the practice was first
introduced, Lee rushed to join Young’s spiritual family. “I was adopted
by Brigham Young,” he explained, “and was [therefore] to seek his
temporal interests here [on earth], and in return he was to seek my spir-
itual salvation.”42 Although just one of many men adopted to Young,
Lee took the matter more seriously than some, perhaps because it set
him apart from other church members or gave him the father figure
he missed in his youth—even though Young was just nine years his
senior.43
Lee reached Utah in 1848, and two years later Young asked him to
help settle southern Utah, where his whirlwind energy might do some
good. Young may have had another reason for sending Lee south. Both
before and during the Saints’ westward migration, Lee had trouble get-
ting along with people and found himself called before church tribu-
nals for offenses that included bickering, lewd talk, boasting of a sexual
orgy with one of his wives, and domestic violence. “He threatened to
cut my throat,” said wife Nancy Bean in a December 4, 1847, state-
ment that detailed instances of Lee’s physical and emotional abuse.
“I have heard him often say that if he managed to keep his actions
secreted from Brigham and the Twelve [Apostles],” Bean said, “he did
not care for any other persons—as nobody else had a right to say any-
thing about him.” Lee often denied the stories others told about him,
casting them as outlandish charges aimed to destroy his public char-
acter. But Young and others came to believe that Lee had been guilty
of some misconduct. In one tribunal, after Lee was “reproved . . . vary
sharply for trying to cover his faults & Justify himself in his errors,”
Young “backed up” the “reproof & reproved Br Lee himself.”44
The incident caused a minor stir; Lee’s reputation had been dam-
aged and possibly his career in the church as well. For his part, Young
was willing to leave the matter to “eternal oblivion” and never raised
the issue again, even after the two men later became estranged.45

john d. lee. Courtesy
LDS Church History
Library.
Young’s hope that Lee might have a second chance was probably one
reason he sent Lee south as a member of the Iron Mission—and a rea-
son that Lee accepted the assignment, despite preferring to stay in the
Salt Lake Valley. He went, he said, “to redeem my standing.”46
Lee soon was reporting that his new assignment had been for the
best. Earlier in life, he told Young, he “had Zeal but not acording to
knowledge” and failed “to bear with the people & would gain their Ill
will by my own folly.” But pioneering, Lee said, had smoothed things
and “placed me in circumstances where of necessity I had to Rub up
my Tallent.”47
July 1853 saw the outbreak of the Walker War, skirmishing between
Mormon settlers and some of the territory’s Indians who chafed because
white men were taking their land and resources. Young, acting as the

territory’s governor and superintendent of Indian affairs, decided on a
policy unusual for the American frontier. Instead of fighting the Indi-
ans, he sent general orders requiring settlers in outlying areas to move
within the forts of larger and stronger settlements while he tried to
negotiate peace. Young also ordered the settlers to send their surplus
livestock to Salt Lake City for safekeeping.48
This policy of “defense and conciliation,” while eventually quieting
the frontier, caused problems among the settlers, who were forced to
live in crowded forts for months. Some were malleable, like William
Dame, who abandoned his new $3,000 house in Paragonah and moved
back to the Parowan fort.49 Others bristled at the new restrictions. Some
settlers in the Cedar City fort rebelled against the order to send their
cattle north. A few “brought out their Guns” and “threatened to shoot
the man who would touch their cattle.”50 In cash-starved pioneer Utah,
cattle were as close to a circulating medium as most people had, and
despite the territory’s reputation as a submissive society, these men were
unwilling to trust Young when it came to their pocketbooks. Some pre-
ferred the old American way of fighting Indians instead of seeking peace
with them, or thought Young had greatly exaggerated the danger.51
When Matthew Carruthers, a Scottish convert and Cedar City’s
militia major, resigned his commission rather than comply with the
order to send cattle north, he was replaced by Lee, who had been mili-
tia captain at Harmony and would soon be promoted to major.52 By
Lee’s own account, he forced the citizenry to toe the line. He later
told Young that he girded on his sword, “called the people togeather”
and said that “by the help of god & the Faithful of my Brethren, I was
determined to carry out the instructions & requirements contained in
the general orders, if it need be by the shedding of the Blood, of those
cursed wicked apostate fault[-]finding wretches.”53
The men who rebelled were put in chains, and local military author-
ities even talked of the death penalty for their mutiny in a time of war.54
When the matter ended, no men lost their lives, but militia records
had a dozen or more pages devoted to courts-martial—some for minor
offenses—and there was a great deal of bitterness.55 Thirty-one men
and women who found “the presiding Officers tyranical in their rule”
left the Iron Mission for California, and for their desertion they were
quickly excommunicated.56 The lesson was clear: There were unpleas-
ant penalties for disobeying militia leaders.
In May 1854 the Walker War ended just as Young hoped—with a
meeting and negotiation between himself and Ute leader Wakara.57
But the conflict led Young to conclude that he and his church were

not doing enough for the territory’s native people. Months before the
war’s end, he decided to establish a mission for them, just as Mormon
missions had been created in other parts of the world. Young called
missionaries to live among the Indians, to learn their language and
customs, and to teach, feed, clothe, and convert them.58
While the Walker War prompted Young to found the Southern
Indian Mission, his interest in the Indians of the region went back
almost to the beginning of the Mormons’ settlement of Utah. Dur-
ing these first years, Wakara himself had asked Young to establish a
colony in the area to teach his people how to farm.59 During Parley
Pratt’s exploring expedition, a local headman had also welcomed the
Mormons and “invited and strong[ly] urged our people to settle with
them and raise cornee,” Pratt reported.60 These requests agreed with
the Saints’ hope to bring the Christian message to local Indians and
spiritually “redeem” them.61
The hope for a great Indian destiny was one thing; reality was
another. The northerly Utes maintained several camps in the south,
mainly one near Beaver led by Wakara’s kinsman Ammon. Ammon’s
borderland band included southern Utah Indians the white men called
“Paiutes,” or sometimes “Piedes.” The usually passive Paiutes had a rich
culture of their own based on agriculture and harmony with the land,
which met most of their basic needs until white incursions depleted
the game and native plants.62 One Mormon called the impoverished
Paiutes “the most destitute People I ever Saw.”63 Young believed that
work among Utah’s Indians, like “other works of great philanthropy,”
would probably be “gradual in its operation.”64
During the Walker War, the Paiutes sided with the Mormons for
good reason. The settlers buffered them from Ute raiders who had
often taken Paiute children and women to sell as slaves in New Mexico
and California. The Paiutes had neither the horses nor rifles of the
Utes with which to resist. Their loose family groups were better suited
to food-gathering and small-scale farming than fighting. In the 1850s
Paiutes ranged from Beaver Creek on the north to the Colorado River
on the south, reaching west across what is now southern Nevada into
California.65
The Mormon Indian missionaries provided the Paiutes clothing,
established schools for them, and sought to learn their language while
teaching them English.66 Though the Paiutes had a long history of
irrigated farming, the missionaries introduced them to the white man’s
plow and large-scale irrigation techniques.67 They also taught their
religion to the Indians, baptized converts, gave them new names from

scripture, and tried to convince local bands to follow Paiute leaders
who were pliable to white man’s ways. Like many humanitarians of
the time, the Mormons believed the Indians would be best off if they
abandoned their own culture and became a part of the white man’s
developing world.68
At the time of the establishment of the Southern Indian Mission,
John D. Lee’s fort at Harmony was the Mormon settlement deepest
within Paiute territory. From this hub, the missionaries spread out-
ward.69 In 1854 Santa Clara, thirty-three miles southwest of Harmony,
became the Indian mission’s next major post, near where many Paiutes
lived. There missionaries and Indians worked together to build two
cabins—one for the whites and one for the Paiutes. The next year,
the two groups worked together to erect a fort at Santa Clara—most
Mormon frontier communities began with a fort.70 To expand farm-
able Paiute land, the Mormons built canals and at least one new dam.71
Tutsegavits, an influential Paiute, wanted the best of this new acreage,
citing an ancestral claim that the missionaries did not question. “We
have ever kept in mind not to rob the Indians of their rights but rather
sought to help them in every way that we could,” said one missionary,
though over succeeding years, the whites would not live up to this
ideal.72
While relations between the missionaries and the Paiutes at first
thrived, relations between the missionaries and Lee were troubled from
the start. Shortly after the missionaries’ arrival in Harmony, Lee met
with their leaders, who had been appointed in Salt Lake City, and told
them there should be only one “head” in Harmony, and “this was his
place.” The missionaries agreed to cooperate for the time being but
would appeal to Young when he came on a visit a few weeks later.73
When Young and his traveling party arrived in late spring of 1854,
he sought to resolve the tension in Harmony by maintaining the mis-
sionaries’ leadership over the Indian mission but allowing Lee to lead
the local congregation as its presiding elder. “Be united and seek to
know the mind of the Spirit of the Lord,” Young told the group.74
Young apparently felt he had solved the problem. But Harmony had
little peace, and by early 1855 conditions were at a breaking point. One
of the missionaries, Thomas D. Brown, wrote an extended passage in
his diary that accused Lee of having an “abundance of dreams, visions
and revelations” that he used for his own purposes. Brown believed
the actual source of Lee’s information was more ordinary. “He lis-
tened behind a fence to Bros. P[eter] Shirts and W[illia]m Young who
were talking of his immeasurable selfishness, and he repeated it next

meeting as having read it from a sheet let down from the heavens
before his eyes,” Brown claimed. In another incident, “when another
Bro. was exhorting to meekness, humility, and against theft, Bro. Lee
followed and all but accused said brother of hypocrisy, blackness of
heart and evil speaking, and said he himself would not hesitate to steal
from the Gentiles who had so often robbed the Saints.”75
Another complaint accused Lee of staging a tantrum over a small
dispute, throwing his hat and shoe to the floor, “spoiling both, and
cursing in wrath.” More easily confirmed was the missionaries’ com-
plaint that Lee was writing to Young behind their backs. Lee admitted
writing a letter but denied sending it.76 Yet two such letters arrived
at church headquarters. Lee did not wish to be “finding fault” with
the missionaries, one of the letters said. He was only keeping Young
informed.77
A year later, Lee again wrote Young, this time about some veiled
misconduct on his part. He implied that local church leaders were
making him the target of “religious opposition,” and he feared for his
position in the church. He also worried that he had lost Young’s favor.
Addressing Young as “beloved Father,” Lee explained, “I say Father
because a Father you have been to me . . . To know that my course of
conduct is aproved of by you is to me more than all the riches posi-
tions and honors in this world.” It would be a privilege, he said, to
step between Young and the “cannons Mouth.” Lee said that without
Young’s approval, he felt “wretched.”78
As it turned out, Young was not angry with Lee and probably did
not know of the charges being made against him by church authori-
ties in the south. Before receiving Lee’s letter, Young had already sent
his own to Lee, appointing him as a U.S. Indian farmer to the Paiute
people. When Lee learned of his appointment, he wept—not because
it satisfied his ambition, he said, but because it allowed him to continue
to serve. He later said that several days before Young’s letter arrived,
“an angel of the Lord . . . stood by [his] bedside and talked . . . about
these and many other things.”79
Unfortunately, neither angelic interview nor Young’s letter helped
Lee understand his new assignment, which he wrongly assumed gave
him control of Indian mission affairs in the south. He began a flurry
of activity that brushed aside anything and anyone in his way, includ-
ing the Indian missionaries.80 Young had to correct him; he had only
wanted Lee to assist the Indians with their farming and distribute
government farming supplies to them. The Indian mission was off
limits.81

Lee apologized to Young but blamed others for his misunderstanding.
The damage had been done, however, and a petition against Lee—which
included the signatures of Indian missionaries and settlers—circulated
at Harmony. Haight, who had ecclesiastical jurisdiction, heard about
the matter and came to Harmony to hold a hearing. When it was
over, Lee was voted out of his church office as presiding elder of Har-
mony. He said that the margin was five votes and later complained that
“7 women voted on the negative,” as if the voters’ gender called into
question the final result.82 Haight, reporting to Salt Lake City, said the
vote against Lee was a more decisive twenty-six to six.83
Lee was retained as Indian farmer and kept his rank as major over
the Harmony battalion of the Iron militia. That was still too much
authority for the Indian missionaries, who moved their headquarters
from Harmony to the small settlement of Pinto, sixteen miles to the
northwest, where summers were cooler and they had easier access to
Santa Clara and the Indians who lived near there. This new location
also put a mountain range between them and the volatile Lee.84 A year
later when George A. Smith made his tour through southern Utah
to sound the war cry against the federal army, Lee was still a divisive
figure in the region.
After Smith’s week of respite with his family in Parowan, he joined
William Dame and several other militia leaders on a wide, circu-
lar sweep of local settlements. Smith asked Dame’s adjutant, James
H. Martineau, to keep a detailed record of the journey, and Martineau
recorded that the trip’s purpose was “completing the organization
[of ] our regiment, . . . inspecting the troops in their various localities
and giving them such injunctions as should seem necessary.”85 The
itinerary included stops at Cedar City, Harmony, and Washington
to the south, and Santa Clara, Mountain Meadows, and Pinto to the
southwest. “The spirit seemed to burn in my bones to visit all these
settlements,” Smith said.86
Though Smith said his tour was “a mission of peace to preach to the
people,” his sermons continued to blaze. Preaching in Sunday services
in Cedar City, he said that “in spite of all I could do I found myself
preaching a military discourse” that left the people full of “enthusi-
asm.” Haight showed the traveling party the iron works, improve-
ments to the city, and the imposing new home he was building of
burned brick—“the only one in [the] Territory,” Smith’s office journal
recorded.87
Young had earlier sent word to Haight that Smith was coming south
with general news of “things transpiring in the lower world”—the

United States—as well as bearing vital dispatches. “I wish you to pay
the strictest attention to the instructions which I forwarded to you by
him,” Young wrote, referring to the letters about conserving grain and
putting the militia on alert. Young’s letter also praised Haight’s work in
trying to make iron and announced Young’s intention to put new lead-
ers in charge of the Indian mission. The letter was dated August 4, the
day after Smith left Salt Lake City, and was meant to leave no doubt in
Haight’s mind about how important the war policy was.88
When Dame’s party reached Harmony, Smith’s sermon to the local
congregation “partook of the military more than the religious,” Smith
later reflected. “It seemed that I was perfectly running over with it.”89
One listener recorded, “President G A Smith delivered a discourse on
the Spirit that actuated the United States towards this people—full of
hostility and virulence.”90 Following the same pattern as in Cedar City,
Dame drilled the battalion at Harmony, and the local militia leader,
Lee, joined the traveling party, as did Haight.91 By this time the party
had a dozen and a half members, some on horseback and others riding
in wagons. Several of the men’s wives were also along.92 Dame, Haight,
and Lee—a triad of future massacre leaders—soaked up the apostle’s
message of coming war.
Because of the warm temperature of the region and its prospect
for growing cotton, the Mormons called the land south of Harmony
their “Dixie,” but it was more formidable than anything found in the
American South.93 “I think if the Lord had got up all the rough, rocky
and the broken fragments of the earth in one he might have dropped
it down there,” Smith said of the landscape.94 He described the trail
they traveled, which would be called the Black Ridge Road, as “the
most desperate” he had ever seen, full of “stones, volcanic rock, cobble
heads . . . and in places deep sand.”95 At the memorable “Peter’s Leap,”
wagons had to be eased down a precipice, two or three feet at a time,
by men holding ropes.96
Two days into this strenuous leg of their journey, an event took
place that gave it a sense of urgency. The party was overtaken by a
rider from Parowan carrying a military express for Col. Dame from
Gen. Daniel H. Wells in Salt Lake City.97 Before Smith left for the
south, it was believed the federal army would be unable to reach Utah
before winter. But word had come that Col. Edwin V. Sumner’s First
U.S. Cavalry, reported to be chasing Cheyenne Indians, had been spot-
ted on the Sweetwater River just a few hundred miles northeast of Salt
Lake City.98 Mormons suspected that Sumner’s pursuit of the Indians
was a ruse to get him closer to Salt Lake City before the populace

learned of his movements. Later, Mormons remembered variants of
these rumors. One said that a group of soldiers planned to attack from
the south, “travel North to meet the main body of the U.S. forces,
and clean out the inhabitants as they went along.”99 Still another said
that an army captain had gone to Texas to gather volunteers to make a
southern attack.100
In Salt Lake City, leaders began to worry that U.S. troops might
enter Utah anywhere along its eastern borders and perhaps from
California as well, though the northeast Echo Canyon road remained
the likely route for the main assault.101 Not wanting the Saints to “be
taken at any point by surprise,” Wells sent an express to military com-
manders throughout Utah, especially in the south, to guard the moun-
tain approaches into the territory. He wanted this duty performed by
the local militias and, where possible, by Indians, who Mormon leaders
continued to hope would side with them in the approaching war. The
Indians, Wells said, should be told they were in as much danger as the
Mormons were.
Besides stressing the need for Indian cooperation, Wells’s express
reemphasized the importance of grain. Not a kernel was to be lost,
he urged. “Drop other business” to get the crops in, “thrash out the
grain,” and find “good safe places in the mountains where grain can
be cached and where women and children can be safe in case we have
to take to the mountains.”102 Wells’s dispatch gave George A. Smith’s
words an even harder edge. Within days, Utah’s southern militia began
to watch the mountain passes, east and west, while Smith and Dame
and their party continued their tour, preaching of the coming crisis
and drilling the militia.103
Wells’s instructions to secure Indian help was nothing new—Young
had suggested this policy during his August 2 prayer meeting with
Mormon leaders—but the new orders put the southern leaders on
notice of its importance as they entered a country heavily inhabited
by Paiutes. At the new community of Washington, after Smith and
Dame once more did their preaching and drilling, they parleyed with
local Indians. As the party turned west and made its next camp, Paiutes
cared for the Mormons’ horses, and the Indians and Mormons prob-
ably had more talks.104 The next day Dame and Smith’s party arrived
at the Santa Clara fort, where a large number of Paiutes gathered to
“see the ‘Mormon Captain.’ ” When the interview was over, Smith
described it as “glorious.”105
The good feeling continued as the party turned north to return to
Cedar City, having reached the most distant point of their trip. Now

they were on the California road, which branched southwest from
Cedar City. The group headed up the Santa Clara River canyon with
its occasional steep walls and underbrush. Several years before, a wife
of one of the Indian missionaries shuddered as she traveled through
the area—“a very favorable place for the Indians to attack travelers,”
she said of its reputation.106 Yet the dominant Paiute leader in the area,
Jackson, despite his later reputation for robbery and mayhem, offered
Smith and his party hospitality, which they declined.107
After passing through the Santa Clara canyon, the Mormons trav-
eled to the Indian camp of another local headman, Kahbeets, where
hundreds of Paiutes gathered around the travelers and gave them
roasted corn and melons. “We stopped over night with them, and
not one of them asked me for a thing,” Smith said. “I was treated as
well as if I had been among the Saints, and I never enjoyed a treat
better.”108
Leaving the camp, the party passed north through the Mountain
Meadows. In the middle 1850s, Indian missionary Jacob Hamblin
and a few other Mormons had established an outpost at its northern
springs, calling the tiny settlement Hamblin’s Ranch. The Meadows’
southern springs, four miles below, were used by California-bound
travelers before they dropped into the canyon of the Santa Clara and
out onto the deserts of what became southern Nevada. Smith’s party
stopped at the Meadows for “toast & cheese.”109
The last settlement on the tour was Pinto, home to missionaries
who had broken off from Harmony. Smith preached and Dame drilled
the militia. Then, after a week of travel, the party returned to Cedar
City, having completed a 186-mile circuit through “the most barren,
desolate and miserable country I ever saw inhabited,” Smith said.110
In after years Smith’s journey to southern Utah became a matter of

controversy, with some interpreting his sermons and even the places
he stopped as a deliberate prelude to the Mountain Meadows Massacre
less than a month later. John D. Lee’s several posthumously published
“confessions”—which appeared two decades after the tour—said that
while the party was passing through the Santa Clara canyon, Smith
asked, “Brother Lee, what do you think the brethren would do if a
company of emigrants should come down through here making
threats? Don’t you think they would pitch into them?”111
“They certainly would,” Lee replied, to which Smith said, “I asked
Isaac (meaning Haight) the same question, and he answered me just as
you do.”112

Several months after the first publication of this conversation,
another version of Lee’s confessions appeared under the title Mormon-
ism Unveiled. It made the charge against Smith even stronger. “I have
always believed, since that day, that General George A. Smith was then
visiting Southern Utah to prepare the people for the work of extermi-
nating Captain Fancher’s train of emigrants,” the book said, “and I now
believe that he was sent for that purpose by the direct command of
Brigham Young.”113 The passage would be used by some writers as key
evidence for saying that Smith and Young had planned the massacre.114
These statements, however, would have required remarkable pre-
science on Smith’s part. Even if he knew which trains would take the
northern or the southern routes to California, it is doubtful that he
knew their behavior on the road would include making threats against
southern Utah people. Moreover, Lee’s attorney and editor, William
W. Bishop, almost certainly reworked Lee’s “confessions” in Mormon-
ism Unveiled after Lee died to make the book more sensational and
to improve its sales, including the charges against Smith and Young.
Bishop had a motive for making these changes as his legal fees were
tied to the book’s royalties.115
Just moments before Lee’s execution—and after he had suppos-
edly written the words in Mormonism Unveiled—Lee talked with a
reporter from the then unabashedly anti-Mormon Salt Lake Tribune.
The reporter pressed Lee to know what Smith had said to him before
the massacre.
“Did he preach hostile to the emigrants?” the reporter asked.
“He was visiting all the settlements and preaching against the
emigrants,” Lee said. Then referring to the people killed at Moun-
tain Meadows, he added, “I don’t know that he meant those particular
emigrants.”116 This—Lee’s final statement on the subject—makes it
unlikely that he made the statement attributed to him in Mormonism
Unveiled, especially since he had been offered his life by prosecutors if
he would just charge Smith and Young with ordering the massacre. He
went to his death instead.117
Jacob Hamblin, who traveled with Smith during part of his August
1857 journey, confirmed this overall judgment. “George A.’s instruc-
tions to the people were that our enemies were going to make us more
trouble, and that the people should be careful to save every spoonful of
grain,” Hamblin later said. “I never heard from George A. an idea of a
hint that we should molest or mistreat an emigrant.”118
Yet something may have happened at the Santa Clara. Wells’s recent
dispatch had ordered the settlers to guard all the mountain passes into

Utah, and during the next several weeks southern Utahns would closely
watch the approaches to the east and west.119 Smith understood, as did
everyone, that if troops came from California in a surprise attack, they
would likely come on the well-traveled California road, and that the
strategic and difficult Santa Clara canyon would be the best place to
stop them.120
Smith may well have asked Lee if he thought the local people could
stop a threatening company traveling up the canyon.121 While passing
through Cedar City after completing his circle tour in Washington
and Santa Clara, Smith asked Maj. Haight what he would to do if six
hundred dragoons descended upon the city as rumored. The decisive
Haight replied that there would be “no time to wait for any instruc-
tion.” He would “take his battalion and use them up before they could
get down through the kanyons, for said he, if they are coming here
they are coming for no good.”122
Smith returned to his home in Parowan on August 21, where he
spoke once more before heading back to Salt Lake City.123 Reflecting
on his tour, he said, “In all the course of my trip south I have not yet
seen any one alarmed as yet.” He counseled the Parowan settlers to
“prepare for the worst and hope for the best.” Noting some fault-
finding in the town, he counseled the settlers “not to pick flaws” with
their leader, Dame.124
Dame himself seemed to be taking a careful course. On August 23
he wrote a letter to Wells giving a progress report: “Every inlet of
the District south of Beaver is now guarded,” he wrote. “If a hostile
force is found to be approaching us, we shall immediately express to
you, and await your further orders; unless attacked, in which case we
shall act on the defensive, and communicate immediately with you.”125
While Smith saw no panic in the south and Dame was acting deliber-
ately, tensions and emotions were nevertheless rising, some caused by
Smith’s preaching but primarily due to the rumored invasion. “Men
were stationed in all the dangerous places, women were excited, and
the people as a whole were ready for any emergancy,” remembered one
of the local settlers.126
Farther up the road outside of Beaver, Smith heard that Indians
discovered tracks from shod horses, at first thought to belong to army
scouts. The Beaver militia immediately investigated, only to find that
the trail led to Parowan and belonged to that city’s own militia. Still,
everyone was on alert, and at Fillmore and other points south, Smith
thought that a single “word” would be enough “to set in motion every

man, or set a torch to every building, where the safety of this people is
jeopardized.”127
Some of his Fillmore impressions may have come from Emily
Hoyt, Smith’s cousin, with whom he often stopped when traveling up
or down the southern road. On August 19 Hoyt wrote in her diary
that she felt “considerable excitement in [con]sequence of the express
which came on [the previous] Sunday”—probably Wells’s message
about guarding the passes. A week later, she heard “more startling
reports.” She wrote anxiously, “What the [U.S.] troops want or want
to do we do not know.”128
The rising feeling Smith found during his journey south had an ele-
ment of relish for some, which troubled him. Some Mormons, hating
“to owe a debt and not be able to pay it” were eager to get on with the
fight with the U.S. Army, which the Mormons continued to call a mob.
At Provo, Charles Jameson, who had been wounded in the Haun’s Mill
Massacre in Missouri nearly twenty years before, was praying for the
troops to come quickly, “for he wanted to have a chance at them.”129
Old hatreds were being easily transferred to new opponents.
When Smith preached to the Saints in Salt Lake City after return-
ing from his trip, he seemed to have two minds about preparing for
war. If a defense of the Saints was required, he wanted no faltering.
“No one will ever get to heaven unless he is willing to die,” he said.130
Yet he looked with trepidation at the coming conflict. “I do not know
but it is on account of my extreme timidity,” he said, but “I would a
great deal rather that the Lord would fight the battles than me, and
I feel to pray that he will punish [the army] with that hell which is to
want to and can’t.”131

chapter six
A Splendid Train
Arkansas to Utah, Emigration Season, 1857
T
he threat of war in Utah did little to slow the flood of emi-
grants who would pass through on the way to California—
though for a time the weather did. After two years of drought,
the winter of 1856/57 had brought ten feet of snow to some Utah
communities. The snow pack in the mountains averaged twenty feet.
At first winter refused to give up. Prairie grass east of South Pass was
“six weeks later than ever known,” and some emigrant cattle died for
the lack of feed.1 Then, suddenly, spring came, unleashing the pent-up
emigration.
People crowded the Missouri River loading docks. “Every boat to
this place comes crowded with emigrants, and we scarcely ever have
less than one and sometimes as many as three or four [boats] each day,”
reported a Leavenworth, Kansas, newspaper editor.2 Emigrants poured
onto the trails, and when the tide began to ebb in late summer, the reg-
ister at a “Mormon mail station” in present-day Wyoming showed that
12,500 emigrants, 950 wagons, 67,000 head of cattle, 2,500 horses and
mules, and 10,000 sheep had passed Devil’s Gate during the season.
These totals omitted the Mormon trains. They also did not include
emigrants from southwestern Missouri and northwestern Arkansas
who took the Cherokee Trail, following the Arkansas River before
turning north to join the more celebrated Oregon-California Trail
pioneers in the rocky mountains. Frances F. Palmer, Currier and Ives, Courtesy
Library of Congress.
west of Fort Laramie.3 The Cherokee Trail lay near the cattle markets
of Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri, and was the likely choice of citizens
traveling from those areas and taking their cattle to California.4
Whatever the actual scope of the ’57 migration, it left observers
marveling. One San Francisco newspaper called the traffic coming in
from western Utah Territory “one uninterrupted chain” of wagons
and cattle. “The wagons are in sight of each other the whole way,” it
reported.5 This last observation had to be newspaper hyperbole, but it
captured the excitement of the day. America was moving west, and the
emigration of 1857 had its own personality. Some emigrants were des-
perate. “I’ll be dog-gone if I’ll stay in a country where the cold weather
freezes the shucks off the cattle’s feet,” chewed one Missourian.6 He
was reflecting the bad times brought on by the recent unusual weather
that reached from California to midcontinent. For others, the deci-
sion to go to California had to do with the “pull” of profits and not
the “push” of hardship. They believed fortunes could still be made in
California—not from gold but from livestock.
Before the legendary cattle drives of the Abilene, Chisholm, or
Bozeman trails, there was the livestock traffic on the California trail—
“the first of the great cattle drives.”7 It owed its origin to the California
gold camps, where miners grew weary of their usual diet of salt bacon
A Splendid Train 75
and pork or the sinewy beef of the old California herds, bred for tallow
and hides. Tender beef from across the plains was the answer, and a
California butcher might pay top dollar for a steer from Arkansas or
Missouri, especially if the animal had been fattened at the end of the
trail on the rich grasses of California’s Central Valley.8 To get the herds
west, some men used the English system of drovers—not the later,
more familiar techniques of the Spanish-Mexican cowboys. These
drovers—sometimes called “bullwhackers”—walked or rode near the
herds and controlled the animals with great snapping whips capable of
killing a large steer if the aim were bad and the whip’s end hit a vulner-
able part of the beast.9
During the early 1850s, enterprising cattlemen drove herds west-
ward and returned with tales of riches from the cattle trade. A rush
followed that glutted California with beef, and by early 1856 the cattle
market was beginning to falter.10 With grass scarce and feed costly,
some cattlemen began selling their herds in California for whatever
they could get. “I am getting down on this country,” one of them wrote
back home. Still, herders kept driving stock to California, chasing the
mirage of quick riches.11 Others went to build homes and grow rich
from patient ranching.
By 1857 many herds on the road west were accompanied not just
by drovers but by whole families relocating to California.12 Men who
earlier had gone to California for gold or cattle-profit were now going
back with their wives and children, convinced of the state’s long-range
potential. Their enthusiasm rubbed off on extended family members
and neighbors who joined them. The family wagon trains included
“ ‘a right smart sprinkling’ of young ladies,” promising to brighten
“the dreary home of some old bachelors there,” according to one
traveler.13
The enthusiastic emigrants headed west in 1857 did not know of
the sagging market, ignored it, or focused on long-term prospects.
The late spring forced the emigrants into the middle and late stages of
the migrating season, further snarling trail traffic and creating anxiety.
Would there be enough grass along the way? Would so many people
produce more than the usual number of disputes among emigrants?
And what about Indians? The more emigrants, the more trouble there
often was between them and native peoples as they competed for dwin-
dling grass and game.14 This year’s heavy traffic increased the odds.
John Twitty Baker, “generally known by the name of ‘Jack,’ or
‘Captain Jack Baker,’ ” was among the emigrants of ’57.15 Born to par-
ents who settled in Madison County, Alabama, in about 1807, he knew

firsthand the relationship of hard work and rising fortunes. Jack’s par-
ents had done well by buying hundreds of acres of property and build-
ing them up by shrewd planning and industry. Soon they had a large
home of cedar logs and an estate that included sixteen slaves.16 Toward
the end of their lives, their assets were impressive for the time: ten
thousand dollars in real property and another thirty-seven thousand
in personal wealth.17 But there was not much pretense. Jack’s mother,
part-Cherokee, “smoked a corncob pipe and walked with a cane with
a crook on the end, with which she grabbed a grandchild if they mis-
behaved.”18
Jack followed his parents’ examples. Moving to nearby Jackson
County, Alabama—just across the county line from their home—he
settled down with his wife, Mary, and began his own patient pursuit of
wealth by farming with slave labor. Like his mother and father, he had
a hardy, rough quality. Neither he nor Mary picked up book learning.
Moreover, Jack “did not, always, get along with some of their neigh-
bors,” said a family member, diplomatically.19
One dustup involving Jack came when a public gathering ended
in drink and argument. Before long, “the fighting got to be a general
thing.” One of the men in the brawl attacked another with “a good
rock,” knocking him down before running off “so fast you could have
played cards on his shirt tail as it floated out behind him.”20
But not every one of these encounters was viewed in good humor.
Jack Baker, known to “regularly imbibe,” once went to buy supplies in
town, where he met three men who “were not his best friends.” A fight
broke out and, according to family tradition, Baker killed his three
attackers. It was probably one of those blood feuds that were so much
a part of Appalachia and the southwestern frontier. Although Baker
was badly hurt, he got himself home. Mary dressed his wounds and
sent him to the sanctuary of his parents’ home across the county line
to protect him from angry relatives of the three slain men. When he
finally returned to his own property, he found his barn burned down,
many of his cattle gone, and the threat of more depredations looming
constantly before him. He put up with the retaliation for years before
finally selling out in October 1848.21
His new address was Crooked Creek Township, Carroll County,
Arkansas, in the half-wild northwest frontier, south of present-day
Harrison.22 Almost immediately, Jack Baker became a presence. The
1850 U.S. Census put his real estate at forty-five hundred dollars—
higher than anyone else’s in the township.23 He also was a prominent
slaveholder in the region.24 His dominance rubbed people either right
A Splendid Train 77
or wrong. A neighbor said, after his death, that he was one of “our best
citizens . . . a warm friend and a bitter enemy.”25
In the early 1850s, the Baker family heard the siren call of California.
Some said Jack himself visited the state and liked what he saw.26 More
likely, the reconnaissance was done by Jack’s sons; George W. Baker
lived for a time in Stockton, Sonora, and Columbia, California, and
younger brother John Henry lived in California from 1852 to 1854.
( John Henry did not join the Baker family train of 1857).27 According
to George’s daughter Sarah, “my father and some of the other men
from our neighborhood went out to California to look over the lay of
the land and they came back with stories about gold that would just
about make your eyes pop out. There wasn’t anything to do but for
everybody in the family to pack up, bag and baggage, and light out for
the coast.”28 The Bakers sought gold not by mining but by selling their
beef to hungry miners.
Basil Parker, who lived several miles from Jack Baker on the Buf-
falo Fork of the White River, later claimed a role in getting him to go
west. Parker, like the Baker sons, had already been to California and
now prepared for a second trip. “My doing so,” said Parker, “had a
tendency to stimulate a man of the energy of Captain Baker, so he fit-
ted out a splendid train and had about six hundred head of cattle, mules
and horses.”29
Jack’s share of the cattle was 138 head, described by Mary as “all
good stock . . . three years old and upwards . . . picked cattle.” Jack also
had nine yoke of work oxen, two mules, a mare, a large ox wagon, and
as Mary would put it, “provisions, cloathing, and camp Equ[i]page for
him self and five hands.” The equipment included a tent, saddles and
bridles, and firearms, including one of Samuel Colt’s famous repeat-
ing pistols. The family believed Baker’s trail property and cattle were
worth over $4,000 in Arkansas, and even more in California.30
Three of Jack and Mary’s children were part of the gathering train.
Nineteen-year-old Abel was single and probably went along to help
herd the stock.31 George, by now twenty-seven and independent in
his own right, had about as many beef cattle, wagons, and work oxen
as his father.32 He and his wife, Manerva Beller Baker, had four small
children going with them, as well as Manerva’s younger brother and
sister and two hired hands.33
Yet another child of Jack and Mary who joined the company
was twenty-one-year-old Sarah Baker Mitchell, married to Charles
Mitchell. The couple brought their infant son. Charles Mitchell and
his brother Joel were the sons of William C. Mitchell, one of their

neighborhood’s most prominent citizens.34 The Mitchell boys started
out with $275 in cash, thirteen yoke of oxen, and sixty-two head of
cattle. According to a later inventory, there were a lot of miscellaneous
items as well: “one large ox wag[on], log chains . . . wearing apparel, beds,
and beding and cooking utencils . . . guns, Pistols and Bowie knives,” as
well as “one horse, saddle and bridle” and “camp equ[i]page.”35 The
brothers bought more stock in nearby Washington County after leav-
ing home, giving them about a hundred head, including their oxen, by
the time they reached the Arkansas border.36
Overlanders typically started their journey in April, when the win-
ter mire began to firm and spring offered new grass. The Baker family,
prepared and resolute, began to assemble near Beller’s Stand, a store
once owned by George Baker’s late father-in-law, William Beller.37
Here last-minute provisions could be secured, and a spring—later
called Caravan Spring—provided fresh water. The surrounding, gen-
tle prairie was ideal for camping, grazing, and outfitting.38 When the
party finally rolled out, neighbors, relatives, and friends turned out to
see them off. Some went along for a few miles, helping with cattle and
delaying their final goodbyes. The Baker train took the military road
west, while the Parker train went southwest. Like other emigrants,
they would meet again later in the Cherokee Nation, a region just
across the Arkansas border.39
Comfortable Mary Baker decided to stay behind, at least for the
present. She had borne a dozen children and had enough of pioneer-
ing.40 “Arkansas is plenty good enough for me,” she told her husband,
“and Arkansas is where I’m going to stay.” Others said, despite her
protesting, she planned on coming out later and that her reluctance
had to do with an uneasy premonition.41 Before leaving Arkansas, Jack
authorized a will, “knowing the uncertainty of life and the certainty of
death and not knowing the time of my dissolution.” Besides provid-
ing for Mary and their heirs, he hoped that his body might receive “a
decent burial in the bosom of it[s] mother Earth” and that his spirit
would return “to the God who gave it.”42
Somewhere along the line, perhaps at Crooked Creek, two large
Dunlap families joined the Baker train. Jesse Dunlap Jr., a merchant, had
reportedly been in business with William Mitchell. The 1855 tax records
for Marion County showed Jesse to be worth $570 in taxable property.
Jesse and his wife, Mary, had ten children. His older brother, Lorenzo
Dow Dunlap, a tenant farmer, and his wife, Nancy, had eight.43
Finally, of necessity, the party had its drovers to herd stock. One
man who traveled with the Bakers said that “a large number of hired
A Splendid Train 79
men accompanied the train as ‘bullwhackers’ and stockherders.”44
Jack Baker alone had “five hands,” which might have included his son
Abel.45 Other stock herders in the company were young men from
the neighborhood or perhaps farther away who looked forward to the
adventure of the West.46 Some black men may have done this duty, too.
The Baker family census enumerations of 1850 and 1860 suggested
the possibility, as did the Dunlap family tradition that black slaves
served in the train as laborers.47 No contemporary observer confirmed
this, although a few black men or women in a company of southern
emigrants probably would not have elicited much comment.48
The makeup of most emigrant companies changed during the
course of their journey, and the Bakers were no different. At some
point, the party met up with another family grouping led by Alexander
Fancher. Like the Baker sons and Basil Parker, Fancher had been to
California before. Born in northern Tennessee in 1812, Fancher and
his wife, Eliza Ingram, lived in Illinois and Missouri before settling in
Arkansas in the 1840s and raising their nine children.49 The Fancher
family had been cattle people for generations, and Alexander’s relatives
were among the land and slave owners of the Ozark hill country west
of Crooked Creek.50
In 1849 Alexander served as a private in the state militia during
the Tutt-Everett War, a “dark and bloody chapter of contention and
crime” growing out of one of the feuds of Ozark clans. He served under
the command of Capt. William C. Mitchell, whose sons were tied to
Jack Baker’s family as well as to Baker’s emigrant train. Mitchell’s con-
tingent marched from William Beller’s farm on Crooked Creek and
experienced “open war in all its pomp.”51
A year later Alexander and his elder brother John traveled to Cali-
fornia, likely taking the southern route through Utah and stopping at
the Mountain Meadows before reaching San Diego, where Alexander
and his family appear in census records.52 For these farmers and cattle-
men, southern California did not have the same charm as the fertile
grassland of California’s central San Joaquin Valley, nor the nearby
market of the hungry gold seekers. Soon John went north, where he
registered the first cattle brand in Tulare County in late 1852. He was
in Mariposa County three months later, still closer to the miners.53
Sometime in the early to mid 1850s, Alexander Fancher and his
family returned to Arkansas to drive more cattle to California. The
timing of this trip was again right for making money in California’s cat-
tle boom.54 In 1854 and 1855 Fancher was back in Arkansas, where he
purchased land in Benton County, on the northwest edge of the state,

perhaps as a staging ground for acquiring cattle for his third trip.55
According to a local historian, Fancher “related stories of the won-
derful land of opportunity [California] . . . and succeeded in interesting
much of the cream of the citizenship in his westward journey.”56
In April 1857 Fancher was forty-five years old and seasoned in the
ways of the frontier. He also had talent and charisma. A family his-
tory described him as “a farmer, tall, slim, erect, of dark complexion, a
singer, and a born leader and organizer of men,” with “great common
sense.”57 A newspaper reporter who interviewed his neighbors years
later painted a similar portrait of “superior intelligence, integrity and
courage.”58
According to close family members, Fancher had four wagons with
teams of oxen and mules. He may also have had as many as two hun-
dred head of cattle, although that figure was less certain. He carried
“considerable money,” up to $2,000 in cash.59 When the Fancher com-
pany left Benton County in 1857, it was—like the Baker company—an
extended family. With Alexander was Eliza, then thirty-three, and nine
Fancher children, twenty-two months to nineteen years. His party
or Baker’s also included two of Alexander’s cousins, James Matthew
Fancher and his brother Robert.60
The growing stream of Arkansas emigrants had many small tribu-
taries. Also from Benton County came the Peter Huff and Saladia Ann
Brown Huff family. Peter, a forty-one-year-old Tennessee farmer, had
settled in Missouri before getting to Arkansas.61
Nearby Johnson County, Arkansas, in turn furnished several more
families. These included John Milum Jones and Eloah Angeline Tack-
itt Jones. They brought their two small children; John’s brother, New-
ton Jones; and Eloah’s forty-nine-year-old widowed mother, Cyntha
Tackitt. Widow Tackitt had eight children, including a son Pleasant
Tackitt, who joined the train with his wife, Armilda Miller Tackitt,
and their two sons. Historical records suggest that the Joneses and the
Tackitts were tenant farmers who probably struggled to get by.62
Others went in the Jones-Tackitt group, making almost a small car-
avan to themselves. When friends met them on the trail, they reported
seeing three men named Poteet with the group and also a man named
Basham. One of the Poteets had his wife and children with him.
The members of the group “left the state of Arkansas for California
together,” a neighbor said, “sometime in the month of April 1857.”63
William and Martha Cameron were also part of the Arkansas migra-
tion. They were natives of Tennessee who lived in Alabama before
moving west to Arkansas and establishing themselves at Crooked Creek
A Splendid Train 81
Township in the early 1840s.64 They were likely in the neighborhood
when Jack Baker first arrived, though later they moved farther south,
around Clarksville, Johnson County. The couple had nine children,
six of whom started the journey in Arkansas, including their daugh-
ter Matilda, married to Josiah Miller, along with their four children.
Two other adult Cameron children joined the family along the way.
Malinda Cameron, the oldest of the children, was married to Henry
D. Scott, had three small children, and was pregnant with a fourth.
Tillman Cameron owned a racehorse named One-Eye Blaze and was
in business at Fort Smith, near where Mormon apostle Parley Pratt
would be killed on May 13, 1857.65
At some point along the trail, a small company from Ohio may have
joined the Arkansas travelers; the Ohio contingent, under the leader-
ship of W. B. Duck, later claimed they had “set out with the [Baker]
train from the Arkansas line.”66 Pioneers like those in Duck’s company
often took the river route from Ohio to Arkansas because Fort Smith
had a reputation as a good place to gather and buy provisions—“the
best point for emigrants . . . to assemble, and make preparations,” one
local booster said. Fort Smith was a gateway to the Cherokee Trail for
those headed west.67
As the emigrants began their journey, these groups—Baker, Fancher,
Jones-Tackitt-Poteet, Mitchell, Cameron, Parker, Duck, and others—
were often in flux, camping together occasionally and then separating
with plans to rendezvous later on the trail. That may also have been
the case with Peter Campbell’s family. Nancy Ann Campbell, at the
time only four years old, recalled the family’s train moving slowly to
present-day Oklahoma—and then waiting a month for fifty wagons
from Missouri.68
Little Nancy Ann Campbell’s memory of Missourians being in the
party remains one of the unsolved mysteries of the emigrant company.
Rumors about Missouri wagons traveling near the Baker, Parker, and
Fancher parties would also surface along the trail and in Utah. A mem-
ber of the Duck group said that a Reed family from Missouri, along with
the Bakers, “were the principal owners of the [live]stock,” with enough
money to make some land investments in southern California.69
The point where the predominantly Arkansas parties may have first
camped together for their overland trip was near present-day Salina,
Oklahoma—then known by its French-trapper name of La Grande
Saline (from La Grande River and nearby salt springs). This village
was in Indian Territory, land where the U.S. government relocated the
Cherokee and other Indians in the 1830s.70

Some gave Alexander Fancher the credit for leading the forming
company. He “was well fitted for the leadership in the expedition which
his followers by a unanimous choice assigned him,” they said. Utah and
Western historians followed suit for most of the next century, calling
the Arkansans “the Fancher company.” However, a public meeting at
Carroll County, Arkansas, less than a year after the emigrants left, put
Jack Baker’s name at the top of a list of pioneers and Fancher’s near the
end.71 Basil Parker, who knew and saw both men en route to Califor-
nia, described Baker as the most influential but said Fancher was “one
of the leading men.”72 More likely, with so many groups semi-allied
but loosely organized on the trail, the Fancher and Baker companies
each had their own leaders, at least until they reorganized in Utah.
According to Parker, sometimes his own “train was in the lead,”
sometimes Baker’s. But the two were close enough together that “folks
visited back and forth.” They were also close enough for Parker to see
that some members of Baker’s party were “wasteful” with their gun-
powder and lead. Like many overlanders, the Baker people “could not
resist” shooting at whatever fancied them along the trail, he said. The
behavior was especially understandable for Ozark hunters, who mea-
sured manhood by how well they used their Kentucky long rifles.73 It
probably also reflected their expectation of being able to buy more
ammunition once they reached Salt Lake City.
Target shooting was a way of staying sharp and relieving monot-
ony. For Nancy Campbell, ever anxious to get there, the travel seemed
beyond patience; at least she described one delay after another as her
train lumbered along.74 Malinda Cameron Scott also recalled the slow,
mile-after-mile travel. “There was no such a thing as a [settlement]
from the time we left Cherokee Nation,” she remembered, “but just
the bare ground and we never saw a place where you could buy a thing
from there to Salt Lake. . . . It was just one long traveling road.” When
asked by a questioner, “Do you know where you crossed the Rocky
Mountains?” she replied that “it all seemed to be Rocky Mountains all
the way.”75 Of course, trading posts and small settlements were on the
trail, and the Rocky Mountains were not so ever-present as she said.
But many years later, it was the rough, solitary loneliness of her travel
that stuck in her memory.
Successful overland caravans started early in the morning, nooned
for several hours in the heat of the day to relieve the oxen, and traveled
again in the late afternoon and early evening. On a good day, work
animals might go sixteen or eighteen miles—much more might cause
them injury. Campsites were naturally fixed by the need for water and
A Splendid Train 83
good grass.76 The Arkansas trains observed another general rule of
overland travel—they rotated the wagons in the lead. As one partici-
pant remembered: “The man driving the leading wagon in the train,
should be responsible to aid in choosing the camp site for the night.
The following day that wagon would become the last in line, and the
one behind it would be first . . . each wagon thus having a day in each
position in line.” The process meant the travelers took turns enduring
the dust and manure of the forward wagon teams. There were other
routines, too, including much-needed wash days and delays caused
by broken-down wagons.77 On these occasions, members of the party
might split apart for a time until the stragglers, scurrying, caught up.
Parker remembered disagreements. “We got along fine until we
came to the first small desert,” he said, perhaps in what became east-
ern Colorado. Then “some of the train said I was too strict, so several
persons concluded to travel by themselves, but they were glad to get
back to us before we met any indians.”78 This last fear, which gripped
many overlanders, offset any fractious feeling, as men and women trav-
eling in small parties could hardly defend themselves against a serious
attack. “Many a night we sat up and watched all night,” said one of the
emigrants, because of fear that “Indians would break in at any time.”79
Emigrants often exaggerated the Indian danger, especially for the
first half of the California road. Their primal fears of the plains Indians
usually outweighed reality.80 But there were in fact conflicts along the
trail in 1857.81 Native peoples were angry about the damaging traffic
on their lands; U.S. troopers, reacting to Indian unrest, swept through
the area, raising native emotions still more.82 Many overlanders added
to the trouble by having what one historian called a “callous attitude
of cultural and racial superiority.” Their airs and fears led to one
depredation after another against Indians.83
Once Parker was catching up with the rest of his party after stop-
ping for repairs. He saw what he described as five hundred Indians
arrayed before the emigrants’ cattle; they wanted “pay for the grass the
cattle ate”—a request the frontiersman refused. “I determined to make
a big bluff,” Parker’s later account said, “and dashed up at one of the
indians who was getting ready to shoot a calf, then coming to a sudden
stop I leveled my pistol at him and yelled for him to ‘vamos’ or I would
kill him. . . . The indians drew off and I gave the signal to my wife for
the train to move on and move on it did although the indians threat-
ened us as we went by. I never got away with a bluff so easy.”84
Later, some of the emigrants’ horses were stolen, perhaps as payback
for Parker’s imperativeness. The frontiersman then seized a nearby

Indian leader until the animals were returned.85 It was Parker’s way of
doing business. Earlier in his career, during a confrontation between
whites and Indians, he had shot a fleeing Indian. In still another inci-
dent, he had approved the vigilante-like killing of an Indian accused of
cattle-stealing.86
But such actions often came with a price. When Nancy Campbell’s
family fell a quarter mile behind the next wagon in line, Indians
dashed up on horses and reached for the Campbells’ three children,
who were sitting on the wagon bed. The riders rode off empty-handed
“as quickly as they had come” but startled the children and scared
their mother.87 Perhaps the incident was nothing more than an act of
bravery by the young Indians or an attempt to frighten the travelers.
Or perhaps the native youth were expressing how they felt about the
emigrants.
On another occasion, an Indian came into the Baker party’s camp
and asked to stay the night. The emigrants gave their permission but
put their guest under heavy guard. The night passed without incident,
though native campfires dotted the hills and Indians appeared to be
everywhere—at least to the emigrants. The next morning the Indian
was sent off with gifts of sugar and milk. “Nothing was again seen or
heard of him or his friends,” said Nancy Campbell. “If he had planned
some sort of signaling, his plans were thwarted.”88
Three times the herds of the Arkansas emigrants were stampeded—
twice from unknown causes and once by Indians.89 According to one
emigrant, this last attempt was stopped by a “noted plainsman from
Missouri,” who led a several-day chase to get the animals back. During
the chase, “the party captured an Indian and pressed him into their
service as a guide.”90
In July after some three months of travel, the Arkansas emigrants
began arriving at Fort Bridger, then a part of Utah Territory. Most
of their cattle apparently made it through, too, although at least one
party behind them was not so fortunate; “Captain Henry of Texas” lost
151 head to Arapaho raids.91 By late July there was a fresh uncertainty
at the fort. The Mormon outpost buzzed about how the U.S. mail had
been suspended because of troubles in the territory, and the Mormons
talked excitedly of a coming fight with the U.S. government.92
The emigrants had their own problems. According to one account,
some of them quarreled, and a few families split off from the main party
and took the Fort Hall route to California. In addition, Peter Huff,
“one of the leaders from Arkansas,” developed a sore on his hand. No
one saw what caused it, but the emigrants assumed “a tarantula, or some
A Splendid Train 85
cattle on the range. F. M. Steele, C.R.I. & P. Railway System, Courtesy Library
of Congress.
other venomous creature” struck him in his sleep. He suffered for days
before he died, “leaving a widow and a large family of young children.”
The Huffs had been traveling in the train that included the Bakers, and
Peter’s illness and death “delayed the party for some days.”93 Other
emigrant trains moved ahead, gradually making their way through
the canyons that led into the Salt Lake Valley. Frank King, an emi-
grant who later converted to Mormonism, reported traveling with the
Fancher group for two weeks from Pacific Springs back near South
Pass to Emigration Canyon east of Salt Lake City. According to King,
the Arkansas party was traveling in tandem with a train “called the Illi-
nois company.” The Fancher emigrants camped for some time in the
canyon or moved down it slowly; King said, “I went out to Emigration
can[y]on three times to see them.” He remembered several families in
the group, including Fanchers, Dunlaps, and Hamiltons.94
While the Fancher group lingered in the canyon, the Illinois com-
pany may have pressed forward on its own. On Monday, July 20, clerks
in the Church Historian’s Office in Salt Lake City recorded, “About
noon a company of emigrants for Cal arrived mostly from Illinois.”
That Saturday, the clerks noted the arrival of another company of

California-bound emigrants, who camped at Townsend’s, a public
house in the heart of Salt Lake City where some of Col. Steptoe’s men
had boarded nearly three years earlier. On Monday, July 27, the clerks
wrote, “More Emigrants arrived.”95 Other Arkansas travelers passing
through the Salt Lake Valley on or before August 3 saw the Fancher,
Cameron, and Dunlap companies “encamped six miles from Salt Lake
City,” where they had been “for some time.” The passing travelers
reported that “Baker had not arrived.”96
About July 26 Eli Kelsey, a Mormon Indian missionary just released
from his post south of Fort Bridger, joined some well-to-do Arkansas
emigrants traveling through the mountain passes—probably the Baker
group. “They were moral in language and conduct, and united regu-
larly in morning and evening prayers,” Kelsey reported years later, after
becoming disaffected from Mormonism. They had “peace of domestic
bliss and conscious rectitude” and were “an exceedingly fine company
of emigrants, such as was seldom seen on the plains.” Kelsey said he
had “never travelled with more pleasant companions.”97
But Kelsey spoke harshly of a rough set of men who joined the
Arkansas people in the leap-frog manner of the overland trail. He called
these men “Wild-cats” from Missouri and said their camp rang with
“vulgar song, boisterous roaring, and ‘tall swearing.’ ” And they spoke
of the need to wipe out the Mormons. Kelsey said that when traveling
with the Arkansans, he warned them to separate themselves from the
rowdy group as much as possible as “at that time it was easy to provoke
a difficulty” with the Saints and perhaps the Indians as well. Still later,
he visited their Salt Lake City camp to warn them again. The emi-
grants reportedly thanked him and said they would heed his advice.98
The identity of these Missouri “Wild-cats” would become a mat-
ter of controversy. Some writers concluded that they traveled with
the Arkansas companies all the way to the Mountain Meadows and
perished there.99 Missourians were probably among those killed at
Mountain Meadows, but the “Wild-cats” Kelsey described may have
taken the northern route to California. Parker, who lagged behind
the Bakers and other emigrants at Fort Bridger, later caught up with
the Thomas D. Harp train, which stopped to recover cattle taken by
Indians on the headwaters of the Humboldt in present-day Nevada.
A party of “mostly Missourians” helped retake the cattle and, accord-
ing to emigrant Helen Carpenter, “some of them were disposed to
treat the squaws as the Border Ruffians did the women of Kansas,” and
“some were for having the squaws killed.” She felt relieved that “there
were enough real men” in the party to save the native women.100
A Splendid Train 87
The Baker train—and presumably the “Wild-cats”—pulled into
Salt Lake City on August 3.101 If the “Wild-cats” parted with the Bak-
ers and went north out of the city, however, other Missourians were
already camped with the south-bound Fanchers, Camerons, and Dun-
laps before the Bakers arrived to join them. These Missourians “fell in
with” the three advance Arkansas companies, according to California-
bound emigrants passing through the valley at the time.102
The passers-by said the members of the camped Arkansas trains
planned to rest for weeks until the hot weather moderated for their
trip across the southwestern deserts. A long stay in the valley would
also fatten the cattle for the remainder of the trip. If in fact those were
their plans, they soon changed. Few emigrants driving large herds of
cattle had any desire to linger in Utah in 1857; range was limited and
tempers were rising.103

chapter seven
Restless and Excited Beings

Northern Utah, July–August 1857
W
est of South Pass in what became the state of Wyoming,
most California-bound overlanders turned toward what
is now Idaho, avoiding all but the northwest corner of
present-day Utah. Others drove southwest into Salt Lake City—and
thereby added miles, trail time, and the worry of mingling with the
reputedly fanatical Mormons.1 Despite the rumors, those who braved
the Mormon capital found a bit of frontier civilization.
The city of several thousand citizens was carefully laid out. Wide
streets on a grid crossed each other at right angles. Neat adobe-brick
and log homes sat on one-and-a-quarter-acre lots in checkerboard
fashion, bordered by vegetable and flower gardens, orchards, and
shade trees. Water from the canyons to the east and northeast flowed
in refreshing rivulets along the streets.2 For trail-worn travelers seeing
the city for the first time, it seemed a “paradise,” as one overlander put
it, “the most lovely place I ever saw.”3
“These Mormons look and act like human beings,” marveled one
1853 emigrant.4 They could also be the source of benefits. The emi-
grants who took the road from Fort Bridger to Salt Lake wanted pro-
duce, flour, grain, and the chance to rest and repair their outfits. Worn
stock might be exchanged for fresh animals. The arrangement also
worked well for the Saints. It gave them the chance to make some
wagons on main street, salt lake city, ca. 1869. Baron de Joseph Alexander
Hubner, Passeggiata intorno al mondo (Milano, 1879).
money and secure hard-to-get goods that filled—and often slowed—

the emigrants’ wagons. The local people might complain of dam-
age done by passing livestock or entertain fears of disease that trains
brought. But overall, Utahns counted the advantages.5
Beginning in late July each year, overlanders flooded Salt Lake
City’s streets, and the tide was especially high in 1857. Church clerks
sometimes noted the arrival of emigrants, but the Mormons did not
formally record the names of non-Mormon companies nor keep a run-
ning tally of visitors. Other sources, however, suggest the number of
persons traveling through northern Utah in 1857 may have approached
a thousand, perhaps even more. “Our streets are daily thronged with
emigrants from the States for California,” reported Mormon apostle
Wilford Woodruff in early August.6 That season, dozens of emigrant
groups arrived in, departed from, or formed in the Salt Lake Valley—
the large majority of them being non-Mormon. A dozen of these emi-
grant parties drove a total of nearly eight thousand head of cattle.7
The great number of people and animals was one reason for the
tension in 1857. Years earlier, Salt Lakers had grown tired of emigrants
who “turn their teams loose in our streets, and near our city,” caus-
ing “much destruction of crops and grass.” Emigrant cattle had over-
grazed land near the city, forcing local citizens to go as far as twenty

miles to cut hay and even farther to winter their herds. To solve these
problems, in 1851 animals were forbidden from roaming inside the
municipality of Salt Lake, “which extends to some six or eight miles
square.”8 Instead, emigrants and their stock might be met at the city
limits and piloted through town to herd grounds outside the city.9
Normally, the system worked reasonably well, but by 1857 two
years of drought had left the Mormons’ animals weak and underfed,
which made locals not only in Salt Lake but throughout the territory
especially protective of pasture lands. While the grass had improved
because of heavy snow the prior winter, large emigrant herds still taxed
the natural resources.10
But an even greater problem was the threat of war—and everything
that flowed from it. As the Saints prepared for the army’s arrival, one
of the main reasons for emigrants taking the road from Fort Bridger
to Salt Lake City—trading—became a matter of exasperation and
friction. The stiffly toned orders from Daniel H. Wells and Brigham
Young during the first week of August forbade selling grain to outsid-
ers.11 The policy was another setback for the travelers. This season’s
late and overgrazed grasses, occasional stampedes, and the usual dis-
ease and weariness of overland travel had already taken a toll on the
cattle. A little Mormon grain could have helped them a great deal,
though cattle could get by with feeding on the range. More critical
were the emigrants’ mules and horses. They needed grain.12
Also scarce in Salt Lake City were powder and lead, which must
have made the members of the Baker train regret their target practice
on the plains. “I know they were una[b]le to buy any from the Mor-
mons,” their occasional traveling companion Basil Parker said, for the
Mormons “had offered me almost any price” for such supplies.13 Gun-
smiths were busy fixing Mormon guns, and one correspondent wrote,
“The question is asked hundreds of times during the day, Where can
I buy a rifle? Where can I purchase some amunition?”14 One traveler
reported that Mormon women followed the wagons of overlanders
pleading for guns and ammunition.15
The emigrants did not leave Salt Lake City entirely empty-handed.
Local citizens sold them fresh produce that would not store, and likely
a limited amount of grain and flour.16 When one of the 1857 trains
passed through Spanish Fork, south of Salt Lake City, its members
declined to buy potatoes and flour offered for sale, saying “they did
not need any supplies”—a sign that they had replenished their stores
in Salt Lake.17 The Baker and Fancher companies may have bought
equipment and sundries from the firm Gilbert & Gerrish, one of the
Restless and Excited Beings 91

principal merchant establishments in the city.18 The threat of war and
pressure to have unsympathetic gentiles leave town eventually per-
suaded these merchants to sell out to Mormons for whatever they
could get.19
The Mormons’ grudging policy toward the range and trade were
symptoms of growing tension in the territory. Emigrants passing the
trading post of Fort Bridger near Utah’s northeast border met Mor-
mons going east to watch for U.S. troops. These scouts vented their
feelings, speaking of the old torment of Missouri and Illinois and of
“the unjustness and tyranny of the people of the United States.” If
Gen. Harney “was coming peaceably, we will let him come,” they said,
“but if not, we will drive him back.” As these emigrants got closer to
Salt Lake City, they met a Mormon named John Killian who lived
on the main road through Emigration Canyon. He complained about
territorial officers and the Buchanan administration. He unabashedly
“rejoiced that the time had come when the saints would be avenged on
their enemies.”20
The sixty-one-year-old Killian was an example of how close and
personal these encounters could be. He had joined the Saints in 1831,
and his new religion soon made him the target of violence in Mis-
souri. Killian served as an officer in the Mormon-controlled Caldwell
County militia, and he and his family had been driven from the state.21
In Utah he worked for Daniel H. Wells in levying tolls for lumber
taken from the canyon.22 Killian’s nearby home allowed him to watch
incoming emigrants, one of whom was Nicholas Turner, a Missou-
rian who arrived in the Salt Lake Valley not long after the Fanchers
and Bakers and would follow them south with his own train. Killian’s
first wife, Lydia Ann Hopper, was a cousin of Turner’s wife, Keziah
McClure. When Lydia Ann died, Killian married Keziah’s sister, mak-
ing him Turner’s brother-in-law. More than family ties connected the
two men. Turner had commanded the Johnson County militia during
the 1838 Missouri conflict with the Mormons in Caldwell County.23
But an emigrant did not have to be a known Mormon fighter to be a
target of the locals’ ire. “There did not seem to be much love between
the Mormons and Missourians,” said one 1857 overlander generally.24
The Mormons were preparing for war, and all outsiders—whether
from Missouri, Arkansas, or elsewhere—were seen as potential ene-
mies. For their part, the emigrants saw the Mormons as expatriates
and even traitors. During August and September, local militia units
were busy drilling to defend their homeland.25 For the outsiders, every
military maneuver was evidence the local people were on the wrong

side in what might be a coming civil war. These people were “the most
restless and excited beings on earth,” one emigrant said after traveling
through Salt Lake City.26
The brewing animosities played themselves out in various ways.
When William Cureton’s emigrant party entered the Salt Lake Val-
ley, a quiet couple that had traveled with it immediately left the train
without notice. They were Mormons who apparently felt they had to
keep their religion to themselves. Later, after Cureton passed through
the city and camped, a dozen “villainous looking” Indians seemed to
be peering at his wagons as if getting ready for a future raid, he said.
He was in the area, too, when Richard Pettit and Joseph Thompson
thrashed lapsed Mormon C. G. Landon of the surveyors office—and
outraged emigrants came dangerously close to getting involved in the
scuffle. With so much uncertainty in the air, Cureton was probably
relieved to leave the Mormon capital after only two or three days.27
According to Hamilton G. Park, Brigham Young’s property man-
ager, the tension in Salt Lake City almost turned into general fisticuffs
when a few emigrants who had been drinking boasted that they had
helped drive the Saints out of Missouri and that they were “among
the mob at Carthage when Joseph and Hyrum Smith were murdered.”
Some Mormons took the bait and made plans to give the emigrants
“such a drubbing that if the[y] survived the[y] would not forget.” Park
said Young learned of the plan and summoned the Mormons to his
office, where he dressed them down “as only Brigham Young could do.”
He did not want “a finger” raised against any of the emigrants, some of
whom, Park believed, were later killed at Mountain Meadows.28
Others also spoke of emigrant-settler conflicts in Salt Lake City.
According to Basil Parker, who arrived in the city the day after the
Bakers left, Mormons claimed that members of the Baker party had
“insulted” Mormon women—probably references to polygamy. The
Mormons also told Parker that Baker’s group “accused the Mormons
of poisoning the water that had killed some of the emigrants’ cattle”—
a charge that other Latter-day Saints would later make against the
emigrants themselves. One Mormon, sitting in Parker’s tent, was so
agitated at the emigrants’ remarks that he “almost threatened” Baker’s
train—at least that was how Parker remembered the event.29
In later years, southern Utah settler and judge John Steele left
behind notes that were probably meant as a draft for a formal state-
ment. Steele, who did not participate in the massacre but had an
interest in explaining it, apparently interviewed a few Salt Lake City
citizens about their interactions with 1857 emigrants. One witness he

interviewed claimed that emigrants let down a fence and turned their
animals into a local hay field. When Mormons “told [them] to get
on to where there was more room and not damage the Setlars,” the
emigrants used “terrible oaths” and taunted settlers about having the
firearm that killed Joseph and Hyrum Smith.30
Because the statements of Park, Parker, and Steele were written so
many years later, they may have been tainted by retrospective myths
and rumors about the emigrants. Yet it is difficult to dismiss them
entirely. Park had a reputation for reliability, while Parker—a non-
Mormon and fellow Arkansan—would seem to have no motive for
saying Baker’s company had insulted Mormon women. As for Steele’s
account, two of his informants, William Strong and Lyman Leonard,
were known to have ties to the Salt Lake City neighborhood through
which the emigrant companies probably passed.31
The accounts had also the broad truth of the tension that was
building between local settlers and emigrants, which erupted on the
road that ran north out of Salt Lake City. This road eventually veered
northwest to join the main overland trail at the landmark called “The
City of Rocks” in present-day southern Idaho. Most emigrants leaving
Salt Lake City took it.
Apostle Lorenzo Snow, presiding at Brigham City, about sixty
miles north of Salt Lake City, and Verulam Dive, a Mormon bishop
in a settlement between those two cities, were the first to sound an
alarm. Snow’s and Dive’s letters to Young reported that during late
July and early August, emigrants and Indians were quarreling, and the
Mormons, because they lived nearby and needed Indian allies, were in
the middle of it.32 Such troubles would continue into September.33
On July 30 Indians stole six horses from an emigrant company at
Blue Springs, forty miles north of the Mormon settlement of North
Willow Creek (present-day Willard, Utah). While pursuing the thieves
south toward the settlement, the emigrants hired a Mormon to pay two
Indians to recover the animals. The Indians drove five of the horses
from a hiding place in the nearby mountains to a place where the emi-
grants could retrieve them. Another Mormon offered to locate the last
missing horse if the emigrants “would be peaceable and not Kill the
Indians.” The emigrants spurned the offer, saying that “if they Killed
any their Scalps should pay the debt.” Before the emigrants reached the
recovered horses, two Indians rushed in to steal them again. Accord-
ing to Dive, the emigrants and Indians arrived at the horses “about
the same time when the Emigrants firing their Revolvers killed one”
Indian and “the other escaped.”34

The emigrants, with their recovered horses, then traveled to a camp-
site about four miles north of Willow Creek, where they were soon
surrounded by twenty-five Indians upset by the shooting. The confron-
tation ended only after the emigrants gave the Indians “one Horse some
Blankets & shirts.” The next morning, not distinguishing one emigrant
party from another and still angry over the killing of one of their men, the
Indians “poured out their spite” on a small group of emigrants camped
within the local Mormon fort. Again, gifts staved off an attack.35
A few days later emigrants killed another Indian near the Bear Riv-
er’s estuary into the Great Salt Lake. “Much excitement prevailed,”
Snow wrote Young on August 7, “and we had much difficulty in pro-
tecting [an]other company of emigrants from being massacred by the
fury of the Indians.”36
Emigrant trains continued to experience trouble. D. C. Hail, an
emigrant who passed through Salt Lake City in August, reported that
as his train moved north from Salt Lake City, Mormons treated the
emigrants like “highway robbers or murderers,” and at one point two
dozen Indians and perhaps ten Mormons had confronted the train.
“The Indians attempted to drive off our stock,” he said, “the Mormons,
at the same time, cursing us, and telling us ‘to give up our blankets and
some of our cattle, or they [the Indians] would murder us!’ We then
succeeded in driving them [the Indians] back, but they followed on in
pursuit of us.”37
For years the Saints had mediated disputes between overland trav-
elers and Indians. This season alone, Young said, the Mormons had
helped nearly twenty parties, small and large, get through the terri-
tory, usually by providing gifts to Indians from the church or federal
government.38 Yet it was a thankless job. Lorenzo Snow grumbled that
if the season’s “emigrants would . . . have one tenth part of the forbear-
ance with the ignorant people of the forest that we have they would
find it for their interest.”39
Many of the emigrants could not understand why the Saints wanted
to maintain the Indians’ friendship, unless for some sinister reason.
Emigrants in Brigham City saw Indians, supposedly so angry and out
of control, “chating and laughing” with Mormons. The result was
damning, as Snow well knew. “I have acted as prudently as I knew
how between the Indians and emegrants,” he wrote Young on August
13, “and yet I am certain they will tell an awful tale of Brigham City
being in league with the Indians & we are in for it most posatively.”
The travelers were “humble as kittens while here,” Snow said, but he
predicted that once beyond the settlements they would have “the spirit

of the damned.”40 Sure enough, on reaching California the emigrants
denounced the Saints for not being more on their side.41
After the conflicts near Brigham City, Snow could report, “The
Indians feel well at present.”42 But the Mormons’ role as mediator
risked putting them between Indians whose friendship they needed
in the coming war and travelers who treated native peoples harshly.
Early in the season, a group of eastbound Californians coming across
present-day Nevada reportedly “shot at every Indian that they saw.”43
Some westbound overlanders did the same, including M. W. Buster’s
train. Buster, from Greenfield in southwest Missouri, began “killing
Indians indiscriminately” as early as Fort Laramie and later wiped out
eighteen more near Gravelly Ford on the Humboldt River after the
Indians supposedly “bantered the boys to fight.”44 These were notori-
ous examples, but other emigrants displayed what one leading historian
of the overland migration, John D. Unruh Jr., described as “blatant
superiority” and “reckless actions” with regard to native people, even
“shooting at Indians on sight.”45
By the second week in August, the large herds on the trail, the bru-
tal acts of some emigrants, and the unsettling possibility of war made
some Indians restive. When an emigrant told Little Soldier’s band of
Indians at the East Weber, about twenty miles east of the Willow Creek
episode, that Brigham Young was going to cut their throats and take
their women as his wives, they appeared to believe the worst.46 Some
Indians may have believed that Mormon help had been too little and
too late. Reports reaching Salt Lake City suggested “great commotion”
among the Indians and the possibility of a “general outbreak”—just at
the time the Saints anxiously wanted them as allies.47
Young acted swiftly to restore calm. Still serving officially as U.S.
superintendent of Indian affairs for the territory, he dispatched gifts—
flour, potatoes, corn, cattle, and ammunition worth $1,700—to such
native leaders as Little Soldier (at Ogden Hole, present-day Hunts-
ville), Pi-bi-gand (Box Elder), and Ke-tant-mah (East Weber). His
action was in keeping with his belief that it was easier to feed Indians
than to fight them, though the incident could not have come at a worse
time for the Mormons. They needed the goods to supply their own
militia if it came to war.48
To handle the negotiations and the distribution of gifts to the Indi-
ans, Young sent his chief Indian scout and brother-in-law Dimick
B. Huntington. Huntington was a stoutly built native of Jefferson
County, New York, and an early Latter-day Saint convert who con-
sidered his work with the Indians to be a religious mission conferred

upon him by Joseph Smith. “God has shown to me that you have got
to go among the Lamanites,” Smith told him in 1839. Arriving in Utah
eight years later, Huntington began to trade with Indians and soon was
able to make himself understood in the Ute and Shoshone dialects.
In the years that followed, Young used him as his right-hand man in
one Indian matter after another. In 1853 he received the grisly task to
recover and bury the bodies of the Gunnison massacre victims and to
retrieve the slain party’s papers and property. In sending Huntington
to help ease the tension along the northern road, Young had someone
who had influence with the Indians of Utah Territory, partly because
the Indians understood his close ties with Young.49
Huntington kept a record of the negotiation that went along with
the gifts. Meeting with northern Indians in August—first with four
hundred and later with a thousand—Huntington urged Little Soldier,
whose relations with the Mormons had been mixed, to convert to the
Saints’ beliefs and adopt white man’s farming. He warned of a Last
Days’ siege and famine that might go on for seven years.50 In addi-
tion, there may have been a show of force; according to William Bell,
dimick huntington. Courtesy

LDS Church History Library.

a non-Mormon Salt Lake City merchant, conditions did not com-
pletely cool until a militia company entered the area.51
These Mormon countermeasures persuaded the Indians not to
oppose the local settlers. But it was at best an arm’s-length relationship,
not the close alliance for which Young had hoped. Little Soldier, saying
he feared the approach of U.S. soldiers, told Huntington that he planned
to retreat to the mountains and see how the struggle between the Mor-
mons and the government turned out; he was satisfied to be a bystander.
Over the next several weeks, other Indians said the same thing.52
When offering a public prayer on August 13, Young still hoped the
Indians might rise to what he believed was their prophesied destiny,
pleading that they might yet “do thy will & be as a wall of defense
around about us.”53 On the same day, Gen. Wells sent out his impor-
tant dispatch telling the Saints to watch the mountain passes and cul-
tivate Indian friendship.54 But it was not until the following Sunday,
August 16, that Young gave his clearest reaction to the events that had
taken place in northern Utah.
His address began with the emotional kindling of the Mormons’
past persecution and the threat of war. He also spoke publicly for
the first time of his military strategy of guerrilla fighting. He then
announced a new Indian policy. If the army comes and commences
war on the Saints, he declared, “I will tell you honestly, and plainly, and
in all good feeling that I will not hold the Indians still while the emi-
grants shoot them, as they have hitherto done, but I will say to them
[the Indians], go and do as you please.”55 The old policy of mediating
between emigrants and Indians had almost led to an Indian war just at
the time when Young was trying to curry favor with native peoples for
the coming conflict.56 Something else may also have kindled Young’s
anger. He had been a federal Indian superintendent for years, and yet
Washington had failed to reimburse him and his people fully for keep-
ing peace with the Indians; the arrears by 1857 had reached more than
$30,000—a large sum for the time.57
One extended passage in the August 16 sermon was clearly meant
for Washington, possibly in hopes of bringing about a settlement.
“I . . . wish to say to all Gentiles,” Young told non-Mormons in the con-
gregation, to “send word to your friends that they must stop crossing
this continent to Calafornia for the indians will kill them.” He wanted
Washington to know what it would lose by alienating the Mormons.
The Mormon leader was raising the stakes by threatening the flow of
goods and people across the middle of the continent. But there was
also the practical reality that if the Saints fled to the mountains to fight

a guerrilla war, they could no longer mediate between emigrants and
Indians. “This people have always done good to the travelers,” Young
insisted. “They have kept the Indians from injuring them and have
done all in their power to save the lives of men, women and children,
but all this will cease to be, if our enemies commence war on us.”58
For three weeks, the emotions of the Saints had been building. Dur-
ing his speech when Young asked if they were willing to “lay wast[e]
and desolate every thing behind you” and flee to the mountains, there
was an emotional outburst.59 Members of the congregation raised both
hands in the air and waved and clapped their assent. “We declared
with uplifted hands that we would from this time fourth defend our-
selves from any further oppression from the Gentiles[,] God being
our helper,” said one of the settlers who was present.60 One of the
clerks, unsure a mere transcript could capture the moment, penned
into his record, “The feeling that prevailed in the meeting cannot
be discribed.”61
Young’s sermon also chastened non-Mormon merchants in the audi-
ence who, Young believed, were part of the clique working against his
people in Washington. Several days later, keying off Young’s remarks,
local zealots forced their way into gentile stores to seize lead, clothes,
and other items. When Young learned what had been done, he rebuked
the men and took steps to safeguard the merchants’ property. “A mean
course of conduct to the Gentiles would result in fighting [against]
the Saints,” he said. Two of the men involved in the raid were Richard
Pettit and Joseph Thompson, who had earlier participated in the beat-
ing of C. G. Landon.62
Young’s August 16 address had softer themes, too, as he urged his
people to build up God’s kingdom and fill the earth with peace. Some
passages were heartfelt soliloquy. “How my soul has longed to see the
time when the sufferings of the people will cease,” he said. “How my
soul has been pained while I have been in the world, to see the people
poor, bound down and suffering for food and raiment, to see them
imprisoned innocently and bound down by priestcraft. How my soul
has desired to see the fetters broken asunder.” The Mormon mission
of “revolutionising” the world must go forward, he said.63
But it was Young’s wartime preaching that stood out. The raids
on the gentile merchants showed how his pulpit language—and the
threat of war—could have unexpected consequences. Perhaps Young
accepted these risks as a necessary part of war, but he seemed uneasy by
the decisions he was making. “I wish to meet all men at the judgment
Bar of God without any to fear me or accuse me of a wrong action,”

he told his diary several days after his August 16 address. Before any
fighting was to be done, he wanted to give his “enemies fair warn-
ing.”64 A week later, Young reportedly sent a letter to Harney telling
the U.S. commander that he and the Mormons did “not wish to fight
anybody”—but if the army continued its advance the soldiers should
expect resistance.65
Neither Harney nor Washington were interested in Young’s pleas
and protests—if they saw Young’s letter at all. The war had its own
momentum. As the U.S. soldiers continued to march to Utah, the
Mormons, as inexorably, continued to get ready to fight.

chapter eight
We Have Better Claim

Salt Lake to Fillmore, August 1857
T
hough most trains took the northern trail out of Salt Lake
City in 1857, a few took the southern route. Among them was
the large train later massacred at Mountain Meadows. About
two weeks before the atrocity, these emigrants camped near the north-
bound Jacob Hamblin in central Utah, where they told Hamblin that
their “one train was made up near Salt Lake City of several trains that
had crossed the plains separately; and being southern people had pre-
ferred to take the southern route.”1
Arkansas emigrants who took the northern route remembered see-
ing parts of the train before it headed south. Camped together near
Salt Lake City were Fanchers, Camerons, and Dunlaps—“three, and
perhaps four companies from Arkansas, while the balance . . . was made
up from Missourians.”2 Farther back on the road they saw other emi-
grants who would join the southbound group, emigrants they also knew
by name: the Bakers, the Mitchells, Milum Jones, and Cyntha Tackitt.3
When all of these emigrants joined together to form a new company
in Salt Lake, they may have chosen Alexander Fancher as their overall
leader.4 While the Baker group had most of the property and people,
Fancher had Utah experience. Because of the predominance of Arkan-
sans in the train, it would come to be called “the Arkansas company.”5
The Missourians seen encamped with the Fanchers, Camerons,
and Dunlaps were never identified by name. They may have traveled
Map by Sheryl Dickert Smith and Tom Child
with the Arkansans to Mountain Meadows—relatives of the Arkansas
victims and historians have been able to account with certainty for
only about three-fourths of the approximately 120 killed in the mas-
sacre. Members of the company who met Hamblin told him their
group was “mostly from Arkansas,” and Hamblin said there were
“outsiders” traveling with the train who were “rude and rough,”
though he failed to say who they were.6 Brigham Young later spoke
of a group of emigrants who had lingered in Salt Lake City for six
weeks before leaving. “It was very noticeable that they did not hurry
along like other emigrants,” he said. None of the companies identi-
fied as going south in 1857 stayed in the city more than a couple
of weeks.7
The Mormons may have urged these loiterers and the Arkansas
emigrants out of town. The Camerons, Dunlaps, and Fanchers had
been camping in the Salt Lake Valley “for some time” and, according
to other emigrants who had seen them there, wanted to stay for several
weeks to spare themselves the summer heat on the southern road.8 But
with an army marching toward the territory, the local people did not
want hosts of strangers milling behind the lines of a possible battle.
The Saints made the same point when ridding themselves of the sur-
veyors and, still later, the gentile merchants.9
While Young heard something from apostle Charles Rich about
the company that stayed six weeks, he said little about the Arkansas
company that went south. In a sworn deposition eighteen years later,
Young denied hearing anything much about it, except by rumor.10 His
statement, made under the advice of legal counsel, may have mini-
mized what he knew. It made no mention of the near-brawl in Salt
Lake City between emigrants and Mormons that Young’s manager
Hamilton Park later reported, nor Young’s intervention to stop local
rowdies from carrying out their plans.11
Peyton Welch, a member of Nicholas Turner’s company, said two
trains started south before his—the broadly construed Fancher and
Baker portions of the Arkansas company.12 They were a typically fluid
group that probably broke apart and came together as it traveled south,
depending on circumstances like the availability of good grass, good
water, and good company. Often, there was another reason for joining
together—anxiety. Usually this meant fear of Indians, and native peo-
ple could be seen about Salt Lake City in the late summer of ’57. But
for the southbound emigrants, the perceived threat of the Mormons
must have been greater. The sullen mood of a territory on the eve of
war warned emigrants to be on guard.13
We Have Better Claim 103

When all its members traveled together, the Arkansas train had
about 140 people.14 At times there may have been more. After the
massacre, other emigrants or their families told stories of parting with
the company just before its destruction, though some of the stories
lack credibility and others deal with emigrants who probably took the
northern road.15
One emigrant who took the northern route was Malinda Cameron
Scott. She and her husband went north, while her parents and other
family members went south and would be murdered at Mountain
Meadows. Not long after starting north, Malinda’s husband was killed
by a member of his own train following a dispute. Adding to her tri-
als, Malinda soon gave birth to a child on the trail. Yet she eventually
reached the San Joaquin Valley in California.16
The Arkansas company as it headed south was a bustling village on
the move, made up largely of young families. The senior citizens of the
group included Jack Baker, as well as William and Martha Cameron—
all in their fifties. The widow Cyntha Tackitt was forty-nine; Alexander
Fancher, forty-five. The two Dunlap brothers, Jesse and Lorenzo, and
their wives, Mary and Nancy, were all about forty. A few others in the
company were known to be in their thirties.17
Beyond these, young people were the norm, making up as much as
two-thirds of the train. Of those known to have been in the company,
more than two dozen were in their twenties, just starting out their
adult lives, some bringing with them small families. About the same
number were in their teens, three out of four of them boys. The teens
must have filled the camp with youthful life—and in the case of the
young men, muscle and sinew to help with the cattle. Finally, three
dozen or more of the children—two-thirds of them girls—were age
twelve and younger, half of them below the age of seven.18
The Arkansas company pulled out of Salt Lake City sometime
during the “hot and sultry” first week of August. Midway through
the week, the thermometer read 97 degrees at early evening.19 The
heat-soaked train had around twenty wagons, perhaps more.20 These
carried blankets and bedding, chains and tools, knives and cooking
utensils, clothing, firearms, and what the pioneers simply called camp
“fix-ins”—the staples required for travel and some things for a new life
in California. Near the wagons lumbered hundreds of head of loose
cattle that had survived disease, stampedes, and other hazards of the
trail. The cattle were among the first Texas longhorns seen in southern
Utah. In addition to these were the draft animals and riding horses,
which swelled the count even more.21

The total worth of the emigrants’ property is difficult to calculate,
but a good guess at 1857 prices would be about fifty thousand dol-
lars. Adjusting for inflation, that amount would be more than a million
dollars in 2007, a century and a half later.22 William Carey, who later
prosecuted John D. Lee, described the train as reputedly “the best
equipped and richest that had ever crossed the Rocky Mountains,” an
overstatement even for the emigration of 1857.23 Still, the emigrants’
property made the train “exceptionally well to do.”24 The poor people
in southern Utah, struggling to carve out an existence in their frontier
settlements, must have looked upon the train with wonder, and some
even with envy.
As the party worked its way south, the summer sun bore down on
boys and men snapping their bullwhips and on children and sunbon-
neted women walking through clouds of dust kicked up by animals
and wagons. No records from the train itself survived, making it dif-
ficult to describe the journey south from the emigrants’ perspective.
But accounts of earlier travelers give a feel for the terrain they expe-
rienced.
An 1855 freighter reported that between Salt Lake and Cedar City,
“the road is excellent, with water, grass and wood, at short intervals,
the entire distance.”25 A year later, German emigrant Hans Hoth,
once a Mormon but now eager for a new life in California, left a diary
of his travel. North of Fillmore, about 150 miles south of Salt Lake
City, he remembered going all day without a drink of fresh water; that
was a difficult stretch of the road. But in the places where water was
found, it brought forth life in abundance. Along one stream, Hoth saw
wild scrubs—saffron and peppermint, he thought—as well as twenty
varieties of cactus, some in bloom.26
The trail had other hazards besides thirst. Once wolves stole meat
that Hoth and his companions had put under one of their wagons.
Another night, the company’s livestock bellowed because a bear and
her cub roamed nearby. Some emigrants feared Indians. Two days
after Hoth’s train had left Corn Creek, south of Fillmore, its members
herded their livestock together and put the herd under the watch of a
double crew. “Cattle are often stolen in these parts,” Hoth explained.
But in most respects, the southern road was like other emigrant trails
in the West—one tiring footstep after another.27
The Arkansas company was not the only large train on the southern
road in ’57. Leaving Salt Lake City twelve or fourteen days behind
the combined Arkansas company was Nicholas Turner’s train of emi-
grants. Near it traveled William Dukes’s and Wilson Collins’s wagons.

california-bound wagon train. M. Le Baron De Hubner (Paris, 1862).
The Turner, Dukes, and Collins trains—whose members came from

Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas—came together at some point to form
a single unit, which became known as “the Missouri company.”28 In
between these main parties or following them were smaller ones, some
probably anonymous and lost to history.29 To Volney King, who was
ten years old in 1857 and living in Fillmore, companies seemed to
travel past all season long.30
By the end of the third week of August, more than 250 emigrants
were on the southern road with more than 1,200 head of cattle.31 Because
the Arkansas and Missouri companies traveled so close together, their
identities and actions were later blurred. “I saw the Dukes company
pass through Spanish Fork city on its way to California,” remembered
settler George Armstrong Hicks. “They were quiet and orderly as
far as I know. . . . They were that same that was so cruely murdered at
Mountain Meadows.”32
Hicks’s confusion—he was wrong about the fate of the Dukes group
and perhaps also about the identity of the party he saw in Spanish
Fork—was not unusual. Non-Mormons traveling behind the trains
may also have confused them. After reaching California, these travelers
associated the massacred train with all the conflicts they heard about

as they journeyed south. Whether their identification was correct in
every instance remains unclear. Yet it is certain that a series of conflicts
took place between settlers, emigrants, and Indians that mirrored the
atmosphere in northern Utah.
Mormon militiamen east of Salt Lake City “showed us no favors,”
said a member of the Turner party, “as they considered us Americans,”
referring to the anger that was being expressed on both sides.33 Eight
days after the July 24 picnic and less than a week before the Arkansas
train reached his community, Provo stake president James C. Snow
called Haun’s Mill massacre survivor Charles Jameson to the pulpit
during that town’s Sunday services. “I feel like fighting,” Jameson said,
“& if any Mob comes here I feel like giving them the best I have got
in the locker.”34
Compounding the problem was the way Utah had changed in the
seven years since Alexander Fancher first may have traveled through
the region. In 1850 few Mormons lived south of the Salt Lake Valley.
But by 1857 Mormon colonization had expanded dramatically along
the southern road to California, with new residents claiming land along
most of the main rivers and streams that flowed from the mountains
and the springs that seeped out or bubbled up near the trail. They had
also claimed the best grassland as pasture for their animals.

The wartime atmosphere and competition for grass and water
combined to create disputes. One took place before the second week
of August in Provo, some fifty miles south of Salt Lake City. When
local lawman Lyman Woods found emigrant cattle grazing on the red
top and timothy grass that were the town’s winter range, he asked the
emigrants to move and offered to guide them to another campsite.
According to Woods the company’s captain retorted, “This is Uncle
Sam’s grass. We are his boys. We have better claim on it than a bunch
of rebel Mormons.”35
The U.S. government had not yet established a land office in Utah,
which meant that technically the settlers did not have title to the range.
But everyone understood squatters rights—including the government,
which typically came down on the side of residents in land disputes.36
Both sides felt justified in their positions. The emigrants depended on
grass to feed their cattle, and if the cattle suffered, so might dreams of
profit in California. The grass was also vital to the Mormons, whose
thin herds were just beginning to thrive after the drought.37
Woods gave the emigrants one hour to move and called out the
local “minute men.” Whether the Mormons entrenched and barri-
caded themselves into a firing line, as Woods later claimed, or merely
conducted a militia muster nearby, the show of force had its intended
effect. Five minutes before Woods’s deadline expired, the emigrants
began packing up. “They wisely concluded that even if they won the
battle,” Woods later boasted, “the survivors would never be able to
move to the north, or run the gauntlet of a Lexington line of riflemen
stretching 200 miles to the southern border.”38 Stake president Snow
said in August 9 church services, “I was pleased with the Military yes-
terday. It was the greatest turn out that I ever s[aw].”39
Provo leaders’ minds were fixed on the approaching army. Failing
to distinguish between the army and outsiders in general, one told his
congregation “that the Gentiles are coming here to hang all our lead-
ers & to make Eunichs of the rest.” If the Saints ever did “come in
contact with Uncle Sam,” he predicted, they would discover “that the
Lord has got a Battle axe that the Gentiles does not dream o[f]”—a
reference to Indians whose favor the Mormons were trying to gain.
Snow concluded, “Uncle Sam is determined to make us gain our inde-
pendence as did the people of the U.S. from Great Briton.”40
War fever or not, some local people could not resist trading with
the emigrants. On Sunday, August 16, after the Arkansas company
had passed through, Provo bishop E. H. Blackburn chided his congre-
gation, “Men went last week & sold their flour to our enemies right

against the counsel of Prest B. Young.” Earlier that day, Snow had
reiterated Young’s directive to preserve “every kernal of Grain” and
prepare warm clothing against the coming siege. Snow later added,
“You know that I said this forenoon that I did not want you [to] render
any aid or comfort to any person that is not for us.” Anyone that did,
he now said, was a traitor.41
Emotions were also running high in other settlements in Utah Val-
ley. Snow’s jurisdiction included Springville, just six miles south of
Provo. Some settlers at Springville had been a law unto themselves,
most seriously in March, when they killed two disaffected Mormons and
a third man died in the cross fire.42 The Parrish-Potter murders were
apparently a part of reformation excitement that was still simmering in
the area when the emigrants passed through the town in mid August.
Later that month, the same Springville vigilantes would threaten still
another dissenter, telling him not to talk about the local violence and
exclaiming, “We have declared war against the whole world.”43
Some ten miles south of Springville lay Payson. Eighteen-year-old
James Pearce saw the Arkansas company as it went through town. He
later passed it as he traveled to southern Utah to join his family there.
Pearce remembered that the emigrants had “pretty good teams,”
though “they was pretty well drilled down” by then. “They was going
very slow,” he said. Pearce said he saw “mostly men” in the train, with
only “a few women and children.”44
Decades after the massacre, Payson bishop Charles B. Hancock
said that some men in the town “marshalled” themselves at “unusual
h[o]urs” against a company of emigrants, but he was able to hold the
vigilantes back. Hancock wrote that “the emigrant company was part
of those, when joined by others and on the way to California,” that
were “used up by John D. Lee and Company in 1857.”45 Hancock did
not say what incited the local men or how he knew these emigrants
were among those killed at Mountain Meadows.
Two other accounts offer possible explanations, though both, like
Hancock’s story, came years after the massacre. Ann Eliza Webb,
who married and divorced Brigham Young and became a strong anti-
Mormon lecturer, said that when the train passed through her town
of Payson, she was almost thirteen years old. That was old enough,
she insisted, to remember that “three apostate women” joined the
emigrant group, which angered the local people.46 Another of stake
president Snow’s sermons showed that he believed the rumor. Snow
claimed that Abagail Parrish, sister-in-law to the murdered William
R. Parrish, “apostatized & said she would go to California or die a

trying.” At the time Snow made these last remarks, he believed Abagail
had been killed at the Meadows, though in fact she had traveled south
behind the Arkansas company and survived.47
George Nebeker, nine years old in 1857, later told his daughter that
while he and other boys tended the town herd outside of Payson, they
“got acquainted with a bunch of people from the East” camped there.
“Some of the party were ill,” Nebeker remembered, “and they were
waiting for them to get well before moving on” toward California. The
train had several children Nebeker’s age who offered the herd boys
candy and “nick-nacks,” leading to a friendship between the young-
sters. Before long, some men of the company began target shooting
toward Payson. A local man asked them not to, saying that “if some
one would happen to be coming over the hill they might kill them.”
According to Nebeker, one of the emigrants responded, “I hope to
God old Brigham Young himsel[f] would come over the hill. I’d like
to put a bullet through his heart. I helped to drive the mormons out of
m[iss]o[uri].” The incident “frightened the little boys and they never
like[d] to play there so well again.”48
Although it is not clear who the emigrants at Payson were, it is clear
that the Arkansas company stopped about twenty-eight miles south of
there near Nephi, a settlement sometimes called Salt Creek. Some of
the company made their camp on land claimed by local citizens and
named after the mayor, Josiah Miller. “There is a company of Gen-
tiles at Millers Springs who have 300 head of Cattle,” Mormon settler
Samuel Pitchforth wrote in his diary on August 15, 1857. “The Bishop
sent out to them requesting them to move for they were distroying
our winter feed. They answered that they [w]ere American Citizens
and should not move.”49 Two days later, Pitchforth recorded that “the
company of Gentiles passed through [Nephi] this morning—they
wanted to purchase flour.”50 He mentioned no conflicts or disturbances
in town.
John Pierce Hawley, who later left Utah and its leading church,
spent three days traveling with the Arkansas emigrants south of Nephi
and recalled a conversation with the train’s leader that confirmed
Woods’s and Pitchforth’s accounts: “The captain of the company told
me that they had had some trouble with the Mormons in two of their
settlements. Salt Creek being one and Provo being the other.” The
captain downplayed the incidents. “We have a Dutchman with us, a
single man, and he has given us all the trouble we have had. He would
not obey orders but was sassy with officers in these places and it all
originated by our cattle being grazed on there herd grounds, but we

intend to observe the laws and rules of the territory.” After spending
time with the emigrants, Hawley believed that the “Saints gave them
more trouble than they ought.”51
Though Hawley did not identify him by name, the captain was
probably the trail veteran Alexander Fancher, and other evidence
would corroborate his statement about the troublesome Dutchman in
the company. When the massacre was over and Mormons gave their
account of what had happened, they remembered one man among the
emigrants whose “greater height and strength warranted him in almost
any kind of domineering.” They also remembered a “Dutchman.” Per-
haps they were the same man.52
In the 1850s, the term Dutchman referred to people who spoke Dutch
and others with northern European roots, especially those who spoke
German (Deutsch) or had a Germanic accent. The United States had
hundreds of thousands of such men and women living within its bor-
ders, many of them recent immigrants who had arrived in a great tide
of mid-century migration. Longtime U.S. citizens sometimes treated
them with derision, using the phrase, “D—d Dutchman.”53 Such sen-
timent gave rise to the rapidly growing nativist “Know Nothing” or
“American Party,” aimed against the German and Irish.54
The “Dutchman” traveling with the emigrants may have been John
Gresly, whose family had emigrated from Germany and settled in York,
Pennsylvania, becoming “Pennsylvania Dutch.” John’s brother, Henry
J. Gresly, said he had a brother who died at Mountain Meadows. The
1850 U.S. Census for York listed fourteen-year-old John Gresly as a
member of the Andrew and Rosanna Gresly family, but John’s name
would not appear on later national counts, suggesting an untimely
death.55
Members of the Gresly family were known for combative behavior.
In 1842 John’s father, Andrew, was charged with assault and battery; in
1851 young John was found guilty of malicious mischief. Years later,
another son, George, was arraigned on two charges—assault with
intent to commit murder and carrying deadly weapons—for chasing
down and shooting a man. Yet another son, Anthony, was convicted
of assault and battery.56 In 1857 John Gresly would have been twenty-
one-years old and because of his young age was likely single, matching
the description of the Dutchman in the Arkansas train. Whoever the
mysterious man was, he was by both emigrant and Mormon accounts
a troublemaker.57
After Hawley traveled with them, the Arkansas company came
to the settlement of Buttermilk Fort (present-day Holden) and then

the territorial capitol of Fillmore just below. The Arkansas company
and possibly the Missouri company passed through these settlements
shortly before non-Mormon emigrant George Powers of Little Rock,
Arkansas. When Powers reached Buttermilk Fort, he and his three-
wagon train “found the inhabitants greatly enraged at the train which
had just passed, declaring that they had abused the Mormon women,
calling them w—s, &c., and letting on about the men.” Powers reported
that the locals “had refused to sell that train any provisions, and told us
they were sorry they had not killed them there; but they knew it would
be done before they got in.”58
Powers said the settlers did not plan to attack the train themselves,
but “were holding the Indians in check until the arrival of their chief,
when he would follow the train and cut it in pieces.” Powers’s company
was close enough to the offending train that some men of the settle-
ment confused the two. When his group tried to buy butter from local
women, “the men came running and charging, and swore we should
not have it, nor anything else, as we had misused them. They appeared
to be bitterly hostile,” said Powers.59
George W. Davis, another Arkansan traveling near or with Powers,
described a similar episode, though he put it at Fillmore. The stories
told by Davis and Powers were so much alike that they were likely
describing the same event, with one of the men mistaking the loca-
tion. According to Davis, the bishop at Fillmore—Lewis Brunson—
“said that he could scarcely withhold the brethren from following
after the train (which was afterwards massacred) and cutting it into
pieces; because parties of that train cursed the Mormons for not sell-
ing them provisions.” The bishop explained “that they had instruc-
tions from Brigham Young not to sell any provisions to emigrants
unless they could get guns, revolvers, or ammunition for pay.” This
response had “very much enraged a Dutchman, who threatened, or
said, that if he had a good riding horse, he would go back to Salt Lake
and kill Brigham.” The threat to kill Young so aroused local passion
that, according to Davis’s account, “the Bishop said that the only way
that he could control his men was, that he promised them to set the
Indians on the doomed train.”60 Though Davis believed the massacred
train caused the uproar, the evidence is not conclusive. The Turner
train or other elements of the Missouri company, traveling somewhere
behind the Arkansas company, may also have passed through Fillmore
before Davis’s arrival.
Thomas Cropper was just fourteen years old when the emigrants
passed through Fillmore. His recollections aligned with an element

of Davis’s contemporary account. Cropper remembered one emigrant
saying, “I would like to go back and take a pop at Old Brig, before
I leave the territory.” Cropper added that “there appeared to be two
companies of them joined together for safety from the Indians,” one
of them being mostly men. Cropper claimed they “called themselves
the Missouri Wild Cats. . . . I heard one of them make the brag that he
helped to mob and kill Joe Smith.” Cropper’s account, given many
decades later, was probably influenced by other Utah stories about the
wagon train that proliferated after the massacre.61
Not all in Cropper’s account, however, was negative. He said he and
other boys were herding cattle on nearby mountain benches when they
saw “the unusual sight of an immigrant train.” Eager for excitement,
the boys rushed down to meet the emigrants and went with them the
next “two miles into Fillmore.” Cropper mentioned no problems dur-
ing this leg of the trip, only good-natured fun. “They dares us to ride
one of their wild steers,” Cropper recalled. He mounted the animal
“and it dashed into Cattelin’s Mill pond which caused them a lot of
merriment.”62
John A. Ray, a Mormon who was away from home as a missionary
at the time, wrote in 1859 what he heard about the passage of one
group of emigrants through Fillmore. When the travelers stopped in
the center of town, some of them hailed passing citizens and “inquired
how far it was to any houses”—an insult aimed at the settlers’ log cab-
ins or their new state house, both in clear view. “Angry feelings arose
between the parties,” said Ray, and “the emigrants then in a crow-
ing & insulting manner inquired whether there were any men in the
place.” Ray said the taunting emigrants next mocked the Mormons,
“connecting the name of Deity with all their oaths,” and “stated that
[the] Government had sent Troops to kill every G—damed Mormon
in Utah . . . & that they should like to help them do the job.”63
Philetus Warn left another report. He arrived in Salt Lake City
on August 7 and spent two-and-a-half weeks visiting friends, helping
with chores, and listening to Mormon preaching. He left the city on
August 26 with the fast-moving freighting company owned by half-
brothers Sidney Tanner and William Mathews, Mormons headed to
California in hopes of acquiring arms and ammunition for the coming
confrontation with the approaching army. Traveling for days behind
all the companies on the road—the Fanchers, Bakers, Turners, Dukes,
and the smaller parties—Warn said “he everywhere heard” the settlers’
“threats of vengeance” against the emigrants ahead because of their
“boisterousness and abuse of Mormons and Mormonism.” Whatever

good feeling Warn may have had for the Mormons would dissipate
by the time he passed through the Meadows two days after the mas-
sacre. Just a few weeks later, a newspaper recounting the stories of
Warn and Powers opined on what sparked the atrocity. Besides owning
“considerable valuable property,” which “excited the cupidity of the
Mormons,” it said, “the [emigrant] men were very free in speaking of
the Mormons; their conduct was said to have been reckless, and they
would commit little acts of annoyance. . . . Feeling perfectly safe in their
arms and numbers, they seemed to set at defiance all the powers that
could be brought against them.”64
The conflicts on the road had been two-sided. There was “profan-
ity and ribaldry arrayed against each other,” Daniel Wells said in an
interview that he and Brigham Young gave twenty years after the mas-
sacre—the only time either of them spoke to the eastern press about
the massacre and one of the few times they spoke publicly about it at
all. Wells explained why he believed the settlers had been so ready to
fight, citing “our previous history [of persecution], the condition of
our people and their crops at the time, our relations with the Indi-
ans and the extraordinary news and rumors which accompanied the
simultaneous advance on Utah of Harney’s United States army and
Arkansas emigrants.” The result was “a combination of circumstances
such as will probably never exist again,” in which the “desperate” Mor-
mons came to believe the emigrants were somehow “leagued with the
soldiers.”65
It is also true that the Saints later exaggerated the emigrants’ acts.
The wrangling over pasture was viewed as serious in its day—more
serious on the southern road than the northern one because the Mor-
mons and their animals were concentrated there. But most of the emi-
grants’ acts were nothing more than taunting words or, at the very
worst, small acts of vandalism. These annoyances caused momentary
excitement, but according to Wells, in many settlements were “for-
gotten almost as soon as reported.”66 Wells’s claim was borne out by
reports coming from Fillmore, where some of the tension occurred.
After the Arkansas company passed through the settlement, militia
and church leaders sent messages to Salt Lake City on August 27 and
August 29 that failed to mention any local problem.67 Another pos-
sibility is that the Fillmore problems may have been caused by the
party led by the Saints’ old Missouri nemesis, Nicholas Turner. Turner’s
train did not get to central Utah until two or three days after the dis-
patches were sent north, which might explain why the letters did not
mention any trouble.

People in every society build a memory or reconstruction of the
past—the way in which past events are seen or interpreted by new
generations.68 This tendency was certainly true with many of the Mor-
mons and their view of the events leading to the Mountain Meadows
Massacre. The terrible tragedy was hardly over before a version of
events began to form that downplayed the settlers’ wrongs and built up
the emigrants’. This retelling made the incidents at settlements along
the southern route into an explanation that gave the atrocity a sense of
grim inevitability.69 While some perpetrators of the massacre encour-
aged this interpretation by making false or misleading statements, for
most Mormons the process was an attempt to make sense out of the
unfathomable and to defend their society from assaults being made
against it. The result was a version of history that smoothed Mor-
mon guilt by suggesting that the emigrants somehow got what they
deserved. An already troubled tale became still more confusing.
There were conflicts on the southern road. But the emigrants did
not deserve what eventually happened to them at Mountain Mead-
ows. The massacre was not inevitable. No easy absolution for the per-
petrators is possible. Their later posturing and rationalization could
never overcome one irrefutable fact: All the purported wrongs of the
emigrants—even if true—did not justify the killing of a single person.
The best that could be argued was that during a time of uncertainty
and possible war, some of the Mormons, like other men and women
throughout history, did not match their behavior with their ideals.

chapter nine
Men Have Magnified a Natural

Circumstance
Corn Creek to Parowan, Late August–Early
September 1857
C
orn Creek, twelve miles south of Fillmore, ran thirteen feet
wide and two feet deep during heavy runoff, though in late
August when the Arkansas company arrived, much of the force
was spent. Still, there was water enough to supply people and animals,
both from the creek and nearby springs and sloughs. In good seasons,
there was also enough moisture in the soil to nourish “immense quan-
tities of grass”—a feature that made Corn Creek a fine resting place for
cattle companies on the southern road.1
The Pahvant Indians, a band that mixed the cultures of the Utes
and Paiutes, had occupied the Corn Creek region for centuries. The
Pahvants had wide contacts with other Indians, especially those in the
Paiute heartland farther south.2 The Pahvants had a history of simple
agriculture—growing “corn, beans, pumpkins, squashes, and pota-
toes”—but they also relied heavily on native plants and animals for
their support.3
One tradition claimed that Kanosh, a leading Pahvant, was born on
Shoshone land near the eastern mountains of California and spent time
as a youth learning white man’s ways at a Franciscan mission.4 “He was
corn creek. Courtesy LDS Church History Library (2002).
not fond of roaming and wished to be instructed in tilling the soil,”

Kanosh told Brigham Young when the two first met in 1851. Kanosh
looked as though he could be the ally Mormons were seeking—an
Indian who might show other Great Basin bands the value of Anglo-
American farming.5 In 1855 federal Indian agent Garland Hurt—a
vigorous advocate of Indian farming—reported that sixty acres had
been plowed at the Indian farm on Corn Creek, mainly in wheat, as the
Pahvants “embraced farming more extensively than any of the Indi-
ans in the Territory.”6 Two years later, the cultivated fields had more
than doubled.7
Early trappers saw the Pahvants as desperately poor, and despite
the recent expansions of the Pahvants’ tilled fields, loss of game and
natural plants meant that their food supply had not improved much.8
Like other native peoples, they expected outsiders to recognize their
rights in the land and to compensate them for any trespass. The Pah-
vants’ requests for a fee from outsiders using their lands sometimes led
to conflicts, the most notable of which ended in the 1853 Gunnison
massacre.9
The Arkansas company reached Corn Creek by August 25. Late that
evening, a small party of white men and Indians in two wagons drove
into the Corn Creek grasslands from the south, passed the emigrants,
Men Have Magnified a Natural Circumstance 117

and set up their own camp about fifty yards north across the creek.10 It
was George A. Smith, returning from his tour of the southern settle-
ments, along with several other men. Southern settlers Silas Smith,
Elisha Hoopes, and Philo Farnsworth would continue north with the
Mormon apostle a day or two more. Jacob Hamblin, the Paiute leader
Tutsegavits, Ammon, and other Indians would accompany him to Salt
Lake City, where they would meet with Brigham Young.11
For a moment the two groups eyed each other. The Mormons thought
the emigrants appeared “excited,” doubling the eight-man guard over
their cattle as Smith’s group pulled in. Three of the emigrants, includ-
ing “the Captain,” soon visited the Mormons’ camp and introduced
themselves. The emigrants asked if the Indians camped nearby posed a
threat. George A. replied that as long as they “had not committed any
outrage upon the Indians,” there was no danger. “They assured us,”
Smith said, “that there had been no interruption whatsoever.”12
George A. Smith later described the three emigrants as “gentle-
men,” though the Mormons found the “blasphemous language” in
their “common conversation” a little rough. Silas remembered the
emigrants calling their captain “Mr. Fancher.”13
jacob hamblin. Courtesy


The emigrants asked about road conditions, the disposition of
Indians, and where “they could get good grass and water” as they
traveled south. Hamblin described “the camping places clear to the
Muddy,” remembered Hoopes, referring to the Muddy River, whose
waters met the southern route in the desert southwest of Moun-
tain Meadows. Hamblin also told the emigrants that the “Meadows
was the best point to recruit their animals before they entered upon
the desert.”14
Hamblin’s advice could not have been a surprise. Travelers had
camped and grazed their animals at the same sites for years, and
Fancher had likely used them before.15 After conflicts over their choice
of pasture at Provo and Nephi, the emigrants were probably trying
to determine which range lands they could use without running into
more trouble with settlers. As for Indian concerns, when the emigrants
told Hamblin they had forty or fifty men who could bear arms, he
judged them and their cattle safe with “half that number.”16
To Hamblin, the emigrants “seemed to be ordinary frontier ‘home-
spun’ people” in general, most traveling as families. But he also said
“some of the outsiders were rude and rough, and calculated to get the
ill-will of the inhabitants.” He did not say whether this was his own
impression or part of the “information [he] got in conversation with
one of the men of the train.” The train’s captain had made a similar
comment to John Hawley just days before.17
As Smith and his group hitched up their teams the next morning,
the emigrants came to them with a final question. Would the Indians
accept as a gift an ox that had died in the night? George A. replied that
they probably would; Silas remarked that he thought the Indians “were
better fed” than to eat a dead ox. The Mormons thought the emi-
grants’ question a bit odd, and “it created suspicion, that they would
play foul games, by some means.” The group left Corn Creek feeling
some unease about the emigrants, and Hamblin remembered George
A. Smith saying “he belie[ve]d some evle would be fall them.”18
As the Mormons pulled away, they could see the dead ox, the cap-
tain standing over it with a bottle in his hand. The suspicious Hoopes
asked Smith what the man was doing. Smith replied “that he was prob-
ably taking a drink.” Hoopes would later say he saw the man stab the
carcass a few times and pour something from the bottle into the cuts.
Silas Smith refuted his story. “I saw nothing of this throwing anything
from a vial into [the ox],” he testified.19
The next emigrants to reach Corn Creek noticed nothing unusual
there. George Powers and George Davis, traveling behind the Arkansas

company, said they found plenty of Indians at the place, “all peaceable
and friendly.”20 But the mood changed by the time members of the
Missouri company reached the site. The Turner and Dukes divisions
of the company were now journeying separately “on account of scar-
city of grass” and internal strife.21
Peyton Welch of the Turner division found the Indians at Corn
Creek “very ill disposed toward us.”22 Stephen B. Honea, traveling with
the Dukes train, learned more from a man “who represented himself as
the Indian agent”—undoubtedly Peter Boyce, a government employee
at the Indian farm a few miles southeast of the Corn Creek campsite.
Boyce told Honea that “a short time before” his train arrived, another
train passed that had “poisoned an ox.” Boyce “spoke in abusive terms
of the men of that train, for having acted in an improper manner.”23
Boyce had tried to stop the men from trading the Pahvants powder
and lead for food from the Indian farm. It was “contrary to law” to give
the Indians ammunition, Boyce told them, trying to get them to move
on. The men said they “had the law with them, ‘seventeen rounds.’ ”
The territory’s no-trade policy had made it difficult for them to replen-
ish their food supplies, and they would not let Boyce stand between
them and this opportunity. They stayed long enough to have the Pah-
vants “thrash out wheat” for them and “dig up potatoes” that “were
not half grown.” Concerned about the Pahvants’ winter food supply,
Boyce kept trying to stop the exchange, but the emigrants “cared not
for me or what I said,” he complained. He called the emigrant men
“the roughest set that ever passed by that place.”24
When Philetus Warn and the Tanner-Mathews freight train reached
Corn Creek on September 5, Boyce told Warn that “six Indians had
died” from the “poisoned” ox and that “others were sick and would die.”
With “one of them, the poison had worked out all over his breast, and
he was dead next morning,” Boyce said.25 Over the next month, more
cattle in the area died, and people who handled carcasses became ill
or perished.26
To Boyce and his neighbors, the conclusion seemed obvious that
the Arkansas emigrants poisoned the ox and nearby water. Overland-
ers, after all, could be highhanded and harsh toward Indians. Emigrant
Eleanor F. Knowlton recalled an incident in her 1857 train near the
Humboldt River on the northern road. After an Indian shot one of the
emigrants’ oxen with an arrow, the men of the company “put poisen
in the ox” in order “to kill the Indians if they ate of it.” Knowlton was
indignant, calling the episode “very inhuman.” The Mormons who
lived near Corn Creek thought the same thing had happened there.27

Elisha Hoopes fueled the rumors. No one told the story of the sup-
posed poisoning with more enthusiasm than Hoopes, whom Brigham
Young had called “a kind of perpetual Telegraph” the year before.
After seeing the emigrant standing over the dead ox when he was with
George A. Smith at Corn Creek, Hoopes had continued north with
Smith’s party to Fillmore, where he worked several days. At Fillmore
or passing through Corn Creek again as he returned south to Beaver,
Hoopes must have learned about the dead or dying Indians. He and
others concluded that the emigrants had poisoned the ox carcass
before giving it away. Hoopes repeated the story at Beaver, where he
arrived in early September.28 Later when he heard about the massacre,
he expressed his satisfaction, saying the emigrants “carried poison with
them, and had only got their just reward.”29
In 1859 federal Indian superintendent Jacob Forney commenced an
investigation that brushed aside the poisoning charges. “That an emi-
grant company, as respectable as I believe this was, would carry along
several pounds of arsenic and strichnine, apparently for no other pur-
pose than to poison cattle and Indians, is too improbable to be true,”
he concluded.30 Forney’s companion, U.S. deputy marshal William
Rogers, debunked the poisoning story by looking at the volume and
force of water at Corn Creek. “A barrel of arsenic would not poison
it,” he said.31
In retrospect, the best guess is that microbes, not poison, caused
the reported sickness—a disease borne by cattle and passed to humans.
Arsenic and strychnine, the typical poisons of the time, caused symp-
toms different from those described in the Corn Creek area, and only
large doses could account for the reported loss of people and livestock
over a several-week period. Moreover, poison would have taken effect
quickly, and Powers and Davis saw nothing amiss in the immediate
wake of the Arkansas company’s passing.
Many livestock died on overland trails due to disease and other prob-
lems.32 One common disease was so-called “Texas Fever” or “Spanish
Fever,” notoriously carried by Texas longhorns, like those present in
the Arkansas herds. An infected animal might appear healthy but still
spread contagion to local breeds.33 By the mid-1850s, Missouri farm-
ers were so outraged by “Texas Fever” that they “declared war” on the
longhorns.34
Though humans can contract Texas Fever, the most plausible expla-
nation for what happened at Corn Creek is anthrax.35 In 1975 cattle
pastured along a pioneer-era cattle trail in northern Utah died within
twelve to forty-eight hours after becoming inexplicably ill. Medical

researchers first investigated arsenic poisoning as the cause but soon tied
the outbreak to disturbed anthrax spores that may have lain dormant
since the 1850s. The researchers concluded that “the geographic spread
of anthrax in the western United States seems coupled unquestionably
with the cattle drives of the Texas Longhorn stock.”36 During the mid-to
late 1850s along the trail from Utah to southern California, people died
or became seriously ill after handling cattle carcasses.37 Medical doctors
reviewing these documented cases 150 years after the massacre con-
cluded that anthrax was the likely cause of the recorded symptoms.38
Anthrax can pass from animals to humans as victims breath its
spores, eat diseased meat, or take in spores through a cut or sore in the
skin. In rare cases, the result can be massive swelling of the abdomen, a
limb, or even the face.39 More often, there is an inflamed pustule, with
a black or ash-gray ulcer at the center. Before modern penicillin was
available for treatment, the disease could bring high fever, discomfort
and disorientation, and, in its most serious form, death.40
The emigration of 1857 had several hints of anthrax. “Quite a num-
ber of horned cattle have died this fall from some complaint that is
not understood by stock-owners,” a California newspaper reported in
November 1857. One man “lost an ox, which he afterwards skinned
and came near losing his own life from the effect of the blood of the
animal, which became inoculated in a sore in his left hand.”41 Some of
the Arkansas company’s cattle may have contracted the disease along
the trail. The mysterious bite to the hand that killed Arkansas emi-
grant Peter Huff near Fort Bridger may actually have been a pustule
of skin anthrax.42
Within a week after the first Arkansas parties arrived in Utah with
their cattle, Salt Lake City resident Elias Smith wrote in his diary about
the sudden death of “the only cow I had.” His was not alone. “Many
cattle are said to be dying in the same way in the city and country,” he
wrote.43 A few days later the Baker train arrived in the city and members
of the company complained that Mormons had poisoned their cattle.44
When the Arkansas company got to Corn Creek, the emigrants told
Hamblin “they had from four hundred to five hundred head of horned
cattle,” a count significantly lower than before they left Arkansas.45
Perhaps the hazards of the trail—including disease—had taken a toll.
The symptoms of anthrax in the Corn Creek area in 1857 might
have been taken from a modern medical handbook. One of Fillmore
resident John Ray’s wives, cutting up a dead cow for its tallow, picked
up an infection through a cut on her hand. It swelled and turned black,
and she became ill.46 In another case, fifteen-year-old Proctor Robison

of Fillmore scratched a small sore on his nose while skinning a dead
animal. He was dead within days. “He was so swollen and bloated,” a
friend said, “I would not have recognized him.”47 A twentieth-century
family historian, after consulting medical experts, concluded that Rob-
ison “probably died of anthrax.”48 These incidents took place weeks
after the Arkansas emigrants had passed through the area and long
after any poison they might have left could have had an effect. The
dead cattle were primarily found around the Corn Creek sinks—exactly
where one might expect to find the spores.49
No one in America at the time understood germ theory, spores,
bacteria, or viruses—and they certainly did not understand anthrax.
With no other way to explain the Corn Creek illnesses, the local
people assumed the worst about the emigrants and saw poison as the
cause. Their reaction fit the times, as poison in America had become a
popular catchall. One group of 1852 overlanders, seeing many of their
cattle die, blamed the deaths on Indian poisoning.50 Antebellum Tex-
ans accused abolitionists and slaves of “wholesale poisoning,” which,
like the overlanders’ charges, seemed “to have been the product almost
entirely of fertile imaginations.”51 Capitalizing on the public’s fixation,
popular detective novels made poisoning—and its discovery—a major
plot theme.52 In short, poison was full of mystery and seemed every-
where, including at Corn Creek. It explained the unexplainable.
Anthrax’s multiday incubation period explains the delay in the
appearance of the disease’s effects at Corn Creek. Silas Smith, who
traveled north with George A. Smith after meeting the emigrants
there, reported no problems when he headed back south through the
area a couple of days later. The Indians had been friendly to Davis
and Powers when they arrived at Corn Creek “several days” behind
the Arkansas company. But by the time members of the Turner party
arrived, they found the situation changed dramatically, with the local
Indians “hostile” and seeking “the blood of the Americans.”53
Oblivious to the turmoil and confusion that would follow in their
wake, the Arkansas emigrants pushed on from Corn Creek to Indian
Creek, a few miles north of Beaver. There Silas Smith, returning to his
home near Parowan, “took supper” with the emigrants and watered his
horses before going on to Beaver.54
When Beaver resident Robert Kershaw heard that the Arkan-
sas wagons were approaching his village, there seemed no cause for
alarm. Stories of Corn Creek had not yet reached the town. All Ker-
shaw reported was that the emigrants were stymied again as they
tried to purchase food in town. When the company stopped in front

of Kershaw’s garden, they “wanted to buy peas, potatoes, melons and
onions,” but “I told them I had none to spare,” he said. “I had been for-
bid to trade.” Kershaw and others from Beaver later ventured outside
the town to the emigrants’ camp—but so did a local “policeman,” who
“intimidated people from trading there.”55
By the time Powers and Warn reached Beaver in the first week of
September, the locals were “incensed against the train.” The story
Powers heard there seemed to be Hoopes’s: An emigrant had opened
the carcass of an ox with his knife and poured “some liquid into the
cut from a phial.” Indians ate the meat and died; “several more were
sick and would die.”56 Suspicious of the Mormons, Powers and Warn
tried to confirm the reports. Powers found an English-speaking Indian
in the area, who answered “that he did not know” if there was any
truth to the poisoned meat story, but he did know “that several of the
Indians had died, and several were sick.” The Indian thought water-
melons had brought on the scourge and that Mormons had somehow
poisoned them. Warn may have spoken with the same Indian, whom
he identified as the Ute leader Ammon. Back south after meeting with
Brigham Young, Ammon told Warn several Indians were sick, though
he did not know why.57
Word of the purported poisoning would continue to spread, even-
tually reaching the southern Utah communities with closest ties to the
massacre. Local settlers remembered that rumors of poison reached
their communities in the first week of September, some carried by
Indian runners. As a result, the “excitement had got to be pretty large,”
said one citizen of Cedar City.58 But the extant evidence does not con-
firm that the rumors reached these settlements before the initial attack
on the Arkansas company at Mountain Meadows.59 Nevertheless, in
the wake of the mass killing, the poisoning story quickly became the
perpetrators’ main explanation for their crime. Angry Indians, they
claimed, took vengeance on the company for poisoned comrades.60
No other supposed provocation by the emigrants could measure up
to poisoning.
Jacob Forney suggested there was a difference between perception
and reality. “Those persons in Fillmore, and further south, who believe
that a spring was poisoned with arsenic, and the meat of a dead ox
with strichnine, by said company, may be honest in their belief, and
attribute the cause of the massacre to the alleged poisoning,” he said.
But it was not true. “In my opinion,” he concluded, “bad men, for a bad
purpose, have magnified a natural circumstance for the perpetration of
a crime that has no parallel in American history for atrocity.”61

Though contemporary accounts confirm there were conflicts on
the southern route in 1857, complaints about the emigrants prolif-
erated after the massacre. “The Missouri company acted all right
in passing through Beaver but the part[y] o[f] Arkansas Company
had acted very wicked both to Mormons and Indians,” said Willson
Gates Nowers, who was in the area shortly after both trains—and the
rumors—passed through.62 Another settler claimed he met some of
the Arkansas emigrants on the road ten miles south of Beaver. “I see
that you have not been killed yet by any of those Mormons,” he said to
an emigrant, probably tongue-in-cheek. “No,” the man replied, they
“dare not tack[le] us or they would have done so before this.”63 Out-
side of Parowan, the next town after Beaver, the emigrants reportedly
made “terribl[e] oaths.” One said he was present when Joseph Smith
was killed. Another man called his ox “Brigham.”64 But such charges
were written down many years after the massacre, some by men who
played key roles in the crime, making the claims suspect.
Just before the emigrants got to Parowan, a torrent of rain forced
the company to pull up. William Dame, writing to George A. Smith,
reported that water flushed down the canyon east of the village, “bring-
ing with it all the bridges for 7 miles up” and a dam. The water “ran
north outside the [fort] wall to the bastion by the East gate tore it all to
flinders, [and] buried some of our fields.”65 After the massacre, rumors
circulated that the Parowan city gates had been closed to the emigrants.
The problem may have been nothing more than muck and water.66
But more than floods made the city inhospitable. Even before
1857, leaders in southern Utah had tried to ban trading with outsid-
ers because of the poverty in the settlements and the need to conserve
food.67 Despite such counsel, some settlers continued to trade with
passersby in hopes of profiting or because they felt local leaders inter-
preted policies too tightly.68 One man who traded was Jesse N. Smith,
a cousin of George A. Smith and one of Dame’s two counselors in the
Parowan stake presidency. He sold flour and salt to the Arkansas com-
pany when it came to his home in Paragonah northeast of Parowan
but did not provide them grain—Young’s policy from the beginning.
His brother Silas Smith said the Arkansas emigrants found where he
lived in Paragonah and “camped near that.” Silas went to their camp
and, for the third time, visited with the emigrants. Jesse’s retrospective
diary gave no hint that he or any of his neighbors had bad feelings for
the emigrants.69
But William Dame, at Parowan, strongly opposed trade with
emigrants. He sent enforcers to William Leany’s house after it was

reported that Leany had sold produce to William Aden, a young man
thought to be part of the company.70 Aden would have a hapless and
tragic role in the events at the Meadows.
The episode involving Leany and Aden provides a glimpse into
the strong feelings then existing in southern Utah. Aden’s father,
Dr. S. B. Aden, described nineteen-year-old William as being “well
grown, quite sprightly, a good Sign Painter,” someone who “writes
Poetry & sometimes Prose pretty well, makes a pretty good speach”
and “picks the Banjo tolerably well.” The father also considered his
son “pretty good looking” and “one of the most injenius men of his
age.” The description had an element of pathos; it was written eigh-
teen months after the massacre by a father hoping his missing son had
escaped death.71
Leany’s connection to Aden began many years earlier in Paris, Ten-
nessee. Leany at the time was a Mormon missionary, preaching at the
courthouse when mischievous lads fired a cannon as a prank. Thinking
himself under assault, Leany ran from the building and was on the out-
skirts of the village when S. B. Aden calmed him down and invited him
to his home. His son William had been one of the pranksters.72
William left home in 1857 intending a California adventure. He
was at the Y. X. mail station at the last crossing of the Sweetwater River
in present-day Wyoming when he met a kindred spirit, twenty-one-
year-old William Roberts from Provo, Utah. Roberts, a musician and
member of Provo’s first dramatic association, had gone to the station
to trade with passing emigrants in company with Daniel W. Jones.73
Aden wrote to his father on July 23 from the station on the Sweet-
water, explaining “that he expected to spend the winter in Provo, as he
had undertaken a good job of painting scenery for a Theater there, and
would likely go on to Cal[ifornia] in the spring.” Presumably, Aden
traveled to Salt Lake with the returning Roberts and Jones, arriving
on August 15. After reaching Provo about August 17, he changed his
plans and decided to “overtake a party of emigrants, who were then
some fifty miles ahead of him,” promising Roberts a letter “as soon as
he got through.”74 The party was the Arkansas company.
Aden eventually reached Parowan, where he stopped to visit William
Leany. As a parting gift, the Parowan settler gave the youth some vegeta-
bles, which local authorities took as a violation of the trading ban. “Dame
sent a crowd of his dogs to kill Me in my own door yard,” Leany later
charged. During the assault, Leany was hit on the head, some said with
a fence post, leaving him impaired for life. When Leany later tried to
write an account of the attack, it was rambling and sometimes unclear.75

Besides emotions, war rumors continued to stir. According to local
church records, on August 28 “Br. Hawley arrived from G. S. L. City”
with news that Brigham Young “had caught some of the enemies
spies” in Salt Lake City. Hawley—who had traveled for a time with the
Arkansas company on his way south—said the Mormon leader had dis-
patched a thousand “men to meet the Gentile Army in the mountains.”
More startling, a Ute Indian visiting Paragonah reported Americans
had been seen “coming in at or near San Pete valley,” about a hundred
miles northeast.76 This last rumor seemed to confirm Wells’s warning
that U.S. troops might enter Utah in the south—and soon.
Hawley must have brought word about the approaching emigrants,
as undoubtedly others did too. Aden had traveled south with a small
Mormon company that included Joseph Adair and James Pearce.
Pearce had seen the emigrants in Payson and passed them on his
journey south. Adair surely saw them, too.77
Even as late as Parowan, however, the situation seemed manage-
able. The Leany episode was about trading; no one in Parowan spoke
of fights or near-fights between the villagers and outsiders. One later
attestant remembered the emigrants’ decency and peace. From the
outset, each individual, with his or her own history and emotions, saw
what they chose to see in the emigrants.78
At Cedar City, twenty miles south, it was the dangerous perceptions
that would play themselves out. “So the wind grew into the whirlwind,”
Juanita Brooks wrote in memorable prose. “Exaggeration, misrepre-
sentation, ungrounded fears, unreasoning hate, desire for revenge, yes,
even the lust for the property of the emigrants, all combined to give
justification which, once the crime was done, looked inadequate and
flimsy indeed.”79
Since the time Brooks wrote these words, scholars of religious or
ethnic violence have described the step-by-step process that leads to
mass killing. “Violence is not only what we do to the Other,” Regina
M. Schwartz wrote. “It is prior to that. Violence is the very construc-
tion of the Other.”80 As emotions build, the perpetrators become con-
vinced that their opponents are a threat to their people and values.
They claim to act defensively, even while they are the aggressors.
Rumors are everywhere, and perception becomes reality. The final
cataclysm is sudden and almost inexplicable.81
Certain social factors must be in place, and often there are three.
“Most ordinary people readily allow the dictates of ‘authorities’ to
trump their own moral instincts,” one scholar wrote, summarizing a
half century of experimental and historical experience. “The second

[factor] is conformity. Few people have the courage to go against the
crowd.” The third is the “dehumanization of the victims.” Ordinar-
ily, there is no conspiracy. “Orders, peer expectations and dehuman-
ization need not be explicit to have a powerful effect. In adversarial
settings . . . subtle cues and omissions—the simple failure of authori-
ties to send frequent, clear and consistent messages about appropriate
behavior, for instance—can be as powerful as direct orders.”82
The southern road in late summer 1857 was not just about miles
traveled or events along the way. It was also about that complex web of
fear, misunderstanding, and retribution that prepares normally decent
people to kill. Most everything fit the scholarly pattern: The settlers
began to see the emigrants as the “other” or enemy, believing the out-
siders somehow threatened the values and well-being of the Mormon
community. Rumors circulated that were untrue or enlarged beyond
proportion, and southern Utah society was vulnerable to this excite-
ment. The region was isolated from Salt Lake City. Mixed signals
floated down the trail about Indian and emigrant policy. Civil, reli-
gious, and military power was dangerously held in the hands of a few.
Impoverished settlers knew the virtues of obeying. Even in hierarchi-
cal, theocratic Utah, there were few places like Iron County.
For the most part, the men who committed the atrocity at Moun-
tain Meadows were neither fanatics nor sociopaths, but normal and in
many respects decent people. The modern age, confronted with mass
violence and killings, has rediscovered a fundamental aspect of old
theology. “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously com-
mitting evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from
the rest of us and destroy them,” wrote Russian Nobel Prize winner
Alexander Solzhenitsyn. “But the line dividing good and evil cuts
through the heart of every human being. And who wants to destroy a
piece of his own heart.”83

chapter ten
Make It an Indian Massacre

Cedar City, July 24–September 5, 1857
A
long the California road some 250 miles south of Salt Lake
City and 20 miles south of Parowan lay Cedar City, the heart
of the Mormons’ Iron Mission. To Brigham Young and his peo-
ple, iron making was almost a religious sacrament, as worthy a Saint’s
consideration as preaching the gospel.1 Iron making even became a
Mormon metaphor. “We found a Scotch party, a Welch party, an Eng-
lish party, and an American party,” reported Mormon apostle Erastus
Snow after touring the area in 1852, “and we . . . put all these parties
through the furnace, and run out a party of Saints for building up the
Kingdom of God.”2
By the middle 1850s, however, Cedar City’s iron idealism gave way
to slag. Without adequate financing, good technology, or experienced
managers, the iron business floundered and most of the local people
“lived in isolation and dire poverty, often going without shoes and
warm clothing.”3 “Kisses without the bread and cheese,” quipped one
of the settlers, mocking the hard times with an expression of the day.4
Hans Hoth had nothing good to say about Cedar City when he
passed through in 1856. He described poorly built homes lying hap-
hazard on the land and people whose condition was no better. “Never
before had I seen such dirty and ragged people among the Mormons as
here,” he wrote. Nor did Hoth like the residents. Told by their leaders
Map by Sheryl Dickert Smith and Tom Child
for years not to trade with outsiders, many residents refused to trade
openly with Hoth’s party, though Hoth learned that the cover of night
brought possibilities. Prices for this secret trading ran high, as did his
suspicions. “I have become acquainted with many bad people among
the Mormons,” he said, “and here at this place I did not meet with one
good and sincere person.”5 A Mormon apostate fleeing Utah, Hoth
was bitter toward its people, but he was right about Cedar City’s dire
condition.
When iron production seemed most hopeful, the village had a
boomtown population of almost a thousand men, women, and chil-
dren, making it one of Utah’s largest communities at the time. By
1857 most of the people still lived in “Old Town,” an expansion of
the makeshift pioneer fort built four years before, during the Walker
War. An adobe wall enclosed much of the place, and at the center was
a large area used as a public square. Some of the citizens, however, had
begun moving to more permanent and less flood-prone quarters on
the bench land to the southeast, putting up cabins or digging dugouts.
At least two fine buildings anchored this “New Town”: Isaac Haight’s

new home, still under construction, and the “tithing office.” The lat-
ter, a place to bring the offerings and donations of the people, served
also as the main public building in the city, “a meeting house, school,
theater, and everything.”6
On July 24, 1857, Cedar City had its own Pioneer Day celebration,
just as Brigham Young was holding his in Big Cottonwood Canyon.
Haight—Cedar City’s leading citizen—delivered an oration on the
scenes “the Church has passed through,” and in a parade, residents
carried banners celebrating virtue, unity, and industry. Two of the ban-
ners had more of an edge. Twelve uniformed young men carried the
inscription, “A terror to evil doers”—a biblical term sometimes given
those who enforced law and loyalty in England and America. It was
the phrase recently applied to Haight by John D. Lee. In addition, two
dozen young boys carried the title “Zion’s Avengers.”7
In early August, when news reached Cedar of the approaching U.S.
Army, it flew from house to house, and the “people gathered at the
public square.” “I am prepared to feed the enemy the bread he fed
to me and mine,” Haight reportedly said.8 When George A. Smith
arrived several days later on his southern Utah tour, his speeches fur-
ther roused the people’s enthusiasm. Dispatches from Daniel H. Wells,
the territorial militia commander, warned of a possible attack on the
southern settlements and stressed the need to shore up alliances with
local Indians.9 “You will never know how black the clouds were over
our people,” one Cedar City citizen later told his son.10
Like other Utah communities, Cedar City had recently revitalized
its militia in response to legislation passed early in the year. But the
rumors of war had accelerated preparations for military action. Haight
seemed ready, if not anxious, to defend the city.11
“The ‘Nauvoo Legion’ was fully organized and drilled, . . . spying
out the passes in the mountains, discussing the best means for defend-
ing ourselves and families against the approaching army, looking out
places of security for our families in case we had to burn our towns and
flee to the mountains,” recalled John M. Higbee, a Cedar City militia
major, town marshal, and one of Haight’s two church counselors.12
By the end of August other news was making its way to Cedar City,
not of an approaching army but of a coming emigrant train. Exactly
what the local people heard about the train before its arrival is difficult
to determine. What can be established with some certainty is that the
people of Cedar City knew a non-Mormon company was approach-
ing and that its members had many cattle. Cedar City bishop Philip
Klingensmith said he heard the company had been ordered out from
Make It an Indian Massacre 131

Salt Lake City, and John Hawley may have told what he heard about
the problems over grazing lands at Provo and Nephi.13 Rumors of the
supposed poisoning at Corn Creek reached Beaver by the first week of
September and then Cedar City, though it is not clear exactly when.14
A few reminiscent accounts place its arrival ahead of the emigrant
company, perhaps reflecting stories told in the massacre’s wake.15
After the massacre, its perpetrators and their neighbors—trying to
explain or even justify why it happened—recounted what they heard
about the company before it reached Cedar City and what happened
on its arrival. Local resident Mary Campbell claimed that before the
emigrants reached Cedar, Haight gave an impassioned speech that
rehearsed rumored wrongs of the emigrants. “The rumors raised the
ire . . . of people,” she said. Campbell recalled Haight saying that “the
people in southern Utah needed some stock just then, as if he was giv-
ing the citizens a hint to get the stock away from the company.”16
If Campbell’s reminiscence was accurate, Haight may have been
thinking of his people’s welfare. If the Saints came under siege by
approaching troops, they would need cattle, in addition to grain, to
survive in the mountains. Haight’s comment also fit one later expla-
nation of the massacre. As Philetus Warn later put it, the train “was
known to be in possession of considerable valuable property, and this
fact excited the cupidity of the Mormons.”17 Even Brigham Young
eventually came to a similar conclusion. Some men had taken advan-
tage of “the disturbed state of the country to accomplish their desires
for plunder,” he said in 1877.18
The members of the Arkansas company reached Cedar City around
noon on Thursday, September 3, staying only “a little over one hour.”19
The company’s loose stock—one local citizen estimated five hundred
head—stayed outside the walls, but between twelve and twenty wag-
ons with oxen and horse teams drove through Old Town en route to
Klingensmith’s mill just east of the fort.20 Samuel Jackson Sr., who
farmed southwest of Cedar, had ignored orders not to part with grain
to outsiders and sold the Arkansas people about fifty bushels of wheat,
along with some corn.21 Waiting for the grain to be ground at the mill,
some emigrant men sampled the Mormon “Sage Brush Whiskey” sold
at the nearby distillery. “Getting a little more of this than they should,”
one settler said, “they talked very freely.”22
Trouble broke out when the miller, following “the counsel of I C
Haight,” demanded a cow in trade for grinding the grain—an exorbitant
price, though isolated trading posts along western trails often charged
whatever they could get for goods.23

The high price charged at the last mill before California “caused
some to curse and swear and say hard things about the Mormons,”
one Cedar City resident recorded. Another settler, Charles Willden,
claimed that fifteen to twenty emigrant men began “talking in a loud
excited and boisterous manner profaning and threatening to do bodily
harm and Kill some of the citizens”—including Bishop Klingensmith.
Willden said these men affirmed “that they had helped to Kill Joseph
Smith . . . and other Mormons at Nauvoo & Missouri, and that By___
G___ they would Kill some more yet. That the United States troops
were on the plains enroute to Utah, that they the said Company would
go on to the Mountain Meadows, and wait there until the arrival of the
said troops into the Territory and would then return to Cedar . . . and
carry out their threats.”24
Willden’s testimony, recorded in 1882, summarizes the animosity
and fear engendered by the emigrant train, and the link the Saints
made between the emigrants and the army. His memory was likely
influenced by justifications some Mormons gave for the massacre
after the fact, but he was not the only settler who remembered it
that way. Nephi Johnson, who was visiting Cedar City that day,
said “the company was of a mixed class, some being perfect gentle-
men, while others were very boastful, and insulting, as they said that
they were coming back, and assist the [U.S.] army to exterminate
the Mormons.” Alexander Fancher tried to calm the men. Johnson
reported, “I did hear Capt. F[a]ncher, who was the leader of the emi-
grants, rebuke the boastful ones of the company, for making these
threats.”25
Another run-in took place at the Deseret Iron Company store near
the center of the fort. Store clerk Christopher J. Arthur, Haight’s son-
in-law, remembered that some of the emigrants “came in to buy sev-
eral articles that was not in the store which caused them to act mean.”
With profanity, they vented their anger when they were again unable
to buy badly needed supplies, a problem they had faced repeatedly up
the trail.26
Some of the emigrants went looking for Haight at his nearby house
in Old Town, perhaps wanting to complain about what happened at
the mill and store. Haight was, after all, town mayor and manager
of the Deseret Iron Company. One account said that “cursing” and
“drunk” men went to Haight’s house and demanded that he come out
“if he was a man.” The men also yelled threats about sending an army
from California to seize Young, Haight, Dame, and “every other damn
Mormon in the country.”27

Haight slipped out the back door and ordered Higbee, as town
marshal, to arrest the men.28 The emigrants had not physically harmed
anyone, but Haight had sufficient legal cause to arrest and fine them.
Territorial ordinances declared that anyone “publicly intoxicated, so as to
endanger the peace and quiet of the community, shall be liable to arrest”
and fined. “Profaning the name of God” was also subject to a fine.29
By now a pattern was emerging. At various points through the
territory, the emigrants had a hard time getting the food and other
supplies needed for their survival and comfort. Some vented their frus-
tration in ways that made the Mormons—already apprehensive about
the approaching army—feel even more threatened. At Cedar City the
cycle reached a crescendo. As the emigrants were leaving town, one
reportedly said that if “old Brigham, and his priests would not sell
their provisions, by G–d they would take what they wanted any way
they could get it.” With that, he “killed two chickens, and threw them
into his wagon.”30 They may have been Barbara Morris’s. When the
sixty-three-year-old woman crossed the street from her home to the
central corral, a loudmouthed “tall fellow” on horseback “addressed
her in a very insulting manner,” her son later claimed. The man “bran-
dished his pistol in her face” and “made use of the most insinuating
and abusive language.”31 The “man on a grey horse was the most loud
mouthed of the lot,” said Mary Campbell, perhaps speaking of the
same emigrant.32
Some men in Cedar City, like men elsewhere in America, followed
a code of honor that required anyone who insulted a “wife, mother, or
sister” to apologize or “be punished.”33 Barbara Morris was the mother
of Elias Morris—a militia captain and Haight’s second counselor—and
the wife of John Morris, one of Bishop Klingensmith’s counselors.
When Marshal Higbee tried to arrest the horseman for profanity and
disorderly conduct, he “refused to be taken, and his companions stood
by him.” Higbee was forced to back down.34
Some of the emigrants went farther south to Hamilton’s Fort, where
they were able to trade. No troubles were reported in this tiny settle-
ment. Most of the train then camped a few miles southwest of town
near Quichapa Lake.35
News of the Cedar City disturbance traveled up the road. Nephi
diarist Samuel Pitchforth recorded that on September 8 he heard
“the emegrants who went through a short time since was acting very
mean—Threatening the Bishops life.”36
Minutes of Cedar City’s Female Benevolent Society also provide
contemporary evidence that residents believed the emigrants were a

threat. Later in the week, two women whose husbands followed the
emigrants to Mountain Meadows counseled the other women in their
group “to attend strictly to secret prayer in behalf of the brethren that
are out acting in our defence.” Another woman, “Sister Haight,” told
the women not to be fearful and “to teach their sons & daughters the
principles of righteousness, and to implant a desire in their hearts to
avenge the blood of the Prophets”—referring to the murders of Joseph
and Hyrum Smith.37
A persistent element in the stories told against the emigrants was
that one boasted of having a gun that killed Joseph Smith. The Benev-
olent Society minutes suggest that vengeance for Smith’s death was a
current topic during the week of the massacre. If an emigrant in fact
made such a boast, it was probably just part of the venting that went on
in Cedar City. None of the identified victims of the massacre is known
to have had anything to do with the Smith brothers’ deaths.
Even if local Saints believed they had identified a killer of Joseph
Smith, however, that would not have justified a massacre. Mormon
doctrine strongly held that men should be punished for their own sins
and not for the sins of others, and Latter-day Saint scripture declared
the shedding of innocent blood to be unforgivable.38 A year and a half
before the massacre, Brigham Young and Wilford Woodruff were dis-
cussing a scripture on the topic, and Young observed that it “was a vary
nice point to distinguish between innocent Blood & that which is not
innocent.” He observed that if the Saints were commanded of God “to
go & avenge the Blood of the prophets,” they would not know “what
to do in such a case” because they wouldn’t be able to tell who was
innocent and who was not. “There is one thing that is a consolation to
me,” Young concluded, “and that is I am satisfied that the Lord will not
require it of this people until they become sanctifyed & are led by the
spirit of God so as not to shed inocent Blood.”39
After the Arkansas company left town, Cedar City leaders discussed
what to do. As often happens in times of conflict, they focused not on
the peaceful emigrants, who made up the vast majority of the com-
pany, but on a minority whose actions colored their view of the whole.
From the Cedar City leaders’ point of view, outsiders had defied the
law, faced them down in front of their own people, and resisted arrest.
They had threatened townspeople, mocked the values of the commu-
nity, and announced themselves ready to support the army that seemed
at southern Utah’s doors.
The men of the train would not live to tell their side of the story.
But the fact that not one Utah citizen was physically harmed by the

Arkansas company speaks for itself. Any menacing words from the
emigrants were probably just idle threats and boasts made out of frus-
tration and in the heat of the moment. But in the charged environment
of 1857, Cedar City’s leaders took the men at their word.40
Not willing simply to let the matter go, the leaders sent a message that
day to military district commander William Dame in Parowan, “stating
they could hardly keep people from collisions with them [the emigrants]
on account of their violent language and threats, and asking what to do.”
Haight needed Dame’s permission before he could use the Cedar City
militia to aid Higbee’s embarrassed sixteen-member police force.41
Twenty-two-year-old John Chatterley carried the message to
Parowan. Chatterley waited until early the next morning for a reply
to carry back to Haight. Inside Dame’s home, he could hear the voices
of some of Parowan’s leading citizens, including Edward Dalton, John
Steele, Samuel H. Rogers, and Jesse Smith, as well as Dame.42 The
council saw the Cedar City turmoil for what it was—disturbing, but
hardly a threat that called for harsh measures. The council decided
that “all possible means should be used to keep the peace until the
emigrants should leave and proceed upon their journey.” Dame’s
adjutant, James Martineau, said, “Dame sent a letter in answer coun-
selling peace, and for them not to regard their threats, as ‘words are
but wind.’ ” In a later account, Martineau said the words of the letter
read, “Do not notice their threats, words are but wind—they injure no
one; but if they (the emigrants) commit acts of violence against citizens
inform me by express, and such measures will be adopted as will insure
tranquility.”43
Haight could not have been pleased by Dame’s response. After all,
his community—not Dame’s—had experienced the conflict. Haight
may have believed that Dame, never known for meeting matters head
on, did not understand the situation. George A. Smith later said Dame
had an aversion to bloodshed and Haight felt “contempt for him on
this account.”44 Whatever the reasons, Haight did not accept Dame’s
direction. Instead he and others moved ahead with a plan to take action
against the emigrants.
No record of the decision-making survived, but everything about
1857 must have been part of the calculation: the reformation, the war,
the rumors, and the nerves. Yet it is still difficult to fathom how the
Cedar City conflicts, so minor in retrospect, turned into an atrocity.
The literature of modern behavioral science, whose scholars describe
the conditions leading to mass riots and killings in many cultures, pro-
vides enlightenment.

By the first week in September, the typical components for group
violence existed in Cedar City, including the demonizing of oppo-
nents, a concentration of authority, and a lack of clear orders from
headquarters. The final spark that ignites violence may be small but
seem large in the eyes of perpetrators. “Fear of the victims . . . may have
a realistic component,” wrote violence expert Ervin Staub, “but the
victims’ power or evil intentions are usually exaggerated.”45 “Great evil
can come from small, unremarkable, seemingly innocent beginnings,”
agreed Roy Baumeister in his study of violence. “One does not have
to be at all evil to cross the line. [But] once one has done so, there are
powerful forces that sweep one along into greater acts of cruelty, vio-
lence, or oppression.”46
Brigham Young’s new Indian policy, announced August 16, may have
confused some local leaders. Young had said that “if the United States
send their army here and war commences” then emigrant “trains must
not cross this continent.” If a war began, Young said, “I will say no
more to the Indians, let them alone, but do as you please.”47 Word of
the policy traveled by mouth, with each hearer interpreting it individ-
ually. On August 30 Bishop Blackburn in Provo reported that Indians
near the Malad River on the northern route had stampeded some six
hundred head of emigrant cattle and horses. “Our Prophet says he
had held the Indians back for 10 years past but shall do it no longer,”
Blackburn said.48 News of Young’s speech had probably reached Cedar
City by late August.49
Haight’s interpretation of the policy may have influenced his next
decision. Without mustering out the militia, Haight could try using
local Indians, the Paiutes, to do what he thought needed to be done.
After receiving Dame’s message, Haight and other leaders in Cedar
City decided “to arm the Indians, give them provisions and ammuni-
tion, and send them after the emigrants” to “give them a brush” and
take their cattle.50 Haight asked Cedar City resident William Willis, a
Mexican War veteran, “the best way to make an attack on the train.”
Willis offered advice that now seems ordinary: The attack should
come when the emigrants were traveling. If the attack came while the
emigrants were in camp, he told Haight, “the emigrants would whip
his Indians.”51
Haight and other leaders thought they knew just the place for an
ambush. The California road went west from Cedar City along Leach’s
Cutoff to Pinto and then southwest through the Mountain Meadows.
A dozen miles farther south, the road descended “a very steep incline”
into a canyon created by the merging Magotsu Creek and Santa Clara

River.52 The road wound through groves of trees and below cliffs that
provided ideal hiding places for attackers.
Hans Hoth, traveling the Santa Clara River route in 1856, described
the “many Indians” living there. Hoth also wrote of its reputation
among non-Indians. “Several travelers have already been attacked,
murdered, plundered or crippled by the tribe that lives closest to the
trail,” he recorded nervously before descending into the canyon. Two
days later, as his company passed along the river, Paiutes armed with
guns, bows, and arrows swarmed his company, stripping the men of
their outer clothing and demanding gunpowder and blankets but not
killing anyone.53
Troubles on the road had started long before Mormon settlement
of the region. Traders and emigrants going to and from California
drove stock through the area, depleting fragile native food sources and
trampling or grazing Indian gardens and fields. Slavers captured Paiute
women and children for sale in New Mexico and California, and trav-
elers sometimes shot Paiute men. Santa Clara canyon provided Paiutes
who survived with terrain in which they could defend themselves from
depredations and at times, as Hoth learned, try to even the balance
with outsiders.54
Whites also recognized the canyon’s advantages as an ambush site.
In February 1857, California-bound John Tobin and three other horse-
men camping in the canyon came under fire as they slept. Tobin and two
santa clara narrows overview vista. John W. Telford, Courtesy LDS Church
History Library.

others were wounded. The next morning, the men saw “boot prints
and the tracks of eight shod horses.” Shortly before the attack, the
four men had parted company with “seven or eight” fellow-travelers,
among whom were two ex-convicts. Blame for the attack, however,
was soon laid on Mormons reacting to a circular letter from Brigham
Young. The letter instructed southern leaders to be on alert for the two
recently released convicts, who might attempt a horse or cattle raid.
Horse thieves and cattle rustlers often received summary justice on the
frontier, and Young’s circular expected that if a crime were committed,
there would not “be any prosecutions for false imprisonment or tale
bearers left for witnesses.”55
Though the ex-convicts committed no crimes as they went south,
one historian later suggested that when Dame got Young’s letter, he may
have overreacted. The writer concluded that either Dame or Haight
might have assigned others to attack the travelers, and they simply shot
the wrong men.56 Others who have studied the incident suggest the
victims may have been attacked by the seven or eight horsemen from
whom they had just splintered, including the ex-convicts.57
Whether he had a role in the Tobin shooting or not, Haight—with
his fellow leaders in Cedar City—clearly identified Santa Clara canyon
as the place to ambush the Arkansas company. To them, it offered
“opportun[itie]s for such an attack” that were “more evident” than
elsewhere.58 They planned to have Paiutes “follow the emigrant train”
along the Santa Clara River. Then, “at some opportune point on that
stream, while the company was strung out along the road, traveling,
the Indians should attack it, kill as many of the men as they could, and
get away with as much cattle and spoil as possible, but not to harm the
women and children.”59
For the plan to work, Haight had to convince Paiutes to participate.
He turned for help to the energetic John D. Lee, a fellow major in the
Iron Military District who was still serving as government-appointed
farmer to the Paiutes. Lee recalled a rider coming to Harmony with
a message that “Haight wanted me to be at Cedar City that evening
without fail.”60 Years later, Lee’s wife Rachel described her husband and
Haight as “bitter” enemies at the time.61 Contemporaneous evidence,
however, shows they were on good terms when Haight summoned Lee
to Cedar City that day.62
Haight’s experience told him he could depend on Lee. The year
before, the two were camped at Cove Creek in the mountains north of
Beaver when Haight’s horses disappeared. Haight, with his pleurisy-
scarred lungs, remained in camp alone while Lee braved deep snow

santa clara narrows. John W. Telford, Courtesy LDS Church History Library.
to hunt for them. All day and into the next, Haight waited. Then Lee
reappeared with the horses in tow. Somehow he had managed the two-
to six-foot drifts and difficult terrain to find the animals and rescue
Haight.63
As Lee traveled from Harmony to Cedar City, Haight sent several
riders west along the trail taken by the Arkansas company. They would
get ahead of the emigrants and set the attack plan in motion. Work-
ing through Higbee, Haight first asked Ellott Willden, Josiah Reeves,
and possibly Benjamin Arthur to go to Mountain Meadows, where the
emigrants were expected to camp eventually.64 The three young men
were told that the “plan was to . . . have the Indians ne[a]r to attack on
[the] Santa Clara, instead of the civil authorities arresting the offend-
ers in Cedar.”65 Part of the men’s assignment was “to find occasion or
something that would justify the Indians being let loose upon the emi-
grants.”66 They were also to get the company “to move on”—an effort
to hurry the emigrants into the trap.67
Someone carried an order to twenty-four-year-old Samuel Knight,
who lived at the north end of Mountain Meadows and helped work the
ranch. With Indian mission president Jacob Hamblin away, Knight,

as his counselor, was next in line. Knight was ordered to go south near
Washington and Santa Clara “and instruct the Indians to arm them-
selves and prepare to attack the emigrant train.” The attack was to
occur “at the junction of the Santa Clara and Magotsu.”68
The Paiutes, who generally lived in small groups spread across the
landscape, had never attacked nor killed on anywhere near the scale
that the Cedar City plan required. For the scheme to succeed they
would have to be convinced to participate and then gathered en masse
to the attack site.69
Besides Willden, Arthur, and Reeves, two more riders headed west
from Cedar City. One was Joel White, who served as captain of one
of Cedar’s militia companies. The other was Klingensmith, one of
the most ardent supporters of the plan to attack the train. White and
Klingensmith were on their way before twilight Friday evening.70
The two afterwards claimed their mission to Pinto was “to passify
the Indians there if possible and to let the emigrants pass.”71 According
to their story, they rode a couple of miles out of town, where they met
Lee, who was driving a wagon into Cedar City. “He asked us what the
calculation of the people was in regard to those emigrant people—in
regard to letting tham pass,” White recalled. They told Lee “the con-
clusion was . . . to have the Indians passified as much as possible to let
them pass.” The news seemed to annoy Lee. “I have something to say
in that matter and I will see to it,” he reportedly said.72 He then shook
the reins and resumed his journey toward Cedar City.
Lee denied the incident ever took place.73 He said White and
Klingensmith went “by way of Pinto, to raise the Indians in that
direction.”74 Lee was probably right. Klingensmith and White could
hardly have been going to pacify Indians who did not know of Cedar
City’s plans.
White and Klingensmith drove hard, traveling at night. They took
Leach’s Cutoff, working their way through the low mountains west
of Cedar City and onto the sloping, grassy area near Leach’s Spring.
In the darkness they passed the emigrants camped at the spring
“just off from the road”—the Arkansas company’s last overnight
stop before Mountain Meadows. A half dozen more miles brought
White and Klingensmith to Pinto.75 White claimed they awoke one
of the Indian missionaries, perhaps Richard Robinson, to give him
the sealed order.76 Robinson said he could not “remember such a
circumstance.”77
Soon White and Klingensmith were back on the road toward Cedar
City.78 Riding east on Saturday morning, September 5, they saw the

emigrants pulling up a hill a few miles east of Pinto. As they passed
the train, Klingensmith discreetly pointed out to White the “princi-
pal ones” in the company, particularly the man who “had made these
threats, that he had helped kill Joe Smith.”79 White had not seen the
emigrants before, being absent when the company passed through
Cedar City.80
Klingensmith said he and White met Cedar City high councilman
Ira Allen as they neared town. Allen purportedly told them a “decree had
passed” countermanding their efforts at peace. “He said that the doom
of the emigrants . . . was sealed, that the die was cast,” Klingensmith
claimed.81 But White testified he could not “recollect of meeting any
body on the road.” If such an incident had taken place, White main-
tained, he would have remembered it.82 Klingensmith’s stories of meet-
ing Lee when they left Cedar City and Allen when they returned may
have been a later effort to clear his name: his alibi was that he had gone
toward the Meadows to stop an attack, and the countermanding deci-
sion to destroy the emigrants was made while he was gone.
While Klingensmith and White were riding west on Friday night,
Lee arrived from Harmony and met Haight at the public square in
Cedar City shortly after nightfall. Haight said he wanted to have “a
philip klingensmith.
Courtesy Anna Jean Backus.

long talk on . . . private and particular business.” The two men retired
to Haight’s new, partially built, brick home near the iron works in New
Town.83 “We spent the night in an open house on some blankets,” Lee
said, “where we talked most all night.” Lee claimed Haight told him
terrible things about the emigrants, that they “were a rough and abu-
sive set of men” who “had insulted, outraged, and ravished many of
the Mormon women.” They had heaped abuses on the people “from
Provo to Cedar City” and had poisoned water along the road. “These
vile Gentiles” had “publicly proclaimed that they had the very pis-
tol” that killed Joseph Smith, and wanted “to kill Brigham Young and
all of the Apostles.” They had threatened “to return from California
with soldiers . . . and kill every d—d Mormon man, woman and child.”
Finally, they had broken Cedar City ordinances and resisted arrest “by
armed force.” Because Haight never left an account, there is no way of
knowing how much of the barrage was his—and how much later came
from Lee. But whatever complaints Haight made that night, Lee said
he “believed all that he said.”84
According to Lee, Haight thought that “unless something was done
to prevent it, the emigrants would carry out their threats.” The Cedar
City leaders had decided to provision Indians and send them to kill the
men of the company and take their cattle. But Lee told Haight that in
such a large-scale attack, others would die, too. “You know what the
Indians are,” Lee said he told Haight, reflecting a nineteenth-century
stereotype of Indians. “They will kill all the party, women and chil-
dren, as well as the men.”85
The Cedar City plan—which began as a harsh response to a
minor conflict—was morphing into a massacre of men, women, and
children.
“Perpetrators make many small and great decisions as they pro-
gress along the continuum of destruction,” Ervin Staub observed, and
“extreme destructiveness . . . is usually the last of many steps along [the]
continuum.” According to Staub, “There is usually a progression of
actions. Earlier, less harmful acts cause changes in individual perpetra-
tors, bystanders, and the whole group that make more harmful acts
possible. The victims are further devalued. The self-concept of the
perpetrators changes and allows them to inflict greater harm—for
‘justifiable’ reasons. Ultimately, there is a commitment to . . . mass
killing.”86
In the end, who got killed didn’t seem to matter to the planners,
so long as they could blame the casualties on Paiutes. “It was then
intended that the Indians should kill the emigrants,” Lee explained,

“and make it an Indian massacre, and not have any whites interfere with
them.” According to the plan, “no whites were to be known in the
matter, it was to be all done by the Indians, so that it could be laid to
them, if any questions were ever asked about it.”87 After the massacre,
the story of an attack solely by Indians would be told as a coverup again
and again, long after it had any kind of credibility.88
For Lee and Haight, their all-night meeting was full of fervor—
terrible and, in their minds at the time, necessary. Later, when emo-
tions cooled and the crime was apparent, a controversy began over
which of the men was most responsible for their decisions. Haight’s
friends blamed Lee. Lee had “seemed very determined that the com-
pany should be made to suffer severely for their impudence and lawless-
ness,” said Elias Morris, who claimed he saw Lee “counseling with Isaac
C. Haight.” Speaking of the emigrants, Lee had assured Haight “he
had Indians enough around him to wipe the whole of them out of exis-
tence.” Haight, “more moderate in his feelings,” had at last agreed.89
Lee had his own excuses. He claimed Haight forced him to obey
by placing him under orders, and that these had come from Dame,
the chief military officer in southern Utah. “I knew I had to obey or
die,” Lee said.90 But Dame had not ordered a militia attack, and Lee
probably knew it. Haight and Lee both held the rank of militia major,
though Haight, as major of the second battalion, was by law techni-
cally superior to Lee, major of the fourth.91 Haight, as stake president,
was also Lee’s church leader. But Lee was bold enough to challenge
Haight’s authority if he disagreed. Headstrong, black-and-white in
personality, and speaking his mind to a fault, Lee would have been the
first to object if he had felt Haight’s plans were wrong—and then dare
Haight to do something about it.92
The most likely scenario was that when the two men breakfasted at
Haight’s house on Saturday after their meeting, they were partners—
but with some differences.93 Lee, the religious zealot, wanted to play
a meaningful role in what he supposed to be God’s purpose. The emi-
grants “were enemies to us, & . . . this was the beginning of great and
important events,” he said shortly after the massacre.94 Haight was
caught up by the threat he perceived in the emigrants and wanted “to
put them out of the way before they done any more harm.”95 Both men
also felt the need to settle old scores with the “gentiles,” and the idea
of taking some cattle and other spoils could not have been too far from
the surface.96
In retrospect their motives made little sense, but the contin-
uum that leads to mass murder is not a rational process. Both men

were being swept by “powerful forces” into “greater acts of cruelty,
violence, . . . [and] oppression.”97 Both Haight and Lee were quick to
make judgments and to execute on those decisions—hallmarks of
extralegal justice and unchecked power. During the Walker War, Lee
had strapped on his sword, “called the people together,” and declared
that “by the help of god & the Faithful of my Brethren” he would, if
necessary, shed the blood of the “cursed wicked apostate fault find-
ing wretches” in their midst.98 More recently, Haight had told George
A. Smith that if troops threatened his community, he would not wait
for instruction, but “take his battalion and use them up before they
could get down through the kanyons.”99
Before the meeting ended, Lee said he asked Haight if it wouldn’t
“be well to hold a council of the brethren before making a move.”
Haight replied, “We can’t now delay for a council of the brethren.” He
would bring the matter before a council on Sunday; in the meantime,
Lee was to send Paiute interpreter Carl Shirts to gather Indians in
the south, and Haight would ask interpreter Nephi Johnson to do the
same in the north.100
Haight and Lee soon began to execute on the plan. On Saturday,
Mary Campbell, whose cabin was at the northwest corner of Old
Town, saw four men going to the cottonwoods west of Cedar City,
where members of the Coal Creek band of Paiutes often camped. The
four men were Haight, Lee, Higbee, and Klingensmith, who had just
returned from his overnight trip west. The men persuaded Paiutes
there “to follow up the emigrants and kill them all, and take their prop-
erty as the spoil of their enemies.” That evening, Paiute women visited
Old Town and told Campbell that Indian men had left the camp and
were on their way “to kill the ‘Mericates’ ” (Americans)—the Paiute
term for non-Mormons.101
The white leaders’ inciting of the generally peaceful Paiutes to par-
ticipate in the attack is one of the most disturbing aspects of the entire
story. The Southern Indian Mission had established close ties between
the settlers and the Paiutes, which in cases created a sense of trust,
and even dependence, that made them willing to comply. Wells’s let-
ter warning of possible U.S. troops in the area, which was received
in southern Utah about a fortnight earlier, had urged Mormon lead-
ers to tell the Indians of their peril—“that our enemies are also their
enemies.”102
One theory used to explain Paiute participation had to do with
a meeting that Brigham Young, Jacob Hamblin, and Dimick Hun-
tington held in Young’s Salt Lake City office during the evening of

September 1. Pahvant leader Kanosh from Corn Creek was present,
along with eleven other Indian leaders, including Ute leader Ammon
from Beaver and two leading Paiutes: Tutsegavits, a headman from
the Santa Clara and Virgin River region, and Youngwuds from the
Ash Creek area near Harmony.103 These men, along with Ammon’s
wife and Jacob Hamblin, had traveled to Salt Lake City when George
A. Smith returned from his southern Utah tour because they wanted
to “find out about the soldiers.”104
As part of his developing war policy, Young wanted Indian leaders to
ally themselves with the Saints against the approaching troops and pre-
pare for a long siege. The day before the meeting, Huntington had met
with Indians camped near Ogden north of Salt Lake. In the meeting,
he “gave them all the Beef cattle & horses that was on the Road to Cal
Afornia the North Rout,” telling them that “they must put them into
the mountains & not kill any thing as Long as they can help it but when
they do kill take the old ones & not kill the cows or young ones.”105
Running off cattle and saving them in the mountains would help
assure food for the Indians—and perhaps the white settlers—in the
event of an anticipated siege. Having horses to ride during the coming
war would also prove an advantage.
Similarly, in the September 1 meeting, the native leaders from cen-
tral and southern Utah were told, apparently by Young himself, that
they might take “all the cattle that had gone to Cal the southe rout.”106
Some historians have linked this meeting to the subsequent massacre
at Mountain Meadows. “The conflicts the Arkansas train encountered
on the trail mattered not at all in the final balance,” wrote Will Bagley,
because as the company “struggled southward, its fate was being sealed
in a meeting in Great Salt Lake City between the leaders of the southern
Paiute bands and the man they called ‘Big Um’—Brigham Young. . . .
After their meeting with the Mormon prophet on September 1, the
Paiute chiefs slept in Great Salt Lake City and left precipitously the
next morning.”107 Bagley concluded that when Young “ ‘gave’ the Pai-
ute chiefs the emigrants’ cattle on the southern road to California,” he
“encouraged his Indian allies to attack the Fancher party.”108
But neither chronology nor unfolding events confirm such a charge.
Young’s invitation for Indians to take cattle was a generalized war pol-
icy, not an order to massacre the Arkansas company. As the conflict
continued, Young directed members of the territorial militia to take
cattle and destroy supplies owned not only by the federal government
but also by its private contractors. Despite the wartime atmosphere,
this was done successfully with very few casualties.109

Haight and his associates were recruiting Paiutes before word of the
September 1 meeting reached southern Utah. In addition, the Indians
attending the September 1 meeting in Salt Lake were reluctant to take
part in the crisis. According to Huntington’s account, when the meeting
ended, the Indians declared themselves “afraid to fight the Americans &
so would raise grain & we [the Mormons] might fight.”110
The Indians did not rush south. United States government vouchers
recorded payment for entertaining “Kanosh & 14 of the band, Ammon
& wife, four days,” in Salt Lake City from September 1 through
September 4. The total number of Indians was identical to the number
in the Hamblin entourage and probably included the Paiutes Young-
wuds and Tutsegavits.111 Kanosh and three men of his band received hats
and shoes in Salt Lake City on September 2.112 Tutsegavits, in turn, was
ordained a Mormon elder in the city on September 13.113 According to
the Jacob Hamblin journal, “the Chiefs was treted with mutch respect
[They] was taken to the work Shops gardens orchards and other plases
to Sho them the advantages of industry and incourag . . . them to labor
for a living.”114 Before Tutsegavits left town, he and Hamblin stopped
for another visit with Brigham Young. Wilford Woodruff demonstrated
the advantages of horticulture by showing the Indian leader through
his garden. He gave him peaches to eat and peach pits to plant.115
Indian recruitment for the massacre was local, not influenced by the
September 1 meeting, and it built on trust that southern Utah lead-
ers had already developed with Paiutes. One Indian account told of
a mild protest. “I have not guns or powder enough,” said Moquetas,
one of the Paiute leaders, when asked to help with the attack. John
D. Lee promised him both. Moquetas next asked about plunder, and
Lee offered “clothing, all the guns and horses [of the emigrants], and
some of the cattle to eat.”116
Less than two weeks after the massacre, an Indian from northern
Utah reported meeting a large band of Paiutes who acknowledged
their role in the killings and said the Mormons had “persuaded them
into it.” According to their account, “John D. Lee came to their village
and told them that Americans were very bad people, and always made
a rule to kill Indians whenever they had a chance. He said, also, that
they had often killed the Mormons, who were friends to the Indians.
He then prevailed on them to attack the emigrants . . . and promised
them that if they were not strong enough to whip them, the Mormons
would help them.”117
Despite their promise to help, white leaders wanted to gather enough
Indians together so that white participation would be minimal. “My

orders were to go home to Harmony,” Lee remembered, “and see
Carl Shirts, my son-in-law, an Indian interpreter, and send him to the
Indians in the South, to notify them that the Mormons and Indians
were at war with the ‘Mericats’ . . . and bring all the Southern Indians
up and have them join with those from the North, so that their force
would be sufficient to make a successful attack on the emigrants.”118
While his son-in-law roused Indians in the south, Lee was to gather
Paiutes living around Harmony.
Lee said that on his way back to Harmony from Cedar City, he met
“a large band of Indians under Moquetas and Big Bill, two Cedar City
Chiefs,” probably the Paiutes that he, Haight, Higbee, and Klingen-
smith had recruited at the cottonwoods. “They were in their war paint,
and fully equipped for battle.” The Paiutes asked Lee “to go with them
and command their forces.”119 Despite Lee’s earlier promises to them,
they remained hesitant.
“I told them,” Lee recalled, “that I could not go with them that
evening, that I had orders from Haight, the big Captain, to send other
Indians on the war-path to help them kill the emigrants, and that
I must attend to that first.” Lee told them “to go on near where the emi-
grants were and camp until the other Indians joined them.” He would
then “meet them the next day and lead them.” The Paiutes wanted to
take with them Lee’s adopted Indian son, Lemuel or “Clem,” perhaps
as security that Lee would show up. “After some time I consented,”
Lee said.120
There would be no backing out now.

chapter eleven
A Fearful Responsibility
Cedar City and Southwest, September 5–7, 1857
U
naware of the Cedar City plans, the Arkansas emigrants
drove on to their next camp. Leaving Leach’s Spring on Sat-
urday morning, they continued along Leach’s Cutoff past
Pinto, through the scrub oak and cedar and below the sturdier tim-
ber of the highlands to emerge at the northern neck of the Moun-
tain Meadows. For centuries, Paiute bands had lived in and near the
Meadows, and just the year before, a county court had granted Jacob
Hamblin herding rights there “for the benefit of the Indians Stationed
on the Santa Clara.”1
The emigrant scouts on horseback reached Hamblin’s ranch at
the north end of the Meadows late Saturday morning or early in the
afternoon. The slower wagons with their lumbering teams pulled into
the valley a few hours later. Both were expected. David Tullis, who
worked at the ranch, remembered Mormon messengers Ellott Willden,
Benjamin Arthur, and Josiah Reeves arriving there shortly before the
emigrants with a warning of their “sauciness.”2 As ordered, the three
young men had come to watch the emigrants for reasons to justify the
planned Indian attack in Santa Clara canyon and to hurry them toward
the ambush site.3
Tullis, who was building a house and corral for the absent Hamblin,
eyed the emigrants cautiously but found them “respectable-looking”
mountain meadows camp and siege site. John W. Telford, Courtesy LDS Church
History Library.
despite Cedar City’s forebodings. “One of the men rode up to where

I was working, and asked if there was water ahead,” he remembered.
Tullis gave them the same answer Hamblin had at Corn Creek, point-
ing to the springs at the south end of the Meadows. Tullis had no com-
plaints about the emigrants, who he said treated him “civilly.”4
Hamblin’s wife, Rachel, also watched. She displayed reserve, also
wary because of the rumors. When the wagons drove past her home
without incident, she must have felt relieved.5 Her husband was still in
Salt Lake City and had left Samuel Knight in charge.6
Knight was caring for his Danish-born wife, Caroline, who had
given birth to a daughter a short time before. The delivery had not
gone well, and Caroline lay “nearly at the point of death.” To spare her
the heat of their home in Santa Clara, Samuel had recently moved his
family to the Meadows, where their temporary dwelling was a wagon
box. Samuel’s life had not been easy. His mother, Sally, one of Joseph
Smith’s earliest and staunchest converts, died in childbirth during the
Missouri troubles; after the Saints’ expulsion from Nauvoo, Samuel’s
father, Newel, made it only to the winter camp in present-day Nebraska

before he too died. Samuel struggled to Utah in 1847, just fourteen
years old.7
Samuel and Caroline were at Hamblin’s when the emigrants
approached. The men who visited the ranch asked Samuel where they
could pasture their animals and rest “for a few days before starting out
on the deserts to the west.” Just as Tullis had, Samuel “directed them
to the south end of the valley where grass and water were abundant.”
Knight’s job was to care for the cattle, and like Hamblin, he wanted
the emigrant cattle away from the Mormon herds ranging the foothills
near the ranch.8
“I saw the train encamp at [a] spring from a high point of land where
I was cutting wood,” remembered Albert Hamblin, a Shoshone in his
mid-teens whom the Hamblins had taken into their family several years
earlier.9 Normally the practice of emigrants was to park their wagons
in a rough circle and cluster themselves inside in family groups.10 But
at the Meadows the members of the Arkansas company camped with
their wagons only loosely grouped—evidence that they felt no danger.
They pitched tents near the wagons and probably herded their cattle
into a grassy draw just over a small ridge northwest of their camp.11
They posted herdsmen at strategic points to look after the graz-
ing stock, concerned more about wolves and other animal predators
than about human raiders. By now the emigrants had passed through
the last Utah settlement on the trail, and the Mormons were far less
numerous. The Paiutes seemed no threat. Besides, the undulating
plain, sweet grass, and gurgling spring had a beguiling peace.12 With
milk cows and prized horses staked nearby and the loose cattle lowing
in the distance, the emigrants settled down for the night.
The bucolic scene continued the next morning, Sunday, September
6, with men managing livestock, women and children gathering fire-
wood and filling pails from the spring, and fires dotting the campsite.
Tradition suggests that after breakfast, the people gathered under a
large tent to commemorate the Lord’s day, guided by a “white haired,
old, Methodist pastor” and perhaps other clergymen in the group. If
the tradition is true, the clergy may have been lay ministers, for no
known members of the group were men of the cloth.13 That morning
one of the emigrants visited Rachel Hamblin to see if he could buy
butter and cheese. “I had none,” she said, “and he stayed but a short
time, saying his people had camped at the spring, where they would
stay awhile to recruit their stock.”14
Doing reconnaissance duty, Ellott Willden and another man visited
the emigrants twice. When John Higbee sent them to the Meadows
A Fearful Responsibility 151

to find something to justify an Indian attack, he also instructed them
to tell the emigrants “to move on, on the pretense that the Mead-
ows belonged to them.” When Willden and his companion visited the
camp, the emigrants “acted civil,” saying they were on their way to
“Lower California, but that some of them might return if they did
not like the country.”15 They also planned “to send some of their men
back” to hunt for cattle they had lost while camped at Quichapa Lake.
Other men from their train had already gone southeast of the Meadows
“into the mountains toward Pine Valley to make tar . . . to grease their
wagons, as wagon grease could not be obtained in the settlements.”
The emigrants said that when all their men returned, “the company
expected to continue the journey to California.”16
After talking with the emigrants, the two Mormons returned to
Hamblin’s ranch and helped Tullis make adobe bricks. Later that
morning, William Aden and another emigrant “rode up to the ranch
and watered their horses.” They told the men at Hamblin’s that they
were headed back along the trail to hunt for lost cattle. Soon they
headed back east through Leach’s Cutoff toward Quichapa.17
Sometime during the emigrants’ stay at the Meadows, Amos Thorn-
ton of Pinto also paid a visit to their campground, accompanied by
two other Mormons.18 Thornton may have wanted to see for himself
if the emigrants were really as threatening as the Cedar City leaders
represented.
Confident in their strength or unaware that their hour in Cedar City
had lasting repercussions, the emigrants had no reason to believe they
were in danger. But side by side with the emigrants’ feelings of security
were the deadly plans of Cedar City’s leaders, which were going for-
ward at several places. At the Meadows, Samuel Knight was an unwill-
ing tool. Before noon on Sunday he went south from the Meadows with
orders from “the authorities in Cedar City” to rouse the Paiutes on the
Santa Clara and Virgin Rivers. Knight’s instructions were to have them
“arm themselves and prepare to attack the emigrant train . . . at the junc-
tion of the Santa Clara and Magotsu” in Santa Clara canyon.19
Knight did not welcome the assignment. He did not want to leave
his bedridden wife and their newborn daughter, and more importantly
he was aware of the gravity of the message—and the responsibility
he assumed by carrying it. But it was “an order that could not be dis-
obeyed without imperiling [my] own life,” he later tried to explain.
Knight could not remember whether his orders came from Cedar
City’s military or religious leaders, but Isaac Haight wore both hats,
and the two were often indistinguishable.20

Meanwhile at Harmony, John D. Lee was a whirlwind of activity.
Returning from Cedar City on Saturday evening, he sent messages
to local Paiutes to gather at the fort. He also held a Saturday night
meeting at his woodpile with men of the settlement, including Lee’s
future brother-in-law, Gilbert Morse. “The subject under discussion
was the extermination of the emigrant train,” Morse recalled, and “the
best way to get at them.” When Morse protested the attack, Lee told
him to leave the group, threatening that “if he did not carry himself
straight, he would get his tail cut off just below the ears.”21
Lee got enough of the other men to agree with the Cedar City
plan that he felt confident speaking about it at a general meeting the
next day—Sunday, September 6—his forty-fifth birthday. The meet-
ing took place in lieu of worship services, which normally began at
10:00 a.m. Lee stood at the speaker’s stand, full of outrage, conduct-
ing a war rally. Gentiles had driven the Saints from Nauvoo, caus-
ing some to perish, he reminded his audience. Now, he said, gentile
emigrants had stirred trouble in Cedar City, including at Haight’s
home, threatening an attack not only on the leaders but also “every
other damn Mormon in the country.” Faced with this danger, Lee
said Haight and Dame “thought it was best to put them out of the
way.”22 Haight had either lied to Lee about Dame’s approval, or
Lee was using the district commander’s name to gain support for
the plan.
Lee asked his listeners to show agreement by raising their hands.
Harmony was off the main road, and, like those in Parowan, its citizens
did not have the same strong feelings as leaders at Cedar City. But Lee
had said Haight and Dame were behind the plan, and, in the end, the
decision for many may have come down to what they thought their
leaders wanted. “So of course they lifted up their hands as that was
law,” remembered Annie Elizabeth Hoag. The supporting vote car-
ried by a large majority, though some like Hoag hesitated. She started
to vote her opposition but dropped her hand. Only two or three in
the congregation opposed Lee; probably Annie’s then-husband, Peter
Shirts, and one of the Shirts sons.23
Later that day Lee made an attempt at flourish. He “fixed up as
much like a military officer as he could with the clothes he had,” tying
“a red sash around his waist.” Then with “a sword in his right hand,”
he “marched around the inside of the Fort . . . at the head of about 40 or
50 Indians,” said John Chatterley, visiting from Cedar City.24 Another
witness put the number of Paiutes at seventy-five.25 During the swagger
Lee asked those present to express their support for “success to Israel,”

and two or three responded with lukewarm “amens.” A second try
brought a little more enthusiasm.26
The Indians who marched around the fort included a group from
Cedar City. Sometime Sunday morning, more than a dozen of them
arrived to escort Lee on the expedition. An Indian known as Comanche
had second thoughts about the “program of slaughter” but was per-
suaded to rejoin the ranks.27 At least one important Harmony Indian
did not go. Youngwuds, a leading headmen of the Ash Creek bands,
had left Harmony two weeks earlier to visit Salt Lake City and was still
at the Mormon headquarters.28
From Harmony, “Bro. J. D. Lee went on an expedition South,” said
the cryptic and partially incomplete historical record of the commu-
nity.29 The Santa Clara narrows—southwest of Harmony—remained
his final destination. After soliciting ten days’ provisions from the peo-
ple at Harmony and asking them to pray aloud in their families three
times daily for his success, “Lee, at the head of the Indians with Carlos
Schurz [Carl Shirts] as his interpreter, set out on the expedition against
the emigrants.”30 The group left the fort about noon on Sunday.31
Shirts, Lee’s new son-in-law, headed south to gather more Indians
near Washington and lead them up Santa Clara canyon from the
south.32 Lee and his entourage took a route that would arch north-
west to Leach’s Cutoff, pass through Pinto, and then sweep southwest
through the Mountain Meadows and into Santa Clara canyon from
the north. Lee’s party stopped three miles above Pinto to eat roasted
potatoes from a patch grown by some of the Indian missionaries. The
potato patch was a rendezvous point for the gathering Paiutes and not
far from Mountain Meadows and the unsuspecting emigrants.33
Another drama played out at Carl Shirts’s destination, the small set-
tlement of Washington, about thirty miles below Harmony. A few days
before, Washington’s citizens may have heard about the train from
James Pearce and Joseph Adair, men coming down from Utah County
who passed it on their way.34 If Washington resident William Young
was at Lee’s woodpile meeting on Saturday night as later reported, he
may have brought news of the Haight-Lee plan. William Young and
Shirts probably arrived in Washington late Sunday or early Monday—
though perhaps not together. Shirts went to work recruiting Paiutes.
“The Indians about Washington became very excited running to and
fro,” Young testified, without hinting at who stirred them up.35
“John D. Lee and other officials was having their interpreters sti[r] up
the Indians to commit hostilities on this camp of emigrants,” said John
Hawley, the Mormon who had traveled with the Arkansas company

for three days before reaching his home in Washington. Hawley knew
of the Dutchman’s taunts and the trouble between settlers and emi-
grants over grazing land in Provo and Nephi. But he thought the men
in Washington were overreacting.36
No instructions had come for them to mobilize; the plan at that
point was still to have the Paiutes do the dirty work. But some of the
whites decided to go along anyway. “When the Indians had become
very excited . . . We come to the conclusion at last that we would call
upon our military,” said William Young, laying the blame to the Indians.
A group of Washington militiamen—less than one-fourth of their total
number—took their guns and headed toward Santa Clara canyon.37
While the plan was unfolding everywhere else, it began to unravel
in Cedar City. At 4:00 p.m. on Sundays, after the regular worship ser-
vice, the local leaders sometimes convened a council meeting to discuss
and coordinate policy. At the September 6 meeting, Haight sought the
council’s support for the plan to attack the emigrant train as he had ear-
lier promised Lee to do. The meeting included members of the Cedar
City stake presidency—Haight and his two counselors, John Higbee
and Elias Morris; the Cedar City bishopric—Klingensmith and his
counselors, James Whitaker Sr. and Morris’s father, John; and members
of the stake high council. Other leading citizens were also present.38
One member of the high council, Laban Morrill, was a resident
of Fort Johnson, a half dozen miles north of Cedar City. He was a
blacksmith—a six-foot, 200-pound block of a man with a rugged
and determined manner to match. “His fine head, strong, yet kindly
features and dignified bearing marked him as an altogether superior
man,” said an admirer.39 But he had an irritating pattern of speech, that
of constantly repeating phrases in staccato fashion.40 Morrill entered
the meeting late and immediately sensed “confusion” and some “little
excitement.”41
When Morrill asked “what was up,” he heard the Cedar City con-
cerns. “I was told there was an emigrant train that had passed down
along to near Mountain Meadows, and that they made their threats in
regard to us as a people—signifying they would stay there and destroy
every damn Mormon,” Morrill said. The leaders took the threat seri-
ously because they believed “there was an army coming on the south
and one on the north,” and were debating “what method we ought to
take in regard to preserving the lives of the citizens.”42
Elias Morris recalled that “the more radical members present,
suggested harsh measures,” though he claimed none favored “any
wholesale killing.” Klingensmith later acknowledged that some in the

meeting advocated killing, though he did not put himself among them.
Morrill remembered, however, that Klingensmith, Haight, “and one
or two” others thought it best to destroy the emigrants. “Some had
heard the statement that they had helped to kill Old Joe Smith out of
this emigrant train and [it] made a little excitement.”43
Morrill was stunned by what he heard. “Do not our principles
of right teach us to return good for evil and do good to those who
despitefully use us?” he later remembered countering. “To fall upon
them and destroy them was the work of savage monsters rather than
that of civilized beings of our own enlightened time.”44
Morrill wanted to know “by what authority” Haight and the others
were planning such drastic measures. Had something come from Col.
Dame? If so, Morrill demanded to see the documents. In response,
Haight and his supporters had to admit they were acting on their own.
Nothing had come from Parowan, they said.45 The full truth went
further: Dame had actually told Haight to let the emigrants alone.46
Still more damning, Haight did not tell the council about Lee and the
forces that were already gathering near the Meadows. At least no one
present recorded such an admission.
Morrill said others joined his opposition, although he did not list
them by name.47 Years later, Elias Morris and Klingensmith claimed
they spoke against the plan, though their claims lack credibility.48
Both Morris and Klingensmith had been with Haight and Lee in the
early stages of the planning, and their subsequent behavior showed
they were not opposed to killing.49 Morrill said Klingensmith was “the
hardest man I had to contend with.”50 At one point during the heated
discussion, according to Klingensmith, Haight “jumped up and broke
up the meeting and went out doors.”51
The debate continued until Morrill finally got the men to agree
“that all should keep still [and] quiet and that there should be a dispatch
to Governor Young to know what would be the best course.” Brigham
Young’s views far outweighed anyone else’s in the territory, and con-
sulting him was one way to bring the badly divided men together. The
motion, however, may have been more than an attempt at consensus.
Morrill and others likely believed that Young’s answer would end the
matter quickly and stop the local conspiracy.52
Who in pioneer Utah could oppose such a motion? The vote was
unanimous, but Morrill took pains to have Haight assure him he would
send the dispatch the next morning.53 Utah did not yet have a tele-
graph system, and an express dispatch from Cedar to Salt Lake City
and back would require a week of hard riding.54

Morrill saw two of Haight’s supporters, William Stewart and Daniel
Macfarlane, leave the meeting early, a move that roused his suspicions.
When it came time to go home, Morrill thought Macfarlane and
Stewart—good men in normal times—were waiting to “waylay” him.
He gave his horses “the reins” and hurried back to Fort Johnson by an
alternate route.55
Morrill returned home safely “feeling that all was well.”56 He had
stood up to the extremists and prevailed. The Sunday afternoon meet-
ing had worked the way the Mormon system of councils was intended.
There had been a thorough discussion that checked extremism.
At some point during or after the meeting, Haight decided to send
messengers to Lee. Later that evening, Stewart and Joel White headed
west toward Pinto, where Lee was supposed to be rendezvousing with
Indians. Macfarlane, who served as White’s adjutant, had probably been
excused from the meeting to tell White to prepare for his mission.57
No one ever explained why Haight sent the two men. If he wanted
the attack to go forward in spite of the council’s objections, he may have
sent Stewart and White to spur Lee on. More likely, given the council’s
decision to seek Brigham Young’s advice, he hoped to back Lee off.
There seemed to be enough time to call off the planned attack in
Santa Clara canyon. As far as Haight knew, the emigrants might spend
days resting themselves and their cattle at the Meadows, even though
he had sent Willden and his companions to prod them on. When the
slow-moving cattle company did begin to leave, the journey to the
Santa Clara narrows would require two more days of travel.
But Haight also knew Lee. Something lingered in Lee’s personality
that warned against giving him too much power or trusting his deci-
sions. “Lee was an aspiring Glory Seeking man, who ran before he was
sent,” Higbee later complained, trying to explain what happened.58
Whatever the reason, sometime Sunday evening Lee decided to
make an attack at Mountain Meadows instead of Santa Clara canyon.
According to Ellott Willden, the change in plans took place at the
potato patch near Pinto where Lee and the Paiutes intended to camp
that night. One of the Paiute “chiefs” dozed off “while the corn and
potatoes were roasting for the evening meal,” said one later account. In
his sleep, he “dreamed that his double-hands were filled with blood.”
The Indian leader purportedly regarded “this as a favorable omen, and
rousing his braves,” they began “the hot and furious march for the
emigrant camp . . . the untasted supper being left in the embers.”59 Plac-
ing the blame on the Paiutes, Willden said that “Lee could not hold
the Indians back.”60

Or perhaps he urged them on. According to one source, it was “Lee
who interpreted the ‘double handful of blood’ as a victory for the red-
men . . . that they would secure the blood of the emigrants.” This state-
ment fit Lee’s belief that he himself was an interpreter of dreams, a
modern-day Joseph of Egypt. If Lee had wanted to restrain the Indians
he could have sought help at nearby Pinto or Hamblin’s ranch.61
The notion that bloodthirsty “savages” were primarily to blame for
the attack on the emigrants, forcing white settlers to participate, would
become a persistent part of massacre lore.62 No one was more active in
promoting it than Lee, whose manufactured stories put him anywhere
but at the Meadows when the first attack took place.63 The truth was
that Paiutes would not have attacked the company unless local settlers
had stirred them up. And at the final and decisive moment, Lee led
them—and any white men who may have participated.64
The impromptu plan that emerged Sunday night and early Monday
morning required surprise—“to attack the emigrant party before day-
light when they would be in the most profound slumber, and to massacre
them before they could awake and arm themselves.”65 Before daybreak,
which was about 5:30 a.m., the attackers, their faces painted, moved into
place. The position most dangerous to the emigrants was the gully south-
east of the emigrant camp. This ravine drained the Meadows’ southern
spring, forming the headwaters of Magotsu Creek. By creeping through
the gully, the assailants could be within twenty-five yards of the main
camp, near enough to rush the emigrants and kill them at close range.66
But things went wrong from the beginning. Instead of immediately
rushing the sleeping emigrants, the Paiutes waited for daylight, which
gave the emigrants a chance to start campfires for breakfast. Their
dogs, sensing strangers nearby, “got to barking.”67
Lee planned to take out the emigrant herdsmen, “not wishing to
appear, if possible to avoid it, at the slaughter of the main party.” But
this plan, too, faltered—if an account recorded years later had any
truth to it. According to its narrative, when Lee came across a sleep-
ing emigrant and tried to shoot him, “the cap burst without exploding
the pistol.” The man woke and Lee chased him toward the main party,
shooting him “just as he stooped to go” into one of the tents.68 Claim-
ing he was not really present that morning, Lee later told a reporter
that “one fool Indian off on the hill fired his gun, and spoilt the whole
plan.” The gunshot shattered any hope of surprise, and the Paiutes,
according to Lee, “fired and killed” several of the emigrants.69
At first the surprised emigrants made easy targets. Lee claimed
seven of them died, and another sixteen had wounds, although Indians

put the total number of dead and wounded at fifteen.70 Despite the
heavy casualties, the Ozark pioneers quickly regrouped and soon
were firing back. One child who survived the massacre remembered
the “distinct picture” of his twenty-six-year-old aunt, Eloah Angeline
Tackitt Jones, fighting along “with the men . . . using the gun of one of
the fallen emigrants.”71
Most of the Paiutes were stationed in the ravine and at some point
made a confused rush toward the wagons, only to be repulsed by emi-
grant gunfire that killed one Paiute and wounded two others. The
wounded men, according to Lee, were “two of the chiefs from Cedar,”
Moquetas and Bill, who were “shot through the legs, breaking a leg
for each of them.”72 Martha Elizabeth Baker, another child survivor,
was just five years old at the time. She remembered that after the main
assault failed, “the Indians . . . retreated to the brush-covered hillside
and sought safety behind the huge rocks there.” From these positions,
“a desultory fire pelted our camp.”73 The emigrants fired upon the
Indians “every time they showed themselves,” said one report, their
bullets nicking the stones where the attackers lay concealed.74
Four miles north, the people at the ranch house heard the firing,
which Rachel Hamblin said went on for half an hour.75 “The boys
at Hamblin’s wer astonished,” Ellott Willden said of himself and his
companions. “The attack on Monday was not . . . a part of the plan.” As
soon as it was light enough to see, Willden and two of the others rode
south to learn what had happened. They traveled just far enough to see
“Indians running to and fro, . . . the emigrants’ cattle running about and
several head of stock lying dead.” Thinking it dangerous to go farther,
they retreated to the ranch.76 Most Mormon accounts insisted that Lee
was the only white man involved in the attack, though it was to their
advantage to insist on this version of events.77
By the time Willden and the others got back, two Cedar City mili-
tia leaders had arrived at the ranch house—William Stewart and Joel
White, the two men Haight sent out Sunday evening. If they had
planned to call off Lee, they were too late. Someone at the ranch told
them several emigrant men were outside the Meadows searching for
stray cattle and making pine tar. Stewart asked to borrow Willden’s
pistols, saying he would “fix” the two emigrants who had gone back
to Quichapa for cattle. If the emigrants returned to camp and saw
what was happening, they might ride off to report the attack and
get help.78
Stewart and White backtracked toward Cedar City and eventually
found their quarry. The two emigrants were on horseback returning

to camp and had paused to let their mounts drink from Little Pinto
Creek near Leach’s Spring. Stewart and White approached the unsus-
pecting men and struck up a conversation. The Mormons learned that
one of the emigrants was William Aden, the other the much-talked-of
“Dutchman.” Seeing a tin cup attached to the back of Aden’s saddle,
Stewart asked to borrow it to get himself a drink. When Aden turned to
reach for it, Stewart “shot him through the head, killing him instantly.”
The Dutchman “put spurs to his horse and fled,” dodging the bullets
fired after him, one of which apparently wounded him. The men at
Hamblin’s ranch saw him speed past. So did the besieging Indians, who
tried unsuccessfully to bring him down before he entered the corrall.79
After the initial attack that morning, the emigrants had circled their
wagons, easing the wheels into quickly dug pits so the wagon beds
were flush with the ground. For added security they chained the wheels
together and filled the gaps with dirt. Inside their makeshift fort, they
dug a semicircular ditch, twenty feet long and four or five feet deep.
Here, most of the emigrants huddled like cordwood.80
The wagon corral was only slightly less congested—about a hun-
dred feet across. Within this space, the emigrants had to bury bodies,
leach’s spring. John W. Telford, Courtesy LDS Church History Library.

nurse the wounded, and comfort terrified infants and children. More
than 120 men, women, and children survived the initial onslaught, and
as the siege wore on, these had to cope with the necessities of eating,
sleeping, and sanitation. There were other problems. Ammunition was
running low.81 Just as critical was the lack of water. The Meadows’ rip-
pling springs and brook mocked just out of safe reach.82
While the emigrants fortified their corral, Lee and the Paiutes took
charge of the spoils, although some of the cattle scattered and ran.83
Other cattle were killed by the Paiutes for food or as debt-payment
for dead or wounded comrades. Still others would be taken by Paiutes
who left for home.84
Soon after Monday’s initial attack and the start of the siege, Lee
knew he was in trouble. The plan to wipe out the emigrants in one
quick assault failed, and the Paiutes were angry because of the casual-
ties they suffered and the failure to achieve the easy victory they had
been promised.85 Lee himself had a close call. According to one report,
he was on a knoll near the emigrants’ camp when they opened fire
on him. One bullet passed through his hat, another through his left
sleeve. During the next several days and later in his life, Lee told the
story of his narrow escape many times and with various details, almost
always denying his role in the first attack. Once he said he had been
grazed just above his belt, “cutting through my clothes to the skin
some six inches across.”86
Lee realized he needed reinforcements. On Monday morning, he
sent one Indian runner to Zadok Judd, the acting bishop of Santa Clara,
explaining “that Indians had surround[ed] [the] emigran[t] camp, and
help was wanted.”87 After waiting some time for a response, Lee grew
desperate. The Paiutes were becoming unsettled, and there seemed no
way to end the siege without more men. Lee finally set out to get the
needed reinforcements himself, promising the Indians he would “go
and bring other friends to their aid.”88
Lee had nearly reached the junction of the Santa Clara River and
Magotsu Creek when he heard someone coming and hid himself in the
brush. It proved to be Samuel Knight, returning from his mission to
alert Paiutes downstream, along with Dudley Leavitt, his fellow coun-
selor to Jacob Hamblin in the Southern Indian Mission presidency.89
Lee was “disappointed at not seeing Indians with K[night] & L[eavitt],
for he had expec[t]ed [a] force with which to renew the attack the next
morning.”90
Lee caught Knight and Leavitt up on the news: the attack, the
siege, and the bullet holes in his clothing, which he saw as tokens of

his courage and God’s protection. Lee also had a request. He wanted
Knight and Leavitt to ambush the emigrants who had gone to Pine
Valley to make pine tar. “If any killing was to be done,” Leavitt replied
tartly, it had to be done “fair and square.” Lee backed down. Neither
Knight nor Leavitt liked what was going on, and after their conversa-
tion with Lee they continued to Hamblin’s ranch, which for Knight
meant reunion with his wife and daughter.91
Lee continued south until he met Shirts, the men who were coming
up from Washington, and about 150 Indians. For Lee, the dozen or
so Washington men were a welcome surprise—no orders from Cedar
City had requested them. Seeing them together with the Indian force,
he now felt resupplied. “The whites camped there that night with me,”
Lee claimed, “but most of the Indians rushed on to their friends at the
camp on the Meadows.”92
Meanwhile on Monday morning in Cedar City, Haight was trying
to manage his own difficulties. Sunday’s council meeting had rejected
his plan to attack the emigrants and instead required an express rider be
sent to Brigham Young. Around noon, Haight learned more upsetting
news, probably from an Indian runner arriving from the Meadows.93
For the first time, he became aware of Lee’s failed attack, and with this
information, the Cedar City leader understood that everything had
changed. He now had to explain and manage a situation that was rap-
idly getting out of control. How much should Brigham Young be told?
And how should the situation at the Meadows be resolved?
Each of these two questions required an express rider, one for Salt
Lake City and another for the Meadows. Finding riders would not
be easy; it was harvest time, and the trips would be grueling. By mid-
morning, Klingensmith had asked Joseph Clewes, a twenty-five-year-
old stone mason, who grimaced. Klingensmith tried to be reassuring.
“Do not be afraid, it is a good cause you are going to ride in,” he said.
He told Clewes to get a horse and meet Haight at the iron company
store at noon.94 Although Klingensmith did not reveal Clewes’s des-
tination, at the time it was probably Salt Lake City as news from the
Meadows had not yet reached town.
After that news arrived, Cedar City leaders also recruited James
Haslam, a thirty-one-year-old carpenter and plasterer who served as
a musician in the militia.95 Haslam was “a big, husky fellow”—not the
usual profile for an express rider but willing and available.96 Within
fifteen minutes of agreeing to go, Haslam was home, in his rid-
ing clothes, and back at the iron company store waiting for his dis-
patch.97 By the middle or late afternoon, the two riders received their

assignments. Haslam was asked to carry Haight’s letter to Young—a
letter that was later lost or destroyed, though several people remem-
bered its contents. The emigrants had been acting “verry mean,” the
letter reportedly said, and it rehearsed their threats. The letter also
claimed the emigrants had gotten into trouble with Paiutes, who had
surrounded them and forced them “to seek shelter behind their wag-
ons.” Finally, it sought counsel from Young on “what they must do
with the Americans,” suggesting that Haight had heard about Young’s
changed Indian policy and was uncertain about it. Haslam read the
letter, which he later summarized as saying, “The Indians had got the
emigrants corralled at the Mountain Meadows, and Lee wanted to
know what should be done.” Carefully folding and putting the let-
ter away, Haslam “put spurs to his horse” and galloped north toward
Parowan, the first stop on his long ride to Salt Lake City.98
Express riders seeking Young’s advice were not uncommon in
pioneer Utah. But Haslam’s ride probably had few parallels. He was
given one hundred hours—about four days—to make the roughly five-
hundred-mile round trip.99 Later, his ride was so highly celebrated
that it became chronicled by exact riding times and the settlements
passed through.100 At Parowan, the startled Dame gave Haslam a let-
ter telling up-road bishops and militia commanders to furnish “horses
and supplies, to forward [this] Express [without delay] to Gov or Prest
Young.”101
Within five minutes after Haslam galloped out of Cedar City,
Clewes received his dispatch telling Lee to back off, with instructions
to take it to Pinto and “get there as quick as I could.” His only weapon
was “an old rusty horse pistol,” borrowed from a friend. To Clewes,
it looked as if it had not been used in twenty years. Clewes hurried
west across the valley. At the mouth of Leach’s Canyon, he met Stew-
art and White, who were returning to Cedar City after killing Aden.
They asked Clewes where he was going, and he told them of the mes-
sage he carried from Haight. “Your letter is of no use,” they frowned.
“Lee with the Indians jumped on the emigrant camp this morning and
got a lot of Indians wounded.” After a moment’s reflection, however,
they changed their minds. “No, go on,” one of them said, thinking of
Haight. “I cannot interfere with his orders.”102
Seeing Clewes’s rusty pistol, they traded with him. “Here,” one of
them said, “give me that old pistol and take these,” handing Clewes the
pistols Stewart borrowed from Willden that morning—the weapons
used in Aden’s murder. He probably asked Clewes to return the pistols
to Willden, Clewes’s brother-in-law, still at Hamblin’s ranch.103

When Clewes arrived at Pinto, he handed Haight’s dispatch to
Amos Thornton and then, looking over Thornton’s shoulder, got a
glimpse of its contents. “Take this dispatch to John D. Lee as quick as
you can get it to him,” said one sentence. Clewes also remembered the
main message: “Major John D. Lee: You will use your best endeavors
to keep the Indians off the emigrants and protect them from harm
until further orders.” Thornton later showed the message to the pre-
siding militia and religious leader at Pinto, Richard S. Robinson, who
remembered about the same. “Word had been sent to Salt Lake City,”
Robinson said, “and Lee was to draw the Indians off and satisfy them
with beef if necessary but not to kill the emigrants.”104
While Clewes was reaching Pinto, Stewart and White returned to
Cedar City with their news, and none of it was good. They must have
reported more details on the failed attack at the Meadows, as well as
the killing of Aden and the escape of the Dutchman, who could testify
that white men—not just Indians—were killing emigrants. What if the
people of California learned these facts? And how could Haight explain
to his own people that his assurances during the Sunday night council
meeting meant nothing? When Haight sent Haslam to Salt Lake City,
his letter had omitted key details—a first effort at cover-up. The same
impulse would lead to still greater crimes in the coming four days.105
Sometime on Monday, Haight sent for Nephi Johnson at Johnson
Springs, a few miles north of Cedar City. The twenty-three-year-old
Johnson had learned the Paiute language while a teenager, and perhaps
no Mormon understood or spoke it better. Johnson had a further asset:
the Paiutes trusted him. Such credentials, Haight knew, were invalu-
able. But he also knew that the neighboring Johnson and Morrill fami-
lies were so closely connected that Johnson might share Laban Morrill’s
opposition to the anti-emigrant activity. Haight’s message to Johnson
was suitably vague and probably misleading: “Prest Haight Wanted me
to Come to Cedar to talk with the Indians as the Squaws Were Stealing
Wheat Out of the Field,” Johnson later said of the express.106
When Johnson arrived in Cedar City, Haight rehearsed recent
developments. He told Johnson of his overnight meeting at his home
near the iron works, though he put most of the responsibility on Lee.
“Lee had proposed to Him to gather up the Indians And Distroy the
train of emigrants,” Johnson remembered Haight saying. Haight
had merely “consented to it.” Haight also told Johnson he had sent
a message to Brigham Young, but he now seemed reluctant to wait
for Young’s reply and hinted of quick action. Johnson responded, “It
Would Be a Fearful Responsibility for a Man to take upon Himself

to Distroy that train of Emigrants . . . I Would Wait until I Rec[eived]
word from President Young.” Johnson did not know that the emi-
grants had already been attacked, and Haight did not disabuse him. To
delay matters, Johnson suggested putting off any action until the Santa
Clara narrows. “I was in Hopes He Would put off the Distruction of
the Train until He Rec[eived] Word from President Young,” Johnson
explained, “for I was satisfied What His Answer Would Be.”107
By this time, Haight must have realized that Johnson was in
Morrill’s camp and, for the moment, told him to go home. But it would
not be the last time he would call upon the young man.108

chapter twelve
Finish His Dirty Job

Parowan to Mountain Meadows,
September 7–10, 1857
J ames Haslam’s ride north through Parowan late Monday after-

noon brought Dame word that the emigrants had gotten into a
difficulty with Indians at Mountain Meadows. Whether Dame
believed the message or read between the lines is unclear.1 But he heard
enough to summon a council for advice that evening. The Parowan
men “decided to render aid and protection to the emigrants, should
they call for assistance,” remembered one of the council participants.
“Otherwise it was considered just, in view of the threats and insults the
company had offered to the Saints in passing through the settlements,
to let them fight it out with the Indians as best they could.”2
The council’s decision reflected rumors circulating about the
emigrants. It may also have reflected its members’ understanding of
Brigham Young’s Indian policy, announced August 16, that Mormons
not jump into disputes between emigrants and Indians. In any case,
Dame knew of the need for an Indian alliance in the coming war. Salt
Lake City headquarters had made that point emphatically with the
southern commander.3
At two o’clock Tuesday morning, September 8, an Indian runner
reached Parowan with new details. “The Indians had attacked the emi-
grant company at Mountain Meadows” and had killed two or three of
its members, said the runner, who had come to recruit Paiutes around
Parowan. The news, of course, was of Monday’s attack, but the reported
killings and plea for reinforcements made the situation more serious.
Dame told local Paiutes not to go but wanted more information about
exactly what was happening at the Meadows.4
He called on one of his counselors, twenty-three-year-old Jesse
N. Smith, to get answers. An express rider found Smith harvesting
wheat on his farm at Paragonah, four-and-a-half miles north. Smith
hurried to Parowan, where Dame told him to go “to Cedar City and
ascertain the truth about the matter.” Smith traveled with Edward
Dalton, a Parowan man with a well-deserved reputation for modera-
tion and good judgment.5
When the pair reached Cedar City on Tuesday, Haight waved them
off. When they asked about the reported attack at Mountain Mead-
ows, he told them, vaguely, that he too “had heard the same rumor”
but offered nothing more.6 In fact, Haight knew of the attack, and even
the killing of Aden, but was unwilling to share this information with
Dame’s emissaries.7 Haight also held back that he had just sent a group
of men to the Meadows under Higbee’s command, including Stewart,
White, Klingensmith, high councilman Charles Hopkins, and former
British army officer William Tait.8
Lee later said these men came to the Meadows “merely to see how
things were.”9 Haight needed more details about the situation at Moun-
tain Meadows, but the men he dispatched on Tuesday were on more
than just a reconnaissance mission. From what Stewart and White
must have told him when they reached Cedar the night before, Haight
knew that at least a few emigrant men were outside the besieged corral.
Unless something was done to stop them, they might spread word of
the attack to other California-bound companies.
Some fourteen miles west of Cedar, Higbee’s westbound group met
Joseph Clewes, the courier Haight had sent to the Meadows the day
before. After delivering Haight’s message to Amos Thornton, Clewes
had spent the night at Hamblin’s ranch and started for home Tuesday
morning. When they met, however, Higbee ordered Clewes to turn
around and go with him; he might need the courier. “I had to obey,”
Clewes said. “There was no other alternative.” It would be the great
regret of his life.10
Higbee and his party continued west along Leach’s Cutoff toward
the Meadows. After nightfall in the cedars near Leach’s Spring, some—
if not all—of the men dispatched that day from Cedar City “met two
other men coming from the emigrant camp and going to Cedar to
Finish His Dirty Job 167

obtain help,” Ellott Willden later learned. Thinking the Cedar men
would be their saviors, the two emigrants excitedly told them that
Indians had surrounded their “camp on the previous Monday, that
the camp was still surrounded by the savages, and that they had been
sent to obtain help from the settlements.” In response to the plea for
aid, some of the Cedar men “immediately commenced firing,” killing
the two emigrants. Willden said Klingensmith was one of the killers.
The Cedar City men then went on to Hamblin’s ranch to spend the
night.11
If Clewes witnessed the killings, they must have left him badly
shaken. When he delivered Haight’s message to Pinto the day before,
he had “felt relieved,” believing it would put an end to the violence.12
He could not have been more wrong.
Besides sending Higbee’s group west on Tuesday, Haight sent out
at least one other man. Isaac Riddle was an Indian missionary who
lived in Pine Valley, where a few emigrants had gone to make pine tar
before Monday’s attack. Riddle was at the Cedar City mill on Tues-
day “to get a grist of flour.” As he later put it, Haight approached
him and said “that there was a fuss in the country” where Riddle lived
and that he should go home and attend to his “affairs.” Riddle left his
wagon, wife, and grist in Cedar and “shucked out for home.” He over-
took Higbee and the others on the trail, and rode with them as far as
Pinto before turning south toward Pine Valley.13 The record is silent
on what Riddle’s “affairs” were—and what part Higbee’s men may have
played—but nothing more was ever heard of the pine tar gatherers.14
Hours before Riddle and Higbee’s men left Cedar City, more vio-
lence had erupted at the besieged emigrant camp four miles south of
Hamblin’s. As Lee and the Washington men traveled north from their
camp in Santa Clara canyon to the Meadows on Tuesday morning,
they “met a small band of Indians returning with some eighteen or
twenty head of cattle.” The Paiutes were upset. One had been shot in
the shoulder and appeared to have broken ribs. “He had no shirt on”
and was “bleading very bad,” reported William Young.15
Arriving at the Meadows, Lee said he “found about two hundred
Indians . . . in a high state of excitement,” including the “two wounded
chiefs, Moqueetus and Bill,” from Cedar City. The Paiutes, their num-
bers strengthened Monday night by Indian reinforcements from the
south, had “attacked the emigrants again, about sunrise . . . Tuesday, and
had one of their number killed and several wounded.”16 One Paiute
leader from the Santa Clara—Jackson—said “that a brother of his was
killed by a shot from the corral at a distance of two hundred yards, as

he was running across the meadow.”17 Things were not going as Lee
had promised when he lured the Paiutes to the Meadows and, not sur-
prisingly, they were upset.18
The Paiutes had killed dozens of cattle and wanted to kill more,
either out of anger or just to collect their promised reward. Lee, Carl
Shirts, and Indian missionary Oscar Hamblin “succeeded in getting
the Indians to desist from killing any more stock that night.”19 Lee had
his own designs on the emigrants’ livestock and would eventually get
control over most of the herd as farmer to the Indians.20
One of Lee’s sons later said that his father “traded the Indians
out of some very fine work horses which the Indians did not prefer
because of their weight, and an excellent race horse.”21 The racehorse
may have been Tillman Cameron’s “One-Eye Blaze.”22 Interpreter
Nephi Johnson gave a slightly different story. During the week of the
massacre, some Paiutes told Johnson that Lee had promised them “all
the horses, and now Lee had sent some of the best to Harmony, and
they were going to kill Lee if he did not return them.”23
That was not all that bothered the Paiutes. After Tuesday morn-
ing’s attack Lee received Haight’s message via Thornton “to keep the
Indians off the emigrants and protect them from harm until further
orders.”24 Following Haight’s direction, Lee at first reversed his earlier
course and with his companions from the south told the Paiutes to
hold off on further attacks. But the white men’s vacillation may have
seemed nonsensical—if not two-faced—to the Paiutes, and “the attack
was renewed that night by the Indians, in spite of all we could do to
prevent it,” Lee said.25
In an account that seemed to borrow from his close call on Mon-
day, Lee later claimed he was miraculously spared again as he and
two other white men ran toward the Indians to stop Tuesday night’s
attack. “The bullets came around us like a shower of hail,” Lee said.
While others “threw themselves flat on the ground to protect them-
selves from the bullets I stood erect and asked my Father in Heaven
to protect me from the missiles of death and enable me to reach the
Indians. One ball passed through my hat and the hair of my head, and
another through my shirt, grazing my arm near the shoulder. . . . The
cries and shrieks of the women and children so overcame me that I
forgot my danger and rushed through the fire to the Indians.”26 That
was Lee’s later version of events.
The Indians saw it differently. Paiutes told Nephi Johnson
about “three different attacks, in the third of which”—on Tues-
day evening—“Lee led the attack in person, and received one bullet

through his hat, and one on each side of his body through his shirt,
but his skin was not broke.”27 In one of the earliest records of the
massacre, Paiutes reported that Lee “prevailed on them to attack the
emigrants,” which they did, being “repulsed on three different occa-
sions.”28 Lee’s earliest accounts align more closely with the Paiute
version. Just days after the massacre, Lee said he was forced to lead
Tuesday night’s attack “to save his life,” because the Paiutes “was very
mad” at him “for getting them into the scrape” and “wanted him to
help to use up that company.”29 The Paiutes said “they was not going
to do the dirty work alone,” reminding him that “he had taken them
there.”30
Whatever the case, Lee said he broke down in tears and begged the
Paiutes to desist, evoking their contempt.31 That, Lee claimed, was
the origin of his Paiute nickname “Yauguts,” or “crying man,” which
he would never lose. Tears flowed freely for him throughout his life—
both before and after the massacre.32
Some of the Santa Clara Paiutes threatened to kill Lee and his com-
panions, calling Lee “a squaw” who “did not have the heart of a brave.”
According to Lee’s account, Jacob Hamblin’s brother stepped in to res-
cue him. “I owe my life on that occasion to Oscar Hamblin, who was a
missionary with the Indians. . . . Hamblin shamed them and called them
dogs and wolves for wanting to shed the blood of their father (myself ),
who had fed and clothed them.”33 James Mangum, an interpreter from
Washington, said it was Lee’s adopted Paiute son, Lemuel, who saved
them. “Had it not been for an Indian boy that John D. Lee raised, the
Indians would have killed John D. Lee, Oscar Hamblin and myself,”
he said.34 Whatever Lemuel said to spare the men’s lives apparently
cost him his trust with those Paiutes. The next day an Indian runner
would plead with Nephi Johnson to come interpret for them at the
Meadows because “they were tired of Lees Indian Boy Interpeter [as]
He Lied to Them so Much.”35
According to Lee, he and the interpreters were finally able to con-
vince the Paiutes at the Meadows “to suspend hostilities” on Tuesday
evening and return to their camp, promising they “would hold a coun-
cil” and “send for big Captains to come and talk.” They said Dame
and Haight might come and “give them part of the cattle and let the
company go.” They told the Paiutes “they had punished the emigrants
enough, and may be they had killed nearly all of them.”36
The Tuesday night incident gave Lee the excuse he would use the
rest of his life. Denying he participated in the first attack on Mon-
day, Lee would claim he did not arrive at the Meadows until Tuesday,

when he did everything in his power to save the emigrants from angry
Indians. It was a self-serving story built on half-truths and a persistent
effort to make the Paiutes responsible for what Lee and the Cedar City
leaders started.
Before anyone from Higbee’s party reached them, Lee and the men
at the south end of the Meadows “held a council and decided to send
a messenger to Haight.” Lee later claimed a tenderhearted reluctance.
“Tell Haight, for my sake, for the people’s sake, for God’s sake, send
me help to protect and save these emigrants, and pacify the Indians.”
The message, without its later varnish, recommended the offensive
be called off for good and asked for “further instructions.” The cou-
rier was probably George Adair, whose regular work included carrying
mail between Washington and Parowan.37
When the massacre was over, firebrands like Lee said they tried to
stop things, and at this point it appears Lee really did.38 But crime has
its own momentum. Once begun, its perpetrators find it hard to draw
back, if only to hide what has already taken place.
At noon on Wednesday, with nothing to do but await Haight’s deci-
sion, Lee slipped across the valley toward the ridge northwest of the
corral to reconnoiter. On his way, he said, “the company recognized
me as a white man and sent two little boys about 4 years old to meet
me.” Lee quickly hid himself and the boys turned back, but the emi-
grants persisted in their attempts at communication, hoisting “a white
flag in the middle of their corral.”39
From the ridge, Lee could easily see the emigrants’ chained wagons
and the pit they had dug inside. “The only show for the Indians was to
starve them out, or shoot them as they went for water,” he later said, as
though the Paiutes were solely responsible for what was happening.40
The best the emigrants could do was to wait for someone to rescue
them—or for their attackers to grow weary and leave. Trapped inside
their wagon fort, the survivors had little or no kindling for cooking,
no fresh water, and no milk for the children. A rumor later reached
Cedar City that when one emigrant woman slipped from the fort to
milk a cow, a sharpshooter killed her.41 Though the concerted attacks
had stopped, fitful “shooting between the emigrants and Indians was
continually going on.”42
From his hidden perch northwest of the corral, Lee may have
noticed a commotion east of him on the low-lying hill that concealed
the Indian camp. Paiutes were crowded “pretty thick” around two
white men, “pull[ing] and push[ing]” them to the top of the ridge. The
two were Ellott Willden and Joseph Clewes.43

Wednesday morning at Hamblin’s ranch, Higbee had sent the two
brothers-in-law to the south end of the Meadows “to find out how the
Indians were acting and how many there were.” Obediently, Willden
and Clewes found the Indian camp, which was concealed between “two
low ridges” northeast of the emigrant corral. They saw Paiutes “lying
around on every side,” wounded among them. The Indians were still
upset with Lee. They had not seen him all day and resented that he
“had left them with their dead and wounded,” Willden said.44
At one point—perhaps after getting bullet holes in his clothing—
Lee had told the Paiutes “that the bullets of the emigrants would not
hurt the ‘Mormons’ the same as the Indians.” Seeing Willden and
Clewes, the Paiutes decided to test Lee’s claim. They “demanded that
Willden and Clewes should put on Indian attire and run unarmed past
the emigrant camp within easy range of their rifles, to a neighbor-
ing point about a hundred yards distant.” It may have been the same
route Jackson’s brother took when he was shot. The two white men
concluded they would have to “take their chances” in doing what the
Indians demanded “or risk being killed by them. So they ran, amid a
shower of bullets from the emigrant camp and reached the opposite
point in safety.” The men then returned to the Paiute camp, where
they “were heartily cheered for their bravery after their perilous run.”45
Soon, said Clewes, “we were hailed from a ridge on our left; we looked
around and there stood John D. Lee.”46
Lee told the Indians to return to their camp—“pacif[ying] their
feelings by making explanations to them”—then sat down to talk with
Clewes and Willden. “Willden asked Lee if he had received the express
taken out by Clewes and Thornton,” the one in which Haight told
Lee to back off. Lee said he had, but that “it was too late, the break on
the Indian camp having already been made.” Willden chided Lee for
angering the Paiutes, nearly costing him and Clewes their lives as they
were forced to run through emigrant gunfire. Lee told the young men
they “were getting some valuable experience, and besides it was no
worse for them than for him.” He then showed them the bullet holes
in his clothing.47
After their talk, Lee “went over the ridge,” and Willden and Clewes
met up again with Higbee and his men.48 Higbee looked the situation
over and later used it to advantage in trying to blame the massacre on
Paiutes. Higbee’s account bristled with danger. It was “bedlam or hell,”
he said of what he found Wednesday at the Meadows. Dead horses
and cattle were scattered about, a scene from the “Infernal regions,” as
“deamon like as Could be imagined.” Higbee inflated the number of

Indians to between three and six hundred, calling them “blood thirsty
and crazy” savages “determined . . . to accomplish the destruction of the
Company if they had to fight all the Mormons in the Southern Coun-
try.” The Paiutes were in war paint, he recalled, as were a couple of
unnamed white men in disguise—Willden and Clewes. “Lee was try-
ing to Pasify [the Indians] and have them Scatter and go away and let
the Emigrants go,” Higbee wrote.49
Although Higbee exaggerated the pandemonium at the Meadows,
there was debate in the Mormon ranks about what to do. Young James
Pearce from Washington remembered the emotions. Some of the
leaders “talked as though they [the emigrants] must be put out of the
way,” Pearce later testified. Others said “it never would do.”50
The leaders from Cedar City on the field met to decide “what
Should be done,” and their decision was far-reaching. The Haight-
Lee plan had been designed to be an Indian and not formally a militia
affair. Now, “after a good deal of deliberation,” the Cedar men agreed
that calling out the militia under Col. Dame’s orders to assist was the
only way to end the standoff quickly. Higbee, Klingensmith, and Hop-
kins returned to Cedar City to report to Haight.51
Now there was nothing for the men who remained at the Meadows
to do but wait. Some of them spoke of the humdrum routine, seemingly
oblivious to the suffering of the corralled emigrants. The Mormon
settlers and Indians “were engaged in broiling beef and making their
hides up into lassoes,” Lee recalled. Other men shot at targets. Joel
White said he slept and lounged after his arrival. Pearce described a
diet heavy in meat that led White and some others to Hamblin’s ranch
for buttermilk and salt.52 Three Cedar City men killed time pitching
quoits near Hamblin’s house.53
With the lull, some Paiutes took their spoil of cattle and left, though
many remained. Pearce remembered Indians “pow-wowing around,”
mixing with the whites.54 White recalled a “good many Indians” mill-
ing around the Mormon wagons and resting in the brush and shade.
He thought “they were friendly.”55 Like the Mormon settlers, many of
the Paiutes were reluctant to get too close to the wagon fort. “The emi-
grants had long guns and were good shots,” they said.56 At night, the
valley was quiet, except for “the Indians whooping and yelling—maybe
hollering around,” racket perhaps aimed at keeping the emigrants on
edge. “Nothing more than that,” White said.57
Higbee arrived at Cedar City by Wednesday evening and con-
sulted with Haight. The situation had become more tangled than any-
one imagined at the outset. People had been murdered and survivors

would talk. The emigrants had seen Lee and recognized him as a white
man in spite of any disguise he might have worn. Even if they hadn’t,
the man who witnessed Aden’s murder and returned to the wagon
corral “of course would give the alarm in camp.”58 If the emigrants
were allowed to go on to California, Cedar City residents would pay
a price. And where would it stop? With anti-Mormon feeling already
running strong in the country and an army marching on the territory,
the lives of the entire community might be at risk.
The Cedar City leaders believed they had to do something to bring
events to a conclusion—fast.59 It was emigration season, and they knew
more travelers on the California road were bound to reach southern
Utah and the Mountain Meadows soon. They had also been told that
U.S. soldiers might enter the region at any moment. James Haslam
was expected to return eventually with Brigham Young’s response, but
could the matter wait that long? And although Haight had convinced
himself he was acting in behalf of the Saints, what if Young disagreed?
Events were coming to a head, and the conspirators saw just two
chilling options. They could lift the siege and let the emigrants carry
word of the attack to California, which they feared would unleash
aggression on the southern Mormon settlements. Or they could leave
no emigrants alive who were old enough to “tell tales.”60 The Paiutes
could not kill the remaining emigrants on their own, and the mili-
tia could not be ordered to commit such an act without the consent of
their commanding officer, Dame.
Late Wednesday evening Haight left for Parowan in a light wagon,
taking his counselor Elias Morris with him. “His face and countenance
indicated that something weighed heavily on his mind, and he desired
to go and talk with Col. Dame, his superior in military command,”
Morris later said circumspectly.61 In truth Morris knew what was going
on. The two men had to get Dame to give the order that would bring
the Mountain Meadows matter to what they thought was its inexorable
conclusion.
Haight must have also been worrying about Smith and Dalton, the
men Dame sent to investigate the Indian report of an attack at the
Meadows. Unable to get the information they needed from Haight in
Cedar on Tuesday, the two men had gone to Pinto, where they learned
that the “emigrants were undoubtedly attacked.” Smith said he and
Dalton were advised to go no farther because Mountain Meadows “was
filled with Indians.” The two men returned to Cedar City on Wednes-
day and, after resting from their hard riding, took off for home.62 By
the time Haight and Morris reached Parowan, Dame would know

that Cedar City leaders had blatantly disobeyed his directive to let the
emigrants pass unharmed.
But Smith and Dalton’s report was not Dame’s only headache on
Wednesday. Dame had been busy that day trying to calm another emi-
grant crisis. According to Turner company member Peyton Welch, the
Pahvants were upset when his group of emigrants reached Corn Creek
several days before. Perhaps the “poisoning” was beginning to take its
toll in the area: anthrax spores would have had enough time by then to
start doing damage. Or perhaps members of Turner’s company were
responsible, after all, for reported insults and threats in the Fillmore
area, and Fillmore bishop Lewis Brunson had made good on his prom-
ise “to set the Indians” on them. If so, like Haight at Cedar, Brunson
may have taken advantage of what he saw as Young’s new Indian policy.
At stake were the safety of “twenty-three wagons, 450 head of loose
cattle, and 107 men, women and children.”63
Tuesday evening, Philo T. Farnsworth, Beaver’s bishop and militia
captain, learned from a local Indian that Pahvants were preparing
to attack the Turner company near Beaver. Farnsworth sprang into
action, first visiting Dukes’s party, which had pushed ahead to a camp
just below Beaver earlier in the day, leaving Turner about six miles
back at Indian Creek.64
Farnsworth urged Dukes to turn back to help protect Turner’s
group, but he refused. Members of his company “were so demoral-
ized he could do nothing with them,” he said.65 Farnsworth offered to
detach some of his own men to rescue the Turner company if Dukes
would do likewise, and Dukes finally agreed. By the time the combined
rescue party got to Indian Creek, Pahvants had tried to run off the
emigrants’ cattle, and Turner’s men had shot an Indian.66
As the rescuers escorted Turner’s group south to the Dukes camp,
the Pahvants kept firing on the company’s cattle—they could then use
the abandoned carcasses for food.67 Turner’s men wanted to return
fire, but the Mormon rescuers stopped them, positioning themselves
between the two groups. “From this,” one of the emigrants com-
plained, “we became more apprehensive of the [Mormons] than of
the Indians.”68 Their position in the middle epitomized the Mormons’
dilemma. In rescuing Turner and his men, they pleased neither the
distrustful emigrants nor the Pahvants whose friendship they needed
in the coming war. Young’s new Indian policy had warned about avoid-
ing just such a situation.
Soon the Turner company was camped with the Dukes party just
outside of Beaver, but the fighting was not over—and the Mormons

at Beaver remained in the middle. When emigrant leaders Turner,
Dukes, and Wilson Collins visited the town Wednesday morning, an
Indian named Sissix shot Turner, hitting him “just above the hip.”69
Collins ran for the safety of the blacksmith shop, only to be pushed
back into the open by an occupant who either had no sympathy for
the outsider or felt threatened by the sudden intrusion. Collins then
sustained a serious gunshot wound to the arm, while Dukes, also in
the open, was “grazed by two or three bullets.”70 Farnsworth, who
was eating breakfast when the shooting began, ran out into the street
between the emigrants and the Indians, telling Sissix to get out of
town.71
Farnsworth quickly sent word of the attack to Col. Dame at Parowan,
thirty-five miles south, and Turner, Dukes, and Collins returned to
their combined train. Soon they had “corralled their wagons and made
rifle pits and were in self defense,” their cattle scattered on the plains—
a scene eerily similar to the one at the Meadows.72
Farnsworth’s express reached Parowan as Dame was meeting with
Mormon freighters Sidney Tanner and William Mathews. Traveling
with them since Beaver was George Powers’s three-wagon company.
Powers had been traveling with the Dukes party but was hopping
wagon trains, hoping to catch up with his fellow Arkansans in the
Fancher company.73
The Tanner-Mathews train had already passed through Parowan,
but Dame had sent an express after it, requesting the train “not . . . pro-
ceed any further that day” and that Tanner, Mathews, and Powers come
back and meet with him. When the three spoke with Dame in Parowan
on Wednesday, the southern commander talked of the Tuesday morn-
ing message about an Indian attack at the Meadows and advised Pow-
ers to return to the Dukes company further north. Though he made
no mention of it, Dame had sent Smith and Dalton to investigate what
was going on at the Meadows, and if Mormons were involved in the
attack, he didn’t want any California-bound outsiders stumbling into
the situation.74
“I asked him” said Powers of Dame, “if he could not raise a company,
and go out and relieve the besieged train. He replied, that he could go
out and take them away in safety, but he dared not, he dared not dis-
obey counsel.75 Dame was unwilling to oppose the Monday night deci-
sion of the Parowan council, which had voted to help the emigrants
“should they call for assistance.” Otherwise, given the “threats and
insults the company had offered to the Saints,” they would simply “let
them fight it out with the Indians as best they could.”76

Before Tanner, Mathews, Powers, and Dame could finish their con-
versation, Farnsworth’s express came in, requesting help and “stating
that the Indians had attacked my train in the streets of that place,” said
Powers. Dame hastily convened another council of leaders to discuss
this latest crisis. The council did not change its policy on the situation
at the Meadows—Smith and Dalton had not yet returned from their
fact-finding mission. But it responded to Farnsworth’s express by send-
ing ten militiamen north “to assist in the protection of the emigrants
and settlers in Beaver from the hostility of the Indians.” They arrived
at Beaver “very late in the night.”77
The crisis at Beaver was soon peacefully resolved. The influential
Ute leader Ammon, who attended the important Indian meeting in
Brigham Young’s office on September 1, had returned to the area late
Wednesday afternoon. Ammon told the Pahvants “they must not touch
another man.” He and Farnsworth went together to the emigrants’
corral and “assured them they should not be molested.”78
Ammon’s good offices came at a price. He wanted the emigrants to
give up “six head of cattle” and a horse they had received in trade with
the Indians. The emigrants complied.79 Ammon was well positioned
to work a deal. He had influence not only with his camp at Beaver but
also with the Pahvants. He “had great control over the Indians,” said
Farnsworth.80
After the council meeting at Parowan, Dame met again with Pow-
ers, Tanner, and Mathews and reversed his earlier advice that Powers
return to the Dukes company. Because of the attack on Powers’s for-
mer train, he could continue on with Tanner and Mathews—but only
under certain conditions. When “passing through the Indian country,”
Powers reported, “it might be necessary for me to be laid flat in the
wagon and covered with blankets, for two or three days, as the Indians
were deadly hostile to all Americans.” Powers agreed to the terms.81
Late Wednesday, Smith and Dalton reached Parowan, where they
“expressed much disgust over what they had seen and learned, as John
D. Lee and other white men were assuming a very hostile attitude
toward the emigrants in connection with the Indians.” In addition,
Smith and Dalton probably reported Haight’s stonewalling. The Pinto
missionaries would have told them of the couriers coming and going
from Cedar City.82
Dame finally retired to his home on Wednesday night, but his long
day was not over. Just before midnight, Haight and Morris knocked
on his door. For the second time in several hours, Dame convened a
council. Calvin Pendleton and Jesse Smith, Dame’s two counselors,

were present, as were Parowan resident William Barton and other
“leading men in the settlement.”83
“The subject discussed,” read Morris’s carefully phrased account,
“was concerning the Arkansas company, who had been attacked by
Indians at Mountain Meadows”—nothing about the role of Haight
and Lee, which must have been the quiet subtext for everything said.
Morris’s words hardly hinted at the crosscurrents present.84 The meet-
ing was the first between Haight and Dame since the crisis began, and
everything smacked of insubordination. If the point needed to be made,
Smith, just back from Pinto, was in the room and could make it.
Although the Monday night Parowan council had decided to let
the emigrants handle the Indian troubles on their own, based on what
its members had since learned, the council now reversed its decision.
“A propos[i]tion made by Pendleton was adopted,” said Barton, “to
the effect, that a company should be sent out from Parowan . . . to call
the Indians off, gather up the stock for the company, and let them con-
tinue their journey in peace.”85
Haight later admitted to Barton, “I would give a world if I had it, if
we had abided by the deci[s]ion of the council.” Instead, Haight asked
Dame for a private session immediately after the meeting. If he could
get the district commander on his own, away from his council, Haight
knew Dame might relent. The two men, along with Morris, walked to
a pile of tanning bark lying near Dame’s barn by Parowan’s east gate.
Barton, who attended the just-ended council, watched from a distance.
He could not hear the words, but he later learned their significance. It
was “right there and then” that the “whole programme and plan was
changed,” Barton said.86
What would become known as the “tan bark council” lasted about
half an hour. While Dame and Haight later argued bitterly about
what was agreed upon, the gist of their talk was more certain. Haight
probably shared with Dame details he was unwilling to mention at
the earlier council: the emigrants’ recognition of Lee as a white man,
the wounded man making it into the corral after witnessing Stewart’s
murder of Aden, perhaps even the killing of the two emigrant mes-
sengers who asked for help. Mostly the conversation was about cov-
ering up the white men’s role in the killing in order to protect their
people from what they feared would be harsh retribution. Haight also
implied that most of the fighting was over, sharing Lee’s assertion that
the Indians had killed nearly all the emigrants.87
Dame must have shared some new information of his own. The
Missouri company—Turner, Dukes, and Collins—was at Beaver and

would soon be heading south. Sidney Tanner and William Mathews’s
freighters, traveling with Powers’s small train of outsiders, were even
nearer the Meadows, waiting at Summit south of Parowan. How long
would it be before any of these California-bound parties reached the
Meadows and discovered the truth?88
“It seemed to become necessary to kill all [the Arkansas emigrants]
to silence the rest,” Ellott Willden summed it up. “Hence the tan Bark
Council and other councils.”89 In a rare account of his meeting with
Haight, Dame later told Jacob Hamblin that the final decision was
about consequences. “L[ee] & the Indians had commenced it and it
had to be done,” he said. “For if it should come to the ears of Presi-
dent Bucanann, it would endanger the lives of the Bretheren.”90 When
their talk ended early Thursday morning, Haight, anxious for a reso-
lution, took what he wanted from the discussion. Whether he really
believed it or was just protecting himself, he told his stepson, Daniel
Macfarlane, that Dame gave him “the final order to destroy the entire
company.”91
Later on Thursday, Dame left for Beaver to see if the problems there
were resolved, only to learn along the way that the Missouri company
crisis had been settled. Because of Ammon’s and Farnsworth’s media-
tion and the arrival of the Parowan militia, the emigrants at Beaver were
out of immediate danger and ready to move on.92 “Had J. D. Lee taken
this course,” Farnsworth later wrote, laying the blame to only one con-
spirator, “the Mountain Meadows Massacre would never have been.”93
Haight, meanwhile, reached Cedar City early Thursday morning
feeling he had authority to call out the militia and move ahead with
the killing, not waiting for Haslam to return with Young’s reply.94 He
would make the most of his agreement with Dame. “Returning to
Cedar City Haight called the brethren of that place together,” said
Macfarlane.95
Several of the men who mustered at Cedar later claimed they were
called to the Meadows to “burry the dead.” They did “not know that
they must first make the dead,” Haight said privately.96 Yet only a
fraction of the men took shovels or spades with them, and most took
guns.97 When private John Bradshaw, a thirty-eight-year-old English
brick maker, showed up at the mustering grounds with just a spade,
Haight wanted to know why he was not carrying a gun. Where was
his ammunition? “I told him I didn’t know that it required a gun to
bury dead people,” Bradshaw replied. “He . . . called me a fool; told me
I didn’t know anything about it, didn’t understand things.” Haight dis-
missed Bradshaw, sending him home.98

Many of the men who went to the Meadows were militia officers or
had attended Sunday’s council in which the emigrants’ destruction was
proposed. Most likely these men saw the euphemisms and untruths
for what they were and only later claimed to be unaware of their true
meaning. In crime, the first casualty is often truth.
Nephi Johnson certainly knew what was going on. Haight still
needed Johnson and his Paiute language skills. After Haight sent
Johnson home on Monday, the young interpreter hoped to avoid
getting involved. When an Indian came asking for his help inter-
preting at the Meadows on Wednesday, Johnson refused. “I Did Not
Want Anything to Do with killing the Emigrants,” he said, “for I was
Determined in my Own Mind that I would Keep Away from them.”
But on Thursday Haight gave him no choice. Two express riders
arrived at Johnson’s home with written orders, telling him Haight
required him to go to Cedar City whether he “wanted to or Not.”99
During Johnson’s second meeting with Haight, he was told the
recent details. Haight said Lee had gone to the Meadows to kill the
emigrants. There had been three attacks, but “the emigrants were
better fighters than . . . expected,” and some Indians had been killed
or wounded. Haight said “the indians were getting tired of the job”
and threatened Lee, and “Lee had suggested letting the emigrants
go.” Now Haight wanted the situation to come to an end. Haight told
Johnson that he “had sent word for [Lee] to finish his dirty job, as he
had started it.” Johnson was to help him. He wanted the Indian inter-
preter to go to the Meadows with the militia to help end the siege.100
Both men understood what that meant.
The situation in which Johnson found himself became a common
theme after the massacre. One man after another said he had gone
to the Meadows because of military orders—they had been coerced.
For some it was probably true; but it was also true that many men did
not go, giving rise to a healthy store of folklore—proud families tell-
ing stories of how their ancestors refused to participate in the crime.
“Old Joseph Walker . . . when told to go to the Meadows, put his fist in
Haights face and told him to go to hell and do his own dirty work,”
said one account.101 Another man claimed that his stepbrothers “hid in
the furrows of a potato patch until the Cedar party went on.”102 Peter
Nelson reportedly concealed himself in a bin of grain and escaped
the soldiers’ detection by breathing through a straw.103 Yet another
man supposedly dodged service by claiming to be ill, first lying in a
pile of hot bricks to simulate a fever.104 Legend had it that the men
who refused to go felt that the emigrants “had gone on”—they were

old history—“and that their threats about returning with an armed
force was all wind.”105 While there may have been some conscien-
tious objectors, the operation did not require most of the militia to
go. All told, less than one-fifth of Cedar City’s militiamen went to the
Meadows.106
The men mustered out on Thursday left for their grim task at the
Meadows around midday, led by Major Higbee.107 At 2:00 that after-
noon, leaders of the Cedar City Female Benevolent Society held their
regular meeting. “Sister Haight” reported she had been visiting some
of the Cedar women and “taught them the necessity of being obedi-
ent to their husbands” and not to be fearful in these “troublesome”
and “squally times.” “We ought to attend to secret prayer in behalf of
our husbands, sons, fathers, & brothers,” she said. She instructed the
women to teach their children “the principles of righteousness, and to
implant a desire in their hearts to avenge the blood of the Prophets.”
Additionally, “Sister Hopkins” and “Sister White,” whose husbands
had gone to the Meadows on Tuesday, said they had advised the women
they visited “to attend strictly to secret prayer in behalf of the brethren
that are out acting in our defence.”108
As the women held their meeting and the militiamen set their sights
on the Meadows, James Haslam was barreling south through the Salt
Lake Valley, carrying Brigham Young’s response to Haight. The last
three days since he left Cedar City had been grueling. After passing
north through Beaver on Monday night, Haslam faced delay in Fill-
more. Bishop Brunson was off hunting, and Haslam had to wait hours
for him to return, only to receive a horse that did not make it far.
Returning to Fillmore for a better horse, Haslam pushed on to Payson
and the home of Charles Hancock, the local bishop. Could he sleep
on the porch? Haslam asked. “I made a bed for him and he fell asleep
quick,” Hancock remembered. A short hour later, Hancock got some
cold water to wake and brace him, and after downing coffee and “vitu-
als,” the express rider was once again on his way. Hancock had a fresh
horse saddled and waiting by the gate.109
At Provo and American Fork, Haslam again found fresh mounts.
Traveling through the night, the exhausted rider finally arrived in Salt
Lake City about noon on Thursday. He had ridden hard but calcu-
lated that a third of his sixty-hour trip had been spent getting horses.110
Despite the letter he carried from Dame asking bishops and militia
commanders to furnish him horses, some were not eager to lend their
best animals to a hard-riding expressman.111

james h. haslam. Thomas
and Odell, Courtesy LDS Church
History Library.
In Salt Lake City, Haslam turned left off the upward slope of State
Road onto South Temple Street, stopping at the Lion House, one of
Brigham Young’s homes.112 Soon Haslam was ushered into an office
where Young and a dozen other church leaders were meeting with Jacob
Hamblin, who had been asked to instruct them on how Indians stored
food. The subject was important. The Mormons were still thinking of
fleeing to the mountains, where they would cache provisions for their
survival if the army got through.113
While they were still preparing for the worst, their fears had been
somewhat assuaged two days before by the arrival of Capt. Stewart Van
Vliet—the first representative from the U.S. government to explain
the army’s intentions. Although Mormon leaders remained wary, Van
Vliet had assured them the army meant no harm to the Saints, that
Gen. Harney had been retained for duties in Kansas, and that the
troops were not likely to reach Utah settlements before winter.114
Hamblin gave the fullest account of what happened when Haslam
entered Thursday’s meeting, important because the text of Haight’s
incoming express did not survive. “While in S. L. City an express came
from Iron Co, asking what should be done with a certain Company
of Emigrants, that had behaved verry mean while passing through
the differant Towns,” Hamblin said. “The spirit of the Express rather
asked the privilege to chastize them. . . . President Young answered

them rather haistily, saying No, when I want Marshal Law proclaimed,
I will let you know.”115
Young’s comment suggested that Haight proposed using the militia
against the emigrants—just as he had proposed earlier to Dame. Martial
law—often proclaimed by governments in times of war—would have
allowed the militia to take the law into its own hands in an emergency.
Young had been considering a martial law proclamation for some time
but would not issue it until September 15, after discussions with Van
Vliet convinced him that army leaders were intent on reaching Utah
regardless of how its citizens felt.116
Young asked Haslam, who had spent most of the last sixty hours
in the saddle, if he “could stand the trip back” to Cedar City. When
Haslam replied that he could, Young told him to get a little sleep and
be back in the office in an hour for his written reply.117
Copies of Young’s letter would survive both in rough and final draft
form, the latter preserved in sequential order in Young’s bound let-
terpress copybooks—clear evidence the letter was a contemporary
document. The express, addressed to Haight and dated September 10,
began with news that was apparently intended to relieve Haight’s fear
of imminent attack:118
Dear Brother,
Your note of the 7th inst is to hand. Capt Van Vliet acting Commis-
sary is here having come in advance of the army to procure necessaries
for them. We do not expect that any part of the army will be able to
reach here this fall. There is only about 850 men coming, they are
now at or near Laramie. A few of the freight trains are this side of that
place, the advance of which are now on Green River. They will not be
able to come much if any farther on account of their poor stock. They
cannot get here this season without we help them, so you see that the
Lord has answered our prayers and again averted the blow designed
for our heads.119
The letter’s next two sentences addressed Young’s concerns about

fairness in times of conflict. Although determined to resist the
approaching army, Young had pondered deeply the morality of war.
“[If] I have to fight,” he wrote in his journal three weeks earlier, “I wish
to give my enemies fair warning, and then if the[y] will not take it they
must abide the consequences.” His concern was not just earthly ethics.
“I wish to meet all men at the judgment Bar of God without any to fear
me or accuse me of a wrong action,” he wrote.120 Now he gave similar
advice to Haight:

In regard to emigration trains passing through our settlements we must
not interfere with them untill they are first notified to keep away. You
must not meddle with them.121
Haight’s letter said the emigrants had gotten into a scrape with
Indians, and Young had emphasized the importance of not alienating
native tribes since their help was wanted to resist the army. His instruc-
tion to Haight reflected his new policy of letting Indians and emigrants
resolve their own problems without Mormon interference:
brigham young letter to isaac c. haight, september 10, 1857. Courtesy


The Indians we expect will do as they please but you should try and
preserve good feelings with them.122
With Hamblin nearby to advise him, Young must have known the
Paiutes posed little threat on their own to the well-armed wagon
company. At Corn Creek, when the emigrants asked Hamblin’s opin-
ion, he had told them they could handle the Indians with half the num-
ber of men in their party.123

Young concluded his letter by preaching to Haight the need for
peace, patience, and reliance on God:
There are no other trains going south that I know of if those who are
there will leave let them go in peace. While we should be on the alert,
on hand and always ready we should also possess ourselves in patience,
preserving ourselves and property ever remembering that God rules.
He has overruled for our deliverance this once again and he will always
do so if we live our religion, be united in our faith and good works. All
is well with us.
May the Lord bless you and all saints forever.
I remain as ever your Brother in the Gospel of Christ.124
When Haslam returned to the office after his brief rest, the letter was
ready for him. Young wanted the message to reach Cedar City as soon
as possible. He walked the rider to the hitching post near the outer
gate and repeated his instruction several times as Haslam mounted
his horse and adjusted the saddle girth. “Brother Haslam,” Young
instructed, “I want you to ride for dear life; ride day and night; spare
no horse flesh.”125
Haslam “shot off like an arrow down Theatre Hill and was soon out
of sight.”126

chapter thirteen
Decoyed Out and Destroyed

Mountain Meadows, September 10–11, 1857
H
ours after nightfall on Thursday, the new detachments
from Cedar City reached Hamblin’s ranch house at the north
end of the Meadows and set up camp. A few key men “found
Lee and others, and found how matters stood.”1 Lee “and some of the
principal chiefs of the Indians were gathered” at Hamblin’s, awaiting
word from Cedar.2 Higbee relayed the orders, saying they had come
from Haight and Dame. The emigrants were “to be decoyed out and
destroyed with the exception of the small children” who were “too
young to tell tales,” Higbee said, “and if the Indians cannot do it with-
out help, we must help them.”3
Through interpreter Nephi Johnson, Lee suggested to the Paiute
leaders “that he would try and get the emigrants out of their camp as
well as giving up their arms after which they would kill them.”4 At first,
Johnson hesitated to interpret the awful message. Lee “wanted me to
talk to the Indians in a way I didn’t want to,” Johnson later recalled.
Despite his initial reluctance, Johnson repeated the plan in Paiute,
“and the Indians agreed to assist in killing the emigrants.”5
Higbee, Lee, Klingensmith, and other militiamen then traveled
south to the main Mormon camp, where they met with Ira Allen,
Charles Hopkins, Robert Wiley, William Bateman, and a few other
leaders. The men sat in a circle off by themselves and began by praying
Map by Sheryl Dickert Smith and Tom Child; photo by Wally Barrus
for “Divine guidance,” a sacrilege that only the passions of the time
could explain.6 Then the serious discussion began. When Higbee
shared the orders he had brought, objections arose. Lee later claimed
to be the one who raised them.7
Responding to the dissent, Higbee spoke of the killing of William
Aden and his companion’s escape to the emigrant camp. “White men
have interposed and the emigrants know it,” he said, “and there lies
the danger in letting them go.” Someone reasoned, “If we let them
go, . . . they will raise hell in California, and the result will be that our
wives and children will have to be butchered and ourselves too, and
they are no better to die than ours.”8 No one knew for sure what would
happen if they let the besieged emigrants go. But in the twisted ratio-
nalization that leads to mass killing, sometimes “murder becomes a
service to humanity.”9
Having reached a consensus, the men then discussed how to imple-
ment the orders. They “decided to send a man with a flag of truce and
request that the emigrants send out a delagation to arrange terms upon
which they would leave their camp.” Once the emigrants had left the
protection of their wagon fort and were strung out on the road, the
militia and Indians would destroy them.10
The most common word used by the plotters to describe the plan
was “decoy.” But “deceive” and “double-cross” would have been better
choices. The new plan carried the fewest risks for the militia, and the
planners justified the treachery in a hollow defense of faith and hearth,
a necessary cover-up of what already had taken place that week.11
The first traces of light filled the pleasant valley when the council
put the matter to a vote. “Every man now had to show his colors,”
Lee said. “It was not safe to have a Judas in camp.” Lee had every man
in the council “express himself.” Again no one dared go against the
group. “All said they were willing to carry out the counsel of their lead-
ers; that the leaders had the Spirit of God and knew better what was
right than they did.” Each passed the moral buck up the line.12
Although Lee said all the men in the meeting consented to the plan,
their support probably ranged from fervent to begrudging.13 What-
ever their ardor, the men had deluded themselves into thinking they
were justified in what they were about to do. When Lee told of these
events in later years, he blamed others but credited them with good
intentions. “They were enthusiastic,” he said, “but their motives were
pure.”14 Even on more frank occasions, when he spoke of his own role,
Lee clung to his self-deception, insisting he did “nothing designedly
wrong.”15
Decoyed Out and Destroyed 189

After the council meeting, interpreters Nephi Johnson and Carl
Shirts were sent down toward the Paiute camp “to inform the Indians
of the plan of operations, and to place the Indians in ambush, so that
they could not be seen by the emigrants.” Lee had doubts about the
interpreters. “So suspicious was Lee of me,” said Johnson, “that he
sent an Indian boy who could talk English”—probably Lemuel—“to
see that I carried the right message.”16
After breakfast at the white encampment, the militiamen were called
together to receive instructions from their leaders.17 Klingensmith said
the men were organized into a “hollow square”—a common military
formation of the day—with about fifty men facing inwards, a dozen or
so on each side. Majors Lee and Higbee stood in the center.18 Moun-
tain Meadows was in Washington County—Lee’s jurisdiction—but the
two majors shared leadership on the field. Daniel Macfarlane served as
adjutant, while Klingensmith, only a militia private, exercised informal
leadership because he was Cedar City’s bishop and because he sup-
ported strong action against the emigrants.19
In the excuse-making that followed the massacre, some participants
crafted alibis that put them elsewhere at the time of the killing. Still
enough accounts survived to assemble nearly a full roster of those
present that day. Cedar City furnished roughly thirty of the militia-
men, about a dozen came from Washington, and a few, including those
working at Hamblin’s ranch in September 1857, were from Santa
Clara. Lee and Carl Shirts hailed from Harmony, and Nephi Johnson
was called out from Fort Johnson. But none of the Indian missionaries
from Pinto—the nearest settlement to the Meadows—were identified
by anyone as joining in Friday’s massacre. Nor had Dame sent out any
of the Parowan militia.20
Although by law every state and territory in America had a militia,
Utah had its own peculiar organization in 1857. The Iron Military Dis-
trict had four battalions—one in Parowan, two in Cedar City, and one
headquartered in Harmony. Haight and Higbee were majors over the
two Cedar City battalions, and Lee was battalion major at Harmony.
Captains commanded the battalions’ companies, which in turn were
divided into platoons, each led by a second lieutenant and sergeant
who oversaw at most eight privates. This organization, because of its
top-heavy officer corps and small squads, was an “extreme alteration”
of normal procedure “never known to the Army before,” wrote one
modern military specialist.21
The militiamen at the “hollow square” were mostly officers and
represented only about 15 percent of the Iron Military District.22 The

low turnout suggests that Haight had difficulty finding men to go to
the Mountain Meadows—or recruited only the men he needed.
When it came time to explain their acts, some of the militiamen
excused themselves by saying they were acting under orders; others
cited their youth and inexperience.23 Three were teenagers: William
Edwards was fifteen, James Pearce eighteen, and Columbus Freeman
nineteen. A dozen or so were in their early twenties. More than two-
thirds of them, however, were a mature twenty-five years or older. The
average age was thirty-one. More than 80 percent of the men were
married, and about a third of those married had entered polygamy. All
told, this was a seasoned group of men.24
When the militia meeting began, Higbee and Lee gave the men
detailed instructions. All the emigrants except the small children were
to be killed. The emigrants would be lured from their camp by “a flag of
truce.” They would be told that “the Indians were determined on their
destruction” and that the Mormons “dare not oppose the Indians, for
we were at their mercy.” Instead, if the emigrants would “trust them-
selves in our hands,” then “the best we could do for them” would be
to place a few of their belongings—including their guns—in two wag-
ons and escort the emigrants to the settlements. The wagons would
also carry “the small children and wounded,” and the emigrant women
would “follow the wagons and the men next, the troops to stand in
readiness on the east side of the road ready to receive them.” When
Higbee finally gave the signal “Halt,” the militiamen were to kill the
emigrant men and older boys, while the Indians were to “dispatch the
women and larger children.”25 Higbee ordered most of the militiamen
to put their horses out on the range. He wanted them walking next to
their victims, ready to fire at close range.26
Until they heard the plan announced, some of the men remained
uncertain how the scene would wind up. Some had gone to the Mead-
ows without a clear understanding of what was taking place there, and
speculation had continued in the ranks about just what they might
be expected to do.27 When the plan was finally explained, some were
stunned. “A good many objected,” Johnson said years later, “but they
didn’t dare to say anything.”28 Some of the men’s later claims, of course,
were posturing—attempts to convince others and even themselves that
they were not responsible for what happened. Though “a good many”
may have inwardly objected, Johnson conceded that “most of the men
who took part in the killing, also considered them [the emigrants] as their
common enimies, and under the excitement caused by the advent of the
[approaching] Army they felt partly justified in distroying them.”29

When the militia meeting dissolved and the men began to move off,
Higbee saw Joseph Clewes. The unarmed courier stood “riveted to the
ground,” as perplexed and nervous as when Haight had called him into
service on Monday afternoon. “Clewes, we have no further use for you
here,” Higbee barked. “Get on that mule and ride back to Haight, and
tell him how things are up to this time; and,” he added, shaking his
finger, “not a word of this . . . to any one.” Clewes left immediately, this
time all too happy to obey.30
During the hollow square meeting, Johnson and Shirts had been at
the Paiute encampment telling “the Indians what they were expected
to do.” The Paiutes were to hide in the sagebrush, scrub oak, and rocks
on the north side of a low ridge that extended from the eastern foot-
hills near the Mormon camp to a point just east of the California road.
The ridge formed part of the Rim of the Basin, which divides waters
that flow into the Pacific from those that remain in the Great Basin.
From this location, more than a mile northeast of the emigrants’ camp,
Johnson and Shirts “were to rally the Indians, and rush upon and dis-
patch the women and larger children.”31
The role assigned to the Paiutes was a feeble attempt on the militia
leaders’ part to salve their own consciences. Though reconciled to kill-
ing the emigrant men, they wanted to limit the number of women and
children they would have to kill themselves—as if planning and direct-
ing the crime were not enough.32 After placing the Indians in ambush,
Johnson turned his horse east and rode up the ridge, from where he
“could see it all.”33 For the next sixty years, his role in the plot would
rack him. Memories of the massacre would haunt him in the delirium
of his deathbed.34
In the highly democratic culture of the Paiutes, each man decided
for himself whether to participate.35 Since the attack on Monday morn-
ing, the number of Paiutes at the Meadows had fluctuated as some
came and went. How many Paiutes participated in Friday’s massacre
would become a highly disputed matter. Some Paiutes later said that
none of their people participated in the killings. If they were present,
they merely watched from the surrounding hills. Others acknowledged
Paiute participation but portrayed it as minimal. Understandably,
none relished the odium that white leaders from the beginning had
planned to fix on them.36 One contemporary Paiute who knew massa-
cre participants concluded, “All the Indians there were not more than
one hundred.”37
The white participants, not surprisingly, described the Paiute par-
ticipants as plentiful. Higbee’s accounts put the number as high as six

hundred, while Joel White put it as low as forty with perhaps “a good
many more.”38 Nephi Johnson said that on the day of the massacre,
“There were about 150 Indians present.”39 On “Thursday . . . the Indians
had been largely reinforced during the day,” Clewes wrote.40 “They
was there for to help finish the massacre,” remembered Klingensmith.
“The hills were pretty full around there, and they done the massacre-
ing of the women generally.”41
U.S. Army Brevet Maj. James Henry Carleton, investigating the
massacre in May 1859, concluded that “fifty or sixty Mormons” partic-
ipated in attacking the train. “They had, also,” he wrote, “all the Indi-
ans which they could collect at Cedar City, Harmony, and Washington
City, to help them; a good many in number.” Carleton cited Paiute
leader Jackson as saying that a “combined force of Mormons and Indi-
ans” carried out not only “the first attack” but also “the last massa-
cre.”42 Non-Mormon Indian agent Garland Hurt sent a young Indian
man south to investigate the massacre just days after it happened. He
returned saying he had “met a large band of the Piedes” coming from
Iron County who “acknowledged having participated in the massacre
of the emigrants, but said that the Mormons persuaded them into it.”43
A modern Paiute history would conclude “that although local Nuwuvi
[Paiutes] were involved, they played a secondary role to the local set-
tlers in the actual murders.”44
At about 10:00 a.m., some four dozen militiamen began moving

toward the emigrant corral in an unstructured fashion, “like a lot of
men would go to a meeting house,” someone said. Allen, Higbee, and
adjutant Daniel Macfarlane were on horseback. With the men were
wagons driven by Samuel McMurdy and Samuel Knight.45 McMurdy
had brought his wagon from Cedar on Thursday evening, and a reluc-
tant Knight had been recruited to bring his from Hamblin’s ranch
on Friday morning.46 The militiamen were a motley bunch, armed
with assorted weapons, including revolvers, jaeger rifles, “shotguns,
Kentucky rifles, flint locks and every imaginable firearm.”47
Cedar City sergeant Samuel Pollock and Washington privates
William Young and James Pearce stayed in or near camp, perhaps to
help guard the militiamen’s property. At age fifty-two, Young was the
old man of the group, and eighteen-year-old Pearce was sick with “the
botts” after eating too much “fresh beef.”48
After a dusty mile or so, the militia stopped two hundred yards
northeast of the corral near a three-way intersection in the roughly
defined road. By that time they had formed a line. The emigrants and

militia were now “within a rifle shot” of each other. To the southwest
the soldiers saw a small, white swag hung from a pole visible above
the wagons. The emigrants had raised the cloth above their camp on
Wednesday when they saw Lee, a white man, cross the valley.49 It sig-
naled both hope and despair.
With the approach of the militia, the emigrants’ hopes of deliverance
seemed about to be realized. After four days of siege, the Indians had
disappeared, replaced by citizen soldiers carrying a white flag. Yet there
were warning signs. Instead of flocking to the emigrant camp as rescuers
might be expected to do, the militiamen had stopped short, positioning
themselves at the strategic junction that led from the campground.50
Higbee called William Bateman to carry the militia’s white flag and
make the first contact with the emigrants. Bateman, who had partic-
ipated in that morning’s council of leaders, served as a constable in
Cedar City and as sergeant in one of the platoons. As he crossed the
open land between the two groups, a man left the wagon corral and
met him halfway with his own “white rag on a stick.”51 The two men
talked briefly. “The emigrant was told we had come to rescue them if
they were willing to trust us,” Lee later said. The man agreed to a sec-
ond meeting, and Lee, glib and smooth, walked out next.52
The name of the emigrant representative would be obscured by time
and the massacre. Alexander Fancher was dead, and Jack and George
Baker were wounded.53 Lee said the man’s name was “Hamilton,” a
surname that appears in later lists of emigrants.54 A Fancher family
tradition would hold that the primary negotiator was James Mathew
Fancher, Alexander’s twenty-five-year-old cousin.55 Whoever the man
was, he met Lee outside the corral and talked. After about fifteen min-
utes, Lee motioned for Knight and McMurdy to follow him in their
wagons to the corral, where the emigrant negotiator unhitched some
of the chains that held the makeshift barricade together and moved
one of the emigrant wagons to open a channel.56
It was now around noon, and the September sun stood high in
the sky.57
Lee’s senses absorbed the details as he entered the emigrants’ enclo-
sure. He saw and smelled the signs of close quarters and paid particular
attention to the defenses. The defenders’ guns were “mostly Kentucky
rifles of the muzzle-loading style,” he noted. Inside the circle of chained
wagons was a “rifle-pit” large enough for the entire company. “I found
that the emigrants were strongly fortified,” he said.58
Men, women, and children crowded around Lee. “Some felt that
the time of their happy deliverance had come,” he said, “while others,

though in deep distress, and all in tears, looked upon me with doubt,
distrust and terror.” Seeing the emigrant families up close for the
first time jolted Lee. “My position was painful, trying and awful . . . as
I thought of the cruel, unmanly part that I was acting,” Lee remem-
bered. “My tongue refused its office”—but not for long. “I delivered
my message.”59
Word of the rescue terms, each of them false or misleading, spread
within the corral. The emigrants were promised safe conduct to Pinto
and then Cedar City, but they must first lay down their weapons. The
Indians had “gone off over the hills” but would be watching. If the emi-
grants displayed their arms it would be seen “as an unfriendly act” that
might renew the attacks.60 Second, the emigrants must leave behind
their cattle and other belongings as payment to the Indians for ending
the siege.61 Third, Lee promised to carry the wounded, a few chil-
dren, and whatever other belongings could fit in the two militiamen’s
wagons. Lee told them to hide their firearms under the bedding and
baggage in the wagons, with the wounded on top.62
The most extraordinary demand was that the emigrants leave the
compound in a specific order. Knight’s and McMurdy’s wagons would
lead, followed by the women and children. The men and older boys
would then file out in the rear, each escorted by an armed militia-
man. No one explained how Lee was able to sell the emigrants on the
contrived proposal. Perhaps he argued that the main target of Indian
anger was the Arkansas sharpshooters who had wounded and killed
Paiute men. By having the men and older boys march together, he
could assure the safety of the women and children. Then by putting
an armed militiaman next to each emigrant man, he could assure their
protection, too.63
The emigrants feared a trap. The orchestrated attack on their train
earlier in the week suggested that more than Indian forces were at
work. The emigrants’ raising of a white flag two days before signaled
that they may have seen Lee or other white men during the assaults.
Even if they hadn’t, Aden’s wounded companion had made it back to
the wagon corral, bearing word that white men had fired on the two.64
Because of the emigrants’ suspicions, Lee faced tough questions
from them. They “were afraid they would be killed,” he reported. In
response, Lee asked a question of his own. Did he look like the kind of
man that might betray them?65 “No,” the emigrants replied, but “they
were sure that white men had been with the Indians when the attacks
had been made” earlier in the week.66 Despite Lee’s assurances, some
of his listeners remained suspicious. One emigrant man warned that

any agreement with the militia would make them all dead men. He
called their companion who conferred with Lee a “fool” for consider-
ing the Mormons’ proposals.67
In the end, it didn’t matter much. The talk was less negotiation
than dictation. Four days of death, suffering, squalor, and thirst left the
emigrants with only desperate options.68 While they now had access to
fresh water to slake their thirst—a welcome relief after days of baking
in the sun—they had nearly run out of ammunition. Lee thought the
entire camp was down to twenty remaining shots. “If the emigrants had
had a good supply of ammunition they never would have surrendered,”
he mused. “I do not think we could have captured them without great
loss, for they were brave men and very resolute and determined.”69
Despite the long odds, the suspicion, and the unusual terms Lee pre-
sented to them, the emigrants finally gave in. Lee offered them hope—
the only hope they had.70
As the emigrants prepared to leave their wagon fortress, Lee sat for
a time on the ground “near where some young men were engaged in
paying the last respects to some person who had just died.” In another
account, Lee spoke of seeing the emigrants wrapping buffalo robes
around the corpses of “two men of note” and laying them in a grave.
From various emigrants, Lee learned the inside details of the four-day
standoff—including the number of dead and wounded—things he ear-
lier could only guess about.71
A woman described by Lee as “a large, fleshy old lady” told and
retold him about the emigrants’ recent troubles. Was Lee an Indian
agent? she asked, seeking assurance. “In one sense I am,” Lee replied,
“as [the] Government has appointed me Farmer to the Indians.” Lee
later said, “I told her this to satisfy her.”72
The wagons and teams Lee had motioned into the camp became
the center of activity as he and the emigrants began loading them.73
Knight’s wagon bed was “loaded to its utmost capacity” with people
and possessions, including firearms.74 McMurdy’s wagon had similar
cargo—bedding, clothing, luggage, and miscellaneous “truck,” he
remembered. The blankets in one wagon were bright red with black
borders, one surviving child said. Some of the emigrants carried their
belongings “as if they were going on a journey.”75 They did not know
how short their trip would be.
Knight thought he had “two men, one woman and I think some
children” sitting on top of the baggage, but his memory was unsure.76
McMurdy recalled having half a dozen in his wagon.77 The prior-
ity went to those who were wounded. Loaded next were the small

children, though some babies and other youngsters stayed with their
walking mothers. A few older women were given the wagon space that
was left.78
By now Lee had been in the corral for an hour or more. The nego-
tiation and loading took longer than the impatient militia leaders
expected.79 Would their plan hold together? The Paiutes, about a mile
up the road in their sage-and-cedar hideout, were growing uneasy.80
Nor was time on the militiamen’s side. They stood on the road east of
the corral, jaws set and minds racing for what lay ahead. Killing is best
done quickly, without time to think.81
Higbee, waiting outside the corral with the men, ordered his
twenty-year-old aide, Daniel Macfarlane, to hurry the emigrants. In
better times Macfarlane sang the bass part in the church choir and
took Shakespearean roles in the Cedar City theater. His widowed
mother had become one of Haight’s plural wives, and Macfarlane
himself would later marry one of Haight’s daughters. Macfarlane rode
to the emigrants’ camp to hurry things up “for fear that the Indians
would come back and be upon them.” It was another in a string of
deceits.82
Finally, the two heavily laden wagons led out through the corral and
soon turned north towards Hamblin’s ranch. Lee had told McMurdy
to take this route—“steer north, across the valley,” he said. The wagons’
route lay a little west of the road where the militia stood. From their
position a short distance away, the militiamen could see the bobbing
heads of the wounded, the elderly, and some of the children as the
wagons passed by.83
Lee walked along between the two wagons, and behind them rode
Macfarlane on horseback, leading the way for dozens of women and
children—and two men, wounded but walking.84 Macfarlane led the
women northeastward, “right up to the troops,” where they then
turned north, following some distance behind the wagons.85 The
women’s full dresses brushed against the dust of the road. It was their
first exercise away from the stench of the corral for days and must have
been bracing.
The emigrant men and older boys followed next. By now their
ranks were heavily depleted. Seven men had died in Monday’s attack,
and a few more had since perished from wounds.86 Another five or so
were killed outside of the Meadows—Aden, the two men shot near
Leach’s Spring on Tuesday, and presumably the men sent to make pine
tar before the first attack. In addition, sometime during the week three
men had slipped from the corral in a last desperate attempt to reach

California to summon help—or at least report the emigrants’ sad fate.
With a half dozen or more men riding in the wagons or walking with
the women, the column of emigrant men and older boys totaled about
two dozen, perhaps a few more.87
The militiamen had numbers heavily on their side. McMurdy, Lee,
Knight, and Macfarlane were with the forward party; Johnson and
Shirts waited with the Indians; Pollock, Young, and Pearce remained
at the militia camp; and Clewes, the courier, was on his way back to
Cedar City. Still, the militiamen waiting on the road outnumbered the
men and boys from the corral by as much as two to one.88 As the emi-
grant men approached, the militiamen slung their guns across their
arms, preparing to walk alongside them.89
According to Macfarlane, “One of the emigrants, a boy or young
man, returned to the camp again, after leaving it, declaring that he
believed there was treachery connected with the move, and his com-
rades had all they could do to persuade him to follow them.”90
When the emigrant men reached the militia, they “halted a little
while” as the children and women were “hurried ahead.”91 A few of the
emigrants raised a mild cheer, “as if they believed that [the militiamen]
were acting honestly.”92 Higbee ordered “his men to form in single
file and take their places” four or five feet to “the right of the emi-
grants.”93 The parallel columns of men then followed some distance
behind the wagons and women.94 The march had no rhythm; most
walked haphazardly.95
Farther north at the head of the procession, McMurdy’s horses, “a
very fast walking team,” easily outpaced Knight’s newly broken pair.
Lee walked behind McMurdy and sometimes alongside of Knight.96
Lee wanted a fast pace to put distance between the wagons and the
walking emigrants when the killing began.97 But he also wanted the
two wagons to stay together, and at times McMurdy moved too fast—
Lee had to tell him to slow down “several times.”98
Albert Hamblin, Jacob’s adopted Indian son, and his friend John, a
young Indian who lived with Samuel Knight, reported watching the
procession from a distance. “The women were on ahead with the chil-
dren,” Albert said of what they saw. He did not mention the lead wag-
ons, now well beyond most of the women and children. Lastly, about
a quarter mile behind the middle group were the older boys and men.
“It was a big crowd,” Albert said, claiming also to have seen Indians
hiding in the scrub oak and sage brush. “I said to John, I would like to
know what the emigrants left their wagons for, as they were going into
a ‘worse fix than ever they saw.’ ”99

It was now midafternoon.100
So far, everything was going according to the militia leaders’ plan.

In front, the wagons carried the emigrants’ firearms, now well beyond
the men accustomed to using them and difficult, if not impossible,
for the injured in the wagons to reach because of the bedding and
passengers set over them. The middle group—the women and chil-
dren—were easy targets. From their nearby hiding places, the Indi-
ans could descend on them. Finally, the emigrant men were unarmed,
outnumbered, and within the dead-on range of the militiamen’s arms.
The militia leaders used the landscape in their plan. The women and
children soon reached the Rim of the Basin, beyond which the Indians
were hiding.101
The plan was succeeding because it was so calculated, because the
emigrants had no real options, and because it was so improbably sinis-
ter. Even many of the tough and practical emigrants, used to surprises
on the trail, could not have imagined anything happening to them that
was so premeditated, evil, and cunning.
Some of the Mormons could not believe it either. Despite all their
uncertainties and fears, their feelings of anger or hatred, and their will-
ingness to obey leaders, they struggled when faced with the reality of
what they were about to do. Maj. Higbee, on horseback in the middle
of the long train, was to start the slaughter with the simple command of
“Halt.” But when he reached the point where he was supposed to give
the signal, he said nothing and allowed his horse to saunter. Higbee
reportedly hoped for a reprieving stay—some last minute, impossible
order from Haight that would spare the emigrants.102 Perhaps it was
the sight before him that made him waver. Up ahead on the trail, doz-
ens of defenseless women and children were walking toward the deadly
ambush he would unleash.
As Higbee hesitated, the women and children walked past the hid-
ing Indians toward the open valley where surprise would be more dif-
ficult. The Paiutes scurried to keep up, moving from one concealing
object to another. As the trail began to open up, they were running out
of places to hide and “though[t] they were going to be deceived” by
the militiamen. According to Ellott Willden, “Lee afterwards scolded
Higbee for this delay.”103
The women and children were now a quarter mile past the planned
site of the ambush.104 Higbee, realizing the plan was unraveling,
turned his horse across the road and looked back. Finally he shouted,
“Halt!”105

john m. higbee. Courtesy
Special Collections, Sherratt Library,
Southern Utah University.
The first volley was like “one loud shot,” said one of the militia-
men, and the firing went on for a minute or two.106 When the heavy
smoke lifted, blood and horror were everywhere where the emigrant
men once stood. The militia had killed at close quarters, sometimes
face-to-face. Many of the bullets hit their victims in the front or back
of the head.107 Several of the Mormon men “shed tears at the sight of
the dead lying before them, and only in obedience to what they con-
sidered legitimate military authority would they have done what they
did,” reported one. Not all of the militia took part, refusing to fire
or shooting into the ground or air. Under duress, they failed to kill
quickly and efficiently, if at all.108
Others made up for it, out of duty or conviction or because once
the killing began, they lost control of themselves. William “Bill” Stew-
art—the man who killed Aden—and Joel White, his accomplice, took
out after the few emigrant men spared in the fusillade, who were now
running for their lives. The two Mormons nearly got themselves killed
by running into the line of fire.109 Their act helped earn them the repu-
tation for being the “most bloodthirsty” men on the field.110

The leaders had planned for possible runaways. Higbee and Allen,
each on horseback, were at opposite ends of the line of emigrant men,
and Macfarlane rode at the front of the women. Their duty was to
“round in those who might try to escape.”111 The fleeing emigrant men
did not get far. Some were dead within twenty steps, although one
emigrant almost got to the mountains, a half mile off.112
When later asked if he killed his man, obeying orders to his “full-
est capacity,” Klingensmith acknowledged that he had.113 Then he
said he watched Higbee do one of the follow-up killings. His account
made it sound as if Higbee and his victim knew each other. “That man
was wounded, a little” and “lying on the ground,” Klingensmith said.
“John M. Higbee went up to him and dr[ew] his knife out and cut his
throat. This man begged for his life. . . . He said, Higbee, I wouldn’t do
this to you.” Higbee replied, “You have done something just as bad.”114
Klingensmith gave no explanation of what Higbee meant.
As the emigrant men were being killed, another horrific scene played
out a few hundred yards up the trail. Moments after Higbee gave his
order, Johnson, who was still on the hill overlooking the militia and the
Paiutes, “gave the word to the Indians to fire.”115 They rose up from
their hiding places “yelling and whooping,” some rushing toward the
front of the group of women and children and others toward the back.
At first the terrified women and children ran back toward their men
“until the Indians cut them off; headed them off,” said William Young,
who watched the slaughter from the ridge, near the militia camp. The
Indians hurled “rocks at them and I saw them fall from the rocks and
laid on the ground as though they was dead.”116 Carl Shirts’s father said
“the women and children were knocked down with stones, clubs, and
gun barrels, struck in the neck and butchered like hogs.”117
Young saw one Indian use a large rock to crush life from a teenage
boy who had fallen. Two or three times, the man raised the rock and
crushed it into the boy’s chest.118
One large woman, “hollowing for her husband and children,” some-
how made it through to the white men, only to be shot in the back by
one of them. When she fell, Klingensmith remembered, there was no
quiver.119
Other women and children who weren’t initially struck down
“wheeled” and ran toward the brush or the two wagons on the north.
One blood-covered girl, perhaps ten or eleven years old, got within
about sixty yards of the wagons before an Indian shot her.120 Another
girl was fleeing for her life when an Indian “plunged his knife through
her.”121

nephi johnson. Frank Esshom,
Pioneers and Prominent Men of
Utah (Salt Lake City, 1913).
Some of the victims simply “clung together” in terror.122 Others

fought for their lives. “I saw the women fight,” said Young, “and then
I saw the Indians kill as many as three women; I saw them strike at
them.” Young also saw “an Indian kill an infant child, that a woman
had in her arms before she fell, with a knife.”123
Rebecca Dunlap, six years old at the time, remembered the ter-
ror. She ran and hid in a cluster of sagebrush near the road. From her
hiding place she saw two of her older sisters killed, their bodies fall-
ing nearby. She also heard her one-year-old sister, Sarah, crying. She
found the infant “entwined” in their dead mother’s arms. Sarah “had
been shot through her right arm, below the elbow, by a large ball,
breaking both bones and cutting her arm half off.” Rebecca pulled
Sarah free and took her back into the sagebrush to hide. She stayed
there until she saw a white man and begged him for help.124 She was
spared only because of her young age.
Six-year-old John Calvin Miller “was near his mother when she
was killed.” He desperately “pulled arrows from her back” as she lay
dying.125 When the massacre was over, a militiaman said he saw arrows
“scattered here and there around among the bodies.”126
Another surviving child recalled, “I remember standing by my
mother, holding onto her skirt, while my mother stood with my baby
brother in her arms, and when the white man, not an Indian, raised his

gun to take the life of my mother, she said: ‘God, have mercy on my
children!’ ”127
Four-year-old Nancy Saphrona Huff, whose father had died on
the plains, remembered that Jack Baker was carrying her when he
was shot.128 Baker may have been one of the two wounded men seen
walking with the women and children. Or perhaps he was among the
wounded riding in the wagons, holding little Nancy in his arms.
A third killing site was at the wagons, where, as elsewhere, the later
claims and counterclaims would make it difficult to find the precise
truth. When McMurdy heard Lee order him to “halt,” he pulled on
the reins and brought his team to a stop. “At that instant,” he said,
“I heard the sound of a gun.” Turning to look, McMurdy saw a woman
falling backward and Lee standing with a long-barreled gun to his
shoulder.129
The sharp clap of the firearm spooked McMurdy’s and Knight’s ani-
mals.130 As McMurdy turned back to his horses, he heard behind him
a dull thud such as “a heavy instrument, something like a gun would
make” hitting a human head. From the second wagon, Knight saw
Lee striking a woman with “a club or gun.” When McMurdy looked
back again, he saw Lee firing his pistol, close-up, at two or three of the
wagon riders. According to Lee, one of his pistols accidentally went
off, sending a bullet at McMurdy, cutting his buckskins “below the
crotch” and probably catching some flesh. Then Lee’s gun jammed.131
Sarah Frances Baker remembered sitting on her wounded father
George’s lap in one of the wagons when the same bullet that snuffed
out his life took a nick out of her left ear. Sarah wasn’t quite three years
old. “But even when you’re that young,” she maintained more than
eighty years later, “you don’t forget the horror of having your father
gasp for breath and grow limp, while you have your arms around his
neck, screaming with terror.” She recalled “the blood-curdling war-
whoops,” “the banging of guns,” and “the screaming of the other
children and the agonized shrieks of women” being killed. “And you
wouldn’t forget it, either,” she said, “if you saw your own mother top-
ple over in the wagon beside you, with a big red splotch getting bigger
and bigger on the front of her calico dress.”132
Nephi Johnson, watching from the hill, said he saw Lee and an
Indian pull at least one man from a wagon. The motion of Lee’s arm
made Johnson think “that he was cutting a man’s throat,” although he
could not see for sure.133
In the first two weeks after the massacre, Lee would tell others of his
killings. Then, for the next twenty years, he repeatedly denied taking

any life. Shortly before his death, however, he privately acknowledged
having “killed five emigrants and possibly six.”134
Both Knight and McMurdy claimed Lee did all the killing at the
wagons, saying they had their hands full with their teams. But Lee
was not the only man at the wagons who was taking human life. “The
drivers with me killed the sick and the wounded,” Lee wrote in his
confessions.135 Lee said McMurdy, armed with a double-barreled
shotgun, “shot a man who was lying with his head on another man’s
breast; the ball killed both men.” Lee also claimed Knight “shot a man
with his rifle” and then clubbed a fourteen-year-old boy, crushing his
head.136 McMurdy denied killing anyone, although he wavered during
cross-examination at Lee’s trial. “I believe I am not upon trial, sir,” he
finally told a defense attorney who questioned him on the subject. “I
don’t wish to answer.”137 Knight persistently claimed that he did no
killing—even in a private interview with a Mormon leader near the
end of his life. Rather than do any shooting, he insisted, he had jumped
from the wagon to hold his fractious animals.138
Nineteen years later, Lee accused Knight and McMurdy of witness-
ing falsely against him. They “swore that I committed the awful deeds,
that they did with their own wicked hands.”139
Knight testified that another Mormon participated in the killings at
the wagons, and Johnson agreed, although neither witness identified
the killer. “Who he was I do not know,” Johnson said when testifying
at the Lee trial. “I can’t tell and I never enquired to find out.”140
One or two Paiutes were at the wagons as well. Because they had run
some distance from their hiding places, they arrived after the carnage
started, but “took some part of the killing,” said Johnson.141 According
to Lee, one of the Paiutes at the wagons was “an Indian . . . called Joe,”
from Cedar City. After the massacre, a Joe worked for Elisha Groves
at Harmony and dressed himself in pants and a coat taken from the
emigrants, though he may not have been the man Lee mentioned.142
For the most part, the massacre of the emigrants was over in a
few minutes—Johnson said no more than five.143 In the years follow-
ing the mass killing, the white participants persisted in blaming the
tragedy primarily on Paiutes. Even Johnson, who saw most of what
happened from his position on the hill, at times joined in the finger-
pointing.144 But during a conversation with a senior Mormon leader
from Salt Lake City in 1895, Johnson said that “white men did most
of the killing.”145
The carnage was astonishing. “I saw the bodies of men, women, and
children, butchered in the most horrible manner,” Samuel Pollock said.

“Some of the children with their heads mashed in by rocks, I sup-
pose.”146 Klingensmith gave a similar description. “I found [the bodies]
in almost every condition,” he said, “some with their throats cut, some
heads smashed, some shot.”147 Few if any scalps were taken.148 When
Jacob Hamblin examined the victims’ skeletons in 1858, he “observed
that about one-third of the skulls were shot through with bullets, and
about one-third seemed to be broken in with stones.”149 Although the
militia leaders had planned to spare those “too young to tell tales,” at
least a half dozen of these young children became part of the terrible
harvest, too.150
Though the main slaughter was “quick,” the follow-up killings took
longer.151 Jimmie Pete, the son of Tau-gu (“Coal Creek John”), a Cedar
City Paiute who was at the killing fields, confirmed that the militia and
Indians were careful and systematic. In an oral interview, Pete said his
father told him that after the first wave of killing was over, “they was
going over them [the bodies] again. My father was, I guess, about third
place. Some white man was ahead of him and trying to stir them up, to
see [if] . . . they was alive.” All that showed signs of life, said Lee, were
immediately shot through the head. As the men checking the bodies
approached them, two emigrants pretending to be dead sprang up and
made an impossible dash for freedom. “My father chased them clear
up the mountain and got them up there,” said Pete.152
Some emigrants—like little Rebecca and Sarah Dunlap—were
found in hiding. The “Dutchman” or “German,” whose role figured
so prominently in Mormon accounts about the emigrants, was one of
“several that was hid out that they didn’t get.” The “German” was
probably one of the men seen walking with the women and children
and was holding an infant when he was found. A single bullet killed
both of them, and the double killing became one of the infamous sto-
ries told about the massacre.153
Later, when Lee received the brunt of blame for the butchery, he
was accused of this double murder. Lee reportedly talked about the
killing in a public meeting immediately after he returned to Harmony,
casting it as a dream in which he, dressed like an Indian, led Paiutes in
the attack. Harmony resident Annie Elizabeth Hoag remembered Lee
saying that
when they came to one man that had his child in his arms an infant
babe, he says give up that child. No, Lee, says the man, I know you, I
recognise you [even] if you are painted[,] and you know the penalty of
shedding innocent blood. If you kill me you kill my child, I will part

with the last drop of blood there is in my body before I give up my
child. Lee asked him again, if he would give up his child and he said no;
then John D. Lee said it was his turn to assist and he shot him through
the heart and killed the child at the same time. He said he didn’t con-
sider himself under the penalty of shedding innocent blood, he could
not help it, because the man would not give up his child.154
Soon after, Lee told Peter Shirts, who attended the Harmony meeting,
that the events he related were no dream.155
Even though Lee may have been disguised with paint during the ini-
tial attacks earlier in the week, he could not have been painted during
Friday’s massacre because he was with the emigrants and won their trust
immediately before the massacre began. But Ellott Willden confirmed
Hoag’s testimony that Lee shot a man and baby, clarifying that the
murdered German carried not his own but “somebody elses child.”156
Two Dunlap sisters, probably twelve-year-old twins Lucinda and
Susannah, were among the last emigrants to be killed. During the
tau-gu and john

wesley powell,
1873. John K. Hillers,
Courtesy National
Anthropological Archives,
Smithsonian Institution.

slaughter, the girls tried to escape by climbing into the eastern hills
and hiding “in some bushes.” Albert and John, the two young Indian
wards of the Mormons, saw them go. Albert said he and John “ran
down and tried to save them. . . . A man, who is an Indian doctor, also
told the Indians not to kill them.”157
From his perch on the hill, William Young “saw an Indian leading
two girls one in each hand.” The Indian “led them up in sight of me,”
said Young. He “led them up in among the balance of the Indians and
I saw no more of the two little girls.”158 When Lee came down the road
after the killing at the wagons, a Cedar City “chief ” brought the girls out
and asked him “what he should do with them.” The Paiute did not want
the girls killed because they were “pretty,” Lee later told Jacob Hamblin.
But Lee insisted. “They was too big and too old to let live,” he said. Lee
claimed he told the Indian to shoot one of them and he cut the other’s
throat. When Hamblin returned from Salt Lake City some days after
the massacre, however, he saw the girls’ bodies, both with slit throats,
lying together “some ways off ” from the other emigrants’ remains.159
Some stories about the killing of the girls had even more lurid
details. One account said one of the girls begged for life and offered to
marry Lee, who took her into the brush for half an hour before killing
her.160 “My name’s heralded all over the country as the biggest villain in
America,” Lee told journalist John H. Beadle in 1872. “It is published
for a sworn fact that I violated two girls as [they] were kneeling and
begging to me for life, and so help me God, it is an infernal lie!”161
When the killing ended, the looting began. Militiaman George
Adair said Higbee told the men that if they took property off the
bodies, “it would burn them.” Apparently that curse didn’t apply to
everyone. Adair claimed that when he found “a long purse filled with
gold” and held it away from himself “as a thing accursed,” Higbee
“grabbed the purse, and pushed it in his pocket,” threatening to slit
Adair’s throat if he ever told anyone. At least that was Adair’s version
of the incident.162
Lee said he found Higbee, Klingensmith, and Stewart searching
bodies for money, watches, and jewelry, and that they asked him to
hold a hat for them to collect the valuables. Lee said that only a little
money was found, although several rumors contradicted the claim.163
Gilbert Morse said that after the massacre, Lee “sported a handsome
gold watch and chain.” Holding it up for Morse to see, Lee said he had
eight more like it.164
According to Paiute oral traditions, the militiamen told the Indians
“that if they saw any round gold pieces (coins) lying on the ground

the Indians were not to pick them up because they were poison and
would kill them.” Instead, “the Mormons picked up all the coins and
put them in a sack and kept them.”165 Not all of the Paiutes heeded the
admonishment. Tau-gu said, “Don’t tell us no, cause what we want to
do, we want to do.” Ignoring the white men, some “kept on feeling in
the shirts.”166 By morning most of the bodies would be “stripped of all
the clothing,” as well.167
Nephi Johnson said Lee ordered him to the emigrant corral “to
keep the Indians from taking things out [of] the wagons.”168 By the
time Johnson got to the wagons, several Paiutes were gathering blan-
kets, bedding, clothes, cooking utensils, saddles, and most anything
else that they could quickly pack or hide in the hills and rocks around
them. Johnson told them to stop, and “some of them would and some
of them would not,” he said. Johnson, perhaps recalling Lee’s earlier
failure to reward Paiutes as promised, did not press the matter too
strongly.169
By late evening, the militia leaders gained control over most of the
property. Over the next several weeks, they would distribute it largely
among themselves. Some of the Paiutes drawn to Mountain Meadows
by promises of gain felt the massacre leaders had cheated them.170
Before the looting, Klingensmith had moved up the road to pick up
the surviving boys and girls. “I immediately put the little children in
baggage-wagons belonging to the regiment and took them to Hamlin’s
Ranch,” he said.171 Klingensmith left out grisly details. While many of
the children were in the wagons of McMurdy and Knight during the
slaughter, others were scattered on the ground near their dead moth-
ers or were walking numbly about. Klingensmith chose which ones
would live. “I was told at the time,” said Johnson, that “Klingin Smith,
selected seventeen of the smallest children together, and handed the
older ones over to the Indians who killed them.”172 Nancy Saphrona
Huff remembered, “At the close of the massacre there was 18 children
still alive, one girl, some ten or twelve years old they said was to big
and could tell so they killed her, leaving 17. . . . I saw them shoot the girl
after we were gathered up.”173
When the wagons with the crying and blood-stained children
reached Hamblin’s ranch, Rachel Hamblin took them into her shanty
and surrounding yard. She did her best, one woman caring for seventeen
children, in addition to her own. Some babies were still nursing and
wailed for the comfort of their mothers’ breasts. Two of the young sur-
vivors showed outward wounds. Sarah Frances Baker’s ear was bleed-
ing, and little Sarah Dunlap’s arm still oozed near the elbow, “the bone

being entirely severed.”174 The inner damage was still worse—young
hearts and minds in terrible trauma. Though they had not had peaceful
rest in days, “the children cried all night.”175
The scent of human blood in the Meadows brought coyotes from
their dens, and their howls mingled with the crying of the children and
the bawling of the emigrants’ cattle.176 That night campfires flickered
here and there in the Meadows, although the militia leaders, including
Lee, went to Hamblin’s ranch house in time for supper at sundown.
Despite the din and the fresh memories of the slaughter, Lee rolled
out his saddle blanket and slept soundly.177 Exhausted from the week’s
action, he also had the facility to shield his mind from self-inspection.
He had done his duty; that was all he allowed himself to think.178
Like Lee, some militiamen may have rested well, but the sleep of
others must have been more fitful. However much they sought solace
thereafter, memories of the massacre at Mountain Meadows would
lurk in their minds and haunt them to their deaths. Some sought ref-
uge in excuses or denial. Others fled the land in a vain hope of escaping
the recurring visions of that day. None was ever the same again.179
The tragedy at Mountain Meadows played out on several levels.

The murdered emigrants lost their hopes, their dreams, their prop-
erty, and their lives. Some lost their very identity, their names forever
effaced from human memory. The surviving children were robbed of
the warmth and support of parents, brothers, and sisters. Their first
sobbing night at Hamblin’s was just the start of their ordeal. The
Paiute participants would bear the brunt of blame for the massacre,
shamelessly used by the white men who lured them to the Meadows.
For the militiamen who carried out the crime—as well as their fami-
lies, descendants, and fellow church members—there was another kind
of tragedy. It was the gnawing, long anguish that flows from betrayed
ideals. The burdens of the massacre would linger far beyond what any-
one imagined on the night of September 11, 1857.

chapter fourteen
Too Late to Back Water

Mountain Meadows to Cedar City,
September 11–13, 1857
A
s the horror of the massacre unfolded on that Friday after-
noon, militia courier Joseph Clewes hurried his mule from
the Meadows to Cedar City. While Clewes sped east, two
westbound horsemen rode toward him—Elias Morris, a militia cap-
tain and one of Haight’s two counselors in the stake presidency, and
Christopher J. Arthur, Haight’s son-in-law. Morris and Arthur had left
Cedar for the Meadows that morning, purportedly to check out the
“many conflicting and terrible reports” about events there. According
to Morris, before they left town Haight encouraged him “to use his
influence in the interest of peace, and do everything possible to avert
the shedding of blood.”1
The statement was corroborated by Clewes, who met Morris and
Arthur midway between Cedar City and the Meadows. Morris told
Clewes that he had “an order to save the emigrants and render them
all the assistance that could be given.” Clewes blurted, “Go! go! as
fast as your horses can take you. You may be in time to save them.”
But even as Morris and Arthur spurred their horses on, Clewes’s heart
sank, “for,” he said, “I could not see how they could be in time.”2
Haight left no record of sending such a message. Did he have last-
minute regrets? Or was he trying to create an alibi to hide his own role
in the plan? Still another possibility is that Morris and Arthur invented
the story about their purpose to protect themselves. Morris had been
present in early discussions of killing the emigrants, including the
Sunday council meeting in Cedar City on September 6. More men
had gone to the Meadows from Morris’s militia company than from
any other Cedar City company, and he had accompanied Haight to
Parowan on Wednesday night, September 9, and took part in the tan
bark council early the next morning. Arthur had a run-in with some
of the emigrants in Cedar City when they came into the town store.
It seems unlikely that Haight, so set in his policy for days, had made a
startling about-face on Friday morning. Nor were Morris and Arthur
so unaware of what was going on as they implied.3
After his encounter with Morris and Arthur, Clewes continued on
to Cedar City. The nine heavy freight wagons of Sidney Tanner and
William Mathews beat him there by two hours, rolling in from the
north at 1:00 p.m. Following their meeting with William Dame on
Wednesday, the members of the Tanner-Mathews company had stayed
in camp six miles south of Parowan for two more nights, then started
out for Cedar City on Friday morning.4 After the train pulled into the
old fort at Cedar, Mathews went to see Haight, arriving at his home
just ahead of William Dame.5
Like the Tanner-Mathews train, Dame had left for Cedar City on
Friday morning. After seeing that the Turner-Dukes-Collins stand-
off with Pahvants ended peacefully, Dame decided to hurry “to the
Meadows, for the purpose of putting a stop to the massacre . . . having
repented of what th[ey] had agreed to do.”6 Three other Parowan men
went with Dame, one of whom was James Lewis, the Iron County pro-
bate judge and major of Parowan’s militia battalion.7
When Dame saw Mathews in Cedar City, he told him he needed
fresh animals to get him to the Meadows. Mathews replied that his
partner, Tanner, might spare him some mules. Dame and Haight then
met at Haight’s house.8 That afternoon, two messengers came into
Cedar City from the Meadows. The first was an Indian who left the
Meadows early that morning. He reported that a close-up reconnais-
sance of the emigrants’ corral showed that “only five or six” of them
“were killed.” The message understated the week’s casualties but also
belied statements of Lee and Haight that the killing of the emigrants
was all but finished by Tuesday night.9
The next messenger was Clewes, who arrived at Haight’s home
about 3:00 p.m. He reported that barring some unexpected event,
it was already too late to stop the mass killing. The report sparked
Too Late to Back Water 211

tension between the two senior leaders who heard it. Though Dame
and Haight said nothing in Clewes’s presence, “They were angry
at each other,” Clewes remembered. “I could see it in them.” The
courier then returned home, carrying with him “a horrible remem-
brance of those five days.”10 Clewes would eventually leave Utah and
Mormonism.11
While Dame, Haight, and Clewes met behind closed doors, a curi-
ous Mathews made coffee, perhaps hoping the refreshments would
get him admitted into their chamber. When Mathews knocked on the
door, announcing that the coffee was ready, Dame and Haight refused
to let him in. Mathews grew impatient. “Do you want the mules?” he
called from the threshold. “Yes,” Dame replied bitterly, “I want to go
to see to the burying of the dead.”12
Dame and Haight left with a party for the Meadows sometime
Friday evening.13 They stopped at the Tanner-Mathews camp to eat
supper and borrow the mules. According to Philetus Warn, a non-
Mormon traveling with the train, as the men rode away, someone in
the camp called out, “Be careful, and don’t get shot, Mr. Haight.”
Haight replied, “We shall have no shooting,” with emphasis on we “as
if he meant to imply that the shooting would be all over before he
arrived.”14 E. C. Mathews, William’s son, remembered the mission dif-
ferently. He testified that Dame told the camp, “he was going on out
to try and call the Indians off.”15 Was Dame hoping against hope that
something had intervened to stop the massacre, or was he posturing
for outsiders in the train? Word was already spreading through Cedar
City that “the job had been done.”16
In the early morning hours of Saturday, September 12, Haight
and Dame rode up to Hamblin’s shack.17 When they found the seven-
teen surviving children, huddled and crying, Dame’s last hopes were
dashed, reigniting the rancor that had been smoldering between him
and Haight. Klingensmith witnessed an argument between the two
men over who was responsible for the killings. Haight told Dame that
if he were going to report the massacre to the authorities then he,
Dame, should never have ordered it in the first place.18
Their quarrel roused Lee from his slumber. Lying outside on his
saddle blanket, he recognized the familiar voices arguing. “I heard
some very angry words pass between them,” Lee later wrote. “Dame
said that he would have to report the destruction of the emigrant camp
and the company.”
“How,” Haight replied, “as an Indian massacre?”
Dame said he was not so sure he would put the blame on Indians.

“How the h—l can you report it any other way without implicating
yourself ?” Haight exclaimed.
“Dame lowered his voice almost to a whisper,” and Lee could not
make out the rest of the conversation.19
Haight and Dame went to the makeshift home of Samuel Knight
for something to eat. Years later, Knight confided that while lis-
tening to their conversation, he learned that none of the church
leaders in Salt Lake City “had sanctioned or encouraged in any way
the dastardly deed of which these fanatics were guilty.” Instead,
the two leaders worried over how to report to Salt Lake what they
had done.20
Through the night a few miles south, Nephi Johnson and Cedar
City militiaman John Urie had remained at their posts in the wagon
corral, watching over the emigrant property now claimed by the white
participants.21 Indians had already removed much of the bedding,
taken off the wagon covers, and ripped open feather beds, scattering
the contents in a search for valuables. As the sun rose, other militia
members returned from their camps to the massacre scene, drawn by
a mixture of duty, curiosity, and disbelief. Lee, Dame, Haight, and
others from Hamblin’s “rode up to that part of the field where the
women were lying dead.” As they stopped among the naked, mutilated
bodies, Dame, seeing the carnage for the first time, “seemed terror-
stricken.”22
Another argument ignited between him and Haight. Dame “spoke
low, as if careful to avoid being heard,” and he again insisted that the
attack would have to be reported. Incensed, Haight blustered, “You
know that you counseled it, and ordered me to have them used up.”
“I did not think that there were so many women and children,”
Dame replied. “I thought they were nearly all killed by the Indians.”
Sensing Dame might try to evade all responsibility for the massa-
cre, Haight seethed, “It is too late in the day for you to back water. You
know you ordered and counseled it, and now you want to back out.”
Dame asked Haight if he had any written orders to prove his asser-
tion, then walked away, with Haight screaming after him: “You throw
the blame of this thing on me and I will be revenged on you if I have
to meet you in hell to get it.”23 In truth, there was fault enough to go
around for both men—and for Lee, who walked beside them.
Chided by Lee for their public display of disunity, Dame and
Haight stopped bickering and rode down into the southern part of the
Meadows. The twisted bodies of the dead, some already torn open by
wolves and coyotes, mocked the armchair planning that had led to the

deaths of so many men, women, and children. Both men gave vent to
the emotion welling up in them. William Young, walking among the
bullet-pocked emigrant wagons that morning, recalled that “Haight
made quite a lamentation.” John Higbee later described Dame’s “con-
sternation” at the eerie spectacle.24
If the leaders’ growing regrets did not give them decency enough to
bury the victims’ remains, their desire to keep the massacre a secret did.
Bodies on the landscape would testify of the crime that had occurred
there. The men from Washington hurried home that morning, leaving
only part of the militia to inter the bodies, and the picks and shovels
brought to the Meadows supplied just a fraction of the remaining men.
Despite later claims that the Cedar City men went to the Meadows
just to bury the dead and “took their shovels along,” most had brought
only their guns. Some of the burial detail used the emigrants’ own
shovels, pulled from their wagons, to dig graves.25
Samuel Pollock described how the burial detail worked. The men
found the ground “was very hard; it was impossible for us to dig it.”
They looked for natural cavities and soft places such as washes where
holes could be more easily dug. Most of the bodies were buried close
to where they fell, in graves about three or four feet deep. Some graves
contained three or four bodies. Visitors to the Meadows in coming
months described three major burial areas: one within the emigrants’
wagon corral, another where the men were shot by the militia, and a
third where the women and children were killed.26 Interring the bod-
ies was a grim task, and now ironic. Putting picks and shovels to work
finally fulfilled Haight’s original propaganda that the men were going
to the Meadows to “bury the dead.” As the men beheld the corpses in
the light of the new day, they faced the stark realization of what they
had done—adding to feelings of guilt that would haunt many of them
the rest of their lives.27
Lee later claimed not all in the burial detail expressed remorse as
they worked. Some laughed and talked as if to free themselves from any
second thoughts.28 In general, the men were anxious to work quickly
and get out of the Meadows. They felt like Samuel McMurdy, who,
when he was later asked, “Did you go back at all?” responded “No,
sir.” “Never wanted to go back?” “No, sir, never.”29 Pinto missionary
Amos Thornton, according to his stepson, “helped bury the dead” and
“wished he had not, as the memory of that terrible sight he could not
forget.”30
The bodies did not stay buried for long. The scent of rotting flesh
in the shallow graves attracted wolves, coyotes, and other scavengers.

mountain meadows massacre scene. Harper’s Weekly, August 13, 1859.
Within a day or two, many of the bodies had been pulled to the surface,
torn into pieces, and scattered across the Meadows. Samuel Knight
later reported that “the wolves . . . uncovered the remains and picked
the bones.” This disinterring of victims gave rise to a widespread belief
that no effort at all was made to bury them.31
The militia leaders tried to cover not only the bodies but also their
own tracks. Knowing they could not suppress news of the emigrants’
deaths, they stuck to their original plan to portray the massacre as
an Indian atrocity. On Saturday, September 12, as some of the men

prepared to leave the Meadows, Haight and Klingensmith told them to
keep what had happened secret. “The leaders in it didn’t want it to get
out,” Nephi Johnson later explained. Despite their wishes, the truth
about the massacre, like the victims’ bones, would not stay buried.32
After the corpses were covered, most of the remaining militia-
men trailed unceremoniously home. “We went back promiscuously
[randomly] just about as it happened,” Joel White said. He passed by
Hamblin’s ranch but did not stop.33
The leaders, meanwhile, turned their attention to the emigrants’
livestock, wagons, and surviving children. When Haight visited the
corral where Johnson still watched over the property, he asked what
he thought should be done with it. Johnson replied, “You have made
a sacrifice of the people, and I would burn the property and turn the
cattle loose upon the range, where the Indians could kill them if they
wanted to, and go home like men.”34 Johnson’s statement—if he made
it—was a bold one.35 Yet the poverty of the southern settlements and
the possibility of a long war made the suggestion unattractive. To some
degree a desire for the emigrants’ property had been a motive leading
to the attacks. Instead of abandoning the property, the leaders took
charge of it.36
Not all of the emigrants’ stock had stayed in the Meadows during
the week of the siege. Some cattle may have fled over the nearby hills
and mountains, frightened by the noise and confusion of the attacks.
Stories would persist for decades after the massacre about wild cattle
thought to have originated with the massacred company. Other animals
had died during early assaults on the train, been eaten by the attackers,
or been driven off by Indians who left after the first attacks.37
The day after the massacre, the emigrants’ “loose stock . . . were left
at the Meadows for the time being,” though Klingensmith and Higbee
“ordered some oxen to be brought up, and the herders drove in enough
to haul the [emigrants’] wagons” away.38 The men did not know “how
the oxen had been mated before, and consequently when they happened
to get a [left] ox on the [right] side or vice-versa they would not pull
together.”39 Johnson went with the wagons as they moved north out of
Mountain Meadows. They went to Iron Springs along the Old Spanish
Trail, the route that had been superseded by Leach’s Cutoff between
Cedar City and the Meadows. Off the beaten path, Iron Springs had
water and grass for the cattle, and a place to park the dozen or more
wagons close to Cedar City but beyond travelers’ eyes.40
Finally, there was the question of what to do with the seventeen sur-
viving children, who had been delivered on the night of the massacre

to Hamblin’s ranch, where Rachel Hamblin did her best to care for
them.41 Lee claimed “to act as an agent for the Indians” in barter-
ing the children to the whites who gathered at Hamblin’s. Mormon
families sometimes bartered for Indian children to provide what they
considered a better life.42 Albert and John, the two young Indians at
the ranch, were examples of such adoptions.
Less than two years later, Rachel Hamblin told a federal investiga-
tor that Lee’s pretense of acting for the Indians “was a mere sham.”43
Hamblin entreated Lee to let her keep three Dunlap sisters. Wounded
one-year-old Sarah, she insisted, could not be moved. When six-year-
old Rebecca and four-year-old Louisa begged not to be parted from
their baby sister, “I persuaded Lee not to separate them,” Hamblin
said, “but to let me have all three of them. This he finally agreed to.”44
Klingensmith, bishop of Cedar City and caretaker of the local needy,
took responsibility for transporting the other children to Cedar City.45
And so the three daughters of Jesse and Mary Dunlap said goodbye
to the other surviving children: their first cousins Prudence Angeline
and Georgia Ann, daughters of Lorenzo and Nancy Dunlap; Martha
Elizabeth, Sarah Frances, and William Twitty, children of George and
Manerva Baker; Christopher “Kit” Carson and Triphenia, children
of Alexander and Eliza Fancher; Nancy Saphrona, daughter of Peter
and Saladia Huff; Felix Marion, son of John and Eloah Jones; John
Calvin, Mary, and Joseph, children of Josiah and Matilda Miller; and
Emberson Milum and William Henry, sons of Pleasant and Armilda
Tackitt.46
After leaving Hamblin’s ranch, Klingensmith stopped in Pinto to
leave “one little child there,” five-year-old Martha Elizabeth Baker.
When the wagonload of children rolled on, she remained behind with
the Amos Thornton family.47
After word of the massacre reached Cedar City, many of the local
women gathered to ask one of Isaac Haight’s wives, Eliza Ann Snyder
Haight, what she knew. She told them that Indians had spared some
of the children and sold them to the whites. “They are our children
now to be cared for and loved as our own,” she said, asking the women
to open their homes to the orphans. “These children will be afraid,
afraid of everything, afraid of us,” she said, the last phrase perhaps hint-
ing that she knew what really happened at the Meadows. Klingensmith
brought the children to the Haights’ next-door neighbor, Lydia
Hopkins, a midwife and the president of Cedar City’s Female Benev-
olent Society.48 Lydia was the wife of massacre participant Charles
Hopkins.

When the wagons bearing the orphans arrived, the women gath-
ered around to offer temporary shelter for the children. On Sunday,
Lydia Hopkins would begin finding families to adopt them, but the
important task for the night was to feed the children and provide them
a place to sleep. Many of the Cedar City children had stayed up wait-
ing for the new arrivals. Hearing that the orphans might be frightened,
one local boy had suggested that he and other children be on hand to
greet the newcomers. “They wouldn’t be afraid of us,” he said, and the
mothers agreed.49
Seven-year-old Mary Ann Haight, Isaac and Eliza Ann’s daughter,
watched as her mother helped the children from the wagon, speaking to
them and introducing them to the families with whom they would stay
that night. As Mary Ann observed the children being taken off the wagon
to different homes, she worried that “there won’t be one for us.” Then
she heard Klingensmith announce, “There is just one more, a little girl
who is ill.” The sick child was asleep, and Klingensmith offered to carry
her into the house. Eliza Ann turned to her daughter, saying, “Mary Ann
will show you the way to her bed, and I will come up in a few minutes.”
Klingensmith carried the child and set her on Mary Ann’s bed.50
“She was still asleep,” Mary Ann would remember, “and I was left
alone with her. She was about my size, she lay there so still I was afraid
she was dead, her hair was tangled and her clothes were very soiled.”
Soon Mary Ann’s mother appeared with milk and bread and woke the
new arrival. The girl opened her eyes and said, “Mama.”51
But her “Mama” was not there, and she began to cry. The family
did their best to comfort her, and when the child relaxed, they bathed
her and put her to bed. “Presently Mother came back,” Mary Ann said,
“tucked us down, said a prayer, kissed us good night and assured our
new sister we would love her and take good care of her.”52 The Haights,
including little Mary Ann, called the girl Maria or Anne Marie.53 She
was probably four-year-old Mary Miller.54
Nancy Saphrona Huff, who was also four at the time of the mas-
sacre, went to live with Frances and John Willis, who did not yet have
children of their own. Huff later charged, “I saw Willis during the
massacre, he carried me off from the spot, I could not be mistaken,
living with him made me know him beyond a doubt.”55
With one child in Pinto, three at Hamblin’s ranch, and Nancy Huff
going to live with John Willis, twelve of the surviving seventeen chil-
dren still needed homes. The Haight family kept the girl who spent
the first night with them, and Lydia Hopkins “rustled around” to get
the remaining children more permanently settled.56

Most of the children settled into their Utah homes within weeks
after the massacre, some going to live with massacre participants. Lydia
Hopkins and her husband, Charles, took in two-year-old Sarah Frances
Baker, sister of Martha Elizabeth, who had been left in Pinto.57 The
girls’ nine-month-old brother, William Twitty Baker, went to live with
Cedar City residents Sarah and David Williams.58 Higbee took the two
Tackitt brothers, four-year-old Emberson Milum, who appeared older
than his age, and nineteen-month-old William Henry.59 Higbee later
gave the younger brother to Elias Morris.60
Mary Ann and William Stewart took into their home eighteen-
month-old Felix Marion Jones.61 Elenor and Joseph H. Smith of Cedar
City took charge of twenty-two-month-old Triphenia Fancher.62
Prudence Angeline Dunlap, five-year-old cousin of the three girls
left at Hamblin’s ranch, went to the Samuel Jewkes family.63 Her one-
and-a-half-year-old sister, Georgia Ann, who was still nursing, went
first to Klingensmith and one of his wives who had her own nursing
baby. When Georgia Ann was weaned, the Klingensmiths gave her
to Jane and Richard Birkbeck, a couple that had no children of their
own.64 Cedar City resident George Bowering recorded that some of
the “babes was taken by our sisters . . . and allowed to share the comforts
of the breast with their own natural babes.”65
sarah c. baker mitchell.

Courtesy Utah State Historical
Society.

Other children were settled at Harmony. Christopher “Kit” Carson
Fancher, age five, joined the household of John D. Lee, who called
him Charley.66 The Elisha Groves family from Harmony took in
six-year-old John Calvin Miller, elder brother of Mary, the girl the
Haights kept.67
The last of the seventeen children was the Miller children’s one-
year-old brother, Joseph, adopted by Harmony residents Alexander
and Agnes Ingram, who later moved to Pocketville, about twenty
miles south.68 The childless couple dearly wanted a baby and trav-
eled “a good ways” to retrieve him.69 Eight-year-old Elizabeth Ann
Shirts, a younger sister of Carl Shirts, remembered the child arriv-
ing at Harmony and the group that surrounded him. “I kept pushin’
in till I got up close to where they was,” she recalled. The baby was
hungry, crying, and meant for “a barren woman” who was “happy to
death to get this child.” The child wanted nothing to do with Agnes
but warmed up to the eight-year-old. “I kept gettin’ up closer and
closer and it saw me and stopped cryin’ a little and held out its arms,”
Elizabeth Ann recalled. She took baby Joseph in her arms. “I can feel
the little thing’s flesh on mine now, jist like it was yesterday,” she said
eighty years later. For a while, she stayed with the Ingrams until the
child bonded with Agnes.70
christopher “kit” carson

fancher. Courtesy Utah State
Historical Society.

Some of the surviving children were moved from one location to
another. These transfers were one reason for later rumors of children
being “put out of the way.” Neighbors saw them disappear from their
old surroundings and assumed the worst.71 One story said an emigrant
boy identified a Paiute as “his father’s murderer” and was never seen
again. It concluded, “Perhaps he too, joined the caravan of souls that
winged their flight from the red sod of Mountain Meadows.”72 A simi-
lar story told of a girl who recognized her father’s killer and then sup-
posedly disappeared.73
None of these stories had numbers on their side. A Mormon source
shortly after the massacre recorded that seventeen children had been
saved.74 The same number of children were later turned over to federal
authorities in 1859, including John Calvin Miller, the boy supposedly
killed for knowing too much.75
After getting control of the property and sending the children off,
the remaining militiamen at the Meadows drifted back to their homes.76
Annie Hoag remembered seeing Lee coming back into Fort Harmony
on Sunday, September 13. “I looked out . . . to see John D. Lee . . . at the
head of the Indians,” she said. The Indians “gathered about us there,”
and Lee gave them “mellons, squashes, punkins and pies . . . blankets
shoes and one thing and another and so on.”77 Elizabeth Ann Shirts
remembered, “John D. Lee feasted the Indians in town . . . and they
had the most outlandish garbs on. They had the clothes off the dead
people, their hats and all, and the women had the womens things on
them.”78
On the same Sunday morning, John Hamilton Sr. of Hamilton’s
Fort discovered people and stock in his field. Investigating, he saw
dozens of painted Indians, some with “blankets, quilts, cooking uten-
sils, and women’s saddles and men’s saddles, horses and an amount of
cattle.” While he stared, they shot down two head of cattle for food.
Hamilton kept his distance but made mental notes. He saw “bloody
clothes, both men’s and women’s garments in a pile” three feet high.79
Thomas T. Willis, a teenager in Cedar City at the time of the mas-
sacre, remembered Coal Creek Paiutes returning from the Meadows
with clothing from the massacre victims. “It was generally covered
with blood,” he remembered, and had “bullet holes shot through it.
And the Indians said it came from there, that they had taken it off
the dead bodies.” He watched these Paiutes wash the blood-stained
clothes in a Cedar City water ditch. They also had horses and other
property. “I saw the horses the Indians had,” Willis testified. “They
didn’t have any horses before that. When they came back they was

riding horses and saddles, some of them was dressed up in red topped
boots and high crowned hats sailing around with clothing that they
didn’t have before.”80
Non-Mormon traveler George Powers reported seeing a similar
scene on the previous day. Powers and the Tanner-Matthews train,
traveling toward the Meadows en route to California on Saturday
afternoon, September 12, met some militiamen coming in the oppo-
site direction. Powers said Tanner and Mathews spoke privately with
the militiamen and then reported back to their group that the entire
Arkansas company had been massacred. “And, as it was still danger-
ous to travel the road, they had concluded it was better for us to
pass the spot in the night,” said Powers.81 The Mormons, of course,
did not want Powers and Warn to spot any evidence of what had
happened.
The Tanner-Mathews train moved on “without much conversa-
tion.” Near dusk, in the canyon a mile east of Leach’s Spring, the train
next met Dame, Haight, and other white men “in company with a
band of some twenty Indian warriors,” Powers said. He reported:
These Indians had a two-horse wagon, filled with something I could
not see, as blankets were carefully spread over the top. The wagon was
driven by a white man, and beside him, there were two or three Indians
in it! Many of them had shawls, and bundles of women’s clothes were
tied to their saddles. They were also all supplied with guns or pistols,
besides bows and arrows. The hindmost Indians were driving several
head of the emigrants’ cattle. Mr. Dame and Mr. Haight, and their
men, seemed to be on the best of terms with the Indians, and they were
all in high spirits, as if they were mutually pleased with the accomplish-
ment of some desired object. They thronged around us, and greeted us
with noisy cordiality.82
Dame returned to Tanner the mules he had borrowed the previous

day. He and the others “had been out to see to the burying of the
dead,” Dame said, explaining only part of what happened. “We did not
learn much from them,” Powers said. “They passed on, and we drove
all night in silence.” He found it suspicious that the Mormons had
come from the Meadows with Indians. Nor did he sense much regret
over the emigrants’ death.83
Somewhere along the road that evening the Tanner-Mathews train
also passed Klingensmith and the wagons full of orphaned children.
Klingensmith had ordered the wagons to pull off the road, where he
“pacified” the children “and gave them something to eat and drink,” he

said. The freighting train passed silently at a distance, but close enough
that the watchful Klingensmith could identify “old Billey Mathews”
and other men he knew among the San Bernardino freighters.84
The Tanner-Mathews wagons pushed to get beyond the Meadows
before daylight, and they barely made their goal. With dawn about
to break, E. C. Mathews, son of William Mathews, was driving the
third or fourth wagon in the train when it went through the valley.
He noticed that the teams ahead of him made a slight turn. When
he reached the spot, he did the same and then saw the reason—dead
bodies near the road. “They were just laying on the ground without
clothes on,” he testified.85 Either the burial detail had missed them or
animals had already pulled them from their graves.
Seventeen-year-old Francis Marion Lyman, son of Mormon apostle
Amasa Lyman, was traveling with the Tanner-Mathews company to his
home in San Bernardino. He later wrote that a herd of cattle, which he
assumed belonged to the massacred train, “came rushing around our
wagons, making the night hideous with their bawling, and that, min-
gling with the unearthly stench from the decaying bodies of the human
beings, made it the most terrific night of my life. I felt great relief as we
put distance between us and the fatal spot.”86
The train continued on three miles beyond the Meadows to some
springs, where for the first time since leaving Cedar City, the teamsters
took the harnesses off their mules. It had been a long drive. After rest-
ing for two or three hours on Sunday morning, September 13, they
pushed on, driving another twenty miles and camping that night on the
Santa Clara River near the Indian village that was home to the Paiute
leader Jackson. He and members of his band had reached the Meadows
on Monday night or Tuesday morning near the start of the emigrant
siege, and some had probably stayed on to the end.87
Jackson seemed angry. One of his relatives had been killed in the
fight, and he may have supposed Warn and Powers were friends of the
emigrants who shot him. Or perhaps things he had been told about
the approaching U.S. Army made him suspicious of all Americans. He
and members of his band approached Powers and Warn. Powers said
Jackson “accused me of being an American; appeared mad; stepped
round; shook his head; and pulled his bowstring.”88
Into the tense situation rode Ira Hatch, a Mormon from nearby
Santa Clara. The teamsters importuned him to stay with them and
placate the Indians. “It was a fortunate circumstance for us that this
Mr. Hatch arrived at our camp at the very moment that we were wish-
ing for him most,” Powers recalled. “Mr. Mathews told me [Hatch] was

an Indian Missionary, and of great influence among them. He could do
more with them than anybody else; and if he could not get me over the
road, nobody could. Mr. Tanner had declared that he would not go on
without Mr. Hatch, and pretended to be afraid of the dangers of the
road.” The next morning, however, Hatch left the train and headed
toward the Muddy River. Mathews, feeling nervous without Hatch,
told his company they must leave the area as soon as possible.89
More was afoot than Powers knew. Before the final massacre at the
Meadows, three of the emigrants’ “best scouts” had crept out of the
wagon corral and scrambled toward California.90 They carried with
them “a petition . . . addressed to any friend of humanity” describing
the siege—a last desperate plea for help. The letter reportedly hinted
“that white men were with the Indians, as the latter were well supplied
with powder and weapons.” It listed the names, ages, birthplaces, and
homes of all the emigrants, as well as their material possessions, occu-
pations, and affiliations with churches and fraternal groups in Arkansas
and Missouri.91
One of the three messengers was “young Baker,” probably Jack
Baker’s son Abel.92 The identity of the other two messengers would
remain uncertain.93 Accounts about the fate of the three messengers
differ in detail. Just sixteen days after the final massacre, John D. Lee
spoke openly about “three that got away in the night,” of which “one
was overtaken the next day.”94 Seventeen years after the massacre,
investigative journalist C. F. McGlashan, relying on knowledgeable
local informants like Jacob Hamblin, reported that Jackson himself had
killed the emigrant. McGlashan’s dramatic account claimed Jackson
“crept stealthily up to the sleeping man, placed the flinty arrow-point
just above the collar bone, drew back the bow-string, and sent the shaft
down into the sleeper’s breast.” Waking aghast, the victim leaped to
his feet and “ran nearly forty yards before he fell, faint and dying.”95 If
Lee was right about the timing, the killing took place shortly before
Jackson’s run-in with Warn and Powers.
Sometime later, Jackson took an informant—apparently Hamblin—
to the victim’s remains. They had been burned, leading McGlashan to
surmise that the victim had “lived long enough to be tortured,” though
Paiutes at times cremated even their own dead. Near the spot where
the messenger was killed, Jackson reportedly found the emigrants’ peti-
tion, “a sad, despairing cry of distress.”96 An Indian reputedly gave the
document to Hamblin, “who kept it many years” until “Lee learned of
its existence, took it from him and destroyed it after administering a
sharp reproof.”97

The dead man’s two companions got as far as the Virgin Hills in
present-day Nevada, but accounts differ as to their fate. According to
McGlashan’s sensational details, Paiutes surrounded them, stripped
them of their clothes, and told them to run for their lives. Wounded
by an arrow in the capture, one of the two men did not get far. His cap-
tors “tied him to a stake,” and “faggots were soon blazing around his
quivering body . . . amid all the excruciating agony known to savage tor-
ture.” The third messenger—Baker—fled naked from the scene “with
the swiftness of a deer,” though an arrow pierced his arm, “inflicting a
severe wound.”98
The wounded man propelled himself another fifty miles, aided by
friendly Paiutes along the way who gave him pants, moccasins, and
mesquite bread.99 Continuing west to Cottonwood Spring, he met two
Mormon brothers, Henry and McCan Young, who were en route from
California to Utah. One of the Young brothers said that when they
met Baker, “he seemed to be terror-stricken; his mind was wander-
ing.” He babbled “incoherently about the massacre, and of his pur-
poses.” Knowing nothing about the manhunt for Baker, the Young
brothers gave him a horse to ride and persuaded him to turn back,
believing he would die if he tried to cross the blazing deserts ahead.
Although accounts of Baker’s fate vary, the three men apparently ran
into a search party of Paiutes led by Ira Hatch, who told the Youngs
that Baker had to die. “No sooner had he said the word,” McGlashan’s
account explained, “than the Indians discharged a shower of arrows at
the poor fellow.” One Indian “put an end to the torture by striking the
man on the head with a stone, crushing his skull.”100
As the last of the emigrants were being tracked and killed on the
California road, Isaac Haight waited nervously back in Cedar City for
Brigham Young’s response to the letter he had sent north with Haslam
on Monday. Haslam left Salt Lake City at 1:00 p.m. on September
10—the day before the Friday bloodbath—with carte blanche orders
from Brigham Young for fresh horses at every settlement. He reached
American Fork inside of four hours and Provo by 8:00 p.m. On Friday
morning outside of Nephi, he was “sailing out again on a fresh Mus-
tang” and was in Fillmore for supper. At Beaver he pushed his animal
“as fast as he could stand it.” He used “bronchos, Mustangs, and work
animals” to cover the 250 miles to Cedar City in about seventy hours.
Even then, he had trouble finding fresh mounts. The trip south took a
few hours longer than his journey north.101
Haight and Haslam lived a quarter mile apart in Cedar. After attend-
ing church, where he offered a prayer on Sunday morning, Haight left

for Haslam’s to see if his express rider had returned. Haslam arrived
home a short time earlier and started toward Haight’s house. They
met halfway.
Haslam handed Haight the unsealed letter from Young directing
him to let the emigrants “go in peace.”
Haight took the letter, read through it, and broke down. For half an
hour, he sobbed “like a child” and could manage only the words, “Too
late, too late.”102

epilogue
Under Sentence of Death

Beaver to Mountain Meadows,
March 20–23, 1877
T
he orders came down on Tuesday afternoon, March 20, 1877.
They directed U.S. Army 2nd Lt. George T. T. Patterson and
a detachment from his company to proceed with “utmost
secrecy” to the “appointed place.” There the soldiers, each fortified by
“forty . . . rounds of ammunition and six days rations,” were “to prevent
any interference . . . with the proper execution . . . of John D. Lee, a con-
vict under sentence of death.”1 A posse with Lee in its charge would
follow Patterson’s company the next day.2 At 7:30 Tuesday evening,
after the last glow of twilight had faded, Patterson and his twenty-
three men slipped quietly from southern Utah’s Fort Cameron, two
miles east of Beaver.3
Patterson and his party rode west, skirting Beaver before turning
south and following the road to California that the ill-fated Arkansas
company emigrants took nearly twenty years earlier just before they
were massacred. During their trip, Patterson’s party passed Paragonah,
Parowan, and finally Cedar City, where they took the road west for
Leach’s Cutoff and then Mountain Meadows.4
Almost twenty-four hours after Patterson’s entourage left Fort
Cameron, U.S. Marshal William Nelson drove to the fort to tell
prisoner John D. Lee to prepare for a “journey.” Lee, knowing this to
be his death march, was surprised only by the timing. The court had
decreed that he die on Friday between 10:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., and it
was just Wednesday evening. With little emotion, the prisoner asked
for a bath and fresh clothes. He “wanted to die clean.”5
The nation had watched closely as Lee’s first trial, in 1875, ended in
a hung jury, and his second, the following year, saw him convicted for
his role in the massacre.6 Now in March 1877, reporters for newspa-
pers from coast to coast were again in town to witness and report his
execution. Tipped by Nelson that Lee was about to be moved a day
earlier than planned, the journalists hurried to join the sizable caravan,
which soon strung out on the road. Inside Nelson’s carriage, Lee sat
facing a deputy holding a “double barrelled gun.”7
The suspense made good newspaper copy for a nation that seemed
riveted on Lee and the massacre.
During the ride to the Meadows, Methodist minister George Stokes,
father of the deputy who arrested Lee, accompanied him. According to
a reporter, Lee ventured a confession of sorts, telling Reverend Stokes
“that he killed five emigrants and possibly six.”8 That was the one thing
Lee kept to the last.
For years, he maintained that he rushed to the Meadows as a peace-
maker and had done all in his power to stop the killing. In a written “con-
fession” drafted in the last months of his life, he had even mixed up dates to
conceal his role in the first attack. That same “confession” also claimed he
made a full disclosure to Young two weeks after the massacre.9 But he had
omitted important details then, including those he now gave Stokes.10
Officials never explained their unusual decision—kept secret until
the final hours—to end Lee’s life at the Meadows. Seldom in U.S.
jurisprudence had a criminal been taken to the scene of crime for
execution.11 In this case, the effort required great expense and incon-
venience; Mountain Meadows was almost one hundred bone-shaking
miles from Beaver. Part of the reason may have been rooted in moral
example. Could a more appropriate place be found? Crime and punish-
ment would go together, a perfect stage for any moralist or tragedian.
Hope also lingered that Lee might implicate Brigham Young, the
big game for post-massacre hunters who hoped to destroy Young and
Mormonism. For many Americans, it had become almost an article of
faith that Young had a hand in virtually everything going on in “hierar-
chical, tyrannical” Utah. It seemed to follow then, logically, that Young
had a role in the massacre, too.12
Lee himself affirmed just the opposite. He repeatedly denied that
Young ordered the massacre, but that was not enough for some.13

Young must be guilty, they insisted, and this truth must be pried from
Lee. That hope was almost certainly a reason for taking Lee to the
Meadows. Facing death and the horrid visage of the place, Lee might
at last implicate his adoptive father.
The party conducting Lee arrived at the Meadows on Thursday,
and soldiers and guards set up camp partway down the valley. Later
in the evening as the men gathered by a campfire, Lee was placed in
a wagon with Reverend Stokes. Seclusion with the minister may have
been yet another attempt to get Lee to connect Young to the crime.
Instead, Lee talked mostly about religion, defending his Mormon faith
with a torrent of scripture.14
Brigham Young was attending a church conference in St. George,
less than forty miles away by the roads of the day, and he too wanted to
know how the final scene would play out. Young was aging; he would
be dead within six months. On rare occasions over the last twenty
years, he had spoken publicly about the massacre, condemning it and
offering help to government officials in prosecuting the perpetrators.15
But for the most part, he held his tongue on the subject, for policy and
personal peace, and now said nothing about his preaching and war
policies that formed part of the backdrop for events in 1857. He asked
some men to ride through the night to witness the execution and give
him a report.16 Josiah Rogerson, a stenographer and telegrapher who
had reported Lee’s first trial, hurried from Beaver. He would provide a
record of Lee’s last words.17
Though estimates would vary widely, by midmorning as many
as three hundred onlookers were at the Meadows, many of them
Mormons from nearby settlements. Patterson’s men kept most people
at a distance—some climbed surrounding hills for a better view.18 The
official party, closer in and new to the area, seemed surprised by what
they saw. Instead of the legendary lush grasses of the Meadows, they saw
deep gullies, scrub oak, and sage. Near the old springs—or perhaps just
its remains—was a “sunken pool of slimy, filthy water.” The rivulet that
once ran through the southern end of the valley had been replaced by an
ugly wash 20 feet deep and about 150 feet wide. Some said the change
was from natural erosion. Others said it was the “cu[r]se of God.”19
Lee’s life was now measured by minutes. U.S. Attorney Sumner
Howard, Marshal Nelson, and Reverend Stokes took him aside for one
last interview—and one last attempt to have him accuse Young. In the
end, Lee signed a document implicating “two or three others” in the
massacre—but not the man they wanted most. Lee probably pointed
to John Higbee, William Stewart, or the man most responsible, Isaac
Under Sentence of Death 229

Haight, who were all fugitives from the law. Several times during the
morning, Lee was again asked about George A. Smith’s statement at
the Santa Clara narrows. He had said all he wished on the subject and
now cut off any further questioning. “Let it pass,” he said.20 Smith had
died eighteen months earlier.
A grand jury had indicted nine men for their roles in the massa-
cre: William Dame, Haight, Higbee, Philip Klingensmith, Lee, and
Stewart—all of whom played key parts in the tragedy—as well as three
lesser known figures, George W. Adair, Samuel Jewkes, and Ellott
Willden. Most had been arrested. Klingensmith turned state’s evidence;
Adair, Dame, Jewkes, and Willden were released for lack of evidence.21
Haight, Higbee, and Stewart spent most of their lives running from dep-
uties and, like their fellow perpetrators, from their own consciences.22
Only Lee was tried by a jury and asked to pay with his life.23
On the way back to the main party, Lee rested on the arm of Rev-
erend Stokes and “faltered just perceptibly” right before reaching
his coffin, which had been set in front of three government wagons
cloaked with blankets. Lee sat down on the coffin’s lid, resting briefly
before arising to make his final speech.24
He began deliberately, with few gestures, “then rushed off into
a humid style.”25 “I have done nothing designedly wrong,” he said,
repeating the phrase that had been his salve for nearly twenty years.
“My Conscience is clear before God and man. I am ready to meet my
Redeemer.” When he spoke of his family, his eyes moistened.26 He
had married nineteen wives and fathered more than sixty children, the
youngest being three years old.27 His wives had mostly deserted him;
he named just three as he spoke.28
Lee was conscious that reporters were writing down each word, and
he paused at times to allow them to catch up or to check himself from
saying too much. Toward the end, his voice became stronger. “I do not
believe everything that is now taught and practised by Brigham Young.
I do not care who hears it, it is so. I believe he is leading the people
astray, downward to distruction, but I believe in the gospel that was
taught in its purity and introduced by Joseph Smith in former days.”
The speech lasted five minutes.29
Lee said nothing about the fears, the rumors, the mistaken beliefs,
the bad timing, the poor communication, the leadership failures, the
violent times, the perversion of religion, the concentration of author-
ity, the unintended consequences of the Utah War—and the simple
bad luck—that led to the massacre. He said nothing about such things
as guilt, crime, and redemption—how he and others in the massacre

represented the human struggle in a large and horrible way. And he
said nothing of how the Meadows became an obscenity to all the good
things Mormonism stood for.
When Lee last met Young, seven months before Lee’s arrest, they
were friendly. Four years before the meeting, after learning details of
the massacre that were new to him, Young had excommunicated Lee
from the church for “extreem wickedness.”30 Even earlier, Young con-
demned Lee for his role in the massacre, but as his adoptive father
and spiritual leader, encouraged him to live the best he could in the
remaining years of his life.31 Before their final meeting, Young heard
Lee was keeping bad company, playing cards, and using foul language.
“John,” he chastened, “you Must be careful & stand to your integrity.”
He then blessed Lee and drove on.32 They would not meet again.
In the final moments of his life, unable to undo the atrocity that played
out on his execution site two decades before or to face fully the reality of
what he had done, Lee clung to a last vestige of integrity. He had grown
bitter toward Young for abandoning him in his final years. But even as he
faced the firing squad, Lee refused to accuse Young of the massacre.
Lee sat erect on his coffin, hands on his head, his chest thrust out.
“Don’t let them mangle my body,” he said to the marshal.33
At exactly 11:00 a.m., five balls tore through Lee and left a skipping
pattern on the grass behind.34
john d. lee execution. Jacob Piatt Dunn, Massacres of the Mountains (New York,
Harper & Brothers, 1886.)
Under Sentence of Death 231

Acknowledgments
W
e express appreciation to the many men and women
across the United States whose assistance made this book
possible.
Colleagues in the Family and Church History Department and
other departments of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
and Brigham Young University traveled to many libraries, archives,
and other historical institutions, prepared hundreds of research
memos, read our manuscript, offered helpful suggestions, and
engaged us in scholarly debate that left our manuscript improved. We
extend special thanks to Grant Anderson, Ronald O. Barney, Melvin
L. Bashore, Jay G. Burrup, Craig L. Foster, Chad Foulger, Janiece
Johnson, Jeffery O. Johnson, Michael N. Landon, Chad M. Orton,
Brent Reber, Jennifer Reeder, Brian D. Reeves, Glenn N. Rowe, and
Michael L. Shamo.
We benefited from the professionalism of several editors, including
Amanda Midgley Borneman, Rachel Evans, Edward A. Geary, Daryl
Gibson, Marny K. Parkin, and Heather Seferovich. Alison Kitchen
Gainer—a relative of massacre victims—led the cite-checking effort.
As content editor, Barbara Jones Brown became a colleague in the
writing task, helping not only with diction but with narrative sugges-
tions and organization. We also express thanks to Cynthia Read, our
editor at Oxford University Press, production editor Joellyn Ausanka,
and copy editor Mary Sutherland.
With her expertise in reading nineteenth-century Pitman short-
hand, LaJean Purcell Carruth made a modern transcript of John D.
Lee’s two trials, as well as other manuscripts of shorthand records held
in the Church History Library and other institutions. Likewise, Amy
Carruth’s skill in reading “Deseret Alphabet,” the short-lived Latter-
day Saint pioneer phonetic spelling system, also gave first-time access
to several other historical records.
William W. Slaughter helped with historical images; Micheal
Richards created our original cover design; Tom Child and Sheryl
Dickert Smith laid out maps; and Wally Barrus, John W. Telford, and
James W. and Marlene C. Walker took present-day photographs.
Others at church headquarters or Brigham Young University
who gave countless hours of assistance with their various skills and
knowledge include Jeff Anderson, Mary Teresa Anderson, Stephanie
Anderson, Loren G. Ashcraft, Christy Best, Tim Bingaman, Ada-
lia Bollschweiler, Karen S. Bolzendahl, Aaron M. Chomjak, Scott R.
Christensen, Christine Cox, Ted Cox, Richard H. Davis, W. Randall
Dixon, Larry W. Draper, Patrick C. Dunshee, Terrence Durham,
Marie Hyatt Erickson, Mary K. Gifford, Carolyn Gull, Michael J.
Hall, Elaine E. Hasleton, Sharalyn D. Howcroft, Dean C. Jessee,
Dawn C. Martindale, Robbie McArthur, Marie McBride, Pauline
K. Musig, Veneese Nelson, Jerry A. Niederhauser, Steven L. Olsen,
Richard Oman, Kathryn Phillips, Sidney H. Price, David F. Putnam,
David E. Rencher, Shirley Rogers, Bonnie Shuler, Marianne Skinner,
T. Michael Smith, Brian W. Sokolowsky, Sarah Sorenson, Mark Staker,
Vicki Standing, John D. Stemmons, Russell Taylor, F. Michael Wat-
son, Ronald G. Watt, Vivian Wellman, David J. Whittaker, and April
Williamsen. We also appreciate the contribution of numerous church
service missionaries. In order to understand mid-nineteenth-century
cattle diseases and deaths near Corn Creek, Utah, we asked medical
specialists for advice: Paul V. Christofferson, DVM; Edmund C. Evans,
MD; DeVon C. Hale, MD; Quinton S. Harris, MD; John H. Holbrook,
MD; Robert K. Maddock Jr., MD; John M. Matsen, MD; and George
F. Snell, MD. Fritjof F. Langeland, MD, and Larry J. Wright, MD,
along with Shannon A. Novak, helped debunk the old myth that victims
of the massacre showed signs of venereal disease. Ugo A. Perego and
Scott Woodward offered advice on DNA and other laboratory ques-
tions. We acknowledge the forensic and archeological advice of Shane
Baker, Shannon A. Novak, and George J. Throckmorton.
We have endeavored to listen to the various voices of people and
groups represented in the Mountain Meadows story. The following
234 Acknowledgments
men and women have helped us understand the viewpoint of relatives
of massacre victims and perpetrators: Don Baker, Phil Bolinger,
Robert H. Briggs, Lucile Wilcock Brubaker, Sharon Chambers, Diana
Dowden, Renee Durfee, Bob Fancher, Diann and Harley Fancher,
J. K. Fancher, Karen and Scott Fancher, Lynn-Marie Fancher, Terry
Fancher, Brian W. Higbee, Talana S. Hooper, Kyle Kennedy, LeRoy
Lee, Richard and Rosemary Lee, Verne R. Lee, Roger V. Logan Jr.,
Ronald E. Loving, Gerald Lynch, Karen Maxwell, Patty Norris, Ran-
dall Paul, Shirley H. Pyron, Betty Ramsey, James Sanders, Stella Lee
Shamo, Susan Skinner, Carmen R. Smith, Jared O. Smith, Jim W.
Tackitt, Eric Wadsworth, Cheri Baker Walker, David L. and Sharon
Willden, and Richard Wilson.
We actively sought the perspective of Southern Paiutes, including
Annette “Nikki” Borchardt, Jeanine Borchardt, Barbara Chavez, Dar-
lene Pete Harrington, Marilyn Virginia Rice Jake, Shirley Jake, Vivi-
enne C. Jake, Wilford Moroni Jake, Clarence John, Earnestine Lehi,
Dorena Martineau, Willard G. Pete, Arthur Richards, Glenn Rogers,
Alex Shepherd, Eleanor Bushhead Tom, Gary Tom, Lora Tom, Glo-
ria Vincent, and Rita Pete Garcia Walker. We also wish to recognize
Logan Hebner, who has spent much of his free time capturing Paiute
oral histories.
Our research has been aided by the skills and knowledge of archi-
vists, librarians, historians (including local and family historians), trail
experts, collectors, and others with technical and subject specialties,
some of whom responded to our newspaper solicitation for informa-
tion. These include but are not be limited to Ann Rogerson Adams,
Curtis R. Allen, Ron Andersen, Lavina Fielding Anderson, Richard
L. Anderson, Sharon Avery, Anna Jean Backus, Russell Baker, Philip
L. Barlow, Daniel R. Bartholomew, Lowell C. Bennion, Gary James
Bergera, LaMar C. Berrett, Peter J. Blodgett, Lee Bracken, Newell G.
Bringhurst, Spencer and Lavelle Brinkerhoff, Ann Buttars, McClain
Bybee, Kent Bylund, Raydene Cluff, John L. Cooper III, Robert D.
Crockett, Kevin Cromar, Forrest S. Cuch, Charles H. Cureton, Den-
nis “C” Davis, Paul R. DeBry, Peter H. DeLafosse, Terry Del Bene,
Jonathan A. Dibble, Dixie Dillon, Maurianne Dunn, Christine M. and
George H. Durham, John Eldredge, Ed Firmage, Jack Earl Fletcher,
Patricia K. A. Fletcher, Annewhite T. Fuller, John S. Gardner, Tina
Gillman, Kenneth W. Godfrey, John R. Gonzales, Jean and John
H. Groberg, Jo Lynne Harline, Howard Hatch, Julie Held, Wayne
K. Hinton, Mark W. Holden, Dennis B. Horne, John C. Houston,
George Hurt, Larry Hutchings, Lisa Irle, Marian “Omar” Jacklin,
Acknowledgments 235
Suzanne Scott Jennings, Laura R. Jolley, Christopher Jones, Rhonda
Larkin, Nicholas S. Literski, Clint Lytle, Allen J. Malmquist, Jeffrey
Mann, Michele Margetts, Paul S. Martineau, Shirley L. McFadzean,
Brandon J. Metcalf, Tom Milner, Paula Mitchell, Dorothy O’Brien,
Nathan B. Oman, Dennis Osmond, Carolyn and James C. Pace, Ardis
E. Parshall, Michael Harold Paulos, Richard Peuser, Merle Prince,
Stephen J. Pyne, W. Paul Reeve, Richard L. Rieck, Brent and Lynette
Robinson, Stephen D. Robison, Merle Romer, Ronald E. Romig, Rod
Ross, Vicki Rounsavall, William J. Sawaya, Janet Burton Seegmiller,
Lyle E. and Tracy Shamo, Edwina Jo Snow, G. Murray Snow, James
LeVoy Sorenson, E. Diane Stemmons, Dell Stout, Stephen C. Sturgeon,
Jennifer M. Thomas, Morris A. Thurston, Paul Tinker, Ernest Carl
Turley, John Wadsworth, Nathaniel Wadsworth, Jeffrey Walker, John
W. Welch, Sharon White, Gary Williams, Camille Woodland, and
Fred E. Woods.
The administrative assistants at church headquarters and at Brigham
Young University provided invaluable assistance: Melissa Cantwell,
Marjean Crowther, Jo Lyn Curtis, Dorsalle G. Ford, Joan S. Harding,
Viola Knecht, Laura Korth, Valerie Lindeman, Andrea H. Maxfield,
Kiersten Olson, Marilyn R. Parks, Renee Powell, JaNell H. Riley,
Gina Sconiers, Karen Lee Westenskow, and Kally Whittle.
Although we sought to work from primary sources wherever pos-
sible, we also consulted many works already written about the mas-
sacre and acknowledge the contributions of their authors through our
source notes.
As our manuscript was coming into focus, we asked more than three
dozen friends and scholars to read it and offer feedback. These men and
women, who represented a cross section of disciplines and viewpoints,
greatly improved our manuscript, confirming again that scholarship
is a joint effort and that many of its best practitioners are generous
contributors. We acknowledge Douglas D. Alder, Brent F. Ashworth,
R. Davis Bitton, Annette “Nikki” Borchardt, Robert H. Briggs, Karl
F. Brooks, Lucile Wilcock Brubaker, Richard L. Bushman, John K.
Carmack, Sharon Chambers, Lawrence G. Coates, Todd M. Comp-
ton, Peter H. DeLafosse, Sheri L. Dew, Ronald K. Esplin, Kathleen
Flake, Sarah Barringer Gordon, Leo A. Jardine, Richard L. Jensen,
Verne R. Lee, Patricia H. MacKinnon, Patrick Q. Mason, Armand
L. Mauss, Cory H. and Karen Maxwell, Louis A. Moench, Reid L.
Neilson, Patty Norris, Eric C. Olson, Ardis E. Parshall, Gene A. Ses-
sions, Jan Shipps, Paul H. Smith, John Thomas, Lora Tom, Shirley S.
Turley, John Turner, and Eric Wadsworth. We express special thanks
236 Acknowledgments
to Thomas G. Alexander and William P. MacKinnon. In addition to
reading the manuscript, the former joined our weekly discussions for
several months and gave invaluable input, while the latter sometimes
suggested language which, with his permission, we adopted. We also
express appreciation for the support and feedback of Russell M. Nel-
son and Dallin H. Oaks, advisors to the Family and Church History
Department, and of Marlin K. Jensen, Church Historian.
One of the goals of our book was exhaustive research. We thank the
following institutions and their staffs for their help:
Alabama: Huntsville–Madison County Public Library, Huntsville;
M. Louis Salmon Library, University of Alabama, Huntsville.
Arizona: Arizona Historical Society, Tucson; Cline Library, North-
ern Arizona University, Flagstaff; Hayden Library, Arizona State Uni-
versity, Tempe; University of Arizona Library, Tucson.
Arkansas: Alma Public Library, Alma; Arkansas History Com-
mission, Little Rock; Benton County Historical Society, Bentonville;
Boone County Heritage Museum, Harrison; Boone County Library,
Harrison; Carroll County Clerk-Recorder, Berryville; Carroll County
Historical and Genealogical Society, Berryville; Crawford County
Genealogical Society, Alma; Fort Smith Public Library, Fort Smith;
Franklin County Library, Ozark; Grace Keith Genealogical Collec-
tion, Fayetteville Public Library, Fayetteville; Grand Lodge Masonic
Library of Arkansas, Little Rock; Johnson County Public Library,
Clarksville; L. S. and Hazel C. Robson Library, University of the
Ozarks, Clarksville; Marion County Arkansas Heritage Society, Yell-
ville; Madison County Library, Huntsville; Newton County Historical
Society, Jasper; Newton County Library, Jasper; Northwest Arkansas
Genealogical Society, Rogers; Pope County Library, Russellville; Van
Buren Public Library, Van Buren.
California: Bancroft Library, University of California, Berke-
ley; Beale Memorial Library, Bakersfield; Calaveras County Histori-
cal Society, San Andreas; California State Library, Sacramento; Cecil
H. Green Library, Stanford University, Stanford; Charles E. Young
Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles; College of
the Sequoias Library, Visalia; Columbia State Historic Park, Columbia;
Colusa County Free Library, Colusa; Doris Foley Library for Histori-
cal Research, Nevada City; Fresno City and County Historical Society
Archives, Fresno; Fresno County Public Library, Fresno; George and
Verda Armacost Library, University of California, Redlands; Gerald
D. Kennedy Reference Library, San Joaquin County Historical Soci-
ety & Museum, Lodi; Haggin Museum, Stockton; Henry Wilson
Acknowledgments 237
Coil Masonic Library and Museum, Grand Lodge of the Free and
Accepted Masons of California, San Francisco; Humboldt County
Historical Society, Eureka; Huntington Library, San Marino; John
M. Pfau Library, California State University, San Bernardino; Lake
County Historic Courthouse Museum, Lakeport; Mariposa County
Assessor and Recorder’s Office, Mariposa; Mariposa County Library,
Mariposa; Merced County Historical Society, Merced; Merced County
Library, Merced; Merced County Recorder’s Office, Merced; Meriam
Library, California State University, Chico; Modesto Public Library,
Modesto; Mojave River Valley Museum, Barstow; Napa City-County
Library, Napa; North Baker Research Library, California Historical
Society, San Francisco; Northern Mariposa County History Center,
Coulterville; Oviatt Library, California State University, Northridge;
Porterville Public Library, Porterville; San Joaquin Recorder/County
Clerk’s Office, Stockton; Stanislaus County Clerk-Recorder Office,
Modesto; Stockton-San Joaquin County Public Library, Stockton;
California State Library-Sutro, San Francisco; Sutter’s Fort State
Historic Park, Sacramento; Tulare County Museum, Visalia; Tulare
County Library, Visalia; Tulare Public Library, Tulare; Tulare County
Clerk-Recorder’s Office, Visalia; Tuolumne County Museum and His-
tory Center, Sonora; Tuolumne County Library, Sonora; Tuolumne
County Recorder’s Office, Sonora; University Library, California State
University, Sacramento; University Library, California State Univer-
sity, Stanislaus, at Turlock; University Library, University of Califor-
nia, Davis; University of California, San Diego; William Knox Holt
Memorial Library, University of the Pacific, Stockton; Workman and
Temple Family Homestead Museum, City of Industry.
Colorado: Denver Public Library; National Archives and Records
Administration, Rocky Mountain Region, Denver; Stephen H. Hart
Library, Colorado Historical Society, Denver; University Libraries,
University of Colorado, Boulder.
Connecticut: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale
University, New Haven.
Georgia: Columbus Public Library, Columbus; Georgia Histori-
cal Society, Savannah; Troup County Historical Society Archives,
LaGrange.
Idaho: Eli M. Oboler Library, Idaho State University, Pocatello.
Illinois: Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield;
Charleston Carnegie Public Library, Charleston; Coles County His-
torical Society, Mattoon; Mattoon Public Library, Mattoon; Research
Center, Chicago History Museum, Chicago.
238 Acknowledgments
Indiana: Allen County Public Library, Fort Wayne; Indiana His-
torical Society, Indianapolis.
Iowa: Grand Lodge of Iowa, A.F. and A.M., Masonic Library and
Museum, Cedar Rapids; State Historical Society of Iowa Library, Des
Moines.
Kansas: Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas,
Lawrence; Leavenworth Public Library, Leavenworth; State Archives
and Library, Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka.
Maryland: National Archives and Records Administration, College
Park.
Michigan: Alfred P. Sloan Museum, Flint; Archives of Michigan,
Lansing; Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor; Detroit Public Library, Detroit; Flint Public Library, Flint;
Genesee County Genealogical Society, Flint; Genesee County Pro-
bate Court, Flint; Library of Michigan, Lansing.
Mississippi: J. D. Williams Library, University of Mississippi,
University.
Missouri: Barry-Lawrence Regional Library, Cassville; B. D.
Owens Library, Northwest Missouri State University, Maryville;
Boonslick Regional Library, Warsaw; Clay County Archives and
Historical Library, Liberty; Community of Christ Archives, Inde-
pendence; Duane G. Meyer Library, Missouri State University,
Springfield; F. W. Olin Library, Drury University, Springfield;
George A. Spiva Library, Missouri Southern State University, Jop-
lin; Henry County Museum, Clinton; James C. Kirkpatrick Library,
Central Missouri State University, Warrensburg; Johnson County
Clerk, Warrensburg; Joplin Public Library, Joplin; Joseph R. Palmer
Family Memorial Library, Elsberry; Kansas City Public Library, Kan-
sas City; Lincoln County Recorder of Deeds, Troy; Mid-Continent
Public Library, North Independence Branch, Independence; Mid-
Continent Public Library, Platte City Branch, Platte City; Miller
Nichols Library, University of Missouri–Kansas City; Missouri State
Archives, Jefferson City; National Frontier Trails Museum, Indepen-
dence; Northwest Missouri Genealogical Society, St. Joseph; Ozarks
Genealogical Society, Springfield; Powell Memorial Library, Troy;
Springfield-Greene County Library, Springfield; State Historical
Society of Missouri, Columbia; Trails Regional Library, Lexington
Branch, Lexington; Trails Regional Library, Warrensburg Branch,
Warrensburg.
Montana: Montana Historical Society, Helena.
Nebraska: Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln.
Acknowledgments 239
Nevada: Lied Library, University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Lincoln
County Recorder’s Office, Pioche; Nevada Historical Society, Reno;
Nevada State Library and Archives, Carson City; Noble H. Getchell
Library, University of Nevada, Reno.
New Jersey: Firestone Library, Princeton University, Princeton.
New Mexico: Center for Southwest Research, University of New
Mexico, Albuquerque.
New York: New-York Historical Society, New York.
North Carolina: Danbury Public Library, Danbury; Dobson
Community Library, Dobson; Greensboro Public Library, Greens-
boro; Louis Round Wilson Library, University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill; North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh; Olivia Raney
Local History Library, Raleigh; Orange County Public Library, Hills-
borough; Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library,
Duke University, Durham; Rockingham County Public Library, Eden
Branch, Eden; Rockingham County Public Library, Madison Branch,
Madison; State Library of North Carolina, Raleigh.
Oklahoma: Oklahoma Department of Libraries, Oklahoma City;
Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City; Oklahoma State Uni-
versity Library, Stillwater; Western History Collection, University of
Oklahoma, Norman.
Oregon: Oregon Historical Society, Portland; Southern Oregon
Historical Society, Research Library, Medford.
Pennsylvania: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia;
Lancaster County Historical Society, Lancaster; United States Army
Military History Institute, Carlisle; York County Archives, York; York
County Heritage Trust Library and Archives, York.
Tennessee: Charles C. Sherrod Library, East Tennessee State Uni-
versity, Johnson City; Chattanooga–Hamilton County Bicentennial
Library, Chattanooga; Clyde W. Roddy Library, Dayton; East Tennes-
see Historical Society, Knoxville; Fentress County Library, Jamestown;
Fort Loudoun Regional Library, Athens; Greeneville/Greene County
Public Library, Greeneville; Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Van-
derbilt University, Nashville; Meigs-Decatur Public Library, Decatur;
Millard Oakley Library, Livingston; Overton County Archives, Liv-
ingston; T. Elmer Cox Library, Greeneville; Tennessee State Library
and Archives, Nashville.
Texas: Center for American History, University of Texas, Austin;
University Library, University of Texas El Paso.
Utah: Beaver County Offices, Beaver; Church History Library, The
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City; Family
240 Acknowledgments
History Library, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
Salt Lake City; Gerald R. Sherratt Library, Southern Utah University,
Cedar City; Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo;
Howard W. Hunter Law Library, Brigham Young University, Provo;
J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City; Mer-
rill-Cazier Library, Utah State University, Logan; Pioneer Memorial
Museum, International Society-Daughters of the Utah Pioneers, Salt
Lake City; S. J. Quinney Law Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake
City; Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library, University of Utah,
Salt Lake City; Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden;
St. George Regional Family History Training Center, St. George;
Utah State Archives, Salt Lake City; Utah State Historical Society, Salt
Lake City; Utah Territorial Statehouse State Park Museum, Fillmore;
Val A. Browning Library, Dixie State College of Utah, St. George;
Washington County Library, St. George.
Virginia: Loudoun Circuit Court, Leesburg; Thomas Balch
Library, Leesburg; Wythe-Grayson Regional Library, Independence.
Washington, D.C.: Daughters of the American Revolution Library;
Library of Congress; National Archives and Records Administration;
Smithsonian Institution.
Wyoming: American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming,
Laramie.
Finally, we express gratitude to our families, without whose support
we could never have completed this book.
Acknowledgments 241
Appendix A
The Emigrants
T
he following is a list of emigrants known or strongly believed
to have perished in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, along
with the seventeen children who survived. The emigrants are
listed alphabetically by family name, then by age within each family
group. The names of unmarried children are indented after the names
of their parents; the surviving children’s names appear in italics. After
each name is the person’s approximate age at the time of the massacre.1
Subscript notes indicate that a person was memorialized as a massa-
cre victim on the 1955 monument in Harrison, Arkansas (designated
by H ); on the 1990 monument at Mountain Meadows (designated by
M ); or on the program published for the September 10, 1999, memo-
rial service at Mountain Meadows (designated by MS). Some names
that follow do not appear on any of these three lists. Some persons
identified in the past as massacre victims, like Charles Stallcup and
Alf Smith, do not appear. Though originally thought to have perished
in the massacre, these persons, in fact, left the wagon train sometime
before the massacre and thus survived.
For additional information about the emigrants, including other
possible victims and lists of emigrants who traveled with or near the
victims during their journey west, see mountainmeadowsmassacre.org.
Aden, William Allen, 19. He crossed the plains with another train
but joined the Arkansas company around Parowan, where he visited
William Leany, who had been befriended by his father in Tennes-
see. Shot on Monday, September 7, at Leach’s Spring by William
C. Stewart.2H, M, MS
Baker, George W., 27. A son of John Twitty Baker, he had previously
spent time in Stockton, Sonora, and Columbia, California, during the
gold rush.3H, M, MS
Baker, Manerva Ann Beller, 25. Older sister of David W. and Melissa
Ann Beller.H, M, MS
Mary Lovina, 7. During the massacre, her sister Martha saw her
being led by a couple of men over a ridge.4H, M, MS
Martha Elizabeth, 5. She later married James William Terry
of Harrison, Arkansas, and resided there until her death in
1940.5H, M, MS
Sarah Frances, 2. She eventually married Joseph A. Gladden and
moved to Muskogee, Oklahoma. After Gladden’s death, she mar-
ried Manley C. Mitchell. Died in Muskogee in 1947.6H, M, MS
William Twitty, 9 months. Later worked as a mail carrier. Mar-
ried twice and was the father of fourteen children. Died in Searcy
County, Arkansas, in 1937.7H, M, MS
Baker, John Twitty, 52. Captain of one of the trains that made up
the Arkansas company, he left his wife and some grown children back
in Carroll County, planning to meet up with them again after his trip
across the plains.8H, M, MS
Baker, Abel, 19. Probably one of three men who left the wagon
corral during the week of the massacre to seek help in California
and were killed before reaching their destination.9H, M, MS
Beach, John, 21. Stood four feet six inches and was known for being
very dexterous. He was probably hired as a drover for the cattle.10M, MS
Beller, David W., 12. An orphan, he was a ward of George W.
Baker.11H, M, MS
Beller, Melissa Ann, 14. An orphan, she was a ward of George W.
Baker.12 H, M,
Cameron, William, 51. Lived in Carroll County before moving
to Johnson County, Arkansas, his home previous to his journey
west.13H, M, MS
Cameron, Martha, 51.H, M, MS
244 Appendix A
Tillman, 24. He owned the racehorse called One-Eye Blaze. He
had been in business at Fort Smith, Arkansas, before joining his
family on the trip west.14M, MS
Isom, 18.M, MS
Henry, 16.M, MS
James, 14.M, MS
Martha, 11.M, MS
Larkin, 8.M, MS
Cameron, Nancy, 12. Niece of William Cameron.M, MS
Coker, Edward, 27. Tried ranching in Texas before joining the emi-
gration to California.15
Coker, Charity Porter, 37. The Cokers were reported to have two
children traveling with them.
Cooper, William E., 29. A carriage maker by trade, he and his wife
were living in Dubuque, Scott County, Iowa, in 1856.16
Cooper, Abbey, 29.
Deshazo, Allen P., 22. Brother-in-law of John H. Baker and son-in-
law of John Twitty Baker. He may have worked as a cattle drover dur-
ing the trip.17H, M, MS
Dunlap, Jesse, Jr., 39. Brother of Lorenzo D. Dunlap, brother-in-law
and mercantile partner of William C. Mitchell, a former Arkansas state
senator.18H, M, MS
Dunlap, Mary Wharton, 39. Sister of Nancy Wharton Dunlap.H, M, MS
Ellender, 18.M, MS
Nancy M., 16.M, MS
James D., 14.M, MS
Lucinda, 12. Twin sisters Lucinda and Susannah were reportedly
murdered after most of the other emigrants were already dead.19M, MS
Susannah, 12.M, MS
Margarette, 11.M, MS
Mary Ann, 9.M, MS
Rebecca Jane, 6. She and her two surviving sisters lived with Jacob
Hamblin until she was returned to Arkansas. She married John Wes-
ley Evins and resided in Calhoun and then Drew County, Arkansas.
She died in 1914.20H, M, MS
Louisa, 4. She eventually married James M. Linton and settled first
in Pope County, Arkansas, and then in Oklahoma, where she died
in 1926.21H, M, MS
Appendix A 245
Sarah Elizabeth, 1. She was “shot through one of her arms, below
the elbow, by a large ball, breaking both bones and cutting the
arm off.” While living with the Hamblins, she developed an eye
infection and eventually went blind. She later married James
Lynch, who assisted in rescuing the surviving children. She died
in 1901.22H, M, MS
Dunlap, Lorenzo Dow, 42. Brother of Jesse Dunlap and brother-
in-law of William C. Mitchell.23H, M, MS
Dunlap, Nancy Wharton, 42. Sister of Mary Wharton Dunlap.M, MS
Thomas J., 18.M, MS
John H., 16.M, MS
Mary Ann, 13.M, MS
Talitha Emaline, 11.M, MS
Nancy, 9.M, MS
America Jane, 7.M, MS
Prudence Angeline, 5. She married Claiborne Hobbs Koen and settled
in Texas, where she raised eight children. She died in 1918.24H, M, MS
Georgia Ann, 18 months. Eventually married George Marshall
McWhirter and settled in Dallas, Texas. She died in 1920.25H, M, MS
Eaton, William M., adult, age unknown. Originally from Indiana, he
appears to have been farming in Illinois when he decided to go west. He
sent his wife and children back to Indiana to await his return.26H, M, MS
Edwards, Silas, age unknown. According to Baker descendants, he
was a younger brother of John Twitty Baker’s mother, Hannah.27M, MS
Fancher, Alexander, 45. Described as “tall, slim, erect, of dark com-
plexion, a singer, and a born leader and organizer of men.” He served
in the Carroll County militia to end the Tutt-Everett War in neigh-
boring Marion County, Arkansas. Led his own company west. Prob-
ably captained the Arkansas company that formed in Salt Lake City
before heading south.28H, M, MS
Fancher, Eliza Ingram, 33.H, M, MS
Hampton, 19.H, M, MS
William, 17.H, M, MS
Mary, 15.H, M, MS
Thomas, 14.H, M, MS
Martha, 10.H, M, MS
Margaret A., 8.H, M, MS
Sarah G., 8.H, M, MS
246 Appendix A
Christopher “Kit” Carson, 5. He died in 1873 at the home of his
cousin Hampton Bynum Fancher.29H, M, MS
Triphenia, 22 months. Married James Chaney Wilson and had
eleven children. She died in Osage, Carroll County, Arkansas, in
1897.30H, M, MS
Fancher, James Mathew, 25. Cousin of Alexander Fancher and
brother of Robert Fancher.31H, M, MS
Fancher, Frances “Fanny” Fulfer, age unknown.32M, MS
Fancher, Robert, 19. Cousin of Alexander Fancher and brother of
James Fancher.H, M, MS
Gresly, John, 21. Possibly the man identified as the troublesome “Ger-
man” or “Dutchman.” Born in Pennsylvania to German parents.33
Hamilton. Frank King identified a Hamilton with the company; John
D. Lee said a man named Hamilton met him outside of the emigrants’
corral before the final massacre and acted as the emigrants’ spokes-
man.34 H, M, MS
Huff, Saladia Ann Brown, 38. Saladia’s husband, Peter Huff, died
on the plains before reaching Salt Lake City. Her daughter Nancy
Saphrona remembered seeing her shot in the forehead and fall dead
during the massacre.35H, M, MS
John, 14. Likely one of the unidentified Huff sons listed on the
monument.M, MS
William C., 13.M, MS
Mary E., 11.
James K., 8. Likely one of the unidentified Huff sons listed on the
monument.M, MS
Nancy Saphrona, 4. She remembered being held in the arms of
John Twitty Baker at the time he was killed. She later married
George Dallas Cates and died in Yell County, Arkansas, in 1878 at
the young age of twenty-five.36H, M, MS
son, age unknown.37
Jones, John Milum, 32. Brother of Newton Jones and son-in-law
of Cyntha Tackitt. Left from Johnson County with the Tackitts and
planned to start a ranch with his brother, Newton.38H, M, MS
Jones, Eloah Angeline Tackitt, 26. Daughter of Cyntha Tackitt.H, M, MS
child, age unknown.39H, M, MS
Appendix A 247
Felix Marion, 18 months. Government officials initially misiden-
tified the recovered child as “Elisha Huff ” and, later, “Ephraim
Huff.” Eventually, as a young man, he moved to Texas, where he
married Martha Ann Reed and fathered five children. He died in
1932.40H, M, MS
Jones, Newton, 23. Brother of John M. Jones.41M, MS
McEntire, Lawson A., 21. His older brother, John, had gone west
several years earlier but died of tuberculosis in Salt Lake City. Lawson
probably worked as a drover for the wagon train.42H, M, MS
Miller, Josiah ( Joseph), 30. The uncle of Armilda Miller Tackitt, he
and his family left from Crawford County, Arkansas.43H, M, MS
Miller, Matilda Cameron, 26. Daughter of William and Martha
Cameron. Her son, John Calvin, told how he pulled arrows from his
mother’s body during the massacre.44H, M, MS
James William, 9.M, MS
John Calvin, 6. Government officials originally misidentified
the recovered Miller children as having the surname of “Sorel.”
He accompanied Jacob Forney to Washington, D.C., to testify
about the massacre and by 1860 was back in Carroll County,
Arkansas.H, M, MS
Mary, 4. She may have been the girl the Haight family called Ann
Marie and is thought to have eventually settled in Tennessee.45H, M, MS
Joseph, 1. As an adult, he went by the name of William Tillman
Miller. Married Brancey Ann Reese Boyd or Boyed in Navarro
County, Texas, and fathered six children. He later moved to Cali-
fornia and died in Turlock, Stanislaus, California, in 1940.46H, M, MS
Mitchell, Charles R., 25. Son of prominent Arkansan William C.
Mitchell and nephew of Jesse and Lorenzo Dunlap, he planned to start
a cattle ranch with his brother Joel.47H, M, MS
Mitchell, Sarah C. Baker, 21. Daughter of John Twitty Baker.H, M, MS
John, infant.H, M, MS
Mitchell, Joel D., 23. Brother of Charles R. Mitchell, son of William
C. Mitchell, and nephew of Jesse and Lorenzo Dunlap.H, M, MS
Prewit, John, 20. From Marion County, Arkansas, he was probably
hired as a drover.48H, M, MS
Prewit, William, 18. Brother of John Prewit, he too was probably a
drover.H, M, MS
248 Appendix A
Rush, Milum Lafayette, 29. When he traveled west, his wife and two
young children remained behind to wait for his return.49H, M, MS
Tackitt, Cyntha, 49. Commonly known as “Widow Tackitt” because
her husband, Martin Tackitt, had died several years before she traveled
west. She and her family left from Johnson County, Arkansas, and were
traveling to Tuolumne County, California, where a son resided.50H, M, MS
William H., 23.H
Marion, 20.H, M, MS
Sebron, 18.M, MS
Matilda, 16.M, MS
James M., 14.M, MS
Jones M., 12.M, MS
Tackitt, Pleasant, 25. A son of Cyntha Tackitt, he left from Johnson
County.51H, M, MS
Tackitt, Armilda Miller, 22. Niece of Josiah ( Joseph) Miller and first
cousin to John Calvin, Mary, and Joseph Miller.52H, M, MS
Emberson Milum, 4. He accompanied Jacob Forney to Washing-
ton, D.C., to testify about the massacre. He married Mary Bilinda
Snow of Carroll County, Arkansas. He later settled in Texas and
then Prescott, Yavapai County, Arizona, where he served as a dep-
uty sheriff. He died in 1912.53H, M, MS
William Henry, 19 months. He eventually married Viney Harris
and settled on Shoal Creek above Protem, Taney County, Missouri.
He died in 1891.54H, M, MS
Wilson, Richard, 27. According to family tradition, he was from
Marion County, Arkansas, married Elizabeth Coker, and fathered one
son.55H, M, MS
Wood, Solomon R., 20. Brother of William Wood and brother-in-law
to Charles Stallcup and James Larramore, two men sometimes associ-
ated with the company. He was probably hired as a drover.56H, M, MS
Wood, William Edward, 26. Brother of Solomon Wood.H, M, MS
Appendix A 249
Appendix B
The Emigrants’ Property
T
he following table lists the known property of the
emigrants slain at Mountain Meadows. The amount and
estimated value of property is taken from statements given
by surviving friends and family members, as well as tax records from
1855 through 1857.
The table does not include all of the emigrants’ property for two rea-
sons. First, no property records exist for some of those known to have
been killed in the massacre. Second, some of the victims have never
been identified by name, making it impossible to account for property
they may have owned. Witnesses in Utah gave several accounts of the
emigrant property they saw, ranging from twelve to forty wagons and
three hundred to eight hundred head of cattle to a variety of horses and
mules, camp supplies, and provisions.1
The sources for the property values appear in the notes next to each
emigrant’s name. Discrepancies in values appear in the original source
documents. For example, George W. Baker’s oxen are estimated at
$55 per yoke, while his father’s are estimated at $50 to $70. Some
of the sources provide numbers of items (such as wagons) but give
no value. In such cases, endnotes are used to explain how the value
was estimated. (See, for example, entry for value of Silas Edwards’s
horse.)
Name Wagons Wagon Value Oxen Oxen Value Loose Cattle
Baker, George W.2 2 $250–75 16 $4403 134–44
Baker, John Twitty7 1 $100–$125 18 $450–$6308 130–40

Cameron, Tillman11
Cameron, William13 2–314 $500–$1,25015 16–24 $1,200– 25–3517

16
$3,000
Deshazo, Allen P.21 16–17
23 24
Dunlap, Jesse Jr. 3 $300 18 $540 30
Dunlap, Lorenzo Dow27 1 $100 8 $24028 12
Edwards, Silas30
Fancher, Alexander33 4 $400–$55034 12 $300–$90035 200
Fancher, James Mathew38

Huff, Peter & Saladia 20
Ann39
Jones, John Milum & 1 $125 2–8 $65–$26044 6–8
43
Newton
Mitchell, Charles R. & 1 $120 26 $78047 72–7448
Joel D.46
Rush, Milum Lafayette52 10–12
Poteets, & Basham54 0–255 $0–$27556 * 0–60
Tackitt, Pleasant59 1 $100– *
$137.5060
Totals 16–19 $1,995– 116–30 $4,015–$6,790 655–752
$3,257.50
* Francis Rowan remembered, “The Peteats and Pleasant Tackett had oxen and other property
but I can not say how many.” Fielding Wilburn recalled, “The Peteats, Basham, and Tacketts
had three waggons several yoke of good oxen to each waggon and had one horse—had apparently
plenty of provisions, cloathing and a general outfit to make the trip comfortable.” Francis Marion
Poteet and his family, and perhaps Basham, broke away from the group at some point
252
Loose Cattle Horses Mules Horse & Cash Misc. Total Value
Value Mule Value Personal
Property
$2,010–8804 3 0 $300–$3755 $400– $550–$685 $3,950–$5,855

$1,2006
$2,600–8009 1 2 $350–$40010 $98 $350–$500 $3,948–$4,553
112 $2,000– $2,000–$6,000
$6,000
$1,875– 2–5 0–2 $160– $0–$3,00020 $3,735–$11,550
18 19
$3,150 $1,150
$240–5522 $60 $300–$315
25 26
$360 2 $200 $320 $450 $2,170
$18029 $400 $920
131 $40–$15032 $40–$150
$2,400– 3 8 $730– $1,000– $4,830–$9,180
36 37
$4,000 $1,730 $2,000
3 $120 $120
$25040 3 1 $22541 $1,20042 $1,675
$120–6045 $20–30 $515–$640 $845–$1,215
$864–8849 1 $100 $131–5550 $350 $2,36951
$150–8053 $25 $63 $238–68

$0–$1,20057 0–1 $0–$15058 $0–$1,625
$100–$137.50
$11,049– 20–24 11–13 $4,225– $3,194– $2,738– $27,240–$48,102.50

$16,303 $10,600 $8,028 $3,148
in their journey and arrived safely in California. It is not known how much of the listed property the
Poteets took with them when they separated. Francis M. Rowan and Fielding Wilburn, depositions,
October 24, 1860, PPU; Douglas McEuen, The Legend of Francis Marion Poteet and the
Mountain Meadows Massacre (Pleasanton, TX: Zabava Printing, 1996), 58, 122, 135;
California, Los Angeles County, Los Angeles, 1860 U.S. Census, population schedule, 377.
253
The documented property figures for the slain emigrants show
they were a well-equipped group and that the bulk of the train’s wealth
was in its livestock. William C. Mitchell, a relative and acquaintance
of many of the slain emigrants, estimated that the entire group leav-
ing Arkansas had about nine hundred head of cattle, a number that
may have included the work oxen as well as the loose cattle.61 Many
of the emigrants undoubtedly hoped to profit through the eventual
sale of their cattle in the California market. Members of the Baker
and Fancher families had been to California in the early 1850s when
the cattle market reached its peak.62 During that period, the price of
cattle was as high as $75 per head in San Francisco and $40 in southern
California.63 By 1857, California prices had fallen to between $15 and
$28 per head but still offered a potential profit for some, depending on
the type and quality of stock. For example, milk cows ranged in price
from $38 to $45.64
The property taken from the massacred emigrants also had con-
siderable value in frontier Utah. In southern Utah in the fall of 1857,
a wagon was valued between $75 and $100, a yoke of work oxen from
$100 to $150, mules up to $150, milk cows around $50, and loose cattle
between $35 and $60 per head.65 Some of the emigrants’ property was
taken back to Cedar City and sold at a public auction held at the tith-
ing office.66 Some of the massacre participants ended up with much of
the property. John D. Lee’s total property value increased from $2,500
in 1850 to $49,500 in 1860, in part because of his industry but also
because of the emigrants’ property.67 An acquaintance of slain emigrant
Silas Edwards believed he saw Isaac Haight riding Edwards’s horse
a few days after the massacre.68 Though he did not explain whether
they bought them at the auction or took them at the Meadows, Lee
said that Haight and Philip Klingensmith each got a span of mules,
John Higbee got one mule, Samuel Knight and Joel White each got a
mare, and Haight, Higbee, Richard Harrison, and Ira Allen each had a
wagon.69 Other sources said Harrison had a yoke of oxen and that two
of the wagons were at Klingensmith’s.70 Paiutes were also seen with
some of the cattle, horses, clothing, and other property.71
254 Appendix B
Appendix C
The Militiamen
T
he following is a list of men in the Iron Military District of
Utah Territory’s Nauvoo Legion militia whose names have
been associated with the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The
names have been gathered from a variety of sources including eyewit-
ness accounts, arrest warrants and criminal indictments, and newspa-
per articles.
A completely accurate list of those who participated in or witnessed
the murders of the California-bound emigrants may be impossible to
compile. Many of the participants kept silent about their roles. The
testimonies of many witnesses were given fifteen years or more after
the massacre. Those who admitted being at the massacre were usually
careful not to incriminate themselves and their closest associates.
The names are organized in alphabetical order. Each entry includes
life span, as well as age, militia rank, and residence at the time of the
massacre.1 Because of the varying credibility of evidence, a note of
[A] or [ B] has been placed after each individual’s name and age; [A]
indicates there is strong evidence the individual planned, authorized,
participated in, or witnessed the killing of emigrants, and [ B] indicates
that the evidence is inconclusive. Men whose names have been associ-
ated with the massacre are not listed if there is little or no evidence to
support that association.2
For additional information on the militiamen, see mountain
meadowsmassacre.org.
Adair, George Washington, Jr. (1837–1909), 20. [A] Private, Com-

pany I, Fifth Platoon, Washington City. One of the nine men indicted
for the massacre. Adair admitted going to Mountain Meadows and was
present for the massacre. He may have also been used as a messenger
between the Meadows and Cedar City.3
Allen, Ira (1814–1900), 43. [A] Second Lieutenant, Company E, Fifth
Platoon, Cedar City. At the September 6 council meeting, he sided
with Isaac Haight’s plan to destroy the emigrant company. He was one
of the men on horseback during the final massacre whose orders were
to catch and kill emigrants who attempted to escape the slaughter.4
Arthur, Benjamin A. (1834–83), 23. [A] Sergeant, Company D,
Fourth Platoon, Cedar City. He was one of three men John M. Hig-
bee sent to the Meadows to watch the emigrants. John D. Lee reported
Arthur present when William Stewart and Joel White killed emigrant
William Aden. Arthur was at the Meadows for the final massacre,
though Ellott Willden claimed he was unarmed.5
Arthur, Christopher Jones (1832–1918), 25. [B] Adjutant, Com-
pany G, Cedar City. The son-in-law of Isaac C. Haight, he arrived at
the Meadows with Elias Morris shortly after the massacre ended.6
Bateman, William (1824–69), 33. [A] Sergeant, Company G, Fourth
Platoon, Cedar City. Prior to the massacre, he carried the white flag to
the emigrants’ corral.7
Cartwright, Thomas Henry (1814–73), 42. [A] Private, Company D,
Fourth Platoon, Cedar City. Samuel Pollock recalled traveling with him
to the Meadows.8
Clark, John Wesley (1818–69), 39. [A] Private, Company I, Third
Platoon, Washington City. He was part of the Washington group that
arrived at the Meadows on Tuesday morning.9
Clewes, Joseph (1831–94), 25. [B] Private, Company F, First Platoon,
Cedar City. He served as a messenger between the Meadows and Cedar
City. He left the Meadows before the final massacre but may have wit-
nessed the killing of two emigrants near Leach’s Spring on Tuesday.10
Coleman, Prime Thornton (1831–1905), 25. [B] Private, Com-
pany H, First Platoon, Fort Clara. Coleman admitted to massacre
256 Appendix C
investigator James H. Carleton that he went with Ira Hatch toward the
Muddy River and saw the footprints of three emigrants who escaped
from Mountain Meadows. His statement led Carleton to believe that
he assisted Hatch in tracking and killing those men.11
Curtis, Ezra Houghton (1822–1915), 35. [A] Second Lieutenant,
Company E, First Platoon, Cedar City. Samuel Pollock said Curtis
ordered him to go to Mountain Meadows. Curtis was seen by Lee at
the Meadows with other militia officers before the massacre.12
Dame, William Horne (1819–84), 38. [A] Colonel, Iron Military
District, Parowan. One of the nine men indicted for the massacre.
As the senior militia officer in southern Utah, he originally directed
Haight not to attack the emigrants. During the early morning hours
of Thursday, September 10, however, he consented to their death. He
argued with Haight after the massacre over how the killings would be
reported to authorities.13
Dickson, Robert (b. 1807), 50. [B] Private, Company H, Third Pla-
toon, Pinto. Albert Hamblin recalled seeing Dickson with other Pinto
men at Hamblin’s ranch during the week of the massacre.14
Durfee, Jabez (1828–83), 29. [B] Private, Company E, First Platoon,
Cedar City. Only Lee’s memoirs place Durfee at Mountain Meadows
before the massacre.15
Edwards, William (1841–1925), 15. [A] Cedar City. Too young to
serve officially in the militia, Edwards admitted he was at the massacre,
though he claimed he was drawn there under false pretense to bury
the dead from an Indian massacre. Edwards also claimed that he “with
many of the other white men refused to discharge his weapon.”16
Freeman, Columbus Reed (1838–1907), 19. [A] Private, Com-
pany C, Fifth Platoon, Parowan. Though listed on Parowan militia
rolls in June 1857, Freeman may have gone to the Meadows from
Washington, where his parents and siblings were living at the time of
the massacre.17
Haight, Isaac Chauncey (1813–86), 44. [A] Major, Second Battal-
ion, Cedar City. One of the nine men indicted for the massacre. Even
though he was not at the massacre itself, he was a chief leader in its
planning and execution. He sent the militiamen to the Meadows and
obtained approval from Colonel William Dame for the emigrants’
destruction.18
Appendix C 257
Hamblin, Oscar (1833–62), 24. [B] Second Lieutenant, Company H,
Second Platoon, Fort Clara. He apparently recruited Paiutes along the
Santa Clara River and acted as an interpreter at the Meadows, at least
until Tuesday, September 8. Oscar’s brother, Jacob, maintained that
Oscar brought Indians to Mountain Meadows and then left.19
Harrison, Richard (1808–82), 49. [A] Second Lieutenant, Compa-
ny E, Third Platoon, Cedar City. Frank Jorden, a stepson of Harrison,
recalled him leaving Cedar City with other militiamen. Lee saw Har-
rison at Mountain Meadows on Thursday, September 10.20
Hatch, Ira (1835–1909), 22. [A] Private, Company H, First Platoon,
Fort Clara. Hatch was not at the massacre, but he reportedly led Indi-
ans in tracking and killing three emigrants who escaped the siege site
before the main slaughter on Friday.21
Hawley, George (1824–1905), 32. [B] Sergeant, Company I, Fourth
Platoon, Washington City. Although Hawley’s brothers John and Wil-
liam are often named as massacre participants, only one list, attributed
to Lee, identified George at the massacre.22
Hawley, John Pierce (1826–1909), 31. [B] Sergeant, Company I,
Fifth Platoon, Washington City. Lee said John Hawley was with the
group of men from Washington. Hawley denied Lee’s assertion and
later claimed to have spoken publicly to Lee and others against the
massacre after it was over.23
Hawley, William Schroeder (1829–93), 27. [A] Sergeant, Company I,
Second Platoon, Washington City. Lee claimed he was with the Wash-
ington group that arrived at the Meadows on Tuesday, September 8.24
Higbee, John Mount (1827–1904), 30. [A] Major, Third Battalion,
Cedar City. One of the nine men indicted for the massacre. Higbee led
two groups of massacre participants to the Meadows from Cedar City.
On Thursday night he carried the orders for the emigrants’ destruc-
tion, and on Friday he gave the signal for the massacre to begin.25
Hopkins, Charles (1810–63), 47. [A] Private, Company D, First Pla-
toon, Cedar City. Despite his rank, Hopkins was considered one of the
leaders at the massacre, probably because of his relatively senior age,
prominence in the community, and military experience.26
Humphries, John Samuel (1825–1903), 31. [A] Musician, Com-
pany F, Cedar City. Although several lists of massacre participants
identify Humphries, they give no specifics about his role.27
258 Appendix C
Hunter, George (1828–82), 29. [A] Sergeant, Company D, First Pla-
toon, Cedar City. He was seen at the Meadows by witnesses before and
after the massacre.28
Jacobs, John (1825–1919), 31. [B] Private, Company E, Fourth Pla-
toon, Cedar City. Although Lee claimed John Jacobs was at Mountain
Meadows shortly before the massacre, Jacobs wrote to the Salt Lake
Daily Herald, “I was not there at all, nor indeed within thirty-five miles
of the place at the time.”29
Jacobs, Swen (1823–91), 33. [A] Second Lieutenant, Company E,
Fourth Platoon, Cedar City. He was identified as being at the Mead-
ows by John D. Lee and Philip Klingensmith.30
Jewkes, Samuel (1823–1900), 34. [B] Musician, Company E, Cedar
City. One of the nine men indicted for the massacre, Jewkes was iden-
tified in Lee’s memoirs as being at the massacre. Other information,
however, casts some doubt on the claim.31
Johnson, Nephi (1833–1919), 23. [A] Second Lieutenant, Compa-
ny D, Second Platoon, Fort Johnson. He acted as a Paiute language
interpreter at the Meadows and gave the orders on Friday for Indians
to attack.32
Klingensmith, Philip (1815–81?), 42. [A] Private, Company D, First
Platoon, Cedar City. One of the nine men indicted for the massacre.
Though only a private, he was considered a key supporter of the mas-
sacre and used his role as local bishop to exert his influence. Traveling
to the Meadows late Tuesday, September 8, he killed one of two emi-
grants found in the cedars near Leach’s Spring. He admitted shooting
one of the emigrant men on Friday. He also reportedly had at least
one of the children killed. Klingensmith turned state’s evidence and
thereby avoided prosecution.33
Knight, Samuel (1832–1910), 24. [A] Private, Company H, Sec-
ond Platoon, Fort Clara. He drove one of the wagons that carried the
wounded and small children. Although Lee said Knight helped kill
those in the wagons, Knight and Nephi Johnson claimed he was busy
calming his horses, which were startled by gunshots.34
Leavitt, Dudley (1830–1908), 27. [B] Private, Company H, First
Platoon, Fort Clara. Leavitt’s son Henry said of his father’s role in
the massacre, “It was always my understanding that father was one of
the scouts who rode horseback with messages back and forth,” though
Appendix C 259
no other sources confirm it. Historian Juanita Brooks recalled that
Leavitt, her grandfather, said, “I thank God that these old hands have
never been stained by human blood.”35
Lee, John Doyle (1812–77), 45. [A] Major, Fourth Battalion, Har-
mony. Lee was the only person tried and executed for his role in the
massacre. He led the first attack on the emigrants. He negotiated the
emigrants’ surrender and helped kill those in the two lead wagons.
Although he reportedly admitted killing five or six emigrants, his con-
fessions, published posthumously by prosecuting attorney Sumner
Howard and Lee’s defense attorney William Bishop, maintained that
he objected to what was done and did not kill anyone.36
Loveridge, Alexander Hamilton (1828–1905), 29. [A] Sergeant,
Company F, Third Platoon, Cedar City. He was seen leaving Cedar
City with other militiamen bound for the Meadows.37
Macfarlane, Daniel Sinclair (1837–1914), 20. [A] Adjutant, Com-
pany D, Cedar City. He rode at the head of the women and children
and behind the lead wagons just before the Friday slaughter. As one
of the few horsemen, Macfarlane was to round in any emigrants who
tried to escape.38
Macfarlane, John Menzies (1833–92), 23. [B] Adjutant, Second Bat-
talion, Cedar City. There is debate about whether John Macfarlane
was at the massacre. Judge John Cradlebaugh issued a warrant for his
arrest in 1859. Lee’s confession in Mormonism Unveiled asserts Mac-
farlane’s presence, but with some uncertainty.39 Macfarlane served as
an attorney on the defense team for Dame and Lee in 1875, and there
is speculation that Lee’s attorney and editor, William Bishop, added
Macfarlane’s name to Lee’s original manuscript because of a personal
dislike for him.
McMurdy, Samuel (1830–1922), 26. [A] Private, Company E, First

Platoon, Cedar City. During the final massacre, he drove the lead
wagon and may have assisted Lee in killing those in it.40
Mangum, James Mitchell (1820–88), 37. [A] Private, Company
I, Fourth Platoon, Washington City. James Mangum claimed he was
recruited to go to Mountain Meadows by Carl Shirts to help with Indi-
ans but returned home after the Indians threatened his life. William
Young, however, recalled returning to Washington with Mangum after
the massacre.41
260 Appendix C
Mangum, John (1817–85), 40. [B] Private, Company I, Fourth Pla-
toon, Washington City. Lee’s memoirs say that John Mangum helped
him talk to Paiutes at Mountain Meadows before the massacre but may
have mistaken James for John.42
Mathews, James Nicholas (1827–71), 30. [B] Second Lieutenant,
Company I, Second Platoon, Washington City. Lee was the only wit-
ness who identified Mathews, saying he saw him with the other men
from Washington on Monday night.43
Morris, Elias (1825–98), 32. [A] Captain, Company E, Cedar
City. Though he did not go to the Meadows until after the massa-
cre was over, he was with Haight at key planning meetings, includ-
ing the “tan bark council” in which Dame approved destroying the
emigrants.44
Pearce, Harrison (1818–89), 38. [A] Captain, Company I, Wash-
ington City. Pearce led militiamen from Washington toward Moun-
tain Meadows on Monday, arriving the next day. John Hawley recalled
Harrison Pearce making inflammatory speeches against non-Mormons
in a public meeting after the massacre.45
Pearce, James (1839–1922), 18. [A] Private, Company I, Fifth Pla-
toon, Washington City. Though Pearce was at the Meadows during
the week of the massacre, he remained at the militia encampment due
to illness during Friday’s final slaughter.46
Pollock, Samuel (1824–91), 33. [A] Sergeant, Company E, First Pla-
toon, Cedar City. Pollock witnessed the massacre from in or near the
militia campsite, where he may have been on guard duty.47
Reeves, Josiah (1835–1914), 21. [B] Private, Company G, First Pla-
toon, Cedar City. One of three men sent by Higbee to the Meadows to
watch the emigrants. When his brother-in-law Samuel Pollock passed
Hamblin’s ranch, he noticed Reeves keeping Mormon stock apart from
the emigrants’ scattered stock.48 It is unclear where Reeves was during
Friday’s massacre.
Riddle, Isaac (1830–1906), 27. [B] Private, Company H, Fourth
Platoon, Harmony. He was in Cedar City on Tuesday when Haight
suddenly sent him back to his home in Pine Valley. While traveling
home, he overtook Higbee’s detachment headed for the Meadows and
may have witnessed the murder of two emigrants who had gone to
seek help.49
Appendix C 261
Robinson, Richard Smith (1830–1902), 26. [B] Second Lieutenant,
Company H, Third Platoon, Pinto. Since he was considered the leader
of the Pinto settlement, he received messages from Cedar City during
the days leading to the massacre. Albert Hamblin saw him at Mountain
Meadows during the week of the massacre.50
Shirts, Don Carlos (Carl) (1836–1922), 21. [A] Second Lieutenant,
Company H, Fourth Platoon, Harmony. At the time a son-in-law of
Lee, Shirts was sent by him to recruit Paiutes as part of the original
plan to attack the emigrants. Shirts also played a role in instructing
Paiutes for the final massacre.51
Slade, William Rufus, Sr. (1811–72), 46. [A] Private, Company I,
Third Platoon, Washington City. Klingensmith remembered talking
to William Slade Sr. at the Meadows just before the final massacre.52
Slade, William, Jr. (1834–1902), 23. [A] Sergeant, Company I,
Third Platoon, Washington City. William Slade Jr. was seen by Lee
and Klingensmith at the Meadows before the massacre.53
Smith, Joseph Hodgetts (1819–90), 38. [B] Private, Company F,
First Platoon, Cedar City. A list of massacre participants attributed to
Lee and released to the public by his attorney William Bishop identi-
fied “Joseph Smith, of Cedar City.” However, Lee makes no mention
of Smith in his published confessions, nor is there mention of Smith in
any other eyewitness accounts.54
Spencer, George (1829–72), 27. [A] Adjutant, Company I, Wash-
ington City. In 1867 Spencer wrote to Mormon apostle Erastus Snow
confessing that he was “in that horrid ‘Mountain Meadow affair.’ ”
An 1875 article called Spencer a “mono-maniac” about the massacre,
explaining that “he talked constantly of the part he had enacted in the
frightful tragedy.”55
Stewart, William Cameron (1827–95), 30. [A] Second Lieutenant,
Company F, First Platoon, Cedar City. One of nine men indicted for
the massacre. Stewart killed emigrant William Aden on Monday and
during the final massacre on Friday broke from the ranks to chase and
kill emigrants who survived the initial volley of bullets.56
Stoddard, David Kerr (1830–1913), 27. [B] Musician, Company F,
Cedar City. Although no eyewitnesses saw him at the Mountain Mead-
ows, Stoddard’s neighbor John Bradshaw recalled seeing him at Cedar
City with other men mustered to go to the Meadows.57
262 Appendix C
Stratton, Anthony Johnson (1824–87), 33. [A] Second Lieuten-
ant, Company E, Second Platoon, Cedar City. John D. Lee identified
Anthony Stratton with other militia recruits from Cedar City at the
Meadows the night before the final massacre.58
Tait, William (1818–96), 38. [A] Captain, Company F, Cedar City.
A former drill master in the British Army, Tait was one of the few men
in the Iron Military District with formal military training. Tait admit-
ted being at the massacre on Friday but claimed that he and his men
didn’t kill anyone.59
Thornton, Amos Griswold (1832–1902), 24. [B] Sergeant, Com-
pany H, Third Platoon, Pinto. Albert Hamblin recalled seeing him at
Hamblin’s ranch during the week of the massacre, likely to deliver the
message Joseph Clewes gave him at Pinto.60
Tullis, David Wilson (1833–1902), 24. [A] Private, Company H,
First Platoon, Fort Clara. One of the surviving children, six-year-old
Rebecca Dunlap, reportedly identified an “Englishman named Tullis”
as having killed one of her parents. According to Albert Hamblin, after
the massacre Tullis transported the surviving children from the mas-
sacre site to Hamblin’s ranch.61
Urie, John Main (1835–1921), 22. [A] Adjutant, Third Battalion,
Cedar City. Lee said Urie was at the Meadows on the night before the
massacre. After the massacre, Urie guarded the emigrants’ property
and later helped transport it to Cedar City.62
Western, John (1807–65), 49. [B] Sergeant, Company F, First Pla-
toon, Cedar City. Some accounts name “John Weston” as a massacre
participant.63 Although the name is difficult to decipher in the short-
hand of the second Lee trial, Nephi Johnson recalled a John “Weyson,”
“Weeson,” or “Reeson” taking a wagon to Mountain Meadows the
night before the massacre. In longhand transcriptions of the trial, the
name was recorded as “Weston” or “Western,” an inaccurate reflection
of the original shorthand.64 No one named Weston is known to have
lived in southern Utah in 1857. “John Western” is the closest name,
but evidence of Western’s participation is inconclusive.65 Johnson may
have been referring to John Willis.66
White, Joel William (1831–1914), 26. [A] Captain, Company D,
Cedar City. White wounded another emigrant when William Aden
was murdered on Monday, September 7. Although White claimed he
did not have a gun for Friday’s massacre, Ellott Willden claimed he
Appendix C 263
broke ranks to chase after and kill emigrants who survived the initial
gunshots.67
White, Samuel Dennis (1818–68), 39. [B] Private, Company F, Fifth
Platoon, Fort Sidon [Hamilton’s Fort]. Although Samuel White was
identified as a massacre participant in lists released to the public by Lee’s
attorney William Bishop, Lee made no mention of Samuel White in
his published confessions.68
Wiley, Robert (1809–72), 47. [A] Sergeant, Company E, Third
Platoon, Cedar City. Shortly before the massacre, Wiley met with Lee,
Klingensmith, and other leaders at Hamblin’s ranch.69
Willden, Ellott (1833–1920), 23. [A] Private, Company F, Fourth
Platoon, Cedar City. One of the nine men indicted for the massa-
cre. Willden and two others were sent by Higbee to the Meadows to
watch the emigrants. Willden claimed to be unarmed at the Friday
massacre, though Lee said that earlier in the week Willden fired his
gun toward the emigrant camp. Willden owned the pistols William
Stewart borrowed to kill William Aden.70
Williamson, James (1813–69), 44. [A] Private, Company D, First
Platoon, Cedar City. Joel White said Williamson traveled to Mountain
Meadows with him.71
Willis, John Henry (1835–88), 22. [B] Second Lieutenant, Compa-
ny G, First Platoon, Cedar City. Though Willis insisted he did not go
to the Meadows until after the massacre, Klingensmith said he took
his wagon and team to the Meadows the night before.72 Klingensmith
could not remember if Willis joined the militiamen at the massacre
or remained at Hamblin’s ranch.73 Massacre survivor Nancy Saphrona
Huff lived with Willis’s family until 1859 and remembered him taking
her from the massacre site.74
Young, William (1805–75), 52. [A] Private, Company I, Fourth Pla-
toon, Washington City. The eldest militiaman at Mountain Meadows,
he remained at the militia encampment and witnessed the massacre
from a nearby hill.75
264 Appendix C
Appendix D
The Indians
T
he principal aggressors in the Mountain Meadows Massacre
were white Mormon settlers in southern Utah communities.1
They persuaded, armed, and directed some Southern Paiutes
to participate.2 The various groupings of native peoples designated
in modern times as Southern Paiutes were not a monolithic, homo-
geneous group in 1857, the year of the massacre.3 They consisted of
numerous bands and camps scattered principally over a wide swath
of what is now Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and California. Most of these
people did not participate in the massacre.4
Paiutes who participated under white direction in the Monday
morning attack were from Coal Creek and Ash Creek bands. They
were recruited by Isaac Haight, John M. Higbee, Philip Klingensmith,
and John D. Lee.5 Beginning Monday night or Tuesday morning, they
were joined by some Paiutes living along the Santa Clara and Virgin
rivers who were recruited principally by Samuel Knight, Oscar Ham-
blin, and Carl Shirts.6 According to Jackson, a Paiute headman living
near the Santa Clara River, whites “directed the combined force of
Mormons and Indians in the first attack, throughout the siege, and at
the last massacre.”7
Two major lines of Paiute oral history have developed about par-
ticipation in the massacre. One line says that no Paiutes participated
in the massacre. Although this line may in part be a reaction to white
efforts to pin all blame for the massacre on Indians, it also reflects the
fact that the vast majority of Paiutes had nothing whatsoever to do
with the killings.8 The second line of Paiute oral history recognizes
some Paiute participation.9
The following is a list of Indians—primarily but not exclusively
Paiutes—whose names have been associated with the massacre in
various sources. The names are spelled the way they appear in the
sources, most being Anglo nicknames or anglicized versions of
Paiute names. Where both Paiute and Anglo names are known,
preference is given to the Paiute names, with the Anglo or other
names in parentheses. Because of the varying credibility of evidence,
a note of [A] or [B] has been placed after each individual’s name; [A]
indicates there is strong evidence the individual participated in or
witnessed the killing of emigrants, and [B] indicates that the evi-
dence is inconclusive.
Some of the names on the list appear at the top of a November 20,
1857, report written to Brigham Young, territorial superintendent of
Indians affairs, by John D. Lee as Indian farmer. Lee’s letter served
two purposes: (1) to provide a written report of the massacre (albeit
a false one), and (2) to itemize third-quarter 1857 Indian expenses
claimed by white residents of southern Utah. Young’s clerk David
O. Calder subsequently added to the top of the document the names
of several Paiutes—“Tat-se-gobbitts, Non-co-p-in, Mo-quee-tus,
Chick-eroo, Quo-narah, Young-quick, Jackson, Agra-pootes”—and
the date range “between 21st to 26th Sept.”10 These names do not
correspond directly to Lee’s letter but instead are copied from a
voucher submitted for reimbursement by Salt Lake City merchant
Levi Stewart for “articles furnished sundry bands of Indians, near
Mountain Meadows.”11
Some historians have assumed that all of the Indian leaders listed in
this note and their bands participated in the massacre.12 Though these
historians place these Paiute leaders in the vicinity of the Meadows
in the weeks after the massacre, there is no conclusive evidence that
most participated in or witnessed the killings. Evidence also suggests
that two of the Paiute leaders named in these sources, Tutsegavits and
Youngwuds, were in Salt Lake City during the massacre and played no
role in it at all. Their names, along with others who have been wrongly
accused, appear in a separate list at the end of this appendix.
For additional information on the Indians, see mountain
meadowsmassacre.org.
266 Appendix D
Agarapoots [B]. Though his name appears in Calder’s notation on
top of Lee’s account to Brigham Young, evidence of his participation
is inconclusive. Jacob Hamblin’s reminiscent account even suggests he
might have died months before the massacre.13
Bill [A]. Isaac Haight and other leaders at Cedar City persuaded him
to attack the emigrants. Bill was wounded during the first attack on
Monday, September 7.14
Buck [A]. One of the Paiutes wounded at the Meadows during the
week of the massacre.15
Comanche [A]. Harmony resident Benjamin Platt recalled four-

teen Cedar City Paiutes leaving for the Mountain Meadows with
Lee on Sunday, September 6. Platt said Comanche “objected to
the program of slaughter, but was finally induced to accompany the
expedition.”16
Chick-eroo [B]. His name appeared in Calder’s notation at the top of

Lee’s account to Brigham Young, the only link that connects him to
the massacre.17
George [B]. He was reportedly one of the Paiute leaders who

traveled to Salt Lake City in early September and may have been
Youngwuds, who stayed in Salt Lake City until after the massacre.
Other sources identify a Paiute named George as a massacre par-
ticipant, though they may be referring to someone other than
Youngwuds.18
Hamblin, Albert [A]. The adopted Shoshone son of Jacob Hamblin

who, together with John Knight, witnessed much of the massacre from
a hill. He either witnessed or participated in the murder of the Dunlap
twins.19
Hunkup, Isaac [A]. Some oral histories of the massacre originate with
the Paiute elder Isaac Hunkup, who resided for a long time in the
Cedar City area and died in the mid-twentieth century. These oral
histories differ as to whether Hunkup participated in the massacre or
just witnessed it from a nearby hill.20
Jackson [A]. A notable Paiute leader who lived along the Santa Clara
River and was at the Meadows on Tuesday, September 8. He said his
“brother”—a broad term in Paiute culture—was killed by emigrant
gunfire. He reportedly left the Meadows and assisted Ira Hatch in
Appendix D 267
tracking down and killing three emigrants who escaped the wagon cor-
ral before the final massacre.21
Joseph ( Joe) [A]. John D. Lee reported that “an Indian from Cedar City,
called Joe” killed one of the wounded men in the lead wagons. Harmony
resident Annie Elizabeth Hoag testified that a boy living with Elisha
Groves, massacre survivor John Calvin Miller, identified an Indian named
Joe, who worked for Groves, as wearing the clothes of his slain father.22
Kahbeets [B]. He and his band were known to be living in the vicinity
of Mountain Meadows just a few weeks before the massacre, though
no known sources confirm that they participated in or witnessed it.23
Kanarra [B]. He and his band lived near Harmony, and his name is in
the notation above Lee’s report. Thomas Kane, who spent time inves-
tigating the massacre in Utah in 1858, reported that Kanarra’s band
participated in the massacre.24
Knight, John [A]. A Paiute who lived with Samuel Knight, John
Knight watched the massacre with Albert Hamblin from a nearby hill.
John Knight may be the same person as John Seaman.25
Kwi-toos [B]. A Paiute who lived in the vicinity of the Virgin River.
Historian Juanita Brooks claimed that he and his men, carrying spoils
from the massacre, accompanied Lee to Harmony after the massacre.26
Lee, Lemuel (Clem) [A]. The adopted Indian son of Lee, he accom-
panied Cedar City Paiutes to the Mountain Meadows and was used by
Lee as an interpreter during the week of the massacre.27
Moquetas [A]. A leader among the Coal Creek Paiutes in the Cedar
City area, he agreed to join the attacking party after Lee promised
to furnish sufficient guns and ammunition and to give his band the
emigrants’ “clothing, all the guns and horses, and some of the cattle.”
He was shot in his left thigh during the initial attack and never fully
recovered from his wound.28
Myack [B]. Some newspapers reported that Philip Klingensmith testi-
fied about seeing “one Indian, Myack, cut a little boy’s throat.” The
Steubenville Daily Herald, however, reported that Klingensmith said he
“saw one Indian myself cut a little boy’s throat,” raising questions about
whether the Indian Klingensmith identified was named Myack.29
Non-cap-in [B]. He was listed in the notation above Lee’s account of
the massacre, the only link that connects him to it.30
268 Appendix D
Seaman, John [A]. According to Paiute oral tradition, John Seaman
witnessed the massacre from a mountain top. The account states, “he
got scared but three guys went . . . he watched all those people die off.”
This account of Indians witnessing the massacre from a high vantage
point is similar to Albert Hamblin’s account and suggests that Seaman
may have been John Knight.31
Tau-gu (Coal Creek John) [A]. Later an influential headman among
Paiutes in southern Utah, he told his son that before the massacre, a
white man gave Indians guns to use against the emigrants. He also said
he and other Indians, along with white perpetrators, killed emigrants
and looted bodies.32
Toanob [A]. Wounded at Mountain Meadows during the week of the
massacre.33
Tom [A]. Identified by Philip Klingensmith as one of the Paiute
“chiefs” wounded at Mountain Meadows. Possibly Tom Whitney,
whom Mormon leaders blessed (“set apart”) as chief of the Paiutes in
Iron County in 1855.34
Tonche [B]. According to James H. Carleton, a Paiute “chief ” named
Tonche, who lived along the Virgin River, claimed that “a man named
Huntington” delivered a letter from Brigham Young ordering the emi-
grants to be killed. Indian interpreter Dimick Huntington could not
have delivered such a letter at that time, since he did not arrive in
southern Utah until weeks after the massacre.35
Toshob [B]. In 1869, U.S. Army surveyor George Wheeler impli-
cated Toshob, a Paiute then living in the Moapa Valley in present-day
Nevada, as being a leader in the massacre.36
Tunanita’a [A]. According to Paiute oral tradition, he and another
Paiute were picked up by John D. Lee’s group en route to Mountain
Meadows but were not allowed to participate in the killing.37
Indian Leaders Not Involved with the Massacre

The following list includes the names of Indians who have been incor-
rectly associated with the massacre.
Ammon. One of the Indian leaders who met with Brigham Young in
Salt Lake City on September 1, he returned to Beaver on Wednesday,
September 9, in time to negotiate a truce between Indians and the
Turner, Dukes, and Collins companies.38
Appendix D 269
Awanap. Awanap and his band were reportedly invited “to join the
foray against the emigrants,” but he and others from his band in
Parowan were persuaded not to go by William Dame.39
Kanosh. As a leader of the Corn Creek Pahvants, he visited Brigham
Young in Salt Lake City on September 1. Although many massacre
accounts claimed that Pahvants followed and killed members of the
Arkansas company in retaliation for a supposed poisoning at Corn
Creek, neither Kanosh nor any of his band was involved in the massacre,
though some Pahvants attacked the Turner company near Beaver.40
Tutsegavits. Considered by Mormons to be the principal leader over
the Santa Clara Paiutes, he accompanied Jacob Hamblin to meet
Brigham Young on September 1 and remained in Salt Lake City until
after the massacre’s conclusion. While there he toured shops, agricul-
tural gardens, and orchards, and was ordained a Mormon elder. Though
Tutsegavits had no role in the massacre, Thomas Kane reported that
his band did participate.41
Youngwuds. From Harmony, he was one of the Paiute leaders who
met with Young in Salt Lake City on September 1 and remained there
until at least September 10. Though Youngwuds himself had no role in
the massacre, Thomas Kane reported that his band participated.42
270 Appendix D
Abbreviations Used in Notes
The following abbreviations have been used to reduce the bulk of the notes for each
chapter. For a complete bibliography, see mountainmeadowsmassacre.org.
Adams George Rollie Adams, General William S. Harney: Prince of Dragoons

(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001).
AJ1 Andrew Jenson interviews, Jan. and Feb. 1892, Mountain Meadows
file, Andrew Jenson, Collection, CHL.
AJ2 Andrew Jenson interviews, Jan. and Feb. 1892, Archives of the First
Presidency, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt
Lake City, UT.
Arrington1 Leonard J. Arrington, Brigham Young: American Moses (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1985).
Arrington2 Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the
Latter-day Saints, 1830–1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2005).
Bagley Will Bagley, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at
Mountain Meadows (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002).
Baumeister Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Violence (New
York: W. H. Freeman, 1997).
Beadle1 J. H. Beadle, “Interview with Jno. D. Lee of Mountain Meadows
Notoriety,” Salt Lake Daily Tribune, July 29, 1872.
Beadle2 J. H. Beadle, Western Wilds, and The Men Who Redeem Them (Cincin-
nati: Jones Brothers, 1878).
Beckwith Frank A. Beckwith, Indian Joe: In Person and In Background (Delta,
UT: DuWil Publishing, n.d.).
Bowering George Kirkman Bowering, Journal, 1842–75, CHL.
Brooks1 Juanita Brooks, John Doyle Lee: Zealot, Pioneer Builder, Scapegoat
(Logan: Utah State University Press, 1992).
Brooks2 Juanita Brooks, The Mountain Meadows Massacre, 2d ed. (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
Brown Thomas Dunlop Brown, Diary, 1854–57, CHL. Conveniently
published in Journal of the Southern Indian Mission: Diary of Thomas
D. Brown, ed. Juanita Brooks (Logan: Utah State University Press,
1972).
“Butchery” “Mountain Meadow Massacre: The Butchery of a Train of Arkan-
sans by Mormons and Indians While on Their Way to California,
Related By One of the Survivors,” Fort Smith (AR) Elevator, Aug. 20,
1897.
“BY” “Brigham Young: Remarkable Interview with the Salt Lake Prophet,”
New York Herald, May 6, 1877. Reprinted in “Interview with Brigham
Young,” Deseret Evening News, May 12, 1877.
BYU L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham
Young University, Provo, UT.
Cannon Abraham Hoagland Cannon, Diary, 1879–95, Typescript, BYU.
Copy located at CHL.
Carleton James Henry Carleton, Report on the Subject of the Massacre at the
Mountain Meadows, in Utah Territory, in September, 1857, of One Hun-
dred and Twenty Men, Women and Children, Who Were from Arkansas
(Little Rock, AR: True Democrat Steam Press, 1860).
“Cates” “The Mountain Meadow Mas[s]acre: Statement of Mrs. G. D. Cates,
One of the Children Spared At the Time,” Dardanelle Arkansas
Independent, Aug. 27, 1875. Reprinted in “The Mountain Meadow
Massacre: Statement of One of the Few Survivors,” Daily Arkansas
Gazette, Sep. 1, 1875.
CCF Utah Second District Court, Criminal Case Files, 1874–77, Series
24291, Utah State Archives, Salt Lake City, UT. Copy located
at CHL. The number following the abbreviation is the case file
number.
Chandless William Chandless, A Visit to Salt Lake; Being a Journey Across the
Plains and a Residence in the Mormon Settlements at Utah (London:
Smith, Elder, and Co., 1857).
Chatterley John Chatterley to Andrew Jens[o]n, Sept. 18, 1919, Mountain
Meadows file, Andrew Jenson, Collection, CHL.
CHC B. H. Roberts, A Comprehensive History of The Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints, 6 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press,
1930).
“Children” “ ‘Children of the Massacre’ May Meet in Reunion,” Arkansas Sunday
Post Dispatch, 1895. Also found in JH, 1857, Supplement, pp. 5–8.
CHL Church History Library, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints, Salt Lake City, UT.
Clewes Joseph Clewes, in “Mountain Meadows Massacre: Joe Clewes’ State-
ment concerning It,” Salt Lake Daily Herald, Apr. 5, 1877.
272 Abbreviations Used in Notes

Clew/Will Ellott Willden’s corrections of Clewes account, made during
interview with Andrew Jenson, Jan. 28, 1892, AJ2.
CM Collected Material concerning the Mountain Meadows Massacre,
CHL.
Corr1 Andrew Jenson, corrections to Hubert H. Bancroft, History of Utah,
ca. Jan. 1892, AJ1.
Corr2 Ellott Willden, corrections to H. H. Bancroft, History of Utah, given
to Andrew Jenson, Jan. 28, 1892, AJ2.
Cradlebaugh Utah and the Mormons: Speech of Hon. John Cradlebaugh, of Nevada, on
the Admission of Utah as a State (Washington, D.C.: L. Towers, 1863).
CSM Cedar Stake, Minutes, William R. Palmer Collection, Special Col-
lections, Gerald R. Sherratt Library, Southern Utah University,
Cedar City, UT.
DBY Brigham Young, Diary of Brigham Young, 1857, ed. Everett L. Cooley
(Salt Lake City: Tanner Trust Fund/University of Utah Library,
1980).
“Extract” “Extract from a Letter to the Editor, Dated Carroll Co., Jan. 5, 1858,”
Little Rock Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat, Feb. 13, 1858.
Fancher Burr Fancher, Captain Alexander Fancher: Adventurer, Drover, Wagon
Master and Victim of the Mountain Meadows Massacre (Portland, OR:
Inkwater Press, 2006).
Farnsworth Philo Taylor Farnsworth, Dictation, ca. 1886, Bancroft Library, Uni-
versity of California, Berkeley. Microfilm copy located at CHL.
FHL Family History Library, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints, Salt Lake City, UT.
Fish Joseph Fish, The Life and Times of Joseph Fish, Mormon Pioneer, ed. John
H. Krenkel (Danville, IL: Interstate Printers & Publishers, 1970).
Forney J. Forney to A. B. Greenwood, Sep. 29, 1859, in Report of the Commis-
sioner of Indian Affairs, Accompanying the Annual Report of the Secretary
of the Interior, for the Year 1859 (Washington: George W. Bowman,
1860).
Furniss Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict, 1850–1859 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1960).
Gardner Hamilton Gardner, “The Utah Territorial Militia,” ca. 1929, Type-
script, CHL.
Gibbs Josiah F. Gibbs, The Mountain Meadows Massacre (Salt Lake City: Salt
Lake Tribune, 1910).
Greenhaw Clyde R. Greenhaw, “Survivor of a Massacre: Mrs. Betty Terry of
Harrison Vividly Recalls Massacre of Westbound Arkansas Caravan
in Utah More Than 80 Years Ago,” Arkansas Gazette, Sunday Sec-
tion, Sep. 4, 1938.
Haslam James Haslam, interview by S. A. Kenner, reported by Josiah
Rogerson, Dec. 4, 1884, typescript, in Josiah Rogerson, Transcripts
and Notes of John D. Lee Trials, CHL.

Hawley John Pierce Hawley, Autobiography, 1885, Community of Christ
Archives, Independence, MO. Published as John Pierce Hawley,
Autobiography (Hamilton, MO: Robert Hawley, 1981).
HBM Harmony Branch, Minutes, Henry E. Huntington Library, San
Marino, CA, sometimes misidentified as Rachel Lee’s journal.
HC History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Period 1: His-
tory of Joseph Smith, the Prophet, by Himself, ed. B. H. Roberts, 6 vols.
(Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1953).
Hill William Carroll Hill, The Fancher Family, ed. William Hoyt Fancher
(Milford, NH: Cabinet Press, 1947).
HOGCM Historian’s Office, General Church Minutes, 1839–77, CHL.
HOJ Historian’s Office, Journal, 1844–1997, CHL.
Holt Ronald L. Holt, Beneath These Red Cliffs: An Ethnohistory of the Utah
Paiutes (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2006).
“Horrible” “The Late Horrible Massacre,” Los Angeles Star, Oct. 17, 1857.
Hoth Hans Peter Emanuel Hoth, Diary, Typescript, trans. Peter Gulbrand-
sen, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
Huntington Dimick Baker Huntington, Journal, 1857–59, CHL.
Hurt Garland Hurt to Jacob Forney, Dec. 4, 1857, in Executive Documents
Printed by Order of the House of Representatives during the First Session
of the Thirty-Fifth Congress, 1857–58, 14 vols. (Washington: James B.
Steedman, 1858), Doc. 71, 10:199–205.
JD Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (Liverpool: F. D. Richards, etc., 1854–86).
JDL1-BT United States v. John D. Lee, First Trial, Jacob S. Boreman Transcript,
Jacob S. Boreman, Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.
The numbers that follow this abbreviation stand for the book and
page number, which are separated from each other by a colon.
JDL1-PS United States v. John D. Lee, First Trial, Adam Patterson Shorthand
Notes, Jacob S. Boreman, Collection, Huntington Library, San
Marino, CA, transcription by LaJean Carruth located in CHL. The
numbers that follow this abbreviation stand for the book and page
number, which are separated from each other by a colon.
JDL1-RS United States v. John D. Lee, First Trial, Josiah Rogerson Shorthand
Notes, Josiah Rogerson, Transcripts and Notes of John D. Lee trials,
1875–85, CHL, transcription by LaJean Carruth located in CHL.
The numbers that follow this abbreviation stand for the book and
page number, which are separated from each other by a colon.
JDL1-RT United States v. John D. Lee, First Trial, Josiah Rogerson Transcript,
Josiah Rogerson, Transcripts and Notes of John D. Lee trials, 1875–85,
CHL. The numbers that follow this abbreviation stand for the book
and page number, which are separated from each other by a colon.
JDL2-BT United States v. John D. Lee, Second Trial, Jacob S. Boreman Tran-
script, Jacob S. Boreman, Collection, Huntington Library, San
Marino, CA. The numbers that follow this abbreviation stand for

the book and page number, which are separated from each other by
a colon.
JDL2-PS United States v. John D. Lee, Second Trial, Adam Patterson Shorthand
Notes, Jacob S. Boreman, Collection, Huntington Library, San
Marino, CA, transcription by LaJean Carruth located in CHL. The
numbers that follow this abbreviation stand for the book and page
number, which are separated from each other by a colon.
JDLC John D. Lee, Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino,
CA.
Jenson Andrew Jenson, Latter-day Saint Biographical Encyclopedia, 4 vols. (Salt
Lake City: Andrew Jenson History Company, 1901–36).
JH Journal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
CHL.
JHM James Henry Martineau, Autobiography and Journal, photocopy of
manuscript, CHL.
JHM1907 James Henry Martineau to F. E. Eldredge, July 23, 1907, “The
Mountain Meadow Catastroph[e],” CHL, also located at BYU.
Journals John D. Lee, Journals of John D. Lee, 1846–47 and 1859, ed. Charles
Kelly (Salt Lake City: Western Printing, 1938).
JPDC Jacob Piatt Dunn, Collection, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapo-
lis, IN.
Kaibab Richard W. Stoffle and Michael J. Evans, Kaibab Paiute History: The
Early Years (Fredonia, AZ: Kaibab Paiute Tribe, 1978).
Kearny [Lt. Kearny], “List of the Children Saved from the Mountain Mead-
ows Massacre,” Los Angeles Southern Vineyard, June 3, 1859. Also
reprinted in “The Mountain Meadows Massacre—List of the Chil-
dren Saved,” San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, June 11, 1859, copy
located in Historian’s Office, Newspaper Scrapbook, 12:70, CHL.
Knack Martha C. Knack, Boundaries Between: The Southern Paiutes (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2001).
Knight Samuel Knight, affidavit, Aug. 11, 1904, First Presidency, Cumula-
tive Correspondence, 1900–49, CHL.
Lair Jim Lair, “Fancher: ‘A History of a Remarkable Family,’ ” Carroll
County Historical Quarterly 27, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 12–14.
“LC” “Lee’s Confession,” Sacramento Daily Record-Union, Mar. 24, 1877.
LeCheminant Wilford Hill LeCheminant, “A Crisis Averted? General Harney and
the Change in Command of the Utah Expedition,” Utah Historical
Quarterly 51, no. 1 (Winter 1983): 30–45.
“Lee Trial” “The Lee Trial: What the Chief [of ] the Beaver Indians Has To Say
About It,” Los Angeles Star, Aug. 4, 1875.
“Letter” P., Oct. 29, 1857, in “Letter from Angel’s Camp,” San Francisco Daily
Alta California, Nov. 1, 1857.
“LLC” “Lee’s Last Confession,” San Francisco Daily Bulletin Supplement, Mar.
24, 1877.

Logan1 Roger V. Logan Jr., “The Mountain Meadows Massacre,” in Mountain
Heritage: Some Glimpses into Boone County’s Past After One Hundred
Years, ed. Roger V. Logan Jr. (Harrison, AR.: Times Publishing,
1969), 25–31.
Logan2 “Wagon Train Kinships,” Broadside of familial relationships of
the Baker-Fancher emigrant party, Sep. 9, 2001. Copy located in
MMMRF.
Lyman Francis M. Lyman, Diary Excerpts of Francis M. Lyman,
1892–96, Typescript, in New Mormon Studies CD-ROM: A Compre-
hensive Resource Library (Salt Lake City: Smith Research Associates,
[1998]).
M1877–10 Malinda Cameron Scott Thurston, affidavit in support of H.R. 1459,
Oct. 15, 1877, 45th Cong., 1st sess., National Archives, Washington,
D.C. Copy of transcript in CHL.
M1877–12 Malinda Cameron Scott Thurston, affidavit in support of H.R. 3945,
Dec. 18, 1877, 45th Cong., 2nd sess., National Archives, Washing-
ton, D.C. Copy of transcript in CHL.
M1911 Malinda Cameron Scott Thurston, deposition, May 2, 1911, Malinda
Thurston v. United States, U.S. Court of Claims, no. 8479, Selected
Documents Relating to the Mountain Meadows Massacre, National
Archives, Washington, D.C. Copy of transcript at CHL.
Marcy Randolph B. Marcy, The Prairie Traveler: A Hand-Book for Overland
Expeditions (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1859).
Martineau LaVan Martineau, The Southern Paiutes: Legends, Lore, Language, and
Lineage (Las Vegas: KC Publications, 1992).
“Massacre” P., Oct. 14, 1857, in “The Immigrant Massacre,” San Francisco
Daily Alta California, Oct. 17, 1857. Also reprinted in “The Late
Immigrant Massacre,” Weaverville (CA) Trinity Journal, Oct. 24,
1857.
MBB Minute Book B, 1869–81, Utah, Second District Court (Beaver
County), Court Records, 1865–81, Film 485241, FHL. Original
located at Southern Utah University, microfilm copy located at Utah
State Archives, and photocopy located at CHL.
MC John D. Lee, A Mormon Chronicle: The Diaries of John D. Lee, 1848–
1876, ed. Robert Glass Cleland and Juanita Brooks, 2 vols. (San
Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 2003).
McGlashan C. F. McGlashan, “The Mountain Meadow Massacre,” Sacramento
Daily Record, Jan. 1, 1875.
“Meeting” “Public Meeting of the People of Carroll County,” Arkansas State
Gazette and Democrat, Feb. 27, 1858.
Mitchell Sallie Baker Mitchell, “The Mountain Meadows Massacre—An Epi-
sode on the Road to Zion,” American Weekly (Aug. 25, 1940): 10–11,
15, 18.
MMMRF Mountain Meadows Massacre Research Files, CHL.

MRIMD Muster Rolls for Iron Military District, Oct. 10, 1857, U.S. War
Department, Utah Territorial Militia Records, 1849–77, Utah State
Archives, Salt Lake City, UT. Microfilm copy located at FHL.
MU William W. Bishop, ed., Mormonism Unveiled; or The Life and Con-
fessions of the Late Mormon Bishop, John D. Lee; (Written by Himself)
(St. Louis: Bryan, Brand & Co., 1877).
NJ1908 Nephi Johnson, affidavit, July 22, 1908, First Presidency, Cumulative
Correspondence, 1900–1949, CHL.
NJ1909 Nephi Johnson, affidavit, Nov. 30, 1909, CM.
NJ1910 Nephi Johnson to Anthon H. Lund, Mar. 1910, CM.
NJ1917 Nephi Johnson, conversation with Anthony W. Ivins, Sept. 2, 1917,
typescript, Anthony W. Ivins, Collection, USHS.
Nuwuvi Nuwuvi: A Southern Paiute History (Salt Lake City: Intertribal Council
of Nevada, 1976).
“OBF” Jack Baker Holt, “One of the Baker Families of Carroll (Boone)
County Arkansas,” transcript of tape, in Boone County Historian 5, no.
3 (Fall 1982): 160–66.
OIMD William H. Dame, “Organization of the Iron Military District,” June
1857, BYU.
“Outrages” “More Outrages on the Plains!” Los Angeles Star, Oct. 24, 1857.
“Paiute” Gary Tom and Ronald Holt, “The Paiute Tribe of Utah,” in A History
of Utah’s American Indians, ed. Forrest S. Cuch (Salt Lake City: Utah
State Division of Indian Affairs and Utah State Division of History,
2000), 123–65.
Palmer William R. Palmer, “The Mountain Meadows Massacre,” 1958, in
William R. Palmer Material, First Presidency, General Administra-
tion Files, 1923, 1932, 1937–67, CHL.
Parker1 Basil G. Parker, The Life and Adventures of Basil G. Parker (Plano, CA:
Fred W. Reed, 1902).
Parker2 Basil G. Parker, Recollections of the Mountain Meadow Massacre: Being
an Account of That Awful Atrocity and Revealing Some Facts Never Before
Made Public (Plano, CA: Fred W. Reed, 1901).
Peck M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983).
PGM Provo Utah Central Stake, General Minutes, CHL.
Pitchforth Samuel Pitchforth, Diary, 1857–61, Photocopy of typescript, CHL.
PKS Philip Klingon Smith, affidavit, Apr. 10, 1871, in “A Massacre by
Mormons,” New York Times, Sept. 14, 1872, also in “Mormon Mon-
strosity,” New York Herald, Sept. 14, 1872.
PPU Papers Pertaining to the Territory of Utah, 1849–70, 36th Cong.,
Records of the Senate, RG 46, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
PSHR Parowan Stake, Historical Record, 1855–60, CHL.
Ray John A. Ray to Editors of the Mountaineer, Dec. 4, 1859, Historian’s
Office, Collected Historical Documents, ca. 1854–60, CHL.

Rea Ralph R. Rea, “The Mountain Meadows Massacre and Its Comple-
tion as a Historic Episode,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 16 (Spring
1957): 28–45.
Rogers Wm. H. Rogers, “The Mountain Me[a]dows Massacre,” Salt Lake
City Valley Tan, Feb. 29, 1860.
SAJ Jesse Nathaniel Smith, Autobiography and Journal, 1855–1906,
CHL.
SDoc42 U.S. Congress, Senate, Message of the President of the United States,
Communicating, in Compliance with a Resolution of the Senate, Infor-
mation in Relation to the Massacre at Mountain Meadows, and Other
Massacres in Utah Territory, 36th Cong., 1st sess., 1860, S. Doc. 42.
Shirts [Peter Shirts], statement, ca. 1876, manuscript 3141, Smithsonian
Institution, National Anthropological Archives, Suitland, MD.
SLDS James B. Allen and Glen M. Leonard, The Story of the Latter-day
Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1992).
Staub Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group
Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Stenhouse T. B. H. Stenhouse, The Rocky Mountain Saints: A Full and Complete
History of the Mormons, from the First Vision of Joseph Smith to the Last
Courtship of Brigham Young (New York: D. Appleton, 1873).
Stout Hosea Stout, On the Mormon Frontier: The Diary of Hosea Stout, ed.
Juanita Brooks, 2 vols. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press/
Utah State Historical Society, 1964).
Tambiah Stanley J. Tambiah, Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and
Collective Violence in South Asia (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1996).
Terry Elizabeth Baker Terry, in “I Survived the Mountain Meadow
Massacre,” True Story Magazine, n.d. Copy located at BYU.
TF Morris A. Shirts and Kathryn H. Shirts, A Trial Furnace: Southern
Utah’s Iron Mission (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press,
[2001]).
Thurston Malinda Thurston v. United States and Ute Indians, U.S. Court of
Claims, no. 8479, Selected Documents relating to the Mountain
Meadows Massacre, National Archives, Washington, D.C. Copy of
transcript at CHL.
Tullidge Edward W. Tullidge, History of Salt Lake City (Salt Lake City: Star
Printing, 1886).
Unruh John D. Unruh Jr., The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the
Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1979).
UofU Special Collections, Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake
City, UT.
USBIA U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Letters Received by the Office of
Indian Affairs, Utah Superintendency Papers, National Archives

Microfilm Publications #234, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
Microfilm copy located at CHL.
USHS Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City, UT.
“Victims” “Lee’s Victims,” San Francisco Chronicle, Mar. 23, 1877. Also reprinted
in “The Slaughtered Emigrants,” New York Herald, Mar. 25, 1877,
and Daily Memphis Avalanche, Mar. 31, 1877.
Welch Peyton Y. Welch, Oct. 26, 1857, in “More Trains Destroyed by the
Mormons and Indians,” Hornellsville (NY) Tribune, Jan. 21, 1858.
Reprinted from the Missouri Expositor, Jan. 5, 1858.
Whitney Orson F. Whitney, History of Utah, 4 vols. (Salt Lake City: George Q.
Cannon & Sons, 1892–1904).
Woodruff Wilford Woodruff, Journals, 1833–98, CHL.
YOF Brigham Young, Office Files, CHL.

Notes
All quoted matter preserves the spelling of the original sources, except where
noted. Spelling corrections in square brackets [ ] have occasionally been made
to enhance readability. Italics are as in original sources unless otherwise noted.
Sources that have not been abbreviated appear with full citations at first mention
in each chapter; all following citations of these sources within that chapter are
shortened.
Preface
1. Juanita Brooks, “Side-Lights on the Mountain Meadows Massacre,” type-
script, 1940, copy at BYU; Juanita Brooks, The Mountain Meadows Massacre
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1950).
2. Anne Marie Gardner, “Forgiveness Highlights Meadow Dedication,” Salt
Lake Tribune, Sept. 16, 1990; Loren Webb, “Time for Healing, LDS Leader
Says about Massacre,” St. George (UT) Daily Spectrum, southern ed., Sept. 16,
1990; Art Challis, “Mountain Meadows Now Can Symbolize Willingness to
Look Ahead, BYU Chief Says,” Deseret News, Sept. 16, 1990; Cynthia Gorney,
“Epilogue to a Massacre,” Washington Post, Sept. 17, 1990.
3. Quoted by Gordon B. Hinckley at funeral services for Rex E. Lee, in Greg
Hill, “Funeral Speakers Laud Life of Rex E. Lee,” Church News, Mar. 23, 1996.
4. Roger V. Logan Jr., quoted in John Magsam, “Utah Massacre Memorial Dedi-
cated,” Little Rock Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Sept. 12, 1999.
5. AJ2; Whitney, 1:692–709; AJ1.
6. First Presidency, letter, Jan. 21, 1892, in Autobiography of Andrew Jenson (Salt
Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1938), 197–98.
7. Andrew Jenson, Journal, Jan. 31, 1892, CHL.
8. Michael Feldberg, The Turbulent Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
9. Regina M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
10. Staub; Peck, 212–53; Rosa Brooks, “Good People, Evil Deeds,” Los Angeles
Times, June 9, 2006, also reprinted in “Killings in Iraq by ‘Bad Apples’? Prob-
ably Not,” Deseret Morning News, June 18, 2006.
11. William R. Palmer to Joseph Anderson, Oct. 16, 1959, William R. Palmer,
Material, First Presidency, General Administration Files, 1923, 1932,
1937–67, CHL.
Prologue
1. Aurora Hunt, Major General James Henry Carleton (1814–1873): Western
Frontier Dragoon (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark, 1958), 171; Rogers.
2. Carleton, 3.
3. Ibid., 28; Donald Jackson and Mary Lee Spence, eds., The Expeditions of John
Charles Frémont, vol. 1, Travels from 1838 to 1844 (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1970), 692–93.
4. LeRoy R. Hafen and Ann W. Hafen, eds., Central Route to the Pacific, by
Gwinn Harris Heap, The Far West and the Rockies Historical Series,
1820–1875, vol. 7 (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark, 1957), 231.
5. Jacob Forney to Elias Smith, May 5, 1859, in “Visit of the Superintendent of
Indian Affairs to Southern Utah,” Deseret News, May 11, 1859; Jacob Forney
to Kirk Anderson, May 5, 1859, in Salt Lake City Valley Tan, May 10, 1859;
Rogers.
6. Carleton, 29.
7. [ James] Lynch, statement, in “The Mountain Meadows Massacre: Surviving
Children of the Murdered Fix the Crime upon the Mormons,” San Francisco
Daily Evening Bulletin, May 31, 1859; Rogers; Forney to Smith, May 5, 1859,
in “Visit of the Superintendent”; Forney to Anderson, May 5, 1859, in Valley
Tan, May 10, 1859.
8. Charles Brewer to R. P. Campbell, May 6, 1859, in SDoc42, 16–17; Carleton,
28; John W. Phelps to Dear General, June 12, 1859, John W. Phelps Papers,
New York Public Library.
9. Carleton, 28; Jacob Hamblin, in Carleton, 8; Jacob Hamblin, JDL2-BT 1:86;
Marion Jackson Shelton, Diary, October 11, 1858, CHL, transcription of
Pitman shorthand by LaJean Carruth, copy in MMMRF.
10. Shelton Diary, May 20, 1859.
11. Carleton, 29.
12. Ibid., 28–29; HOJ, July 19, 1860; Shannon A. Novak and Derinna Kopp, “To
Feed a Tree in Zion: Osteological Analysis of the 1857 Mountain Meadows
Massacre,” Historical Archaeology 37, no. 2 (2003): 100.
13. Carleton, 3, 28.
14. Ibid., 29–30.
15. J. H. Carleton to W. W. Mackall, June 24, 1859, RG 393, Department of
the Pacific, Letters Received, National Archives, Washington, D.C. See also
Carleton, 30–31. Carleton’s later actions demonstrated he was serious in
advocating retributive violence. His reputation was later stained by “brutally
282 Notes to Pages xiv–5

harsh” Indian campaigns and the ruthless internment of Navajos at Bosque
Redondo. Arrell Morgan Gibson, “James H. Carleton,” Soldiers West: Biogra-
phies from the Military Frontier, ed. Paul Andrew Hutton (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1987), 68–69; Dennis B. Casebier, Carleton’s Pah-Ute
Campaign (Norco, CA: By the author, 1972), 11, 18, 26, 44.
Chapter 1
1. See SLDS, 1–305.
2. Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 1985), ix–x; SLDS, 1–220, 224, 286–300, 349–474.
3. Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), xx.
4. Ohio Journal, Dec. 2, 1835, in Dean C. Jesse, ed., The Papers of Joseph Smith,
vol. 2 (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1992), 93; HC, 2:323–24.
5. For other examples of such thinking, see editorial comments in a church-
run newspaper, Times and Seasons 4, no. 7 (1843): 98; Times and Seasons 6,
no. 3 (1845): 811. For reviews of millennial studies, see Leonard I. Sweet,
“Millennialism in America: Recent Studies,” Theological Studies 40 (Sept.
1979): 510–31; Hillel Schwartz, “The End of the Beginning: Millenarian
Studies, 1969–1975,” Religious Studies Review 2 ( July 1976): 1–15. Grant
Underwood, The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1993), examines how last days perspectives influenced early
Mormonism.
6. Grant Underwood, “Millenarianism and the Early Mormon Mind,”
Journal of Mormon History 9 (1982): 43, citing John G. Gager, Kingdom and
Community: The Social World of Early Christianity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1975), 25; Kenelm Burridge, New Heaven, New Earth: A Study
of Millenarian Activities (New York: Schocken Books, 1969); Thomas S. Kuhn,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1970).
7. Paul Gilje, Rioting in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996),
1–86.
8. Jeremiah Hughes, Niles’ Register 66 ( July 27, 1844): 344–45, cited in David
Grimstead, “Rioting in Its Jacksonian Setting,” American Historical Review 77
(Apr. 1972): 392–93.
9. Richard Maxwell Brown, Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American
Violence and Vigilantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 30–33,
35. See also David T. Courtwright, Violent Land: Single Men and Social Dis-
order from the Frontier to the Inner City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1996), 1. Western historian Patricia Limerick maintains that politi-
cal, religious, and economic differences could be as inflammatory as racial
differences in the nineteenth-century American West, the violence against
Mormons being one example. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the
American West (New York: Norton, 1987), 280–88.
Notes to Pages 5–8 283

10. Robert Wadman and William Thomas Allison, To Protect and to Serve:
A History of Police in America (Upper Saddle, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall,
2004); Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in
American History and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 157;
Boyd W. Johnson, The Arkansas Frontier (St. Charles, AR: Perdue Printing,
1957), 129; Kenneth S. Greenberg, “The Nose, the Lie, and the Duel in the
Antebellum South,” American Historical Review 95 (Feb. 1990): 57–74.
11. Wadman and Allison, To Protect and to Serve.
12. Dean C. Jessee, ed., The Papers of Joseph Smith, vol. 1 (Salt Lake City: Deseret
Book, 1989), 374–77; Historian’s Office, History of the Church, 1:205–7,
CHL; HC, 1:261–64; Luke Johnson, “History of Luke Johnson,” Latter-day
Saints’ Millennial Star 26, no. 53 (1864): 834–35; George A. Smith, Nov. 15,
1864, in JD, 11:5–6; CHC, 1:280–82.
13. Evening and Morning Star (Dec. 1833): 226–28.
14. Ibid.; Max H. Parkin, “Lamanite Mission of 1830–1831,” in Encyclopedia of
Mormonism, ed. Daniel H. Ludlow (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 2:803.
15. Stephen C. LeSueur, The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri (Columbia: Uni-
versity of Missouri Press, 1987), 16–18; Warren A. Jennings, “Zion Is Fled:
The Expulsion of the Mormons from Jackson County, Missouri” (PhD
diss., University of Florida, 1962), 1–81, 129; Max H. Parkin, “A History of
the Latter-day Saints in Clay County, Missouri, from 1833 to 1847” (PhD
diss., Brigham Young University, 1976), 56–90; Evening and Morning Star
(Dec. 1833): 226–28; Richard Bushman, “Mormon Persecutions in Missouri,
1833,” BYU Studies 3 (Autumn 1960): 1–20.
16. Lyman Wight, testimony, in “Trial of Joseph Smith,” Times and Seasons 4, no.
17 (1843): 264; Jennings, “Zion is Fled,” 137–201; Evening and Morning Star
(Dec. 1833): 226–28.
17. Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of the Latter Day Saints (Kirtland, OH:
F. G. Williams, 1835), 217–19 (current D&C 98:16, 23–48).
18. The Book of Mormon (Palmyra, NY: E. B. Grandin, 1830), 344, 358, 459 (cur-
rent Alma 43:46; 48:14; 3 Nephi 3:21).
19. John Corrill, A Brief History of the Church of Christ of Latter Day Saints . . .
(St. Louis: Printed for the Author, 1839), 19. See also Alexander W.
Doniphan, interview, “Mormon History,” Saints’ Herald, Aug. 1, 1881, citing
Kansas City Journal; Jennings, “Zion is Fled,” 137–201.
20. Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt, 3rd ed. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1938), 103.
21. LeSueur, 1838 Mormon War, 19–27; Alexander L. Baugh, A Call to Arms: The
1838 Mormon Defense of Northern Missouri (Provo, UT: Joseph Fielding Smith
Institute/BYU Studies, 2000), 13–14.
22. Thomas Wilson to Samuel Turrentine, July 4, 1836, in Durward T. Stokes,
ed., “The Wilson Letters, 1835–1849,” Missouri Historical Review 60 ( July
1966): 505, 508; Marie H. Nelson, “Anti-Mormon Mob Violence and the
Rhetoric of Law and Order in Early Mormon History,” Legal Studies Forum
21 (1997): 353–88; William R. Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America: The
284 Notes to Pages 8–10

Contentious History of a Founding Ideal ( New Haven: Yale University Press,
2003), 30–58.
23. Daniel Dunklin to W. W. Phelps, July 18, 1836, in William Wines Phelps,
Collection of Missouri Documents, 1833–37, CHL; Nelson, “Anti-Mormon
Mob Violence,” 371. See also Peter Crawley and Richard L. Anderson, “The
Political and Social Realities of Zion’s Camp,” BYU Studies 14 (Summer
1974): 415–20; Jenson, 3:694.
24. Joseph Smith, Journal, Mar. 30, 1836, Joseph Smith, Collection, CHL; Jes-
see, Papers of Joseph Smith, 2:206.
25. Reed Peck, “Manuscript,” 8, cited in LeSueur, 1838 Mormon War, 39–40.
26. Peter Crawley, “Two Rare Missouri Documents,” BYU Studies 14 (Summer
1974): 527.
27. MU, 56–60. See also Reed C. Durham Jr., “The Election Day Battle at
Gallatin,” BYU Studies 13 (Autumn 1972): 36–61; Brooks1, 32–33; William
G. Hartley, My Best for the Kingdom: History and Autobiography of John Lowe
Butler, a Mormon Frontiersman (Salt Lake City: Aspen Books, 1993), 51–61.
On the Mormons’ fighting back in Jackson County, see Warren A. Jennings,
“The Expulsion of the Mormons from Jackson County, Missouri,” Missouri
Historical Review 64 (Oct. 1969–July 1970): 47–51.
28. Baugh, Call to Arms, 36–43; LeSueur, 1838 Mormon War, 64, 112–28.
29. See, e.g., Dean C. Jessee, ed., The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, rev. ed. (Salt
Lake City: Deseret Book; Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2002), 420–21.
30. D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power (Salt Lake City:
Signature Books, 1994), 99.
31. Gilje, Rioting in America, 77; Richard Maxwell Brown, “Violence,” in Clyde
A. Milner II, Carol A. O’Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss, eds., The Oxford
History of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 416;
LeSueur, 1838 Mormon War, 3–4; Donald L. Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic
Riot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 74–75.
32. L. W. Boggs to John B. Clark, Oct. 27, 1838, in Executive Orders, 1838,
Missouri State Archives, photocopy at CHL; L. W. Boggs to John B. Clark,
Oct. 27, 1838, in Document Containing the Correspondence, Orders, &c. in
Relation to the Disturbances with the Mormons (Fayette, MO: Boon’s Lick
Democrat, 1841), 61; LeSueur, 1838 Mormon War, 152; Richard Lloyd
Anderson, “Clarifications of Bogg’s ‘Order’ and Joseph Smith’s Constitu-
tionalism,” in Arnold K. Garr and Clark V. Johnson, eds., Regional Studies in
Latter-day Saint Church History: Missouri (Provo, UT: Brigham Young Univer-
sity, 1994), 27–83; Baugh, Call to Arms, 121, 140, 146n48.
33. Baugh, Call to Arms, 115–27; LeSueur, 1838 Mormon War, 162–68.
34. LeSueur, 1838 Mormon War, 161–244; Baugh, Call to Arms, 149–53.
35. Grant Anderson, “Research on Missouri Persecutions,” Nov. 8, 2006, MMMRF.
36. For figures on Mormon property losses, see Clark V. Johnson, ed., Mormon
Redress Petitions: Documents of the 1833–1838 Missouri Conflict (Provo, UT:
Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1992), xxviii–xxix.

37. For figures on the number of Saints driven from Missouri, see Eliza R. Snow
to [Isaac] Streator, February 22, 1839, copy at CHL, original at Western
Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, OH; B. H. Roberts, The Missouri
Persecutions (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1965), 264; William G. Hartley,
“ ‘Almost Too Intolerable a Burthen’: The Winter Exodus from Missouri,
1838–39,” Journal of Mormon History 18 (Fall 1992): 7; Alexander L. Baugh,
“From High Hopes to Despair: The Missouri Period, 1831–39,” Ensign
( July 2001): 44.
38. Joseph Smith Jr. to Presendia Huntington Buell, Mar. 15, 1839, in Jessee,
Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, 428.
39. Gilje, Rioting in America, 77; Brown, “Violence,” 416; Horowitz, Deadly Eth-
nic Riot, 74–75; LeSueur, 1838 Mormon War, 3–4; Glen M. Leonard, Nauvoo:
A Place of Peace, a People of Promise (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book/Brigham
Young University Press, 2002), 525–36.
40. Leonard, Nauvoo, 103–4, 280–81.
41. Thomas Sharp, Warsaw (IL) Signal, Feb. 21, 1844.
42. “Unparalleled Outrage at Nau[v]oo,” Warsaw Signal, June 12, 1844.
43. The Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints,
2nd ed. (Nauvoo, IL: John Taylor, 1844), 444–45 (current D&C 135:4);
Bushman, Joseph Smith, 541–47.
44. Doctrine and Covenants (1844), 445 (current D&C 135:7); Rev. 6:9–10, King
James Version (hereafter KJV).
45. Willard Richards, John Taylor, and Samuel H. Smith to Emma Smith and
[Jonathan] Dunham, June 27, 1844, in Nauvoo (IL) Neighbor Extra, June
30, 1844. On the Saints’ restraint during this period, see M. R. Deming to
the Citizens of Carthage and Hancock County, June 28, 1844, and Deming
to Fellow Citizens of Hancock County, June 29, 1844, in Nauvoo Neighbor
Extra, June 30, 1844.
46. Brigham Young to Vilate Young, Aug. 11, 1844, CHL; Arrington1, 112.
47. “Awful Assassination of Joseph and Hyrum Smith!” Times and Seasons 5, no.
12 (1844): 561.
48. Dallin H. Oaks and Marvin S. Hill, Carthage Conspiracy: The Trial of the
Accused Assassins of Joseph Smith (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975);
“Centennial of Nauvoo Temple Dedication,” Improvement Era 49 (May
1946): 294; Elden J. Watson, comp., Manuscript History of Brigham Young,
1846–1847 (Salt Lake City: Elden J. Watson, 1971), 148; “Joseph Smith,”
Times and Seasons 5, no. 14 (1844): 607; Woodruff, Aug. 27, 1844. Historical
evidence on an “Oath of Vengeance” is mixed. For a compilation and
analysis of the sources, see Van Hale, “Mountain Meadows Massacre and the
Oath of Vengeance,” Supplement, Sunstone Symposium Paper, Salt Lake
City, 2007.
49. Rev. 6:9–10 (KJV).
50. Editorial, Nauvoo Neighbor, Oct. 29, 1845. On the Nauvoo Legion, see
Leonard, Nauvoo, 112–19.

51. Thomas Ford, A History of Illinois, from Its Commencement as a State in 1818
to 1847 (1854; repr., Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons, 1946), 2:306–8,
312–13, 322.
52. Ford, History of Illinois, 2:322–27; Richard E. Bennett, Mormons at the Mis-
souri, 1846–1852: “And Should We Die . . .” (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1987), 82–84.
53. Brigham Young, remarks, in Heber C. Kimball, Journal, Jan. 2, 1846, CHL;
Brigham Young to E. L. Barnard, Dec. 26, 1845, Outgoing Correspondence,
YOF; Brigham Young to William L. Marcy, Dec. 17, 1845, Outgoing Cor-
respondence, YOF; Brigham Young, sermon, Jan. 2, 1846, Historian’s Office,
History of the Church.
54. “A Circular of the [Nauvoo] High Council,” Jan. 20, 1846, in Times and Sea-
sons 6, no. 21 (1846): 1096–97; Brigham Young to Daniel E. Morrison, Sept.
15, 1875, Letterpress Copybook 13:861, YOF; Brigham Young to Thomas
L. Kane, Jan. 31, 1854, Letterpress Copybook 1:409, YOF; Brigham Young,
remarks, July 27, 1850, HOGCM; Brigham Young to James Guthrie, July 31,
1854, Governor’s Letterpress Copybook 1:119–24, YOF; Brigham Young to
S. A. Douglas, Apr. 29, 1854, Letterpress Copybook 1:517, YOF.
55. Brigham Young, Oct. 8, 1868, JD, 12:287. For an account of Young’s early
New York years, see Rebecca Cornwall and Richard F. Palmer, “The Reli-
gious and Family Background of Brigham Young,” BYU Studies 18 (Spring
1978): 286–310. The most complete Young biography is Arrington1.
56. Brigham Young, Oct. 5, 1856, in JD, 4:112; Brigham Young, sermon, Oct.
3, 1852, in “Discourse,” Deseret News, May 11, 1854; Ronald W. Walker and
Ronald K. Esplin, “Brigham Himself: An Autobiographical Recollection,”
Journal of Mormon History 4 (1977): 19–34.
57. On the burned-over district, see Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-Over District:
The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York,
1800–1850 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1950).
58. Brigham Young, Aug. 9, 1857, in JD, 5:127; Brigham Young, Apr. 6, 1860, in
JD, 8:38.
59. Brigham Young, June 3, 1871, in JD, 14:197; Brigham Young, remarks, Jan.
8, 1845, in Utah Genealogical and Historical Magazine 11 (1920): 109–10.
60. Brigham Young, Apr. 20, 1856, in JD, 3:320–21; Brigham Young, sermon, June
21, 1857, Historian’s Office, Reports of Speeches, CHL. See also Brigham
Young, sermon, Aug. 24, 1867, Historian’s Office, Reports of Speeches.
61. Young, remarks, Jan. 8, 1845, in Utah Genealogical and Historical Magazine,
11 (1920): 109–13; Brigham Young, sermon, Feb. 3, 1867, Historian’s Office,
Reports of Speeches; Brigham Young, Apr. 20, 1856, in JD, 3:321; John
Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World, to That Which is to Come (New
York: American Tract Society, n.d.), 24. See also Brigham Young, sermon,
Oct. 3, 1852, in “Discourse,” Deseret News, May 11, 1854.
62. HOJ, Oct. 23, 1859; Brigham Young, remarks, Mar. [9], 1856, HOGCM. On
Young’s temper and speech, see Arrington1, 196–98, 300.

63. Ronald W. Walker, “Raining Pitchforks: Brigham Young as Preacher,”
Sunstone 8 (May–June 1983): 8; Chandless, 189.
64. Thomas L. Kane to James Buchanan, ca. Mar. 15, 1858, draft, Utah War
Correspondence, Thomas L. and Elizabeth W. Kane, Collection, BYU.
65. Sketch by S. A. Kenner, in History of the Bench and Bar of Utah, ed. and
comp. C. C. Goodwin (Salt Lake City: Interstate Press Association, 1913),
12; Chicago Times, report filed Feb. 22, 1871, in Preston Nibley, Brigham
Young, The Man and His Work (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1936),
469; LeRoy R. and Ann W. Hafen, eds., Journals of Forty-Niners; Salt Lake to
Los Angeles, Far West and the Rockies Historical Series, 1820–1875, vol. 2
(Glendale, CA: Arthur R. Clark, 1954), 276n.
66. HC, 3:2; Arrington1, 62; James B. Allen, Ronald K. Esplin, and David
J. Whittaker, Men with a Mission: The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in the
British Isles, 1837–1841 (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1992), xvi, 55; Wayne
L. Wahlquist, “Population Growth in the Mormon Core Area, 1847–90,” in
The Mormon Role in the Settlement in the West, ed. Richard H. Jackson (Provo,
UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1978), 129.
67. Brigham Young, remarks, in Kimball Journal, Jan. 2, 1846; Brigham Young to
“Brother Joseph,” Mar. 9, 1846, Outgoing Correspondence, YOF.
68. Brigham Young to James K. Polk, Aug. 8, 1846, Outgoing Correspondence,
YOF; Thomas L. Kane to Polk, letter, n.d., The Private Papers and Diary of
Thomas Leiper Kane: A Friend of the Mormons, ed. and intro. Oscar Osburn
Winther (San Francisco: Gelber-Lilienthal, 1937), 51–53. Kane’s identifica-
tion of this land was specific: The anticipated Mormon lands were “about
midway between the Missouri and the Pacific and may be loosely described as
lying between the E. shore of Lake Tampanogos [Utah Lake], and the 111th.
degree of W Longitude and extending at least from the 40th. parallel of Lati-
tude to the 42° which lately formed the Northern boundary of the U. States.”
69. Ray Allen Billington, The Far Western Frontier, 1830–1860 (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1956), 196; Ray Allen Billington, “Best Prepared Pio-
neers in the West,” American Heritage 7 (Oct. 1956): 20–25, 116–17; Kane to
Polk, letter, n.d., Private Papers and Diary of Thomas Leiper Kane, 51–53; Lewis
Clark Christian, “Mormon Foreknowledge of the West,” BYU Studies 21
(Fall 1981): 403–15.
70. Brigham Young to the High Council at Council Point, Aug. 14, 1846, Out-
going Correspondence, YOF; Manuscript History of Brigham Young, 203–5,
236–37. For a survey of the recruitment and history of the Mormon Bat-
talion, John F. Yurtinus, “A Ram in the Thicket: The Mormon Battalion in
the Mexican War” (PhD diss., Brigham Young University, 1975); Norma
Baldwin Ricketts, The Mormon Battalion: U.S. Army of the West, 1846–1848
(Logan: Utah State University Press, 1996); David L. Bigler and Will Bagley,
eds., Army of Israel: Mormon Battalion Narratives (Spokane, WA: Arthur
H. Clark, 2000).
71. Young to Polk, Aug. 8, 1846, Outgoing Correspondence, YOF.
288 Notes to Page 18

72. “To Our Patrons,” Nauvoo Neighbor, Oct. 29, 1845.
73. See Isa. 33:1. Part of the passage was repeated in one of Smith’s revelations,
Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt
Lake City: Deseret News, 1876), 365 (current D&C 109:50). Taylor’s com-
ments fit the millennial pattern. “Men cleave to hopes of imminent worldly
salvation only when the hammerblows of disaster destroy the world they
have known,” observed Michael Barkun’s, Disaster and the Millennium (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 1. See also Underwood, “Millenarian-
ism and the Early Mormon Mind,” 46.
Chapter 2
1. Ray Allen Billington, The Far Western Frontier, 1830–1860 (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1956), 196; Ray Allen Billington, “Best Prepared Pio-
neers in the West,” American Heritage 7 (Oct. 1956): 20–25, 116–17; Thomas
L. Kane to Polk, letter, n.d., The Private Papers and Diary of Thomas Leiper
Kane: A Friend of the Mormons, ed. and intro. Oscar Osburn Winther (San
Francisco: Gelber-Lilienthal, 1937), 51–53; Lewis Clark Christian, “Mormon
Foreknowledge of the West,” BYU Studies 21 (Fall 1981): 403–15.
2. Richard D. Poll, Thomas G. Alexander et al., eds., Utah’s History (Provo, UT:
Brigham Young University Press, 1978), 160; Arrington1, 227.
3. Lemuel G. Brandeburg, Perry [E.] Brocchus, and B. D. Harris to Millard
Fillmore, December 10, 1851, in The Spiritual Wife Doctrine of the Mormons
Proved (Cheltenham, UK: R. Edwards, [1852]), 1–11; Perry E. Brocchus,
Letter of Judge Brocchus, of Alabama, to the Public, upon the Difficulties in the
Territory of Utah (Washington, D.C.: Henry Polkinhorn, 1859), 18–31; Poll,
Alexander, Utah’s History, 160–63; Arrington1, 228; SLDS, 269–70.
4. See U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Reports of Explorations and
Surveys, to Ascertain the Most Practicable and Economical Route for a Railroad
from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, 33rd cong., 2nd sess., Doc. 91,
10; U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Central Pacific Railroad, 33rd
cong., 1st sess., Doc. 18, 1–10; David Henry Miller, “The Impact of the
Gunnison Massacre on Mormon-Federal Relations: Colonel Edward Jenner
Steptoe’s Command in Utah Territory, 1854–1855” (master’s thesis, Univer-
sity of Utah, 1968); Ronald W. Walker, “President Young Writes Jefferson
Davis about the Gunnison Massacre Affair,” BYU Studies 35, no. 1 (1995):
146–70. Cf. Robert Kent Fielding, The Unsolicited Chronicler: An Account of the
Gunnison Massacre (Brookline, MA: Paradigm Publications, 1993).
5. Stout, 2:536, Dec. 23, 25, 1854; Sylvester Mowry to Edward Joshua Bicknall,
Dec. 31, 1854, Apr. 27, 1855, Mowry Letters, Beinecke Library, Yale Univer-
sity, New Haven, CT, cited in William P. MacKinnon, “Sex, Subalterns, and
Steptoe: A Civil Affairs Nightmare Impacts 1850s Mormon-Federal Rela-
tions” (paper delivered at the Mormon History Association annual meeting,
Casper, WY, May 2006), 12, 15–16, to be published as “Sex, Subalterns, and
Steptoe: Army Behavior, Mormon Rage, and Utah War Anxieties,” Utah

Historical Quarterly 76 (Summer 2008); Miller, “Impact of the Gunnison
Massacre,” 214–17; Mosiah Hancock, “The Life Story of Mosiah Lyman
Hancock,” 33, typescript, copies available at BYU and CHL.
6. See Edwin Woolley, Mar. 4, 1855, HOGCM.
7. Bill Hickman, Brigham’s Destroying Angel: Being the Life, Confession, and Star-
tling Disclosures of the Notorious Bill Hickman, the Danite Chief of Utah, ed.
J. H. Beadle (New York: George A. Crofutt, 1872), 112; Stout, 2:583–84, Jan.
5–9, 1856.
8. Stout, 2:613, 622, Dec. 30, 1856, Feb. 13, 1857; Furniss, 58. On Stiles’s
excommunication, see CHC, 4:199; Woodruff, Dec. 22, 1856.
9. Brigham Young to Horace S. Eldredge, Dec. 30, 1858, Letterpress Copybook
5:21, YOF; Brigham Young to John M. Bernhisel, Jan. 2, 1859, Letterpress
Copybook 5:19, YOF.
10. See Everett L. Cooley, “Carpetbag Rule: Territorial Government in Utah,”
Utah Historical Quarterly 26 (Apr. 1958): 107–29; Duane A. Smith, Rocky
Mountain West: Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, 1859–1915, Histories of
the American Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
1992), 66–67; Odie B. Faulk, Arizona: A Short History (Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, 1970), 128; Ted Tunnell, “Creating ‘the Propaganda of
History’: Southern Editors and the Origins of Carpetbagger and Scalawag,”
Journal of Southern History 72 (Nov. 2006): 789–822.
11. Woodruff, Jan. 13, 1856. See also ibid., Feb. 24, 1856.
12. Brigham Young to John M. Bernhisel, Aug. 30, 1856, Letterpress Copybook
3:39–41, YOF; Brigham Young to George A. Smith and John M. Bernhisel,
Jan. 3, 1857, Letterpress Copybook 3:355, YOF. In a further inflamma-
tory charge, Young claimed that the surveyors were “ready to take my life
and the lives of this people.” “Items of Interview between Prest B. Young &
Messrs Livingston & Bell,” July 6, 1858, Memorandums and notes, 1852–75,
General Office Files, YOF. For a review of the controversy and an assessment
of mismanagement and even fraud, see C. Albert White, Initial Points of the
Rectangular Survey System (Westminster, CO: Professional Land Surveyors
of Colorado, 1996), 310–30. See also Charles W. Moeller, affidavit, June 26,
1857, in St. Louis Daily Missouri Republican, July 23, 1857, reprinted in White,
Initial Points of the Rectangular Survey System, 320–21; Lawrence L. Linford,
“Establishing and Maintaining Land Ownership in Utah Prior to 1869,”
Utah Historical Quarterly 42 (Spring 1974): 136.
13. William P. MacKinnon, “The Buchanan Spoils System and the Utah Expedi-
tion: Careers of W. M. F. Magraw and John M. Hockaday,” Utah Historical
Quarterly 31 (Spring 1963): 132–35.
14. W. M. F. Magraw to Mr. President, Oct. 3, 1856, in U.S. Congress, House,
The Utah Expedition, 35th Cong., 1st sess., 1858, Doc. 71, 2; LeRoy R. Hafen
and Ann W. Hafen, The Utah Expedition, 1857–1858: A Documentary Account
of the United States Military Movement under Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston, and
the Resistance by Brigham Young and the Mormon Nauvoo Legion, The Far West

and the Rockies Historical Series, 1820–1875, vol. 8 (Glendale, CA: Arthur
H. Clark, 1958), 361–63.
15. Woodruff, July 24, 1847. For references to Isaiah, see The Orson Pratt Jour-
nals, comp. Elden J. Watson (Salt Lake City: Elden J. Watson, 1975), 461–63,
Aug. 1, 1847; July 25, 1847, HOGCM.
16. Woodruff, July 25, 28, 1847; Howard R. Egan, Pioneering the West, 1846 to
1878 (Richmond, UT: Howard R. Egan Estate, 1917), 108; Minutes, July 25,
1847, HOGCM.
17. “Journey to Zion, From the Journal of Erastus Snow,” Aug. 8, 1847, Utah
Humanities Review 2 ( July 1948): 281.
18. Orson Pratt, The Kingdom of God (Liverpool: S. W. Richards, [1852]), 1;
Klaus J. Hansen, Quest for Empire: The Political Kingdom of God and the Council
of Fifty in Mormon History (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press,
1967), 184–85. On Deseret, see Heber C. Kimball, Aug. 30, 1857, in JD,
5:164.
19. Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the
American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 155.
20. Howard Roberts Lamar, The Far Southwest, 1846–1912: A Territorial History
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 13–14. For evaluations that the
appointees were more than the “political hacks” that many westerners made
them out to be, see Smith, Rocky Mountain West, 65–66; Kermit L. Hall,
“Hacks and Derelicts Revisited: American Territorial Judiciary, 1789–1959,”
Western Historical Quarterly 12 ( July 1981): 273–89.
21. Lamar, Far Southwest, 11–12. See also Julienne L. Wood, “Popular Sover-
eignty,” Dictionary of American History, ed. Stanley I. Kutler et al., 3rd ed.
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons and Thomson Gale, 2003) 6:415–16;
Paul K. Conkin, Self-Evident Truths: Being a Discourse on the Origins
& Development of the First Principles of American Government—Popular
Sovereignty, Natural Rights, and Balance & Separation of Powers (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1974), 2, 24–25.
22. On popular sovereignty and polygamy, see Sarah Barringer Gordon, The
Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century
America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 8–10, 51,
54–83.
23. Lamar, Far Southwest, 308, 320–21, 338.
24. Brigham Young to William I. Appleby, Mar. 1, 1857, Letterpress Copybook
3:404, YOF.
25. David L. Bigler, Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon Theocracy in the American
West, 1847–1896 (Spokane, WA: Arthur H. Clark, 1998), 59.
26. See Earl S. Pomeroy, The Territories and the United States, 1861–1890: Studies
in Territorial Administration (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1947); Lamar, Far Southwest; Thomas G. Alexander, A Clash of Interests: Inte-
rior Department and Mountain West, 1863–1896 (Provo, UT: Brigham Young
University Press, 1977).

27. Paul H. Peterson, “The Mormon Reformation of 1856–1857: The Rheto-
ric and the Reality,” Journal of Mormon History 15 (1989): 60–65; Gustive
O. Larson, “The Mormon Reformation,” Utah Historical Quarterly 26 ( Jan.
1958): 46, 48. On British converts, see Richard L. Evans, A Century of “Mor-
monism” in Great Britain (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1937), 244.
28. David O. Calder to William H. Miles, Feb. 28, 1857, in Mormon, May 9, 1857.
29. Leonard J. Arrington, Feramorz Y. Fox, and Dean L. May, Building the City of
God: Community and Cooperation among the Mormons (Salt Lake City: Deseret
Book, 1976), 15–40, 75.
30. William Gibson, Journal, Oct. 8, 1855, CHL; Brigham Young to William
Gibson, Mar. 1, 1856, in Gibson Journal.
31. Brigham Young, Mar. 2, 1856, in JD, 3:222, 226.
32. Harrriet Beecher Stowe, Old Town Folks (1889; repr., Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966), 475.
33. Brigham Young, Dec. 20, 1846, in Historian’s Office, History of the Church,
518–19, CHL; Brigham Young to Charles C. Rich, Jan. 4, 1847, Outgoing
Correspondence, YOF; Brigham Young, remarks, Nov. 15, 1847, HOGCM;
“Bishop Higbee,” remarks, Nov. 25, 1847, HOGCM; The Book of Mormon
(Palmyra, NY: E. B. Grandin, 1830), 230–32, 238–39, 266–73, 282–89, 303–4,
310–23, 340–45, 417–22 (current Mosiah 25; Alma 4, 6, 16–17, 21–22, 29, 31–35,
43; Helaman 5). “The New England leaders of the church, while playing the
role of frontiersmen, were still Puritan at heart, and the Reformation reflected
a clash between deep-rooted traditional convictions and the compromises and
expediencies of frontier living.” See Larson, “Mormon Reformation,” 48.
34. Brigham Young, Sept. 21, 1856, in JD, 4:52–54.
35. Brigham Young, Feb. 8, 1857, in JD, 4:219.
36. PSHR, Oct. 17, 1856, 2nd section, 21; Hannah Tapfield King, Autobiogra-
phy, 142–43, typescript, CHL.
37. King Autobiography, 142–43.
38. Chatterley.
39. See N. B. Baldwin to Brigham Young, Nov. 15, 1857, Incoming Correspon-
dence, YOF.
40. Cedar Stake Journal, Dec. 19, 1856, Jan. 18, 29, Feb. 22, 1857, Special Col-
lections, William R. Palmer Collection, Gerald R. Sherratt Library, Southern
Utah University, Cedar City, UT.
41. Brigham Young to John Steele, Mar. 18, 1857, Letterpress Copybook 3:488,
YOF; Brigham Young to George A. Smith and John M. Bernhisel, Jan. 3,
1857, Letterpress Copybook 3:355, YOF; John Ward Christian, Dictation,
[1886], H. H. Bancroft Manuscript Collection, Bancroft Library, Berkeley,
CA, microfilm copy located at CHL.
42. Peterson, “Mormon Reformation,” 74–76. Peterson argues that one of the
hallmarks of the reformation was its spirit of forgiveness and mercy. See also
Brigham Young to Philo Farnsworth, Apr. 4, 1857, Letterpress Copybook
3:540, YOF.

43. See Wilford Woodruff, Nov. 23, 1856, in Historian’s Office, History of the
Church; Heber C. Kimball to James Snow, Mar. 6, 1857, Letterpress Copy-
book 3:468, YOF. In Aug. 1857 when Snow made harsh remarks in a public
meeting, he paused and urged the members of the congregation “to not run
off ” and report what he had said to Brigham Young. PGM, Aug. 2, 1857.
44. Brigham Young and Daniel Wells to William H. Dame, Sept. 14, 1857, Let-
terpress Copybook 3:859, YOF.
45. Application for Statehood, Mar. 27, 1856, Governor’s Letterpress Copybook
1:456–60, YOF; Stout, 2:595, Mar. 27, 1856; Edward Leo Lyman, Political
Deliverance: The Mormon Quest for Utah Statehood (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1986), 8.
46. William P. MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part I: A Documentary History of the
Utah War to 1858, Kingdom in the West: The Mormons and the American
Frontier 10 (Norman, OK: Arthur H. Clark, 2008), 55.
47. “Expedition against Utah,” Deseret News, Oct. 7, 1857; Memorial, Executive
Files, Governor’s Office Files, YOF.
48. Brigham Young to George A. Smith and John M. Bernhisel, Jan. 3, 1857,
Letterpress Copybook 3:259, YOF.
49. John M. Bernhisel to Brigham Young, Mar. 17, Apr. 2, 1857, Utah Delegate
Files, YOF.
50. See “Southern Secession,” in The Annals of America, vol. 9, 1858–1865: The
Crisis of the Union (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1968), 204–9.
51. MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, 67, 100–102, 107.
52. W. W. Drummond, letter, in “Dreadful State of Affairs in Utah,” New York
Herald, Mar. 20, 1857; W. W. Drummond to Jeremiah S. Black, Mar. 30,
1857, in Executive Documents Printed by Order of the House of Representatives
During the First Session of the Thirty-Fifth Congress, 1857–58 (Washington:
James B. Steedman, 1858), Doc 71, 10:213. For a summary of Drummond’s
charges, see CHC, 4:202–5. See also Stout, 2:613, 622, Dec. 30, 1856, Feb.
13, 1857. Though the Mormons destroyed some of Judge George P. Stiles’s
law firm records, the federal records were not destroyed and were returned
after Governor Alfred Cumming’s 1858 arrival in Utah. See Curtis E. Bolton
to Jeremiah S. Black, June 26, 1857, in Executive Documents, 10:214; Stout,
2:613, Dec. 30, 1856; Furniss, 57–59; Andrew Jenson, comp., Church Chro-
nology, 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1914), 61. The U.S. military
investigated Babbitt’s death and concluded he was killed by Cheyenne. U.S.
Congress, House, Almon W. Babbit—Administrator Of, 35th Cong. 2nd sess.,
Jan. 21, 1859, H. Report 131, Serial 1018; U.S. Congress, House, Almon W.
Babbit—Administrator Of, 36th Cong. 1st sess., Apr. 6, 1860, H. Report 346,
Serial 1069. See also Stout, 2:601, 601–2n75,
Oct. 4, 1856.
53. MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, 108–9.
54. “The Mormon Horde,” American Journal, Apr. 29, 1857, in Historian’s
Office, Historical Scrapbooks, 6:33, CHL.

55. Editorial, New York Daily Tribune, May 18, 1857; “Highly Important from
Utah,” New York Daily Tribune, May 18, 1857.
56. “The Mormon Rebellion,” New York Times, May 11, 1857. See also Drum-
mond to Black, Mar. 30, 1857, in Executive Documents, 10:214.
57. Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” in Hof-
stadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 3; Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture:
From the Kennedy Assassination to The X-Files (New York: Routledge, 2000),
3; Mark Fenster, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), xii–xiii.
58. Enoch Baker, “Mormonism,” in Peter Knight, ed., Conspiracy Theories in
American History: An Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003)
2:509; David Brion Davis, “Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analy-
sis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature,” Mississippi
Valley Historical Review 47 (Sept. 1960): 205–24; Peter Knight, Conspiracy
Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America (New York: New York Uni-
versity Press, 2002), 4; Leo P. Ribuffo, “Religious Prejudice and Nativism,”
in Charles H. Lippy and Peter W. Williams, eds., Encyclopedia of the American
Religious Experience (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988), 3:1525–35.
59. Bernhisel to Young, Mar. 17 and Apr. 2, 1857, Utah Delegate Files, YOF.
60. Kenneth M. Stampp, America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990), 200; “Republican Platform of 1856,” in
Donald Bruce Johnson, comp., National Party Platforms, 1840–1956 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1978), 27; “To the Latter-Day Saints,” Circle-
ville Ohio Herald, Nov. 21, 1856.
61. “Remarks of Geo. A. Smith at the Peace Conference,” June 12, 1858,
Historian’s Office, Letterpress Copybook 1:630, CHL.
62. George W. Lay to W. S. Harney, June 29, 1857, in House, Utah Expedition,
Doc. 71, 7; Hafen and Hafen, Utah Expedition, 30–34.
63. Furniss, 95.
64. See Jean H. Baker, James Buchanan (New York: Times Books/Henry Holt,
2004); Stampp, America in 1857; Elbert B. Smith, The Presidency of James
Buchanan (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1975).
65. Joseph W. Young, Journal, May 19, 1857, in JH; George Laub, Journal, May
30, 1857, CHL; Bernhisel to Young, Mar. 17, 1857, Utah Delegate Files, YOF;
Thomas L. Kane to Brigham Young, May 21, 1857, Incoming Correspon-
dence, YOF; Bernhisel to Young, Apr. 2, 1857, Utah Delegate Files, YOF;
HOJ, May 29, 1857; Woodruff, May 29, 1857; Brigham Young, July 5, 1857, in
“Remarks,” Deseret News, July 15, 1857; “Arrivals,” Deseret News, June 3, 1857.
On Young’s serving on an interim basis, see Bigler, Forgotten Kingdom, 92n18.
66. Pitchforth, June 19, 1857; Wilford Woodruff to the editor of the Millennial
Star, July 1, 1857, Historian’s Office, Letterpress Copybook 1:472, YOF.
67. Brigham Young to Henry G. Boyle, July 4, 1857, Letterpress Copybook
3:694, YOF.

68. HOJ, June 23, 1857. A sampling and introduction to Pratt’s prose is provided
in Peter Crawley, ed., The Essential Parley P. Pratt (Salt Lake City: Signature
Books, 1990).
69. John R. Young, Memoirs of John R. Young: Utah Pioneer, 1847 (Salt Lake City:
Deseret News, 1920), 70; Steven Pratt, “Eleanor McLean and the Murder of
Parley P. Pratt,” BYU Studies 15 (Winter 1975): 228.
70. Pratt, “Eleanor McLean,” 225–34; Memoirs of John R. Young, 71. When a
newspaper reporter asked Eleanor if she divorced McLean before marrying
Pratt, she answered: “No, the sectarian priests have no power from God to
marry; and as a so-called marriage ceremony performed by them is no mar-
riage at all, no divorce was needed.” Eleanor McLean Pratt, interview, in New
York World, Nov. 23, 1869, in Pratt, “Eleanor McLean,” 233n28.
71. John R. Young to William G. Black, Mar. 1930, typescript, CHL; Woodruff,
Sept. 7, 1856; Pratt, “Eleanor McLean,” 231–36, 238–39n43. See also
Woodruff, Jan. 3, 1858.
72. Pratt, “Eleanor McLean,” 234–39.
73. Ibid., 244–48; Eleanor Pratt to “Ye loved ones in Utah,” May 14, 1857, in
Parley P. Pratt, Collection, CHL; Hector McLean, statement, in “The Kill-
ing of Pratt—Letter from Mr. McLean,” San Francisco Daily Alta California,
July 9, 1857; Hendrick Hartog, “Lawyering, Husbands’ Rights, and ‘The
Unwritten Law’ in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American His-
tory 84 ( June 1997): 67–96.
74. For the California editor’s comment, see “Killing of Pratt.” On the role of
Masons in assisting McLean, see “An Unwritten Leaf of History,” Boonville
(MO) Weekly Advertiser, Feb. 14, 1890.
75. Brigham Young to Silas Smith and the Brethren on the Sandwich Islands,
July 4, 1857, Letterpress Copybook 3:698–99, YOF.
76. Brigham Young to Orson Pratt and Ezra T. Benson, July 30, 1857, Let-
terpress Copybook 3:658, YOF; Young to Boyle, July 4, 1857, Letterpress
Copybook 3:694, YOF.
77. Brigham Young to George Q. Cannon, July 4, 1857, Letterpress Copybook
3:691, YOF.
78. Brigham Young, remarks, May 1, 1865, in HOGCM; Woodruff, May 1,
1865.
Chapter 3
1. See Steven L. Olsen, “Celebrating Cultural Identity: Pioneer Day in
Nineteeth-Century Mormonism,” BYU Studies 36 (1996–97): 159–77;
Thomas Bullock, “Report of Proceedings,” July 24, 1849, HOGCM; His-
torian’s Office, History of the Church, July 24, 1849, CHL. Young actually
entered the Salt Lake Valley shortly after most members of his 1847 com-
pany, but the date for Pioneer Day was based on his July 24 arrival. The Pio-
neer Camp of the Saints: The 1846 and 1847 Mormon Trail Journals of Thomas
Bullock, ed. Will Bagley (Spokane, WA: Arthur H. Clark, 1997), 237, 237n5.

2. “Celebration of the Twenty Fourth of July, 1856 in the Tops of the Moun-
tains,” Deseret News, July 30, 1856; Charles C. Keller, The Lady in the Ore
Bucket (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2001), 58–59; Brigham
Young, Office Journal, July 23–25, 1856, YOF.
3. Brigham Young, July 19, 1857, in JD, 5:56; DBY, 45–47, July 16–18, 1857;
“Names of Persons Invited to Spend the 24 July 1857 at the Head Waters of Big
Cotton Wood,” General Office Files, President’s Office Files, YOF; G. D. Watt,
“The 24th of July in the Tops of the Mountains,” Deseret News, July 29, 1857.
4. Brigham Young, Remarks, Jan. 17, 1848, in HOGCM.
5. See Heber C. Kimball to Franklin D. Richards, Aug. 31, 1855, Heber
C. Kimball, Papers, 1837–66, CHL; Wilford Woodruff to Asa Fitch, July 31,
1856, Historian’s Office, Letterpress Copybook 1:342–44, CHL.
6. Presiding Bishopric, Bishops Meeting Minutes, Mar. 11, 1856, CHL.
7. See Brigham Young to Silas Smith and the Brethren on the Sandwich Islands,
July 4, 1857, Letterpress Copybook 3:698, YOF.
8. DBY, 48, July 22, 23, 1857; Woodruff, July 22, 23, 1857.
9. Stout, 2:633, July 22–23, 1857; Watt, “24th of July.”
10. See Rex Thomas Price Jr., “The Mormon Missionary of the Nineteenth
Century” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1991), 58–59, 265–76; Wayne
L. Wahlquist, “Population Growth in the Mormon Core Area: 1847–90,” in
The Mormon Role in the Settlement of the West, ed. Richard H. Jackson (Provo,
UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1978), 107–30; William E. Hughes,
“A Profile of the Missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints, 1849–1900” (master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 1986), 7–14,
104–7, 182–91; Historian’s Office, Missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints, ca. 1925, vol. 1, CHL.
11. Watt, “24th of July”; DBY, 48, July 23, 1857; The Journal of Lorenzo Brown
(n.p.: Heritage Press, n.d.), 86, July 23, 1857; John H. Evans, “Grandmoth-
er’s Stories of Early Days,” Juvenile Instructor 40, no. 19 (Oct. 1, 1905): 577;
Joshua Midgley, Diary, July 23, 1857, microfilm, CHL; Keller, Lady in the Ore
Bucket, 65; Andrew Jackson Allen, Reminiscences and Journal, July 24, 1857,
typescript, CHL; Woodruff, July 24, 1857.
12. Ira Ames, Autobiography and Journal, July 24, 25, 1857, CHL; Watt, “24th
of July.” Ames incorrectly puts the speech on July 24; other sources confirm
it occurred July 23.
13. Allen, Reminiscences and Journal, July 24, 1857.
14. Watt, “24th of July”; Evans, “Grandmother’s Stories of Early Days,” 577;
John Adams Wakeham, Autobiography, 8, CHL.
15. DBY, 49, July 24, 1857; Watt, “24th of July”; HOJ, July 24, 1857; Tullidge,
158; Woodruff, July 24, 1857.
16. A. O. Smoot, Letter, Feb. 14, 1884, in Tullidge, 156; DBY, 49, July 24, 1857.
17. Smoot, Letter, Feb. 14, 1884, in Tullidge, 156–57; Woodruff, July 24, 1857; DBY,
49, July 24, 1857; HOJ, July 23, 1857; Elias Smith, Journal, July 23, 1857, CHL.
18. Smoot, Letter, Feb. 14, 1884, in Tullidge, 156; DBY, 49, July 24, 1857.

19. Smoot, Letter, Feb. 14, 1884, in Tullidge, 157; Smith Journal, July 23–24, 1857;
HOJ, July 23, 24, 1857. Rockwell would become a controversial and legendary
lawman and gunslinger. See Harold Schindler, Orrin Porter Rockwell: Man of
God, Son of Thunder, 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1983).
20. Smith Journal, July 23, 1857; “Mrs. McLean,” Mormon, June 27, 1857; Eleanor
J. McComb Pratt, Account of the Death of Parley P. Pratt, ca. 1857, CHL;
“The Utah Question,” San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, July 1, 1857.
21. See Woodruff, June 23, 1857.
22. DBY, 49, July 24, 1857.
23. Ibid.
24. Adams, 128–34; LeCheminant, 31.
25. “Gen. Harney,” Circleville (OH) Herald, June 20, 1856; Adams, 46–51, 286;
William P. MacKinnon, ed., At Sword’s Point, Part I: A Documentary History
of the Utah War to 1858, Kingdom in the West: The Mormons and the
American Frontier 10 (Norman, OK: Arthur H. Clark, 2008), 168.
26. Adams, 50–51.
27. Arrington2, 161–63; Smoot, Letter, Feb. 14, 1884, in Tullidge, 56; Smith
Journal, July 23, 1857; HOJ, July 23, 1857.
28. “Remarks of Geo. A. Smith at the Peace Conference,” June 12, 1848,
Historian’s Office, Letterpress Copybook 1:635–36. A clerk in Salt Lake
City noted Smoot’s July arrival in the city the day before the canyon cel-
ebration and recorded that the new governor was to be “Cumming of St.
Louis.” HOJ, July 23, 1857. Although Alfred Cumming, the new governor,
did not actually accept his appointment until July 11 of that year, newspapers
had been discussing his potential appointment for weeks.” The confusion
of Cumming with Cummins was understandable. Besides having a similar
name, Cumming also had a Missouri connection, having most recently served
as superintendent of Indian affairs for the Upper Missouri, headquartered in
St. Louis. MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, 180–81; “Latest Intelligence,” New
York Daily Times, June 6, 1857; Charles S. Peterson, “A Historical Analysis
of Territorial Government in Utah under Alfred Cumming, 1857–1861”
(master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 1958), 8–9.
29. DBY, 48–49, July 24, 1857; Smith Journal, July 23, 1857; Smoot, Letter, Feb.
14, 1884, in Tullidge, 156–57; Arrington1, 250–52.
30. Woodruff, July 24, 1857; DBY, 49, July 24, 1857, emphasis in original.
31. Jenson, 1:63–64; Gardner, 319–21; Whitney, 4:175–77.
32. “Daniel,” Salt Lake Daily Tribune, Dec. 4, 1874. On Wells’s ability as an ora-
tor, see Bryant S. Hinckley, Daniel Hanmer Wells and Events of His Time (Salt
Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1942), 23, 235, 418, 428.
33. Ames, Autobiography and Journal, July 24, 25, 1857; Allen, Reminiscences
and Journal, July 24, 1857; Watt, “24th of July.”
34. Henry Ballard, Journal, July 24, 1857, typescript, Joel E. Ricks Collection of Tran-
scriptions, vol. 1, Utah State University Library, copy also located at the CHL.
35. Clarence Merrill, Autobiography, 9, CHL.

36. Allen, Reminiscences and Journal, July 24, 1857; Watt, “24th of July”;
Woodruff, July 24, 1857; Wakeham, Autobiography, 8; Journal of Lorenzo
Brown, 87, July 24, 1857; Ames, Autobiography and Journal, July 24, 25,
1857; Evans, “Grandmother’s Stories of Early Days,” 578.
37. See Louis G. Reinwand, “An Interpretive Study of Mormon Millennialism
During the Nineteenth Century with Emphasis on Millennial Developments
in Utah” (master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 1971).
38. Journal of Lorenzo Brown, 87, July 24, 1857. See also Ames, Autobiography and
Journal, July 24, 25, 1857; Watt, “24th of July”; Midgley Diary, July 24, 1857.
39. DBY, 49, July 24, 1857.
40. Ames, Autobiography and Journal, July 24–25, 1857; Watt, “24th of July”;
Journal of Lorenzo Brown, 87, July 24, 1857.
Chapter 4
1. Brigham Young, discourse, June 21, 1857, in Historian’s Office, Reports of
Speeches, CHL.
2. Brigham Young to Thomas L. Kane, June 29, 1857, Letterpress Copybook
3:667, YOF; “Judge Drummond of Utah,” San Francisco Western Standard,
July 3, 1857.
3. Brigham Young to John M. Bernhisel, Oct. 29, 1856, Letterpress Copybook
3:152, YOF; John M. Bernhisel to Brigham Young, Jan. 17, 1857, Incoming
Correspondence, YOF. Mormons charged that before coming to Utah, Drum-
mond had deserted his family and once in the territory displayed another woman,
reportedly a prostitute, in his courtroom. John M. Bernhisel to Brigham Young,
Jan. 17, 1857, Utah Delegate Files, YOF; W. I. Appleby, letter to the editor of
New York Daily Times, Aug. 24, 1857, in “Mormon Affairs—Mr. Appleby in Reply
to Judge Drummond,” Mormon, Aug. 29, 1857. W. M. F. Magraw, the other main
accuser, had led a Jackson County “band of ruffians” that threatened a Mormon
with hanging. Later, his petty fights and delays associated with the nation’s new
Pacific Wagon Road would offend many of the people he worked with. See John
Taylor to Bro. Appleby, July 9, 1857, in “Editorial Correspondence from the
Plains,” Mormon, Aug. 8, 1857; W. Turrentine Jackson, Wagon Roads West: A Study
of Federal Road Surveys and Construction in the Trans-Mississippi West, 1846–1869
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), 175, 192–97, 200, 211–12; Wil-
liam P. MacKinnon, “The Buchanan Spoils System and the Utah Expedition:
Careers of W. M. F. Magraw and John M. Hockaday,” Utah Historical Quarterly
31 (Spring 1963): 134–43; John Wolcott Phelps, Diary, Sept., 3, 1857, in LeRoy
R. Hafen and Ann W. Hafen, The Utah Expedition, 1857–1858: A Documentary
Account of the United States Military Movement under Colonel Albert Sidney John-
ston, and the Resistance by Brigham Young and the Mormon Nauvoo Legion, The Far
West and the Rockies Historical Series, 1820–1875, vol. 8 (Glendale, CA: Arthur
H. Clark, 1958), 122, original located in the New York Public Library.
4. Brigham Young to Thomas L. Kane, June 29, 1857, Letterpress Copybook
3:668, 670, YOF. For evidence the Saints heard rumors of the troops coming

before July 24, see George Laub, Journal, July 5, 1857, CHL; George
A. Smith, July 12, 1857, in PGM; Jens Christian Nielsen, “History of Jens
Christian Nielsen,” 63, July 15, 1857, FHL. For other statements reflecting
Young’s sense of providence, see Brigham Young, July 5, 1857, in “Remarks,”
Deseret News, July 15, 1857. Several years earlier when rumors spread that
Washington would replace him as governor, Young had said the govern-
ment “can do as they please, or rather as the Lord pleases . . . If no one else
acknowledges the hand of the Lord in such things, we do.” Brigham Young to
Erastus Snow, Feb. 28, 1855, Letterpress Copybook 2:3, YOF.
5. Smith, July 12, 1857, in PGM.
6. See A. O. Smoot, Letter, Feb. 14, 1884, in Tullidge, 156; DBY, July 24, 1857.
7. See Lorenzo Snow to Brigham Young, Aug. [13], 1857, Incoming Cor-
respondence, YOF. See also “From Salt Lake City,” Los Angeles Star, Dec.
12, 1857; Susan Tate Laing, Andrew Hunter Scott: Builder in the Kingdom
(Provo, UT: The Andrew Hunter Scott Genealogical Association, 2001), 530,
Sept. 25, 1857.
8. HOJ, July 25, 1857; C. G. Landon, letter to the editor, Nov. 13, 1857, in
“Incidents of Mormon Life and Practices,” Sacramento Daily Union, copy in
Historian’s Office, Historical Scrapbooks, 1857, 267, CHL; C. G. Landon to
D. H. Burr, Sept. 18, 1857, General Land Office Correspondence, National
Archives and Records Administration, Rocky Mountain Region, Denver, CO
[hereafter GLOC]; William Bell to D. H. Burr, Mar. 1, 1858, GLOC.
9. Salt Lake City 6th Ward, Report of Excommunicated, 1857–59, Historian’s
Office, Excommunication Lists, 1858–68, CHL, copy located in MMMRF;
Alonzo Hazelton Raleigh, Journal, June 13 1857, CHL.
10. Landon, letter to the editor, Nov. 13, 1857, in “Incidents of Mormon Life
and Practices.”
11. Landon to Burr, Sept. 18, 1857, GLOC; David H. Burr to Thomas A. Hen-
dricks, Oct. 19, 1857, GLOC; David H. Burr to Thomas A. Hendricks, Mar.
15, 1858, GLOC; A. B. Hoy, statement, in “Later from the Plains,” Memphis
Daily Appeal, Sept. 18, 1857.
12. Landon to Burr, Sept. 18, 1857, GLOC; [C. G.] Landon, Sept. 18, 1857, in
“Mormon Outrages,” Weekly Richmond (VA) Enquirer, Oct. 28, 1857, citing the
Washington Union; Burr to Hendricks, Oct. 19, 1857, GLOC; Landon, letter
to the editor, Nov. 13, 1857, “Incidents of Mormon Life and Practices”; Bell
to Burr, Mar. 1, 1858, GLOC; Burr to Hendricks, Mar. 15, 1858, GLOC.
13. W. H. Wilson, affidavit, Nov. 29, 1858, GLOC; Bell to Burr, Mar. 1, 1858,
GLOC.
14. C. L. Craig to David H. Burr, Aug. 1, 1856, GLOC; David H. Burr to
Thomas A. Hendricks, Mar. 28, 1857, GLOC; David H. Burr to Thomas
A. Hendricks, June 11, 1857, GLOC; C. G. Landon to David H. Burr, Sept.
18, 1857, GLOC.
15. Joseph Troskolaw[s]ki, May 19, 1857, in “Affairs among the Mormons,” New
York Herald, May 24, 1857. For correspondence of the Utah surveyors sent

to headquarters, see Craig to Burr, Aug. 1, 1856, GLOC; David H. Burr to
Thomas A. Hendricks, Aug. 30, 1856, GLOC; Burr to Hendricks, Mar. 28,
1857, GLOC; Burr to Hendricks, June 11, 1857, GLOC; Landon to Burr,
Sept. 18, 1857, GLOC.
16. Brigham Young to John M. Bernhisel, Aug. 30, 1856, Letterpress Copybook
3:40, YOF. In a further inflammatory charge, Young claimed that Burr and
others were “ready to take my life and the lives of this people.” “Items of
Interview between Prest B. Young and Messrs Livingston & Bell,” July 6,
1858, Memorandums and Notes, 1852–75, General Office Files, YOF.
17. Jeff Walker, “Mormon Land Rights in Caldwell and Daviess Counties and
the Mormon Conflict of 1838: New Findings and New Understandings,”
unpublished paper in possession of authors.
18. See Brigham Young to John M. Bernhisel, Aug. 30, 1856, Letterpress Copy-
book 3:39–41, YOF; Brigham Young to George A. Smith and John
M. Bernhisel, Jan. 3, 1857, Letterpress Copybook 3:355, YOF; C. Albert
White, Initial Points of the Rectangular Survey System (Westminster, CO: Pro-
fessional Land Surveyors of Colorado, 1996), 310–30; Charles W. Moeller,
affidavit, June 26, 1857, in St. Louis Daily Missouri Republican, July 23, 1857,
reprinted in White, Initial Points of the Rectangular Survey System, 320–21;
Lawrence L. Linford, “Establishing and Maintaining Land Ownership in
Utah Prior to 1869,” Utah Historical Quarterly 42 (Spring 1974): 136.
19. Brigham Young to Thomas A. Hendricks, Apr. 5, 1858, Governor’s Office
Files, YOF; HOJ, Sept. 22, 1857; Thomas L. Kane, Diary, Apr. 1858, Thomas
L. Kane, Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford Uni-
versity Libraries, Stanford, California, copy at CHL.
20. Brigham Young, July 26, 1857, in JD, 5:75, 78. One outsider in the congregation
even claimed that Young, to make his point, reached beneath his coat as if to put
his hand on a concealed weapon. Hoy, statement, in “Later from the Plains.”
21. Young, July 26, 1857, in JD, 5:75.
22. Young, July 26, 1857, in JD, 5:77–78.
23. Heber C. Kimball, July 26, 1857, in JD, 5:88, 95.
24. Heber C. Kimball, Aug. 2, 1857, in JD, 5:132, 138.
25. Brigham Young, Aug. 2, 1857, in JD, 5:98–99.
26. Woodruff, Aug. 2, 1857.
27. Woodruff, Aug. 2, 1857; DBY, 56, Aug. 4, 1857; Brigham Young to George
Q. Cannon, Aug. 4, 1857, Letterpress Copybook 3:735, YOF; Brigham Young
to C. W. Wandell, Aug. 4, 1857, Letterpress Copybook 3:740, YOF; Brigham
Young to Silas Smith, H. P. Richards, Edward Partridge, Aug. 4, 1857, Letter-
press Copybook 3:749–50, YOF; Brigham Young to William Crosby and W. J.
Cox, Aug. 4, 1857, Letterpress Copybook 3:751, YOF; Brigham Young to H.
S. Eldredge, Aug. 8, 1857, Letterpress Copybook 3:773, YOF; Brigham Young
to William J. Cox and William J. Crosby, Oct. 1, 1857, Letterpress Copybook
3:882–83, YOF; Brigham Young to H. G. Whitlock, Oct. 1, 1857, Letterpress
Copybook 3:885, YOF; Brigham Young to W. J. Cox, Nov. 5, 1857, Letterpress

Copybook 3:921, YOF; Brigham Young to William Matthews, Nov. 5, 1857,
Letterpress Copybook 3:924, YOF; Arnold K. Garr, Donald Q. Cannon, and
Richard O. Cowan, eds., Encyclopedia of Latter-day Saint History (Salt Lake City:
Deseret Book, 2000), 190–92; James W. Hulse, The Silver State: Nevada’s Heri-
tage Reinterpreted (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1991), 58–60.
28. See Furniss, 106–7, 114, 183.
30. See Brigham Young, Discourse, Aug. 16, 1857, reported by George D. Watt,
in Historian’s Office Reports of Speeches; David L. Bigler, Fort Limhi: The
Mormon Adventure in Oregon Territory, 1855–1858 (Spokane, WA: Arthur
H. Clark, 2003), 175–80; Richard Bennett and Arran Jewsbury, “The Lion
and the Emperor: The Mormons, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and Vancou-
ver Island, 1846–1858,” BC Studies 128 (Winter 2000/2001): 57–62; Clifford
L. Stott, Search for Sanctuary: Brigham Young and the White Mountain Expedi-
tion, University of Utah Publications in the American West, vol. 19 (Salt
Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1984), 28–30.
32. See Brigham Young to Jacob Hamblin, Aug. 4, 1857, Letterpress Copybook
3:737, YOF; Brigham Young to William Felshaw, Aug. 4, 1857, Letterpress
Copybook 3:759–60, YOF; Daniel H. Wells to William H. Dame, Aug. 13,
1857, William R. Palmer, Collection, Special Collections, Gerald R. Sheratt
Library, Southern Utah University, Cedar City, UT; [Daniel H. Wells] to
William B. Pace, Provo, Aug. 13, 1857, Utah Territorial Militia records,
Utah State Archives, Salt Lake City, UT.
33. Martin Ridge, “Mormon ‘Deliverance’ and the Closing of the Frontier,”
Journal of Mormon History 18 (Spring 1992): 146.
34. http://www.nps.gov/hobe/historyculture/index.htm (accessed February 29,
2008).
35. A Book of Commandments for the Government of the Church of Christ ([Indepen-
dence, MO]: W. W. Phelps, 1833), 116 (current D&C 49:24–28); The Book of
Mormon (Palmyra, NY: E. B. Grandin, 1830), 488, 500, 528 (current 3 Nephi
16:15; 3 Nephi 21:11–21; Mormon 5:22–24).
36. Book of Mormon (1830), 497 (current 3 Nephi 20:14–17).
37. Phelps Diary, Sept., 15, 18, 1857, in Hafen and Hafen, Utah Expedition, 128, 130.
38. HOJ, Sept. 18, 1857; Stout, 2:638, Sept. 19, 1857; Arrington2, 175, 464n59.
39. Brigham Young to Jacob Hamblin, Aug. 4, 1857, Letterpress Copybook 3:738,
YOF; Brigham Young to Silas Smith, H. P. Richards, and Edward Partridge,
Aug. 4, 1857, Letterpress Copybook 3:748, YOF; Brigham Young to William
Crosby and W. J. Cox, Aug. 4, 1857, Letterpress Copybook 3:752–53, YOF.
40. L. U. Reavis, The Life and Military Services of Gen. William Selby Harney
(St. Louis: Bryan, Brand & Co., 1878), 276–79; Furniss, 121; LeCheminant,
30. Though the Salt Lake Temple would not be completed until 1893, out-
siders used the term “temple” loosely to include other Mormon edifices on
Temple Square, such as the Old Tabernacle.

41. See Glen M. Leonard, Nauvoo: A Place of Peace, a People of Promise (Salt Lake
City: Deseret Book/Brigham Young University Press, 2002), 380–98, 595–621.
42. Adams, 166.
43. “The Mormon Exodus,” New York Times, June 17, 1858; Furniss, 121.
44. Phelps Diary, Aug. 24, 1857, in Hafen and Hafen, Utah Expedition, 115.
45. Furniss, 122.
46. William P. MacKinnon, “Epilogue to the Utah War: Impact and Legacy,”
Journal of Mormon History 29 (Fall 2003): 221–22, 235.
47. Furniss, 122.
48. DBY, 56, Aug. 4, 1857; Young to Crosby and Cox, Aug. 4, 1857, Letterpress
Copybook 3:751–54, YOF; Edward Leo Lyman, San Bernardino: The Rise
and Fall of a California Community (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1996),
197–98, 371–83, 414–15.
49. Brigham Young to William Felshaw, Aug. 4, 1857, Letterpress Copybook
3:759–60, YOF; Brigham Young to Nathaniel V. Jones, Aug. 4, 1857, Let-
terpress Copybook 3:763–64, YOF.
50. Brigham Young to Jacob Hamblin, Aug. 4, 1857, Letterpress Copybook
3:737, YOF. See also Brigham Young to Philo T. Farnsworth, Aug. 4, 1857,
51. Juanita Brooks, Jacob Hamblin: Mormon Apostle to the Indians (Salt Lake City:
Westwater Press, 1980); Pearson H. Corbett, Jacob Hamblin, The Peacemaker
(Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1952).
52. Daniel H. Wells, General Orders, Aug. 1, 1857, Letter Book, 93, Nauvoo
Legion (Utah) Adj. Gen. Records, 1851–70, CHL; Daniel H. Wells to
F. D. Richards, Aug. 1, 1857, Daniel H. Wells, Letters, Beinecke Library,
Yale University, New Haven, CT; Daniel H. Wells to Wm. H. Dame, Aug.
1, 1857, Palmer Collection; Whitney, 1:620–21. On Wells’s forefathers, see
Bryant S. Hinckley, Daniel Hanmer Wells and Events of His Time (Salt Lake
City: Deseret News Press, 1942), 19–20.
53. Wells, General Orders, Aug. 1, 1857, Letter Book, 93, Nauvoo Legion
(Utah) Adj. Gen. Records. On the admonitions regarding grain, see Brigham
Young, sermon, July 14, 1850, in Deseret News, July 20, 1850; Brigham Young,
sermon, Oct. 7, 1852, in George D. Watt, Papers, CHL, transcription by
LaJean Carruth; Heber C. Kimball, sermon, Oct. 7, 1852, in Watt Papers,
transcription by LaJean Carruth; Heber C. Kimball, sermon, circa May 8,
1853, in Watt Papers, transcription by LaJean Carruth; Brigham Young, June
5, 1853, in JD, 1:250; Orson Hyde, Sept. 24, 1853, in JD, 2:117–18; Brigham
Young, Oct. 8, 1855, in JD, 3:117–19, 122; Brigham Young, Jan. 27, 1856, in
JD, 3:196; Jedediah M. Grant, Jan. 27, 1856, in JD, 3:200; Heber C. Kimball,
June 29, 1856, in JD, 4:3–4; Brigham Young, Aug. 17, 1856, in JD, 4:25,
30–31; Raleigh Journal, June 10, Aug. 6, 1857.
54. Brigham Young to Bishop Br[u]nson, Aug. 2, 1857, Letterpress Copybook
3:732, YOF, copy of which was “sent to president I. C. Haight for the Bish-
ops and presiding Elders in and south of, Iron County.”

55. Young to Br[u]nson, Aug. 2, 1857, Letterpress Copybook 3:732, YOF.
56. George W. Lay to W. S. Harney, June 29, 1857, in Hafen and Hafen, Utah
Expedition, 30–31. On receiving the details of the orders in Feb. 1858, see
Richard D. Poll, Quixotic Mediator: Thomas L. Kane and the Utah War (Ogden,
UT: Weber State College Press, 1985), 16. On the orders being similar to
those given in Kansas, see George W. Lay to W. S. Harney, June 29, 1857, in
Hafen and Hafen, Utah Expedition, 30–31; Adams, 162–63.
57. Copies of the orders were sent to military leaders in Iron, Fillmore, Nephi,
San Pete, Peteetneet, Provo, Box Elder, Weber, Davis, Lehi, Cedar Valley,
and Tooele. Wells, General Orders, Aug. 1, 1857, Letter Book, 93, Nauvoo
Legion (Utah) Adj. Gen. Records. See also Wells to Richards, Aug. 1, 1857,
Wells Letters.
58. Franklin D. Richards, letter, Aug. 6, 1857, Utah Territorial Militia Records,
series 2210, Utah State Archives, Salt Lake City, UT, also cited in Brooks2,
20–21. On Martin Van Buren’s comment to Joseph Smith, see Joseph Smith
and Elias Higbee to Hyrum Smith, Dec. 5, 1839, Letter Book 2:85, Joseph
Smith, Papers, CHL; HC, 4:40, 80.
59. George A. Smith, Sept. 13, 1857, in “Remarks,” Deseret News, Sept. 23, 1857.
60. Smith, Sept. 13, 1857, in “Remarks”; “Remarks of Geo. A. Smith at the
Peace Conference,” June 12, 1858, Historian’s Office, Letterpress Copybook
1:636, CHL.
62. Woodruff to Editor of the Western Standard, Aug. 4, 1857, Historian’s
Office, Letterpress Copybook 1:476; HOJ, Aug. 3–8, 1857; Whitney, 1:696;
Application for Statehood, Mar. 27, 1856, Governor’s Letterpress Copybook
1:456–60, YOF.
63. George A. Smith, deposition, July 30, 1875, CCF 31.
64. HOJ, Aug. 3–8, 1857.
65. Lyman, San Bernardino, 28–30, 38, 243, 248–50; Unruh, 319. “State Road”
and “State Street” information confirmed by Ezra C. Knowlton, History of
Highway Development in Utah (Salt Lake City: Utah State Dept. of Highways,
[1967]), 15; “Big Field,” Deseret News, Apr. 3, 1852.
66. William Palmer, “Pioneers of Southern Utah,” Instructor 79 ( Jan. 1944):
24; George A. Smith to Hanah Buttler, Dec. 13, 1868, Historian’s Office,
Letterpress Copybook 2:732; C. Kent Dunford, “The Contributions of
George A. Smith to the Establishment of the Mormon Society in the Terri-
tory of Utah” (PhD diss., Brigham Young University, 1970), 18–19; William
R. Palmer, “Geo. A. Smith,” William R. Palmer, Papers, CHL; Merlo
J. Pusey, Builders of the Kingdom: George A. Smith, John Henry Smith, George
Albert Smith (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1981), 113.
67. Jenson, 1:37, 39, 41; Dunford, “Contributions of George A. Smith,” 27–28;
Garr, Cannon, and Cowan, Encyclopedia of Latter-day Saint History, 1114;
Davis Bitton and Leonard J. Arrington, Mormons and Their Historians (Salt
Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988), 20.

68. Justin McCarthy, Reminiscences ( New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers,
1899), 1:258.
69. George Alfred Townsend, The Mormon Trials at Salt Lake City ( New York:
American News, 1871), 47–48.
70. See Pusey, Builders of the Kingdom, 3–123; Dunford, “Contributions of
George A. Smith,” 23; Ray B. West Jr., Kingdom of the Saints (New York:
Viking Press, 1957), 116; Whitney, 4:37.
71. George A. Smith to John Codman, Nov. 14, 1874, in John Codman, Through
Utah (New York: 1875), 625; George A. Smith, letter, Jan. 17, 1851, in
Deseret News, Feb. 8, 1851.
72. Jenson, 1:41; Whitney, 4:37; Isaac Higbee to Brigham Young, May 26, 1852,
Incoming Correspondence, YOF. For Young’s misgivings about the conduct
of the people in Provo, see Brigham Young to William H. Hooper, Feb. 4,
1868, Letterpress Copybook 10:631–34, YOF.
73. Whitney, 4:37. During the so-called Walker War, Smith’s headaches were so
severe as to bring on temporary blindness. See George A. Smith to Brigham
Young, Aug. 27, 1853, Nauvoo Legion (Utah) Records, ca. 1852–58, Utah
State Archives, Salt Lake City, UT, microfilm copy at FHL.
74. In May 1854 Smith was replaced by William H. Dame as commander of
the Iron County Militia. Daniel H. Wells, Special Orders, May 21, 1854,
Nauvoo Legion (Utah) Records; William H. Dame, Journal, May 27, 1854,
microfilm, CHL. On George A. Smith being the “father” of southern Utah,
see William R. Palmer, “Geo. A. Smith,” Palmer Papers.
75. JHM, Aug. 8, 1857, 131; PSHR, Aug. 8, 1857, 2nd sec., 32; James
H. Martineau, letter to the editor, Aug. 22, 1857, in “Trip to the Santa
Clara,” Deseret News, Sept. 23, 1857; HOJ, Aug. 8, 1857. On the reorganiza-
tion of the militia, see Gardner, 305–6, 316.
76. JHM, Aug. 2, 6, 1857, 130–31.
77. John M. Higbee, affidavit, June 15, 1896, in CM.
78. JHM, Aug. 2, 1857, 130; PSHR, Aug. 8, 1857, 2nd sec., 32.
79. Martineau, letter to the editor, Aug. 22, 1857, in “Trip to the Santa Clara”;
HOJ, Aug. 8, 1875.
80. JHM, Aug. 8, 1857, 131; PSHR, Aug. 8, 1857, 2nd sec., 32; HOJ, Aug. 8, 1857.
81. George A. Smith, in PSHR, Aug. 9, 1857, 1st sec., 21–24; PSHR, Aug. 9,
1857, 2nd sec., 32–33; HOJ, Aug. 9, 1857.
82. Smith, in PSHR, Aug. 9, 1857, 1st sec., 23.
83. JHM, Aug. 9, 1857, 131.
Chapter 5
1. HOJ, Aug. 9–14, 1857; Zora Smith Jarvis, Ancestry, Biography, and Family of
George A. Smith (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1962), 215.
2. TF, 3.
3. “Pratt’s Report to the Legislative Council,” Feb. 5, 1850, in William B. Smart
and Donna T. Smart, eds., Over the Rim: The Parley P. Pratt Exploring Expedi-

tion to Southern Utah, 1849–1850 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1999),
179, 181–82.
4. Brigham Young, May 27, 1855, in JD, 2:282.
5. TF, 8, 193.
6. George A. Smith to John Codman, Nov. 14, 1874, in John Codman, Through
Utah (New York: 1875), 625; George A. Smith, letter, Jan. 17, 1851, in
Deseret News, Feb. 8, 1851; TF.
7. Smith to Codman, Nov. 14, 1874, in Codman, Through Utah, 625; Smith, letter,
Jan. 17, 1851, in Deseret News, Feb. 8, 1851; Whitney, 4:37; Parowan Ward,
Manuscript History and Historical Reports, 1847–1926, Aug. 4, Nov. 3, 5, 10,
1851, June 26, Nov. 5, 1852, Sept. 11, 1853, CHL; Woodruff, May 19, 21, 1855.
8. George A. Smith, letter to the editor, Dec. 8, 1852, in Deseret News, Dec. 11,
1852; Smith, letter to the editor, Oct. 24, 1852, in Deseret News, Nov. 27, 1852;
Smith to Samuel W. Richards, Nov. 7, 1852, in “Prosperity of Iron County,
Deseret,” Latter-Day Saints’ Millennial Star 15, no. 12 (Mar. 19, 1853): 188.
9. George A. Smith, Journal, May 16, 1851, George A. Smith, Papers, CHL; TF,
123, 216; John Steele, Reminiscences and Journal, June 18, 1853, CHL; William
T. Davenport, “Life History of William H. Dame,” 1–2, 1966, transcript, copy
in CHL; William H. Dame, Journal, May 16, 1851, microfilm, CHL.
10. Daniel H. Wells, Special Orders, May 21, 1854, Nauvoo Legion (UT), Records,
ca. 1852–58, Utah State Archives, Salt Lake City, UT, microfilm copy at FHL;
Dame Journal, May 27, 1854; PSHR, Aug. 8, 1857, 2nd sec., 32; OIMD.
11. PSHR, Jan. 20, 1856, 2nd sec., 11.
12. Fish, 69; Minos, Nov. 24, 1874, in “Col. William H. Dame,” Salt Lake Daily
Tribune, Nov. 28, 1874; [ Josiah Rogerson], untitled typescript, 4, CM.
13. [Rogerson], untitled typescript, 3, CM.
14. [Rogerson], untitled typescript, 3, 6, CM; Harold W. Pease, “The Life and
Works of William Horne Dame” (master’s thesis, Brigham Young University,
1971), 1, 148–49; Davenport, “Life History of William H. Dame,” 1.
15. Minos, Nov. 24, 1874, in “Col. William H. Dame”; Davenport, “Life History
of William H. Dame,” 3; [Rogerson], untitled typescript, 3, CM.
16. Thomas F. Edgerly, Letter of Recommendation, Apr. 9, 1838, in William
H. Dame, Papers, CHL.
17. S. S. Barton, “Death of W. H. Dame. A Brief Biographical Sketch,” Deseret
Evening News, Aug. 26, 1884; Jeremiah Gates Dame to William H. Dame,
Oct. 1, 1855, Sarah M. Winn to William H. Dame, Oct. 17, 1855, Dame
Papers; Pease, “Life and Works of William Horne Dame,” 46–47. The scrip-
tural allusion is to Luke 9:62.
18. Isaac Chauncey Haight, Journal, 1842–50, 1, 2, 4, CHL.
19. Haight Journal, 1842–50, 4–6.
20. See Ibid., 7.
21. Haight Journal, 1842–50, June 1844; Robert A. Slack, “A Biographical Study
of Isaac Chauncey Haight, Early Religious and Civic Leader of South-
ern Utah” (master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 1966), 16. On the

destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor, see Dallin H. Oaks and Marvin S. Hill,
Carthage Conspiracy: The Trial of the Accused Assassins of Joseph Smith (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1975), 14–16, 33, 46–51, 80, 197; Leonard
J. Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-
day Saints, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 77–78.
22. Haight Journal, 1842–50, Apr. 11, Sept. 16, 1846, Jan. 1, 1847. On Haight’s
illness, see Slack, “Biographical Study of Isaac Chauncey Haight,” 4, 23–24.
23. Haight Journal, 1842–50, Jan. 9, 1850; Slack, “Biographical Study of Isaac
Chauncey Haight,” 40–42; Milton Hunter, Brigham Young, the Colonizer, 4th
ed. (Santa Barbara: Peregrine Smith, 1973), 48.
24. Haight Journal, 1852–62, Aug. 25, 26, Oct. 5, Nov. 18, 1852, photocopy of
manuscript, CHL.
25. Ibid., Jan. 8, 24, Aug. 29, Oct. 8, 1853.
26. Slack, “Biographical Study of Isaac Chauncey Haight,” 5.
27. Haight Journal, 1842–50, 1.
28. See, for example, Frederick S. Dellenbaugh, A Canyon Voyage: The Narra-
tive of the Second Powell Expedition down the Green-Colorado River from Wyo-
ming, and the Explorations on Land, in the Years 1871 and 1872 (New York:
Knickerbocker Press, 1908), 157.
29. John D. Lee to Brigham Young, Nov. 4, 1856, Incoming Correspondence,
YOF. See also MC, 2:299, Sept. 21, 1873.
30. Slack, “Biographical Study of Isaac Chauncey Haight,” 5, 88.
31. TF, 416.
32. MU, 36–38; Spicer, Nov. 22, 1874, in “John D. Lee,” Salt Lake Daily Herald,
Nov. 26, 1874.
33. MU, 37–38, 40; Spicer, Nov. 22, 1874, in “John D. Lee”; Ancestral File
v4.19. Spicer said Lee was only eighteen months old when his mother died.
34. Shorthand manuscript apparently written from dictation by Waddington
L. Cook in 1888 on verso of Rogerson’s shorthand record of R. N. Baskin,
JDL1-RS; MU, 38–39; Spicer, Nov. 22, 1874, in “John D. Lee.”
35. MU, 38–40, 43–50; Spicer, Nov. 22, 1874, in “John D. Lee.”
36. MU, 37, 50–53; Spicer, Nov. 22, 1874, in “John D. Lee”; “The Lee Execu-
tion,” New York Herald, Mar. 25, 1877.
37. John D. Lee, Journals, Apr. [13], 23, Nov. 27–28, 1842, Jan. 6, June 25, ca.
July 25, Aug. 6, 1843, ca. June 29, July 6, 14–15, Aug. 3, 11, 1844, CHL; MU,
97–108, 112, 121–28, 139–40.
38. MU, 101; Brooks1, 45–53.
39. Lee Journal, 1844–46, 56–57; MU, 144, 156–57; Spicer, Nov. 22, 1874, in
“John D. Lee.”
40. MU, 132, 156–57; Lee Journal, 1844–46, 56.
41. MU, 201.
42. MU, 170, 197. On the adoption ritual, see Gordon Irving, “The Law of
Adoption: One Phase of the Development of the Mormon Concept of Salva-
tion, 1830–1900,” BYU Studies 14, no. 3 (Spring 1974): 291–314.

43. That was the conclusion of editors Robert Glass Cleland and Juanita Brooks,
eds., A Mormon Chronicle: The Diaries of John D. Lee, 1848–1876, 2 vols. (Salt
Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1983), 1:xiii. On the men adopted to
Young, see Brooks1, 73.
44. Nancy Bean, statement, December 4, 1847, copy in MMMRF; Woodruff, Dec.
9, 1847; MU, 180–81, 203, 205–10, 216–17; HOGCM, Dec. 9, 1847, CHL.
45. Brigham Young, Remarks, Dec. 9, 1847, copy in MMMRF.
46. John D. Lee to Brigham Young, May 2, 1856, Incoming Correspondence,
YOF; Brigham Young, remarks, Dec. 9, 1847, in HOGCM; Lee Journal,
Dec. 2, 1850.
47. John D. Lee to Brigham Young, Mar. 17, 1852, Incoming Correspondence,
YOF; Brooks1, 172–73.
48. Howard A. Christy, “The Walker War: Defense and Conciliation as Strat-
egy,” Utah Historical Quarterly 47, no. 4 (Fall 1979): 395–96, 400–405;
Brigham Young and Daniel H. Wells, General Orders Nos. 1, 2, July 21, 25,
1853, in Deseret News, July 30, 1853.
49. JHM, Aug. 10, 1853, 44.
50. Bowering, Aug. 8, 1853.
51. See Christy, “Walker War,” 395–96, 405–8.
52. Bowering, Aug. 16, 1853; TF, 324.
53. John D. Lee to Brigham Young, Sept. 24, 1853, Incoming Correspon-
dence, YOF.
54. Brown, June 25, 1854; Bowering, Aug. 8–9, 1853.
55. See Utah Territorial Militia Correspondence, Nauvoo Legion (Utah)
Records, particularly for the months of Aug.–Oct., 1853.
56. Bowering, Oct. 8, 1853; Gardner, 267–69.
57. Thomas G. Alexander, Utah: the Right Place, rev. ed. (Salt Lake City: Gibbs
Smith, 2003), 116; Christy, “Walker War,” 395–420.
58. Brigham Young, remarks, in Brown, May 19, 1854; Brigham Young, Oct. 9,
1853, in “Synopsis,” Deseret News, Nov. 24, 1853; Erastus Snow, Nov. 21,
1853, in “Minutes,” Deseret News, Mar. 2, 1854; James G. Bleak, Annals of
the Southern Utah Mission, May 1854, 22, CHL.
59. Meeting with Wakara and others, June 14, 1849, HOGCM; Parley P. Pratt to
Orson Pratt, Sept. 5, 1848, in Latter-day Saints’ Millennial Star 11 ( Jan. 1849):
23; Ronald W. Walker, “Wakara Meets the Mormons, 1848–52: A Case
Study in Native American Accommodation,” Utah Historical Quarterly 70,
no. 2 (Summer 2002): 215–37.
60. “Pratt’s Report to the Legislative Council,” Feb. 5, 1850, in Smart and Smart,
Over the Rim, 182.
61. Ronald W. Walker, “Seeking the ‘Remnant’: The Native American Dur-
ing the Joseph Smith Period,” Journal of Mormon History 19, no. 1 (Spring
1993): 1–33.
62. Hurt, 200, 203; “Paiute,” 123–31; Knack, 1–94; Holt, 1–31; John D. Lee
to [Willard] Richards, Feb. 5, 1853, in Deseret News, Mar. 19, 1853; Erastus

Snow to J. E. Tourtellotte, July 4, 1870, Record of the Utah Superinten-
dency of Indian Affairs, 1853–70, Bureau of Indian Affairs, National Archives
Microfilm Publications M834, Washington, D.C., copy located at CHL.
63. Hamblin Journal, 1854–58, 8.
64. Brigham Young, Dec. 11, 1854, in “Message of his Excellency Brigham
Young to the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Utah,” Millennial Star
17 (Apr. 28, 1855): 261.
65. Holt, 2, 5–11, 19–26; Knack, 1–4, 10–17, 20–21, 26, 36, 54–58. On Ute
slaving, see Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indian Empires in the Early
American West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
66. T. D. Brown, letter to the editor, May 19, 1854, in “Indian Mission,”
Deseret News, June 22, 1854; Richard L. Jensen, “Forgotten Relief Societies,
1844–67,” Dialogue 16, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 108–18; Brigham Young to Rufus
C. Allen, Sept. 13, 1854, Letterpress Copybook 1:674–75, YOF.
67. George A. Smith, “History of the Settling of Southern Utah,” Oct. 17,
1861, Smith Papers. See also An Enduring Legacy, comp. Daughters of Utah
Pioneers Lesson Committee, 12 vols. (Salt Lake City: Daughters of the Utah
Pioneers, 1978–90), 12:247–48.
68. “Paiute” 130–31, 139–40; Holt, 22–29; Knack, 48–78.
69. Brigham Young to Rufus C. Allen, Aug. 29, 1855, Letterpress Copybook
2:317, YOF.
70. Thomas D. Brown to Brigham Young, Dec. 22, 1854, Incoming Correspon-
dence, YOF; George A. Smith, “History of the Settling of Southern Utah,”
Oct. 17, 1861, Smith Papers; Enduring Legacy, 12:247. “There has never been
a settlement in this territory but what word [has] been given to make a strong
fort before tak[ing] a woman and child to it.” Brigham Young, discourse,
May 20, 1866, George D. Watt, Papers, CHL, transcription of Pitman
shorthand by LaJean Carruth.
71. Smith, “History of the Settling of Southern Utah,” Oct. 17, 1861, Smith
Papers; Enduring Legacy, 12:247–48.
72. Rufus C. Allen to Brigham Young, June 13, 1856, Incoming Correspon-
dence, YOF.
73. Brown, May 2, 1854.
74. Ibid., May 19, 1854; Bleak, Annals of the Southern Utah Mission, May 1854,
23–24.
75. Brown, Mar. 18, 1855.
76. Ibid.
77. Lee to Young, Feb. 1855, Feb. 19, 1855, Incoming Correspondence, YOF.
78. Lee to Young, May 2, 1856, Membership and Court Files, MMMRF.
79. Lee to Young, May 23, 1856, Incoming Correspondence, YOF.
80. Ibid.
81. Young to Lee, Aug. 4, 1856, Letterpress Copybook 2:927–30, YOF.
82. Lee to Young, Aug. 22, 1856, Incoming Correspondence, YOF.
83. Haight to Heber C. Kimball, Aug. 20, 1856, Incoming Correspondence, YOF.

84. See Rufus Allen to Brigham Young, Dec. 22, 1856, Jan. 29, 1857, Incoming
Correspondence, YOF; Brigham Young to Rufus Allen, Jan. 15, 1857, Let-
terpress Copybook 3:283–84, YOF.
85. James H. Martineau, letter to the editor, Aug. 22, 1857, in “Trip to the
Santa Clara,” Deseret News, Sept. 23, 1857; George A. Smith, Sept. 13, 1857,
in “Remarks,” Deseret News, Sept. 23, 1857; HOJ, Aug. 9–15, 1857; JHM,
Aug. 14, 1857, 131.
86. Smith, Sept. 13, 1857, in “Remarks”; JHM, Aug. 14–20, 1857, 131–33;
PSHR, Aug. 15, 1857, 2nd sec., 33.
87. Smith, Sept. 13, 1857, in “Remarks”; HOJ, Aug. 15, 1857; JHM, Aug. 15,
1857, 132; PSHR, Aug. 15, 1857, 2nd sec., 33.
88. Young to Haight, Aug. 4, 1857, Letterpress Copybook 3:742, YOF.
89. Smith, Sept. 13, 1857, in “Remarks.”
90. HBM, Aug. 17, 1857.
91. HOJ, Aug. 15–17, 1857; JHM, Aug. 16–17, 1857, 132; Martineau, letter
to the editor, Aug. 22, 1857, in “Trip to the Santa Clara”; PSHR, Aug. 15,
1857, 2nd sec., 33.
92. JHM, Aug. 14–15, 1857, 131–32; HOJ, Aug. 15, 1857; PSHR, Aug. 15,
1857, 2nd sec., 33.
93. Douglas D. Alder and Karl F. Brooks, A History of Washington County:
From Isolation to Destination (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society/
Washington County Commission, 1996), xvi.
95. Smith, “History of the Settling of Southern Utah,” Oct. 17, 1861, Smith
Papers.
96. JHM, Aug. 17, 1857, 132; Martineau, letter to the editor, Aug. 22, 1857, in
“Trip to the Santa Clara.”
97. SAJ, Aug. 18, 1857, CHL; PSHR, Aug. 15, 1857, 2nd sec., 33; HOJ, Aug. 18,
1857; Daniel H. Wells to A. Johnson, Aug. 13, 1857, Letterpress Copybook,
97, Nauvoo Legion (UT) Adj. Gen. Records, 1851–70, CHL. Copies were
also sent to other military leaders in the south, including Dame and Haight.
98. Elias Smith, Journal, Aug. 11, 1857, CHL; JHM, Aug. 24, Sept. 4, 1857,
133; Fish, 53; James C. Snow, remarks, in PGM, Aug. 30, 1857.
99. Chatterley.
100. Elias Morris, statement to Andrew Jenson, Feb. 2, 1892, CM.
101. Elias Smith, Journal, Aug. 11, 1857; JHM, Aug. 24, Sept. 4, 1857, 133; Fish,
53; Chatterley.
102. Daniel H. Wells to A. Johnson, Aug. 13, 1857, Letterpress Copybook,
97, Nauvoo Legion (UT) Adj. Gen. Records; Daniel H. Wells to William
H. Dame, Aug. 13, 1857, William R. Palmer, Collection, Special Collec-
tions, Gerald R. Sheratt Library, Southern Utah University, Cedar City,
UT. See also SAJ, Aug. 18, 1857.
103. HOJ, Aug. 18–20, 1857; Fish, 55; JHM, Aug. 21, 1857, Sept. 4, 1857, 133.
104. G. A. Smith, Sept. 13, 1857, in “Remarks.”

Smith, Sept. 13, 1857, in “Remarks.”
106. “Sketch of the Life of Mary Minerva Dart Judd,” typescript, 20, BYU.
John R. Young, Memoirs of John R. Young: Utah Pioneer, 1847 (Salt Lake City:
Deseret News, 1920), 112–13; Hoth, Oct. 13–15, 1856. Jackson’s village was
near the bend of the Santa Clara River where the California road veered off
to the southwest. It lay twenty-five miles south of the Mountain Meadows
and close to the present-day reservation town of Shivwits. Melvin Bashore,
“Where Did Chief Jackson’s Band Live,” copy in possession of authors.
108. G. A. Smith, Sept. 13, 1857, in “Remarks”; Martineau, letter to the editor,
Aug. 22, 1857, in “Trip to the Santa Clara.”
109. HOJ, Aug. 20, 1857; Martineau, letter to the editor, Aug. 22, 1857, in “Trip
to the Santa Clara”; PSHR, Aug. 15, 1857, 2nd sec., 33.
110. G. A. Smith, Remarks, Aug. 23, 1857, in PSHR, Aug. 15, 1857, 1st sec., 31;
HOJ, Aug. 20–21, 1857; Martineau, letter to the editor, Aug. 22, 1857, in
“Trip to the Santa Clara”; PSHR, Aug. 15, 1857, 2nd sec., 33. On Hamblin’s
appointment, see Brigham Young to Jacob Hamblin, Aug. 4, 1857, Jacob
Hamblin, Papers, BYU; Brigham Young to Jacob Hamblin, Aug. 4, 1857,
Letterpress Copybook 3:737, YOF; Brigham Young to I. C. Haight, Aug. 4,
1857, Letterpress Copybook 3:742, YOF.
111. “LC”; “LLC.”
112. “LC”; “LLC.” Cf. the later MU, 223–24, which gives an even more elabo-
rate version of this purported conversation.
113. MU, 225.
114. See, e.g., Bagley, 83–87, 376–82; Sally Denton, American Massacre: The Trag-
edy at Mountain Meadows, September 11, 1857 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
2003), 114–17.
115. Richard E. Turley Jr., “Problems with Mountain Meadows Massacre
Sources” (paper presented at annual Mormon History Association Confer-
ence, Provo, Utah, May 22, 2004); Wm. W. Bishop to John D. Lee, Feb.
23, 1877, HM 31234, JDLC; John D. Lee to Joseph H. Lee, Feb. 24, 1877,
HM 31217, JDLC; Wm W. Bishop to John D. Lee, Mar. 9, 1877, HM
31235, JDLC. “LC”; “LLC,” omit the explicit statement about Smith cited
in the text accompanying note 113 above.
116. C. J. S. to Salt Lake Tribune, Mar. 25, 1877, in “Shooting of Lee,” Salt Lake
Tribune, Mar. 30, 1877.
117. See Lee’s journal entries for the dates Sept. 20, 23, 24; Oct. 16, 31, 1875,
in MC, 2:364–65, 368, 369, 369n14, 378, 382; LeGrand Young to Brigham
Young, Mar. 23, 1877, Incoming Correspondence, YOF. See also the journal
entries for Aug. 25 and Sept. 11, 1875 in MC, 2:350, 361.
118. McGlashan. McGlashan’s informant was Hamblin.
119. Fish, 55; Daniel H. Wells to A. Johnson, Aug. 13, 1857, Letterpress Copy-
book, 97, Nauvoo Legion (Utah) Adj. Gen. Records.

120. Lee said that Smith had made just such a point during his preaching tour.
“Our greatest danger lies in the people of California—a class of reckless
miners who are strangers to God and his righteousness,” Smith supposedly
said. “They are likely to come upon us from the south and destroy the small
settlements.” MU, 222, emphasis in original.
121. Juanita Brooks’s 1950 book, Mountain Meadows Massacre, which began
modern historical interpretation of the event, dismissed the charge that
Smith had brought secret orders from Brigham Young for the killing of the
Arkansas emigrants. “No real evidence . . . has been found” to link Smith to
the “ultimate destruction” of the emigrant party, she wrote, though crediting
Smith with inflaming settlers’ emotions. Brooks2, 35, 61. However, in her
1972 version of John Doyle Lee: Zealot, Pioneer Builder, Scapegoat, Brooks
mentioned a “folk-tale that at [a Mormon investigation of the massacre]
Dame declared: ‘You can NOT lay this onto me! I will not take it! If you
dare try, I’ll just put the saddle onto the right horse, and you all know well
who that is!’ ” Brooks concluded, “It could be no other than George A. Smith
himself, sitting at the head of the table.” Yet one might just as easily conclude
that, if this “folk-tale” is true, Dame was referring to “Isaac C. Haight,”
who was also “sitting in the circle” at the investigation. Brooks1, 255. More
recently, Bagley, 83–87, 376–82, and Denton, American Massacre, 114–17,
rejected Brooks’s initial conclusion with circumstantial arguments. For both
Bagley and Denton, a crucial piece of “circumstance” was Lee’s supposed
statement in the flawed Mormonism Unveiled. Because no piece of substantive
evidence links Smith to ordering the massacre, Brooks’s cautious initial
judgment remains the best.
122. G. A. Smith, Sept. 13, 1857, in “Remarks.”
123. HOJ, Aug. 21–25, 1857.
124. G. A. Smith, Aug. 23, 1857, PSHR, Aug. 23, 1857, 1st sec., 24–26.
125. William H. Dame to Daniel H. Wells, Aug. 23, 1857, in Utah Territorial
Militia Correspondence, Nauvoo Legion (Utah) Records.
126. Knight.
128. Emily Hoyt, Reminiscences and Diary, Aug. 19, 26, 27, 1857, CHL.
130. Smith, Aug. 23, 1857, PSHR, Aug. 23, 1857, 1st sec., 25. See also Smith,
Sept. 13, 1857, in “Remarks.”
131. Smith, Sept. 13, 1857, in “Remarks.” See also Smith, Aug. 23, 1857, PSHR,
Aug. 23, 1857, 1st sec., 25.
Chapter 6
1. “News from the Plains,” Leavenworth Kansas Weekly Herald, May 30, 1857;
“Arrival of the Utah Mails,” St. Louis Daily Missouri Republican, May 17,
1857; “St. Joseph Correspondence,” Daily Missouri Republican, Apr. 17,
1857; “News from the Plains,” Daily Missouri Republican, May 5, 1857;

Daily Missouri Republican, May 22, 1857; “The Indians in Utah,” Kansas City
Enterprise, Aug. 22, 1857; D. C. Hail, letter to the editor, Oct. 20, 1857, in
“Horrible Massacre of Emigrants upon the Plains,” Daily Missouri Republican,
Dec. 9, 1857, from correspondence of Little Rock True Democrat; “From Utah
Territory,” Missouri Republican, July 26, 1857. See also “Famine at the West,” San
Francisco Globe, July 17, 1857; “Later from Carson Valley,” San Francisco Globe,
Aug. 4, 1857; “By Magnetic Telegraph!” San Francisco Globe, Aug. 6, 1857.
2. Editorial, Kansas Weekly Herald, May 23, 1857.
3. “Overland Emigration to California,” Daily Missouri Republican, Nov. 24,
1857; “News from the Plains,” Kansas Weekly Herald, Aug. 22, 1857. On the
size of the 1857 emigration, see Letter, June 10, 1857, in “The Great City
of the Plains,” Daily Missouri Republican, June 27, 1857 (“the emigration of
this season is immense”); “Overland Emigration to California,” Daily Mis-
souri Republican, Nov. 24, 1857 (“the largest overland emigration to California
that has been known for years”); “The Overland Immigration,” Stockton (CA)
San Joaquin Republican, Aug. 27, 1857, taken from the Sacramento Union (“the
immigration . . . will be larger this year than it has been since 1852”); “Arrival
of Immigrants,” San Joaquin Republican, Aug. 16, 1857 (“a very heavy immigra-
tion”); “Arrival of the Advance Immigration,” San Joaquin Republican, Aug.
4, 1857, taken from San Francisco Bulletin (“very large overland immigration
is reported”); “Crossing the Plains,” San Joaquin Republican, July 28, 1857
(“emigration to California is greatly on the increase in that part of the State,
never before having been greater, if equalled, unless in the years 1851 and
1852”); “News from the Plains,” Kansas Weekly Herald, Aug. 22, 1857, taken
from Westport (MO) Star of Empire (“emigration to Utah and California by
this road had been large”); “Later from Carson Valley and the Plains,” San
Joaquin Republican, Aug. 8, 1857, taken from Sacramento Union, Aug. 5, 1857
(“the largest emigration ever out for California since ’53”); “Latest News
from Carson Valley and the Plains,” San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, Aug.
13, 1857 (“the accounts of the immense immigration are fully confirmed”);
“The Advancing Immigration,” San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, Aug.
13, 1857 (“an immense immigration will certainly arrive this season”); “This
Year’s Immigration to California,” San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, July
29, 1857, taken from Shasta (CA) Republican (“the immigration to California
across the Plains is much larger this year than we have supposed it would be”).
Cf. “Carson Valley,” San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, Sept. 24, 1857. John
D. Unruh’s statistics show 1857 to be the third smallest emigrating year for
the period 1849–60; the contemporary newspaper accounts, however, suggest
otherwise. See Unruh, 120, 442n8.
4. For information on the Cherokee Trail, see Patricia K. A. Fletcher, Jack Earl
Fletcher, and Lee Whiteley, Cherokee Trail Diaries (Caldwell, ID: Caxton
Printers, [1999]–ca. 2001), 1:8–15, 31–33; Patricia K. A. Fletcher and Jack Earl
Fletcher, “Pioneering the Trail,” http://www.olympus.net/personal/jpfletcher/
pioneering/pioneering.html (accessed Mar. 28, 2007).

5. “The Overland Immigration” San Joaquin Republican, Aug. 27, 1857,
reprinted from the Sacramento Union; “Later from Carson Valley,” San Fran-
cisco Daily Alta California, Aug. 25, 1857.
6. Letter, June 22, 1857, in “Life on the Plains,” New York Tribune, July 29, 1857.
7. Richard H. Dillon, ed., California Trail Herd: The 1850 Missouri-to-California
Journal of Cyrus C. Loveland (Los Gatos, CA: Talisman Press, 1961), 18–19;
Siegfried G. Demke, The Cattle Drives of Early California (San Gabriel, CA:
By the author, 1985), 14.
8. Frank S. Popplewell, “St. Joseph, Missouri as a Center of the Cattle Trade”
(master’s thesis, University of Missouri, 1937), 11–12; Demke, Cattle Drives
of Early California, 9–11, 15; Thomas J. Linton, as cited in J. H. Atkinson,
“Cattle Drives from Arkansas to California Prior to the Civil War,” Arkansas
Historical Quarterly 28 (Autumn 1969): 280.
9. For general details of the California cattle industry, see Terry G. Jordan, North
American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers: Origins, Diffusion, and Differentiation (Albu-
querque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 246–49, 279–80; Demke, Cattle
Drives of Early California, 7–24; Dillon, California Trail Herd, 16–37; Louis Pelzer,
The Cattlemen’s Frontier: A Record of the Trans-Mississippi Cattle Industry from Oxen
Trains to Pooling Companies, 1850–1890 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1969), 26.
10. Demke, Cattle Drives of Early California, 13–14; Robert Glass Cleland, The
Cattle on a Thousand Hills: Southern California, 1850–1880 (San Marino, CA:
Huntington Library, 1964), 109–10; Popplewell, “St. Joseph, Missouri,”
13–14. The Los Angeles Star, Apr. 26, 1856, “quoted best cattle prices in the
north as $16 to $18, with young stock as low as $7 to $8 a head.” Cited in
Demke, Cattle Drives of Early California, 13.
11. Linton, as cited in Atkinson, “Cattle Drives from Arkansas to California,”
280–81; Cleland, Cattle on a Thousand Hills, 109–10.
12. See “Later from Carson Valley,” Daily Alta California, Aug. 25, 1857.
13. “Overland Emigration to California,” Daily Missouri Republican, Nov. 24, 1857.
14. See Unruh, 187.
15. “Letter.” See also Ima Jean Baker Young, “William and Hannah (Edwards)
Baker,” in The Heritage of Madison County, Alabama, comp. Madison County
Heritage Book Committee (Clanton, AL: Heritage Publishing Consultants,
ca. 1998), 77.
16. Barbara Lasater Toney, “Baker-Pennington-Jones,” in The Heritage of Jackson
County, Alabama (Clanton, AL: Heritage Publishing, 1998), 75; “OBF” 160;
Alabama, Madison County, 1850 U.S. Census, slave schedule; Alabama,
Madison County, 1850 U.S. Census, population schedule, 346.
17. Alabama, Madison County, District No. 1, 1860 U.S. Census, population
schedule, 262; Young, “William and Hannah (Edwards) Baker,” 77.
18. Toney, “Baker-Pennington-Jones,” 75; Charles Rodney Baker, “Baker,” in
History of Boone County, Arkansas, comp. Boone County Historical & Railroad
Society (Paducah, KY: Turner Publishing, 1998), 159; Young, “William and
Hannah (Edwards) Baker,” 77; “OBF,” 160.

19. Toney, “Baker-Pennington-Jones,” 75; Young, “William and Hannah
(Edwards) Baker,” 77; “OBF,” 161; Baker, “Baker,” 159; Arkansas, Carroll
County, Crooked Creek Township, 1850 U.S. Census, population schedule,
163B. Some sources list Mary’s maiden name as Beller or Ashby, although
circumstantial evidence based on collateral census and marriage records links
her to the Williams family. Jack Stemmons, “Report concerning the Maiden
Name of Mary Baker,” copy in MMMRF.
20. W. W. Thompson, “A History of Paint Rock Valley and Its Early Settlers,”
Aug. 23, 1933, in Jackson County Chronicles 43 ( Jan. 1986): 8, reproduced in
Wendell Page, comp., Jackson County Chronicles, vol. 1, pt. 4 (Scottsboro, AL:
Jackson County Historical Association and Scottsboro-Jackson Heritage
Center, 1992).
21. “OBF,” 161; Baker, “Baker,” 159; Young, “William and Hannah (Edwards)
Baker,” 77. For a study on violence as part of southern culture, see Dov
Cohen, Richard E. Nisbett, Brian F. Bowdle, and Norbert Schwarz, “Insult,
Aggression, and the Southern Culture of Honor: An ‘Experimental Ethnog-
raphy,’ ” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70, no. 5 (1996): 945–60.
22. “OBF,” 161–62; Arkansas, Carroll County, Crooked Creek Township, 1850
U.S. Census, population schedule, 163B; Mary Baker, deposition, Oct. 22,
1860, PPU. See also Parker2, 4, which claims, “Captain Jack Baker was born
in Alabama and come to Arkansas Territory with his family in 1835.”
23. Arkansas, Carroll County, Crooked Creek Township, 1850 U.S. Census,
population schedule, 163B; Lawrence G. Coates, “The Fancher Party before
Mountain Meadows” (paper presented at the Mormon History Conference in
St. George, UT, May 1992), 33, copy in authors’ possession.
24. Roger Logan Jr., “Slave Holders in Pre-War Days,” Boone County Historian
1, no. 1 (Dec. 1978). For information on slavery in northern Arkansas, see
Roger V. Logan Jr., “A Short History of Boone County, Arkansas,” in History
of Boone County, Arkansas, comp. Boone County Historical & Railroad Society
(Paducah, KY: Turner Publishing, 1998), 16.
25. “Extract.”
26. Logan1, 26.
27. “Letter”; John H. Baker, deposition, Oct. 22, 1860, PPU; “OBF,” 163.
28. Mitchell, 10. Given her age at the time her family left Arkansas in 1857,
Sarah’s recollections of her father’s motivations might well be called into ques-
tion, except that she returned later to live with family members who undoubt-
edly knew and communicated to her why her father had started for California.
29. Parker2, 4; Parker1, 19, 57.
30. Mary Baker, John H. Baker, and John Crabtree, depositions, Oct. 22, 1860,
PPU. Because of the depressed markets in California, however, the value of
cattle in California in 1857 was approximately the same as it was in Arkan-
sas. “Our Monthly Live Stock Report,” San Francisco Herald, June 5, 1857,
recorded: “Sales have been made in Santa Barbara of 600 two-year old and
upwards, at $19. . . . In Monterey, 500 head of cattle, large and small, at $16;

35 one to two year-old heifers at $15; 200 head cows and steers, large and fat,
at $28. Tame cows are held at $38 a $45; wild cattle, grown, $20 a $25, two-
year-old, $15 a $18.”
population schedule, 163B; Wm. C. Mitchell to A. B. Greenwood, Apr. 27,
1860, in USBIA; “Meeting”; “Letter.”
population schedule, 163B; Joseph B. Baines and John H. Baker, depositions,
Oct. 23, 1860, PPU.
33. Logan2; “Meeting”; William C. Beller, deposition, Oct. 23, 1860, PPU;
Logan, “Short History of Boone County,” 12; Appendix A.
34. Roger V. Logan Jr., “Mitchell,” in History of Boone County, Arkansas (Paducah,
KY: Turner Publishing, 1998), 307; Logan2; William C. Mitchell, deposition,
Oct. 22, 1860, PPU; “Meeting”; “Letter”; Appendix A.
35. William C. Mitchell and Samuel Mitchell, depositions, Oct. 22, 1860, PPU.
36. William C. Mitchell, deposition, Oct. 22, 1860, PPU.
37. “OBF,” 162, 164; Logan, “Short History of Boone County,” 12; Logan2;
“Victims”; “Meeting”; Logan1, 26.
38. Information on the traditional starting point of the train comes from Roger
V. Logan Jr., “A Pilgrimage to Some Local Places Connected to the History
of the Mountain Meadows Massacre in Boone and Carroll Counties,” Boone
County Historian 24 (Apr.–June 2001): 31, 36–37; Greenhaw. The traditional
gathering spot, designated Caravan Spring, is memorialized by Arkansas
State Centennial Marker No. 021 on Highway 7. Logan, “Pilgrimage to
Local Places,” 37, 40; Greenhaw.
39. Parker2, 5–6; “Children”; Fielding Wilburn and Francis M. Rowan, deposi-
tions, Oct. 24, 1860, PPU.
40. Logan1, 26; Baker, “Baker,” 160; Young, “William and Hannah (Edwards)
Baker,” 77–78; Arkansas, Carroll County, Crooked Creek Township, 1850
U.S. Census, population schedule, 163B; Mountain Meadows Association,
“Mountain Meadows Massacre Genealogy,” http://www.mtn-meadows-assoc.
com/Genealogy/genealog.html (accessed Aug. 7, 2006).
41. Mitchell, 10, 15; “ Letter.” See also Terry, 44. Ralph R. Rea recorded Terry’s
account without the edits of the “professional writer,” and did not include
the portion about Mary Baker’s premonition. See Rea. Logan1, 26, explains
that Mary planned to go to California “after a home was established.” Baker,
“Baker,” 160, says, “Most of his family remained in Arkansas planning to
move west later.” According to an early California source, Jack “intended, as
soon as he could settle here, to return by water and bring the remainder of
his family.” “ Letter.” But Mary’s 1860 deposition merely says, “The object
my husband, the said John T. Baker had in going to California was to sell a
large lot of cattle with which he started. . . . The stock cattle had been bought
with the view to make quick sales on arriving at California.” Mary Baker,
deposition, Oct. 22, 1860, PPU.

42. “Last Will and Testament of John T. Baker,” Apr. 1, 1857, typescript, Chan-
cery Court Record Book A, 75–76, copy in family information and research
materials of Cheri Baker Walker, Boone County Historical and Genealogical
Society, Boone County, Arkansas.
43. Arkansas, Johnson County, Mulberry Township, 1850 U.S. Census, population
schedule, 129B; 1855 Marion County Arkansas, tax records, 6, film no. 1955429,
FHL; Logan1, 25; Logan, “Mitchell,” 307; Logan, “Short History of Boone
County,” 12; Isabell Minnie Evins Kratz, “The Mountain Meadow Massacre,”
in The Klingensmith Scrapbook, comp. Anna Jean Duncan Backus (Provo, UT:
Brigham Young University Press, 1996), 161; W. K. Sebastian to C. E. Mix, Sept.
11, 1858, in SDoc42, 47; Parker2, 5; William C. Mitchell, deposition regarding
the property of Lorenzo Dunlap, Oct. 26, 1860, PPU; Samuel Mitchell, James
D. Dunlap, and Adam P. Dunlap, joint deposition, Oct. 26, 1860, PPU; Robert
H. Mitchell and William C. Dunlap, joint deposition regarding the property of
Lorenzo Dunlap, Oct. 26, 1860, PPU; James D. Dunlap, deposition, Oct. 26,
1860, PPU; William C. Mitchell, deposition regarding the property of Jesse
Dunlap, Oct. 26, 1860, PPU; William C. Dunlap and Robert H. Mitchell, joint
deposition regarding the property of Jesse Dunlap, Oct. 26, 1860, PPU; Adam P.
Dunlap and Samuel Mitchell, joint deposition, Oct. 26, 1860, PPU; Appendix A.
44. “Victims,” citing emigrant P. K. Jacoby.
45. Mary Baker, deposition, Oct. 22, 1860, PPU.
46. See Appendix A.
47. Arkansas, Carroll County, Jefferson, 1850 U.S. Census, slave schedule;
Arkansas, Carroll County, Jackson and Osage, 1860 U.S. Census, slave sched-
ule; “Last Will and Testament of John T. Baker”; Kratz, “Mountain Meadow
Massacre,” 161; Logan1, 25–26.
48. No slaves were listed in post-massacre, pre–Civil War property claims made
by the families. On the other hand, the families may have thought their
claims for damages stood a better chance in Washington by not delving into
the heated subject of slavery. See Depositions, PPU. Still, no one who saw
the bodies of massacre victims reported black people among them. Shannon
Novak and Derinna Kopp’s study of the bones of some massacre victims
did not identify any as coming from people of African ancestry. Shannon
A. Novak, House of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows
Massacre (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008), 159; Shannon
A. Novak and Derinna Kopp, “Osteological Analysis of Human Remains from
the Mountain Meadows Massacre” (report prepared for the Office of Public
Archaeology, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, and Antiquities Section
Division of State History, State of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, 2002), 12–13.
49. California, San Diego County, 1850 U.S. Census, population schedule, 280;
Jesse Lewis Russell, Behind These Ozark Hills (New York: Hobson Book Press,
1947), 98; Lair, 12; Appendix A.
50. Lair, 12; Russell, Behind These Ozark Hills, 98; Arkansas, Carroll County,
Carrollton, 1850 U.S. Census, population schedule, 128A; Arkansas, Carroll

County, Osage, 1850 U.S. Census, population schedule, 138A; Arkansas,
Carroll County, Osage, 1850 U.S. Census, slave schedule; “Uncle Dick
Fancher Dies,” North Arkansas Star, May 5, 1911, reprinted in Carroll County
Historical Quarterly 15 (Sept. 1970): 23; Beverley Githens, “The Fancher
Family—A Part of Our History,” White River Valley Historical Quarterly 1
(Winter 1963): 15, also available at Springfield-Greene County Library
website, http://thelibrary.springfield.missouri.org/lochist/periodicals/wrv/
V1/N10/W63f.htm (accessed Oct. 9, 2006).
51. W. B. Flippin, in “The Tutt-Everett War,” in Earl Berry, ed., The History
of Marion County (Marion County Historical Association, ca. 1977), 65–70;
Alexander Fancher, affidavit, Sept. 30, 1849, Thomas H. Fancher Family
Files, Carroll County Historical and Genealogical Society, Berryville, AR.
52. William Bedford Temple to Wife and Children, May 11, June 2, 1850, Oregon
Historical Society, Portland, OR. A Dec. 5, 1850, entry in the journal of
Washington Peck—who went through Utah—mentions a Fancher without
giving a first name. Washington Peck, Diary, typescript, National Frontier
Trails Center, Independence, Missouri. Bagley, 60, gives a colorful account of
the journey based on his tacit assumption that Alexander and John Fancher and
their families accompanied Peck through Utah. Larry Coates, “The Fancher
Name in the Washington Peck Diary,” copy in authors’ possession, questions
the assumption. For the Fanchers’ short stay in southern California, see Cali-
fornia, San Diego County, 1850 U.S. Census, population schedule, 280. The
portion of the census listing the Fanchers was not taken until Mar. 1851.
53. Brand Reservation Certificate, Dec. 19, 1852, reproduced in Los Tulares,
no. 13 (Dec. 1952); Annie R. Mitchell, Land of the Tules (Fresno, CA: Valley
Publishers, [1972]); Annie R. Mitchell, “Stock Industry of Early Days Led to
Development of Visalia Saddle,” Visalia Times-Delta, Mar. 29, 1952; Mariposa
County Recorder, Stock Brands, Index to vols. 1 and 2, Mariposa Museum
and History Center, Mariposa, CA.
54. No contemporaneous evidence of this trip has survived, though family tradition
for the trip is strong. See, e.g., Paul Buford Fancher, Richard Fancher (1700–1764)
of Morris County, New Jersey (Atlanta, GA: Paul B. Fancher, 1993), 182. For an
indirect reference that may point to Alexander Fancher’s trip, see Parker2, 1–2.
55. Sherida K. Eddlemon, Index to the Arkansas General Land Office, 1820–1907
(Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 1999), 4:79; Deed records, 1837–86, Index,
1837–1929, Benton County, Arkansas, film no. 1035046, FHL; Deed records,
1837–86, Benton County, Arkansas, vol. C, 249–50, film no. 1034925, FHL.
56. Russell, Behind These Ozark Hills, 98.
57. Lair, 12; Hill, 95–96; Russell, Behind These Ozark Hills, 98.
58. “Children.”
59. H. B. Fancher to James C. Wilson, Aug. 2, 1885, enclosed in J. C. Wilson
to J. P. Dunn, Aug. 11, 1885, JPDC; Mitchell to Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860,
in USBIA.
60. Appendix A; Lair, 12; Mitchell to Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860, in USBIA.

61. Missouri, Dallas County, District 26, 1850 U.S. Census, population schedule,
347B; “Meeting”; Mitchell to Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860, in USBIA; “Cates”;
Logan, “Short History of Boone County,” 13; Appendix A.
62. Francis M. Rowan, deposition, Oct. 24, 1860, PPU; “Meeting”; Mitchell to
Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860, in USBIA; Parker2, 5; “Letter”; Logan, “Short
History of Boone County,” 13; Appendix A. Felix Jones, a brother to John
and Newton, thought their property worth only five to six hundred dollars.
Felix W. Jones, deposition, Oct. 24, 1860, PPU; Coates, “Fancher Party
before Mountain Meadows,” 47.
63. Fielding Wilburn and Francis M. Rowan, depositions, Oct. 24, 1860, PPU.
64. Arkansas, Carroll County, Crooked Creek, 1850 U.S. Census, population
schedule, 159; M1911.
65. M1911; Logan, “Short History of Boone County,” 13; Joel Scott, deposi-
tion, May 2, 1911, Thurston; M1877-10; M1877-12; John P. Shaver, affidavit
in support of H.R. 3945, Dec. 19, 1877, 45th Cong., 1st sess., National
Archives, Washington, D.C., copy of transcript in CHL; Appendix A.
66. “Victims.” P. K. Jacoby, who supplied the newspaper with its information,
said that by the time the members of his group reached Fort Bridger, they
and the others had experienced “months of weary journeying together and
common peril.”
67. S. Charles Bolton, Arkansas, 1800–1860: Remote and Restless (Fayetteville:
University of Arkansas Press, 1998), 155–57. See also Priscilla McArthur,
Arkansas in the Gold Rush (Little Rock: August House, 1986), 24–26, 33–37;
Fletcher, Fletcher, and Whiteley, Cherokee Trail Diaries, 2:196.
68. Ruth Peterson, comp., Across the Plains in ’57: The Story of the Family of Peter
Campbell and a Train of Immigrants As Told by Nancy Campbell Lowell, a Member
of the Party, pamphlet, June 1936, 1, conveniently republished in Carroll
County Historical Quarterly 43 ( June 1998): 60–62; Fletcher, Fletcher, and
Whiteley, Cherokee Trail Diaries, 1:39, 3:170; Francis M. Rowan, affidavit,
Oct. 24, 1860, PPU. P. K. Jacoby of the Duck company said, “Several families
joined the train at a station in the Indian Territory, which was the last point
of departure from civilization.” “Victims.”
69. “Victims.” On rumors of Missourians joining the Arkansans, see Stenhouse,
427–28; JHM, Sept. 12, 1857, 136; “News of the Week,” Weaverville (CA)
Trinity Journal, Oct. 17, 1857; “For the East,” San Francisco Daily Alta
California, Oct. 20, 1857.
70. See Parker2, 6; Fletcher, Fletcher, and Whiteley, Cherokee Trail Diaries, 1:32.
71. “Children”; Lair, 12; Mitchell, 10; “Meeting”; “Letter”; “Victims.” For
historians calling the emigrant group the Fancher company, see Roger
V. Logan Jr., “New Light on the Mountain Meadows Caravan,” Utah Histori-
cal Quarterly 60 (Summer 1992): 227, 227n3; Gibbs, 12, 16, 38, 48; Andrew
Love Neff, History of Utah: 1847 to 1869 (Salt Lake City: Deseret News
Press, 1940), 411–12; Brooks2, 44, 49, 52, 69, 142, 151; Fletcher, Fletcher,
and Whiteley, Cherokee Trail Diaries, 3:170.

72. Parker2, 1, 5, 15–16. Parker actually spelled “Fancher” as “Francher.” See also
Logan, “New Light on the Mountain Meadows Caravan,” 227; Parker1, 62.
73. Parker2, 6, 12; John P. Shaver, affidavit in support of H.R. 3945, Dec. 19,
1877. See also M1911.
74. Peterson, Across the Plains, 1–2.
75. M1911.
76. See Marcy, 45–46.
77. Peterson, Across the Plains, 2–3; George R. Stewart, The California Trail: An
Epic with Many Heroes (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962), 108, 111; William
E. Lass, From the Missouri to the Great Salt Lake: An Account of Overland
Freighting (Nebraska State Historical Society, 1972), 32.
78. Parker1, 58.
79. M1911.
80. Unruh, 176–86.
81. “Indian Hostilities on the Plains,” Springfield (MO) Mirror, June 25, 1857;
“News from the Plains,” Kansas Weekly Herald, Aug. 22, 1857; “Overland
Emigration for Oregon,” Hornellsville (NY) Tribune, Dec. 3, 1857; LeRoy
R. Hafen and Anne W. Hafen, Relations with the Indians of the Plains,
1857–1861: A Documentary Account of the Military Campaigns, and Negotiations
of Indian Agents—with Reports and Journals of P. G. Lowe, R. M. Peck, J. E. B.
Stuart, S. D. Sturgis, and Other Official Papers, The Far West and the Rock-
ies Historical, Series, 1820–1875, vol. 9 (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark,
1959), 24n5.
82. See “R. M. Peck’s Account of the Sedgwick Division,” in Hafen and Hafen,
Relations with the Indians, 112–22; William S. Harney to L. Thomas, Aug. 22,
1857 (ibid., 146–47); E. G. Marshall to S. Cooper, Sept. 12, 1857 (ibid., 152);
E. G. Marshall to Adj. Gen., Sept. 15, 1857 (ibid., 153).
83. Unruh, 186. See also Unruh, 176–79, 186–89; Michael L. Tate, “From
Cooperation to Conflict: Sioux Relations with the Overland Emigrants,
1845–1865,” Overland Journal 18 (Winter 2000–1): 18, 22.
84. Parker1, 59.
85. Ibid., 60.
86. Ibid., 47–48, 51–52.
87. Peterson, Across the Plains, 3. Page 7 of the pamphlet explains, “Concerning
all these adventures, Mrs. Lowell, the little Nancy of the wagon train, though
only four years old at that time, remembers many incidents very distinctly.
The experience of the three Indians grabbing at her made an impression very
clear.”
88. Ibid., 3–4.
89. Ibid., 2.
90. “Victims.” P. K. Jacoby, one of the emigrants, said this incident occurred
“shortly before reaching Fort Bridger.” Later on the trail near a tributary of
the Humboldt, Indians ran off sixty head of the Thomas D. Harp company’s
cattle, and a posse again took an Indian prisoner, promising to free him and

give him a gun if he took the posse to the cattle. The Indian kept his end
of the bargain and the whites eventually did too, but not until “Harp’s
company whipped the Indian with ramrods raising great welts on his back.”
Helen Carpenter, “A Trip Across the Plains in an Ox Wagon, 1857,” in Ho
for California! Women’s Overland Diaries from the Huntington Library, ed.
Sandra L. Myres (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1980), 165–68.
Parker had four men in the posse and wrote, “I think the indians were
killed.” Parker1, 67.
91. S. B. Honea, in “Outrages”; “Letter.”
92. The excitement at Fort Bridger was reported by D. C. Hail, another Arkan-
san, who was in the area about the same time as the Baker and Fancher par-
ties. See Hail, letter to the editor, Oct. 20, 1857, in “Horrible Massacre of
Emigrants.” See also Welch; “Victims”; Brigham Young to Lewis Robison,
Aug. 4, 1857, Letterpress Copybook 3:757–58, YOF.
93. “Victims.”
94. Frank King, JDL1-BT 4:116–17, JDL1-PS 7:2–4; Gibbs, 12–13; Linda
King Newell, “A Web of Trails: Bringing History Home,” Journal of Mor-
mon History 24 (Spring 1998): 14–27.
95. HOJ, July 20, 25, 27, 1857; Heber C. Kimball to William Kimball, Dec. 21,
1854, in “Foreign Correspondence,” Latter-day Saints’ Millennial Star 17,
no. 16 (1855): 251.
96. “Massacre.”
97. Stenhouse, 427–28; Ronald W. Walker, Wayward Saints: The Godbeites
and Brigham Young (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 129–30,
299–300. While Stenhouse did not give the name of his informant, his wife
did. Fanny Warn Stenhouse, “Tell It All”: The Story of a Life’s Experience in
Mormonism (Hartford, CT: A. D. Worthington, 1874), 325. On July 26
Kelsey preached a sermon to his fellow missionaries before leaving for Salt
Lake City with the westward-bound Arkansas trains. Shoshone Mission,
Journal, July 26, 1857, CHL.
98. Stenhouse, 427–29. See also “Massacre.”
99. See, e.g., Brooks2, 47–48, 219.
100. Carpenter, “Trip Across the Plains,” 165–69; Parker1, 65–67.
101. M1877-10; M1911, both give the company’s arrival as Aug. 3. M1877-12
says they arrived “on or about the first of Aug.”
102. “Massacre.”
103. “Massacre.”
Chapter 7
1. See “Overland Emigration to California,” St. Louis Daily Missouri Republi-
can, Nov. 24, 1857; Ashel T. Barrett to his brother, July 3, 1853, in Kanes-
ville Western Bugle, Sept. 21, 1853, cited with other emigrant comments in
Unruh, 333; Radnor, letter to the editor, Apr. 30, 1855, “Salt Lake Corre-
spondence,” Deseret News, Aug. 1, 1855.

2. Fred E. Woods, “ ‘Surely This City Is Bound to Shine’: Descriptions of Salt
Lake City by Western-Bound Emigrants, 1849–1868,” Utah Historical Quar-
terly 74 (Fall 2006): 334–48.
3. Theophilus F. Rodenbough, comp., From Everglade to Canyon with the Second
United States Cavalry, 2nd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000),
230; Virginia Wilcox Ivins, Pen Pictures of Early Western Days (1905), 90–91.
Summed up another visitor, “We are surprised and refreshed with its general
appearance of neatness and order.” “Journal of Captain Albert Tracy,
1858–1860,” Utah Historical Quarterly 13, nos. 1–4 (1945): 26.
4. Barrett to his brother, July 3, 1853, in Kanesville Western Bugle, Sept. 21, 1853,
in Unruh, 333.
5. T. S. Hawkins, Some Recollections on a Busy Life (San Francisco: Paul Elder,
[1913]), 102; Arrington2, 68–71; Brigham D. Madsen, Gold Rush Sojourners in
Great Salt Lake City 1849 and 1850, Publications in the American West 18 (Salt
Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1983), 51–80; Brigham Young, Heber C.
Kimball, and Willard Richards, Apr. 7, 1851, in “Fifth General Epistle,” Deseret
News, Apr. 8, 1851. Fear of disease prompted a quarantine law, approved Jan.
14, 1857. See Acts, Resolutions and Memorials, Passed at the Several Annual Ses-
sions, of the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Utah, from 1851 to 1870 Inclusive
(Salt Lake City: Joseph Bull, 1870), 78. See also Harriet Sherrill Ward, Prairie
Schooner Lady: The Journal of Harriet Sherrill Ward, 1853, ed. Ward G. DeWitt
and Florence Stark DeWitt (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1959), 119.
6. Wilford Woodruff to editor of the Western Standard, Aug. 4, 1857, Historian’s
Office Letterpress Copybook 1:476–77, CHL; HOJ, Aug. 3, 4, 5, 8, 10, 11,
12, 28, 1857. Sources on emigrant companies passing through Salt Lake
City in 1857 include “Over the Plains,” San Francisco Daily Alta California,
July 8, 1857; “Later from Salt Lake,” Stockton (CA) San Joaquin Republican, July
15, 1857; “Later from Carson Valley and the Plains,” San Joaquin Republican,
Aug. 8, 1857; “One Month Later from Salt Lake City,” San Joaquin Republican,
Aug. 11, 1857; “Eastern Bound Emigrants by Overland Route,” Daily Alta
California, Sept. 13, 1857; “Gathering Them In,” Sacramento Daily Bee, Sept.
14, 1857; “From the Plains,” Daily Alta California, Oct. 21, 1857; Parker2, 6;
James Miller Guinn, Historical and Biographical Record of Southern California:
Containing a History of Southern California from Its Earliest Settlement to the
Opening Year of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: Chapman Publishing, 1902),
135–37; Eugene L. Menefee and Fred A. Dodge, History of Tulare and Kings
Counties, California, with Biographical Sketches of the Leading Men and Women
of the Counties Who Have Been Identified with Their Growth and Development
from the Early Days to the Present (Los Angeles: Historic Record, 1913), 768;
Martha Ann Freeman Davis Wootten, “Reminiscences: Coming to California
in 1857,” Yolo County Historical Society 8, no. 5 ( Jan. 1975); Napa County (CA)
Reporter, Aug. 29, 1857; Eunice Bradbury, “Bloody Road to California,” Carroll
County Historical Society Quarterly 26 (Autumn 1981): 1–3; Myron W. Wood,
History of Alameda County, California: Including Its Geology, Topography, Soil, and

Productions, Together with a Full and Particular Record of the Spanish Grants
(Oakland, CA: M. W. Wood, 1883), 985; “More of the Mormons,” San
Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, May 20, 1858.
7. For numbers of stock in the company massacred at Mountain Meadows, see
Appendix B. For the number of stock from other companies passing through
Salt Lake City, see “Important News from Salt Lake,” San Francisco Daily
Evening Bulletin, Aug. 22, 1857; “Later and Important from Carson Val-
ley,” San Joaquin Republican, Oct. 7, 1857, quoting letters to the Sacramento
Union; Letter to the editor, Aug. 26, 1857, in “Arrival Across the Plains,” San
Joaquin Republican, Sept. 6, 1857; Information on the Homer Duncan Com-
pany, “Mormon Pioneer Overland Trail, 1847–1868,” http://www.lds.org/
churchhistory/library/pioneercompany/0,15797,4017-1-46,00.html (accessed
Oct. 17, 2007); Helen Carpenter, “A Trip Across the Plains in an Ox Wagon,
1857,” in Ho for California! Women’s Overland Diaries from the Huntington
Library, ed. Sandra L. Myres (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1980),
165; Parker1, 65–66; J. W. Dunn, Diary, May, 9–12, Aug. 24, Sept. 4–5, 1857,
typescript, Center for American History, University of Texas, Austin, Texas;
William Audley Maxwell, Crossing the Plains, Days of ’57: A Narrative of Early
Emigrant Travel to California by the Ox-Team Method (San Francisco: Sunset
Publishing House, 1915), 2; Wood, History of Alameda County, 985; Welch;
“Later from Carson Valley,” San Joaquin Republican, Oct. 30, 1857; Menefee
and Dodge, History of Tulare and Kings Counties, 768; “More Mormon Mur-
ders,” San Francisco Herald, Nov. 2, 1857.
8. Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, and Willard Richards, Apr. 7, 1851, in
“Fifth General Epistle,” Deseret News, Apr. 8, 1851.
9. Hawkins, Some Recollections, 80, 101; Young, Kimball, and Richards, Apr. 7,
1851, in “Fifth General Epistle”; Alonzo Hazelton Raleigh, Journal, May 30,
185[4], CHL.
10. See Chandless, 141; Pitchforth, Aug. 15, 1857; Hawley, 15.
11. See Parker2, 11. For Wells’s and Young’s letters, see Daniel H. Wells, Gen-
eral Orders, Aug. 1, 1857, Letter Book, 93, Nauvoo Legion (Utah) Adj. Gen.,
Records, 1851–70, CHL; Brigham Young to Bishop Br[u]nson, Aug. 2, 1857,
12. James Pearce, JDL1-RT 2:285–86; Maxwell, Crossing the Plains, Days of ’57,
5–6. On needing grain for mules and horses, see The Encyclopedia Americana
International Edition (Danbury, CT: Grolier, 1995), 14:397; Kyle D. Kauffman
and Johnathan J. Liebowitz, “Draft Animals on the United States Frontier,”
Overland Journal 15 (Summer 1997): 22.
13. Parker2, 12.
14. David O. Calder to John, Aug. 11, 1857, in David O. Calder, Letterpress
Copybook, 1855–1867, CHL.
15. D. C. Hail, letter to the editor, Oct. 20, 1857, in “Horrible Massacre of
Emigrants upon the Plains,” Daily Missouri Republican, Dec. 9, 1857, from
correspondence of Little Rock True Democrat.

16. William Strong, statement, n.d., in John Steele letter, John Steele Papers,
BYU.
17. George Armstrong Hicks, “Family Record and History of Geo. A. Hicks,”
typescript, 25, CHL.
18. This was the account of the firm’s clerk. See History of Montana, 1739–1885
(Chicago: Warner, Beers, & Company, 1885), 1145, cited in William
P. MacKinnon, “ ‘Unquestionably Authentic and Correct in Every Detail’:
Probing John I. Ginn and His Remarkable Utah War Story,” Utah Historical
Quarterly 72 (Fall 2004): 336–37.
19. “Later from Salt Lake—War Certain,” Daily Alta California, Dec. 11, 1857.
20. S. B. Honea, in “Outrages.”
21. Sarah Killion to George A. Smith, Dec. 9, 1858, Historian’s Office, Obitu-
ary Notices of Distinguished Persons, CHL; Clark V. Johnson, ed., Mormon
Redress Petitions: Documents of the 1833–1838 Missouri Conflict (Provo, UT:
Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1992), 78, 257, 665,
672–73; “Died,” Deseret News, Dec. 15, 1858. In Mormon records, the sur-
name is spelled “Killian,” “Killien,” and “Killion.”
22. Jeffrey Carlstrom and Cynthia Furse, The History of Emigration Canyon, Gate-
way to Salt Lake Valley (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2003), 59–61,
citing Minutes, Salt Lake County Court, Oct. 25, 1852; “Died.”
23. Muster Rolls, Mormon War Papers, 1838, Special Collections, Secretary
of State RG, Missouri State Archives, Jefferson City, MO; Craig L. Foster,
“Report on the Turner-Hopper-Helm-Killian Connections,” MMMRF;
“Died”; Killion to Smith, Dec. 9, 1858, Historian’s Office Obituary Notices.
On Turner, see Turner Surname File, Johnson County Historical Society,
Warrensburg, MO; Craig Foster, “Report on the Turner-Hopper-Helm-
Killian Connections” MMMRF; Tom Sutak, “Nicholas Turner—Preliminary
Findings,” MMMRF; Sharon White, genealogical file, MMMRF; Dorothy
J. O’Brien correspondence, MMMRF; Capt. Nicholas Turner Co., Mounted
Volunteers, 4th Div., Missouri Militia Card Index, Mormon War Papers; Pay
Accounts, Supplies, 3rd Div., Officers and Supplies, 4th Div., Mormon War
Papers; Payroll account for Nicholas Turner, 1st Lt., 2nd Co., 2nd Reg., 2nd
Brig., 4th Div., Missouri Mounted volunteers, Osage War, RG 133 Adj. Gen.,
Missouri National Guard, Indian Wars, Missouri State Archives, Jefferson
City, MO.
24. “Overland Emigration.”
25. Calvin Pierce, report, in “Interesting from Salt Lake,” Daily Alta California,
Oct. 21, 1857. See also George Powers, in “Horrible”; Milton D. Hammond,
Autobiography and Journal, Aug. 17, 1857, typescript, CHL; James Leach,
Reminiscence and Diary, Aug. 13, 1857, CHL; Raleigh Journal, Aug. 14, 1857.
26. Hail, letter to the editor, Oct. 20, 1857, in “Horrible Massacre of Emigrants.”
27. William H. Cureton, “Trekking to California,” undated, typescript, Bancroft
Library, Berkeley, CA, copy in MMMRF; HOJ, July 25, 1857. Cureton’s
reminiscent account gives the time of his arrival in Salt Lake City as June

1857, almost certainly misdated a month early since he notes the July 24
anniversary event in Utah.
28. Hamilton Gray Park, statement, ca. 1910, CHL. Park’s statement may have
been part of his sworn statement, also regarding Mountain Meadows Mas-
sacre events, given in 1907.
29. Parker2, 6–7; Suzanne D. Rogers, “Hickman Farmstead, Buffalo National
River, Arkansas,” May 1987, typescript in possession of Ron Loving, copy
at CHL.
30. Strong, statement, n.d., in John Steele letter, Steele Papers.
31. Ibid.; Harriet Strong Speirs, “A Biography of William Strong: A Member of
the Mormon Battalion,” typescript, June–July 1927, 1–3, CHL; Ronald Vern
Jackson and David L. Grundvig, Early Mormon Series, vol. 1: Directory of Indi-
viduals Residing in Salt Lake City Wards, 1854–1861 (Bountiful, UT: Acceler-
ated Indexing Systems, n.d.), 50, 82; “Hamilton G. Park,” Deseret News, Apr.
6, 1918; Jenson, 1:684–85.
32. Lorenzo Snow to Brigham Young, Aug. 7, 1857, Incoming Correspondence,
YOF; Lorenzo Snow to Brigham Young, Aug. [13], 1857, Incoming Corre-
spondence, YOF; Verulam Dive to Brigham Young, Aug. 8, 1857, Incoming
Correspondence, YOF.
33. The James Luttrell train was attacked on Aug. 19 at Box Elder Creek, where
Brigham City is located. “The Overland Immigration,” Daily Alta California,
Oct. 13, 1857; John W. Van Cott, Utah Place Names (Salt Lake City: Univer-
sity of Utah Press, 1990), 48, 50. The Dan Abbott and Henry Obarr trains
were attacked at the City of Rocks on Aug. 24. Menefee and Dodge, History
of Tulare and Kings Counties, 534–35; “More Mormon Murders.” The John
Fine train was attacked three times, once in late Aug. between Salt Lake
City and the Bear River ford, where Fine’s train joined with the Linton-
McCune train; again on Sept. 9 at Pilot Spring on the Salt Lake Cutoff; and
the third time on Sept. 12 at the City of Rocks. “More Testimony against the
Mormons,” Daily Alta California, Nov. 9, 1857; Menefee and Dodge, His-
tory of Tulare and Kings Counties, 768; Dunn Diary, Sept. 1–12, 1857; Angus
McLeod, statement, in “More Mormon Atrocities,” San Francisco Herald,
Nov. 12, 1857.
34. Dive to Young, Aug. 8, 1857, Incoming Correspondence, YOF; Snow to
Young, Aug. 7, 1857, Incoming Correspondence, YOF.
35. Dive to Young, Aug. 8, 1857, Incoming Correspondence, YOF.
36. Snow to Young, Aug. 7, 1857, Incoming Correspondence, YOF.
37. Hail, letter to the editor, Oct. 20, 1857, in “Horrible Massacre of Emi-
grants.” See also “Overland Immigration”; “More Mormon Massacres,” Daily
Alta California, Nov. 1, 1857.
38. Brigham Young, Discourse, Aug. 16, 1857, reported by George D. Watt, in
Historian’s Office, Reports of Speeches, ca. 1845–85, CHL.
39. Snow to Young, Aug. 7, 1857, Incoming Correspondence, YOF. See also
Geo. W. Armstrong to Brigham Young, Sept. 30, 1857, USBIA.

40. Snow to Young, Aug. [13], 1857, Incoming Correspondence, YOF.
41. For examples of subsequent emigrant outrage, see “More Outrages,” Los
Angeles Star, Nov. 7, 1857; “The Mormons in the Capacity of Savages,” San
Joaquin Republican, Oct. 28, 1857.
42. Snow to Young, Aug. [13], 1857, Incoming Correspondence, YOF.
43. Young, Discourse, Aug. 16, 1857, in Historian’s Office, Reports of Speeches.
See also Wilford Woodruff to editor of the Millennial Star, Sept. 12, 1857,
Historian’s Office Letterpress Copybook 1:489.
44. Letter, Aug. 23, 1857, in “Murder of a Providence Man in Utah,” New York
Herald, Nov. 8, 1857; “Arrival from the Plains—Indian Attack—Eighteen
Killed,” San Francisco Daily Globe, Aug. 21, 1857; “Later from Carson Valley,”
San Francisco Daily Globe, Aug. 18, 1857; Sacramento Daily Bee, Aug. 19, 1857.
See also “The Mormons,” New York Times, Nov. 9, 1857.
45. Unruh, 185, 197, 395.
46. Huntington, Aug. 10, 1857.
47. Robert T. Burton, Vouchers 9–16, filed Feb. 12, 1861, in U.S. Congress,
House, Accounts of Brigham Young, Superintendent of Indian Affairs in Utah Ter-
ritory, 37th Cong., 2nd sess., 1862, H. Doc. 29, 21.
48. Wm. H. Hooper, H. S. Beatie, and Edward Hunter, Vouchers 6, 7, and 8,
filed Aug. 8, 9, 1857, in House, Accounts of Brigham Young, Doc. 29, 80–81.
On Young’s Indian policy, see Brigham Young to James W. Denver, Sept.
12, 1857, Governor’s Letterbook, 2:651, YOF; John Alton Peterson, Utah’s
Black Hawk War (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1998); How-
ard A. Christy, “The Walker War: Defense and Conciliation as Strategy,”
Utah Historical Quarterly 47, no. 4 (Fall 1979): 395–420; Howard A. Christy,
“Open Hand and Mailed Fist: Mormon Indian Relations in Utah, 1847–52,”
Utah Historical Quarterly 46 (Summer 1978): 216–35; Lawrence G. Coates,
“Brigham Young and Mormon Indian Policies: The Formative Period,
1836–1851,” BYU Studies 18 (1977–78): 428–51.
49. Oliver Boardman Huntington, Diary and Reminiscences, 129, typescript,
CHL; Whitney, 4:209–10; Jenson, 4:748–49. On Huntington’s position as
chief interpreter, see House, Accounts of Brigham Young, Doc. 29, 8.
50. Huntington, Aug. 10, 11, 31, 1857. On Little Soldier’s relations with the
Mormons, see Scott R. Christensen, “Chief Little Soldier,” Pioneer 42
(Winter 1995): 16–19.
51. “Interesting from Utah,” New York Herald, Feb. 23, 1858.
52. Huntington, Aug. 1857.
53. Woodruff, Aug. 13, 1857.
54. Daniel H. Wells to A. Johnson, Aug. 13, 1857, Letter Book, 97, Nauvoo
Legion (Utah) Adj. Gen. Records.
56. On Mormon apprehensions of attacks by Indians, see “The Mormons,” New
York Weekly Times, Sept. 19, 1857; “Later and Important from Carson Valley,”
San Joaquin Republican, Oct. 7, 1857.

57. Brigham Young to Franklin D. Richards, Mar. 30, 1855, Letterpress Copy-
book 2:42–43, YOF; Brigham Young to James W. Denver, Sept. 12, 1857,
Governor’s Letterbook, 2:651–52, YOF; J. W. Denver to Brigham Young,
Nov. 11, 1857, in Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Accompanying
the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior for the Year 1857 (Washington:
William A. Harris, 1858), 312–14.
58. Woodruff, Aug. 16, 1857; Young, Discourse, Aug. 16, 1857, in Historian’s
Office, Reports of Speeches.
60. Raleigh Journal, Aug. 16, 1857; Young, Discourse, Aug. 16, 1857, in Histori-
an’s Office, Reports of Speeches.
According to Harriet Thatcher, gentile merchants didn’t raise their hands
in assent. [Harriet Thatcher] to William Preston, Aug. 5, 1857, William
Preston, Papers, Special Collections, Utah State University, Logan, UT. The
content of Thatcher’s letter suggests she was present at Young’s mid-Aug.
address, though the opening of her letter was dated nine days before the
address was given.
62. President’s Office Journal, Aug. 19, 1857, YOF; DBY, 62, Aug. 19, 1857;
Young, Discourse, Aug. 16, 1857, in Historian’s Office, Reports of Speeches.
63. Young, Discourse, Aug. 16, 1857, in Historian’s Office, Reports of
Speeches.
64. DBY, 62, Aug. 19, 1857.
65. Woodruff, Aug. 26, 1857.
Chapter 8
1. Jacob Hamblin, statement, in Carleton, 6.
2. “Immigrant Massacre.”
3. “Letter.”
4. Silas Smith, JDL1-RS 7:32, JDL1-BT 5:222; MU, 242–43; NJ1908. Relying
on southern Utah tradition, Juanita Brooks consistently called it the Fancher
train. Brooks2, 44–49, 52, 69, 142, 151.
5. “Report of J. Hamblin,” June 22, 1858, Jacob Forney, Letter Book 1857–59,
292, CHL; George A. Smith, statement, [Nov. 1869], George A. Smith,
Papers, CHL; Jacob Hamblin, statement, in Carleton, 6.
6. Jacob Hamblin, statement, in Carleton, 6; Appendix A.
7. “BY.”
8. “Massacre.”
9. “Outrages”; “Later from Salt Lake—War Certain,” San Francisco Daily Alta
California, Dec. 11, 1857; “Later from Great Salt Lake,” San Francisco Daily
Evening Bulletin, Dec. 11, 1857.
10. Brigham Young, deposition, Aug. 2, 1875, CCF 31; “BY.”
11. Hamilton Gray Park, statement, ca. 1910, CHL.
12. Welch.

13. See Parker2, 6–9; James Leach, Reminiscence and Diary, Aug. 13, 1857,
CHL; Alonzo Hazelton Raleigh, Journal, Aug. 16, 1857, CHL.
14. See Appendix A and mountainmeadowsmassacre.org.
15. The numerous examples of such claims include Frances Fawcett Haynes to
the Bancroft Library, July 19, 1932, Hubert Howe Bancroft Library, Univer-
sity of California, Berkeley, CA; Frances Fawcett Haynes to Mrs. E. A. Brush,
Oct. 2, 1935, CHL; Douglas McEuen, The Legend of Francis Marion Poteet and
the Mountain Meadows Massacre (Pleasanton, TX: Zabava Printing, 1996), 45,
58, 62, 74; California, Los Angeles County, Los Angeles, 1860 U.S. Cen-
sus, population schedule, 377; Douglas McEuen, “Francis Marion Poteet,”
Branches & Acorns 14 ( June 1999): 12.
16. M1911; M1877-10; M1877-12.
17. Appendix A.
18. Ibid.
19. “Journal for August, 1857,” Deseret News, Sept. 9, 1857.
20. Appendix B.
21. Ibid.; Depositions in PPU. Some longhorns were reported in southern Utah
as early as 1853, coming via Texas and southern Colorado over the Old
Spanish Trail. Archibald F. Bennett, Ella M. Bennett, and Barbara Ben-
nett Roach, Valiant in the Faith: Gardner and Sarah Snow and Their Family
(Murray, UT: Roylance Publishing, 1990), 241; Don D. Walker, “Longhorns
Come to Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 30 (1962): 137. Nephi Johnson
said many of the massacred emigrants’ cattle were Texas longhorns. JDL2-
BT 1:66–67.
22. Appendix B; The Inflation Calculator, http://www.westegg.com/inflation/.
23. William Carey, JDL1-BT 2:1. Several 1857 trains had property that rivaled
or exceeded that of the Arkansas company. A few examples are the J. J. Bush
company with eight hundred head of cattle and five hundred mules; the
John Fine company with ninety wagons and an unknown number of loose
stock; Daniel Teeter’s Pope County, Arkansas, train with fourteen hundred
head of cattle; the Jackson company with seventy-five wagons and a large
number of loose stock; and the Rawson company that started with seven
thousand sheep of which four thousand actually made it to California.
“Important News from Salt Lake,” San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin,
Aug. 22, 1857; Eugene L. Menefee and Fred A. Dodge, History of Tulare
and Kings Counties, California with Biographical Sketches of the Leading Men
and Women of the Counties Who Have Been Identified with Their Growth and
Development from the Early Days to the Present (Los Angeles: Historic Record,
1913), 768; Myron W. Wood, History of Alameda County, California: Including
its Geology, Topography, Soil, and Productions, together with a Full and Particular
Record of the Spanish Grants (Oakland, CA: M. W. Wood, 1883), 985; Mary
Elizabeth Jackson Brayton, “Recollections of Crossing the Plains,” Merrill
Mattes Library, National Frontier Trails Center, Independence, MO, quoted
in Patricia K. A. Fletcher, Jack Earl Fletcher, and Lee Whiteley, Cherokee

Trail Diaries (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, [1999]–ca. 2001), 3:180–81;
E. J. Lewis, Tehama County, California . . . (San Francisco: Elliott & Moore,
1880), 151.
24. CHC, 4:140.
25. W. T. B. Sanford, in “The Route to Salt Lake City,” Los Angeles Star, Dec. 19,
1857; Brigham Young to E. J. Steptoe, Jan. 2, 1855, Letterpress Copybook
1:813–16, YOF.
26. Hoth, Sept. 21–29, 1856.
27. Ibid., Sept. 26–30, 1856.
28. Welch; “The Late Outrages on the Plains—Further Particulars,” Los Angeles
Star, Nov. 7, 1857; Petition for Payment of Losses, Sept. 20, 1857, HR 35A-
G7.1, RG 223, National Archives, Washington, D. C.; Willson Nowers, note
to Andrew Jenson, AJ1. Collins’s train was known as the Crook & Collins
company when it left Arkansas. S. B. Honea, in “Outrages.”
29. S. B. Honea, in “Outrages”; Welch; “Horrible”; William Mathews, JDL1-BT
4:45–46.
30. Volney Leroy King, statement, ca. 1875, 73, Volney Leroy King Papers, UofU.
31. Appendix B; “The Late Outrages on the Plains—Another Account,” Los
Angeles Star, Oct. 31, 1857; “Outrages”; Welch.
32. George Armstrong Hicks, “Family Record and History of Geo. A. Hicks,”
typescript, 25, CHL; Davis Bitton, “I’d Rather Have Some Roasting Ears:
The Peregrinations of George Armstrong Hicks,” Utah Historical Quarterly
68 (Summer 2000): 211.
33. Welch.
34. PGM, Aug. 2, 1857; Jenson, 4:750.
35. [ John G. McQuarrie] to [A.] Will Lund, undated and untitled typescript,
[6–7], CM; Hawley, 15.
36. Lawrence L. Linford, “Establishing and Maintaining Land Ownership in
Utah Prior to 1869,” Utah Historical Quarterly 42 (Spring 1974): 126–43; Paul
W. Gates, History of Public Land Law Development (Washington, D.C., 1968),
219–47.
37. Arrington2, 148–51; Pitchforth, June 14, 1857.
38. [McQuarrie] to Lund, [6–7], CM.
39. PGM, Aug. 9, 1857.
40. Ibid., Aug. 9, 1857.
41. Ibid., Aug. 16, 1857.
42. Alvira L. Parish, Orrin E. Parrish, Joseph Bartholomew, Zephaniah J. War-
ren, Alva A. Warren, James W. Webb, Abraham Durfee, Thomas O’Bannion,
Nathaniel Case, Andrew J. Moore, Thomas Hollingshead, Abner M.
Hollingshead, Amos B. Moore, and Alice Lamb, affidavits, in Cradlebaugh,
43–67.
43. Zephaniah J. Warren, Mar. 26, 1859, in Cradlebaugh, 54; Polly Aird, “ ‘You
Nasty Apostates, Clear Out’: Reasons for Disaffection in the Late 1850s,”
Journal of Mormon History 30 (Fall 2004): 173–91.

44. James Pearce, JDL1-RT 2:285–86. James Pearce testified in John D. Lee’s
first trial that he was fourteen at the time of the massacre. Born in 1839, he
was actually eighteen. James Pearce, JDL1-BT 4:105.
45. Charles B. Hancock, Biographical Sketch, Collection of Mormon Diaries,
46, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., microfilm copy at CHL. See
also “The Mountain Meadow Massacre,” New York Herald, Aug. 3, 1875. For
other violent incidents in Payson, see Franklin Wheeler Young, Journal,
1858, CHL, which describes the castration of Henry Jones—a Payson man
accused of adultery as well as of incest with his mother—and the later killing
of both son and mother when they were suspected of planning to steal local
horses. The Jones murders would later be heralded as evidence of extralegal
violence in the territory. Franklin Wheeler Young did “not pretend to justify”
the murders, acknowledging that whatever wrongs the victims committed
could have been handled in a different way.
46. Ann Eliza Webb, interview, Aug. 2, 1875, in “The Mountain Meadow
Massacre,” New York Herald, Aug. 3, 1875.
47. PGM, Sept. 27, 1857; Maryette Parrish Keir, “San Bernardino Pioneers:
Frank Hinckley Keir Family,” Manuscripts and Documents, George William
and Helen Pruitt Beattie Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA;
The Story of Oak Glen and the Yucaipa Valley (O. W. Willits, 1971), 24–25.
48. Myrtilla Nebeker Frey, Memoir, original in possession of Carolyn King
Fillmore, Kaysville, UT, photocopy of manuscript at CHL.
49. Pitchforth, Aug. 15, 1857.
50. Ibid., Aug. 17, 1857.
51. Hawley, 15.
52. “BY”; Mary S. Campbell, AJ1; Elias Morris, statement, Feb. 2, 1892, in CM;
Hawley, 15; “LC”; “LLC.”
53. J. D. Borthwick, Three Years in California (Edinburgh: William Blackwood
and Sons, 1857), 329; Chandless, 20; Mitford M. Mathews, ed., A Dictionary
of Americanisms on Historical Principles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1951), 536, s.v. “Dutchman”; The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1989), 4:1141–42, s.v. “Dutchman.” Borthwick reported
that all Europeans except the French, English, and Italians “are in California
classed under the general denomination of Dutchmen.”
54. The Oxford Companion to United States History (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2001), 423; Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern
Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992).
55. John Gibson, ed., History of York County, Pennsylvania (Chicago: F. A. Battey
Publishing, 1886), pt. 2, 20; Pennsylvania, York County, Borough of York,
North Ward, 1850 U.S. Census, population schedule, 2. The sources on the
Greslys give various spellings of the surname. We have standardized them to
Gresly, the spelling that appears on family grave markers at the Prospect Hill
Cemetery in York, Pennsylvania.

56. York County Quarter Sessions, Nov. 1842, Book C, 262, Apr. 1851, Book
G, 137, 141, Aug. 1863, Book J, 450, Apr. 1858, Book K, 515, York County
Archives, York, Pennsylvania.
57. “The Late Outrages on the Plains—Further Particulars”; Hawley, 15.
58. Powers, in “Horrible.”
59. Ibid.
60. “The Late Outrages on the Plains—Further Particulars”; “Statement of
G. W. Davis,” Daily Alta California, Nov. 13, 1857; Arkansas, Pope County,
1850 U.S. Census, population schedule, 243B.
61. Thomas Waters Cropper, Autobiography, Jan. 15, 1926, CHL. The earliest
known use of the term “Missouri Wildcats” is in Stenhouse, 424, 427, 428.
Whether Cropper actually heard the Missourians call themselves “Missouri
Wildcats” or simply borrowed the phrase from Stenhouse cannot be determined.
62. Cropper Autobiography.
63. Ray. The emigrants were probably not far off in their description of Fill-
more. To Hans Hoth, the Mormon dissenter who passed through the new
village the previous year, the Fillmore courthouse, or territorial capital, was
“large and nicely built,” but the rest of the buildings were “practically all log
cabins,” making “the whole place . . . not look like a city at all.” Hoth, Sept.
24, 1856.
64. Warn, in “Horrible”; Warn, in “Our Los Angeles Corresondence,” Daily Alta
California, Oct. 27, 1857; Ethan Pettit, Diary, Aug. 12, 13, 16, 21, 23, 26,
1857, CHL.
65. “BY.”
66. Ibid.
67. L. H. McCullough to Daniel H. Wells, Aug. 27, 1857, Nauvoo Legion (UT)
Adj. Gen. Records, 1851–70, CHL; Samuel P. Hoyt, for Lewis Brunson, to
Brigham Young, Aug. 29, 1857, Incoming Correspondence, YOF.
68. Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter Jr. and
Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York: Harper & Row, 1980); Michael Kammen,
Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture
(New York: Knopf, 1991); Michael Kammen, “Some Patterns and Meanings
of Memory Distortion in American History,” chap. 8, in In the Past Lane: His-
torical Perspectives on American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press,
1997), 199–212.
69. The argument that historians too often create an artificial and misleading
chain of causes to explain events has been made most recently by Nassim
Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New
York: Random House, 2007).
Chapter 9
1. Addison Pratt, Journal, 1843–1852, Oct. 15, 1849, CHL, published in The
Journals of Addison Pratt, ed. S. George Ellsworth (Salt Lake City: Univer-
sity of Utah Press, 1990), 382, Oct. 15, 1849; “History of the Iron County

Mission,” Jan. 2, 1851, in JH. The grasses, like the stream, could be intermit-
tent. In spring 1855 George Washington Bean found “not much grass” at
Corn Creek. George Washington Bean, Journal, May 10, 1855, microfilm
of typescript, CHL. However, Amasa M. Lyman found “good Grass” there
in late fall 1855. Amasa Lyman, Diary, Nov. 25, 1855, Amasa M. Lyman,
Collection, CHL. See also Amos Milton Musser, Diary, Oct. 28, 1852, CHL;
Silas Smith, Journal, May 15, 1854, CHL. A present-day investigation of the
banks of Corn Creek, now virtually dried up, shows a stream bed, from high
bank to high bank, of sixty feet, stretching out to the west in its fan to several
hundred feet.
2. William R. Palmer, “Utah Indians Past and Present,” Utah Historical Quar-
terly 1 (Apr. 1928): 35–52; J. H. Simpson, Report of Explorations Across the
Great Basin of the Territory of Utah (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing
Office [hereafter GPO], 1876), 117; Knack, 31–32, 143–44.
3. “Sketch of a Trip to Pauvan Valley,” Deseret News, Dec. 13, 1851; John
D. Lee to George A. Smith, June 8, 1851, George A. Smith, Papers, CHL;
Omer C. Stewart, “Culture Element Distributions, XVIII: Ute—Southern
Paiute,” University of California Anthropological Records 6, no. 4 (1941):
250–51.
4. E. L. Black, “Life Story of Indian Chief Kanosh,” manuscript, UofU.
5. “Sketch of a Trip to Pauvan Valley”; Anson Call, letter to the editor, Mar. 7,
1852, in Deseret News, Apr. 17, 1852.
6. Garland Hurt to Brigham Young, June 30, 1855, USBIA.
7. Hurt to Denver, June 30, 1857, USBIA.
8. John Richard Alley Jr., “The Fur Trapper and the Great Basin Indian”
(master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1978), 60. For conditions after the Mor-
mon settlement, see Samuel L. Sprague, letter to the editor, Dec. 29, 1855, in
Deseret News, Jan. 9, 1856.
9. J. McKnight, letter to the editor, Oct. 20, 1858, in “The Storms of Utah,
Corn Creek—Scanty Harvest,” Milwaukee Weekly Wisconsin, Dec. 29, 1858,
copy in Historian’s Office, Historical Scrapbooks, 1840–1904, 11:34, CHL;
“Excursion to Fillmore,” Deseret News, Aug. 29, 1855; “Indians,” Deseret
News, Nov. 16, 1854; Orson K. Whitney, Journal, May 15, 1854, in Newel
Kimball Whitney, Papers, CHL; Daniel H. Wells, “Narrative,” Utah and
the Mormons Manuscript Collection, [17–19], Bancroft Library, Univer-
sity of California, Berkeley, CA, microfilm copy at CHL; Henry Standage
to George A. Smith, Sept. 29, 1853, Smith Papers; Ronald W. Walker, ed.,
“President Young Writes Jefferson Davis about the Gunnison Massacre
Affair,” BYU Studies 35 (1995): 146–70.
10. George A. Smith to Mr. St. Clair, Nov. 25, 1869, Historian’s Office, Letter-
press Copybook 2:941–49, CHL; George A. Smith, statement, [Nov. 1869],
Smith Papers; Philo T. Farnsworth, JDL1-BT 5:277–78, 303, JDL1-RS 8:24;
Silas S. Smith, JDL1-BT 5:220, JDL1-RS 7:31; Elisha Hoopes, JDL1-BT
5:246; George A. Smith, deposition, July 30, 1875, CCF 31.

11. HOJ, Aug. 25, 1857; Jacob Hamblin, Journal, 1854–57, 81–82, in Jacob
Hamblin, Papers, CHL; Silas Smith, JDL1-BT 5:218–22; Smith to St. Clair,
Nov. 25, 1869, Historian’s Office, Letterpress Copybook 2:941–49; Smith,
statement, [Nov. 1869], Smith Papers; Huntington, Sept. 1, 1857; Silas
Smith, JDL1-BT 5:229; Elisha Hoopes, JDL1-RS 8:4, JDL1-BT 5:246. See
also Philo T. Farnsworth, JDL1-BT 5:299.
12. Smith to St. Clair, Nov. 25, 1869, Historian’s Office, Letterpress Copybook
2:941–49, CHL; Smith, statement, [Nov. 1869], Smith Papers; HOJ, Aug.,
25, 1857; Jacob Hamblin, statement, in Carleton, 6.
13. Smith to St. Clair, Nov. 25, 1869, Historian’s Office, Letterpress Copybook
2:941–49, CHL; Smith, statement, [Nov. 1869], Smith Papers; Silas Smith,
JDL1-BT 5:222, 239; Jacob Hamblin, statement, in Carleton, 6.
14. Elisha Hoopes, JDL1-RS 8:4, JDL1-BT 5:246; Jacob Hamblin, statement, in
Carleton, 6; Silas Smith, JDL1-BT 5:229. In 1849 George Q. Cannon noted
that a fifty-mile desert lay ahead of him on the Spanish Trail from the Muddy
to Vegas. Michael N. Landon, ed., To California in ’49, vol. 1, The Journals
of George Q. Cannon, ed. Adrian W. Cannon and Richard E. Turley Jr. (Salt
Lake City: Deseret Book, 1999), 55, 59–60.
15. William Bedford Temple to Wife and Children, May 11, June 2, 1850,
Oregon Historical Society, Portland, OR; Washington Peck, Diary, Oct.
27–Dec. 27, 1857 typescript, National Frontier Trails Center, Independence,
MO; Silas Smith, JDL1-BT 5:229; Jacob Hamblin, JDL2-BT 1:92.
16. Jacob Hamblin, statement, in Carleton, 6.
17. Ibid.; Hawley, 15.
18. Silas Smith, JDL1-BT 5:221, 237–39; Hamblin Journal, 81–82, in Hamblin
Papers; Smith to St. Clair, Nov. 25, 1869, Historian’s Office, Letterpress
Copybook 2:941–49, CHL; Smith, statement, [Nov. 1869], Smith Papers;
Elisha Hoopes, JDL1-BT 5:245–73, JDL1-RS 8:12–21; Philo T. Farnsworth,
JDL1-BT 5:278–79, 303; HOJ, Aug. 25, 1857.
19. Smith to St. Clair, Nov. 25, 1869, Historian’s Office, Letterpress Copy-
book 2:941–49, CHL; Smith, statement, [Nov. 1869], Smith Papers; Elisha
Hoopes, JDL1-BT 5:245–73, JDL1-RS 8:12–21; Silas Smith, JDL1-BT
5:221; Philo T. Farnsworth, JDL1-RS 4:24, JDL1-BT 5:278–79, 303.
20. Powers, in “Horrible”; George W. Davis, in “Letter from San Bernardino,”
San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, Nov. 12, 1857.
21. Welch; An Illustrated History of Los Angeles County, California (Chicago: Lewis
Publishing, 1889), 676–77.
22. Welch.
23. Honea, in “Outrages.”
24. Peter Bo[y]ce, letter to the editor, Jan. 31, 1875, in “Correspondence,” Ogden
Junction, Feb. 5, 1875. The general outline of these events can also be found
in T. S. W., “Mountain Me[a]dow Massacre,” 16–17, Articles Pertaining to
the Mormons in Utah, ca. 1860, CHL.
25. Warn, in “Horrible.”

26. Ray; Joleen Ashman Robison, Almon Robison, Utah Pioneer, Man of Mystique
and Tragedy (Lawrence, KS: Richard A. Robison, 1995), 83.
27. Eleanor F. Knowlton, reminiscence, 1:75, typed excerpts, California Histori-
cal Society, San Francisco, CA.
28. Woodruff, Jan. 13, 1856; Elisha Hoopes, JDL1-BT 5:245–73; Honea, in
“Outrages”; Powers, in “Horrible.”
29. Honea, in “Outrages.” Hoopes’s florid retelling of the Corn Creek episode
during the John D. Lee prosecution almost two decades later earned him a
withering cross-examination. Elisha Hoopes, JDL1-BT 5:245–73.
30. Forney, 370.
31. Carleton, 17; Rogers. Rogers examined Corn Creek during the spring
runoff.
32. See, e.g., Covered Wagon Women: Diaries & Letters from the Western Trails,
1840–1890, eds. Kenneth L. Holmes and David C. Duniway (Glendale, CA:
Arthur H. Clark, 1986), 14; Karen M. Offen and David C. Duniway, eds.
“William Cornell’s Journal, 1852, with His Overland Guide to Oregon,”
Oregon Historical Quarterly 79 (Winter 1978): 388.
33. Richard H. Dillon, ed., California Trail Herd: The 1850 Missouri-to-California
Journal of Cyrus C. Loveland (Los Gatos, CA: Talisman Press, 1961), 19;
Tamara Miner Haygood, “Texas Fever,” The Handbook of Texas,
http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/TT/awt1.html
(accessed Nov. 6, 2007). For Texas longhorns in Utah, see Nephi Johnson,
JDL2-BT 1:66–67; Jacob Hamblin, JDL2-BT 1:93. The longhorns of 1857
were not the first in Utah. The Preston Thomas company of 1853 included a
thousand head. Archibald F. Bennett, Ella M. Bennett, and Barbara Bennett
Roach, Valiant in the Faith: Gardner and Sarah Snow and Their Family (Murray,
UT: Roylance Publishing, 1990), 241. See also Don D. Walker, “Longhorns
Come to Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 30 (1962): 137.
34. Dillon, California Trail Herd, 19.
35. Eleftherios Mylonakis, “When to Suspect and How to Monitor Babesiosis,”
American Family Physician 63 (May 2001): 1969–74. Texas Fever was the
nineteenth-century term for babesiosis.
36. H. B. Rees Jr., M. A. Smith, J. C. Spendlove, R. S. Fraser, T. Fukushima,
A. G. Barbour Jr., and F. J. Schoenfeld, “Epidemiologic and Laboratory
Investigations of Bovine Anthrax in Two Utah Counties in 1975,” Public
Health Reports 92 (Mar.–Apr. 1977): 176–86.
37. See, e.g., Woodruff, Apr. 25–May 18, 1856; “Disease Among Cattle,” Stockton
(CA) San Joaquin Republican, Nov. 10, 1857; Patty Bartlett Sessions, Diary,
Aug. 6, 1858, CHL; “Beware of Dead Cattle,” Mountaineer, Sept. 3, 1859;
Ray; Thomas Cropper, Autobiography, 1926, photocopy, CHL.
38. The authors thank Drs. Edmund C. Evans, DeVon C. Hale, Quinton
S. Harris, John H. Holbrook, and George F. Snell for their 2007 evaluation
of the evidence. Drs. Robert K. Maddock Jr. and John M. Matsen joined
them in a preliminary evaluation of the evidence in 2002.

39. Arthur M. Friedlander, “Anthrax,” Medical Aspects of Chemical and Biological
Warfare, pt. 1, Warfare Weaponry and the Casualty, vol. 3, Textbook of Military
Medicine, ed. Frederick R. Sidell, Ernest T. Takafuji, and David R. Franz
(Washington, D.C.: Borden Institute, 1997), 468; William Arthur Hagan
and Dorsey William Bruner, The Infectious Diseases of Domestic Animals, 4th
ed. (Ithaca: Comstock Publishing Associates, Cornell University, 1961), 185;
Taber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary, 19th ed. (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 2001),
131, s.v. “anthrax”; Gregory B. Knudson, “Treatment of Anthrax in Man:
History and Current Concepts,” Military Medicine 151 (Feb. 1986): 71.
40. Friedlander, “Anthrax,” 467–75; Taber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary, 131, s.v.
“anthrax”; E. Mallon and P. H. McKee, “Extraordinary Case Report: Cutane-
ous Anthrax,” American Journal of Dermatopathology 19, no. 1 (1997): 82.
41. “Disease Among Cattle.”
42. P. K. Jacoby, in “Victims”; “Meeting.”
43. Elias Smith, Diary, July 31, 1857, CHL.
44. Parker2, 7.
45. Jacob Hamblin, statement, in Carleton, 6; Appendix B.
46. Ray. In an 1872 interview, John D. Lee told journalist J. H. Beadle that a
“Widow Tomlinson” got “poison” from an ox carcass in her eyes while trying
“to save the hide and taller.” Her face swelled before she reportedly perished.
Beadle1. We have been unable to confirm the death of a woman surnamed
Tomlinson and believe Lee may have conflated the cases of John Ray’s wife
and Proctor Robison.
47. Cropper Autobiography, Jan. 15, 1926; Ray; Elisha Hoopes, JDL1-BT
5:270–71. For additional sources on Robison’s death, see Robison, Almon
Robison, 79–82.
48. Robison, Almon Robison, 83.
49. Ray; Cropper Autobiography, Jan. 15, 1926.
50. Lois Inman Baker, “Joel C. Inman to Oregon in 1852,” Lane County Pioneer
Historical Society 8 (Nov. 1963), http://inman.surnameweb.org/documents/
joelcinman.htm (accessed Nov. 6, 2007).
51. Claude Elliot, “Abolition,” The Handbook of Texas, http://www.tsha.utexas.
edu/handbook/online/articles/AA/vaa1.html (accessed Nov. 6, 2007).
52. Mark Regan Essig, “Science and Sensation: Poison Murder and Forensic
Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America” (PhD diss., Cornell University,
2000), 4–5, 216–60.
53. Powers, in “Horrible”; Davis, in “Letter from San Bernardino”; Welch; Silas
Smith, JDL1-BT 5:222; HOJ, Aug. 27, 1857.
54. Silas Smith, JDL1-BT 5:222.
55. Robert Kershaw, JDL1-BT 4:90–92.
57. Powers and Warn, in “Horrible.”
58. Joel White, JDL1-BT 4:5; PSHR, Sept. 7, 1857, 2nd sec., 34; Mary S.
Campbell, AJ1; Benjamin Platt, Reminiscences, 5, photocopy of typescript,

CHL; James Pearce, JDL1-BT 4:102; Rachel Hamblin, statement, May 20,
1859, in Carleton, 11; MU, 219; Joseph Sudweeks, “Concerning Myself: The
Life of Laban Morrill,” typescript, MMMRF; McGlashan.
59. PSHR, Sept. 7, 1857, 2nd sec., 34, provides the earliest evidence of the
poisoning rumors’ penetration to a town with links to the massacre. Internal
evidence suggests, however, that the entry was not made until Sept. 12, at the
earliest, which was after the massacre.
60. PSHR, Sept. 7, 1857, 2nd sec., 34; Woodruff, Sept. 29, 1857; Los Angeles Star,
Oct. 10, 1857; John D. Lee to Brigham Young, Nov. 20, 1857, Incoming
61. J. Forney to A. B. Greenwood, Aug. 1859, in SDoc42, 76.
62. Willson Gates Nowers, note to Andrew Jenson, AJ1.
63. [ John G. McQuarrie] to [A.] Will Lund, undated and untitled typescript, [9],
CM.
64. Ellott Willden, AJ1; Beadle1; Elias Morris, statement, Feb. 2, 1892, CM;
James Pearce, JDL1-BT 4:101–2.
65. William H. Dame to George A. Smith, quoted in HOJ, Aug. 31, 1857.
66. Argus, open letter to Brigham Young, July 20, 18[71], in “History of Mor-
monism,” Corrinne (UT) Reporter, July 22, 1871; Dame to Smith, in HOJ,
Aug. 31, 1857; William Carey, JDL1-BT 2:2–3, JDL1-PS 2:17.
67. See, e.g., Cedar City leader Isaac Haight’s counsel in CSM, Aug. 19, 1855,
May 4, 1856.
68. Hoth, Oct. 6, 1856, described those who disobeyed local directives in order
to make money. Nowers in Beaver thought local leaders “misconstrued or
misunderstood” instructions “to mean that the people were not to sell the
emigrants anything.” Willson Gates Nowers, note to Andrew Jenson, AJ1.
69. Silas Smith, JDL1-BT 5:222; SAJ, Sept. 3, 1857; Jesse N. Smith, JDL1-BT
5:214–15;“Parowan,” undated notes, AJ1.
70. William Leany, Reminiscence, 1888, 21–22, CHL.
71. S. B. Aden to Brigham Young, Mar. 14, 1859, Incoming Correspondence,
YOF; “$1,000 Reward! William A. Aden,” Salt Lake City Valley Tan, July
6, 1859; “Supposed to be Murdered in Mormondom,” San Francisco Daily
Evening Bulletin, Aug. 8, 1859; S. B. Aden, Dec. 14, 1874, in “Lingering
Hope,” Salt Lake Daily Tribune, Dec. 24, 1874.
72. Gibbs, 8; Leany, Reminiscence, 22.
73. S. B. Aden to Alfred Cumming, Jan. 27, 1859, Alfred Cumming, Papers,
Duke University, Durham, NC; “William D. Roberts,” in Utah Since State-
hood: Historical and Biographical (Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1919), 566–70; “$1,000
Reward!”; Aden, Dec. 14, 1874, in “Lingering Hope”; Jenson, 1:499–502;
Daniel W. Jones, Forty Years Among the Indians (Salt Lake City: Juvenile
Instructor Office, 1890), 115–16.
74. Aden to Young, Mar. 14, 1859, Incoming Correspondence, YOF; “$1,000
Reward!”; “Information Wanted,” Valley Tan, May 17, 1859; Aden to Cumming,
Jan. 27, 1859, Cumming Papers; Jones, Forty Years Among the Indians, 115–16.

75. Leany Reminiscence, 22; “Notes from the ‘Life of John D. Lee,’ ” Pioche
(NV) Weekly Record, Mar. 31, 1877; “LC”; “LLC”; MU, 280–81; Gibbs, 2,
16–18; R. N. Baskin, Reminiscences of Early Utah (Salt Lake City: Tribune-
Reporter Printing, 1914), 112.
76. PSHR, Aug. 28, 1857, 2nd sec., 34.
77. James Pearce, JDL1-BT 4:105; JDL1-RT 2:286; Leany Reminiscence, 22.
78. Gibbs, 17, 48–49.
79. Brooks2, 59.
80. Regina M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 5.
81. Two impulses lead to the final outburst of violence. “These are, simultane-
ously, rage and anger at the enemy’s alleged attack on the integrity, values,
or well-being of the community in question, on the one hand, and succes-
sively, or in oscillation, fear and mounting panic that the ethnic enemy is
violent, dangerous by nature, and has the capacities and resources to launch
an attack and do great harm, on the other. . . . The two states of collective per-
ception and emotion dialectically act on each other and produce a mounting
tension and a heightened mood, which when it explodes may lead to terrible
brutalities and acts of destruction.” Tambiah, 284.
82. Rosa Brooks, “Good People, Evil Deeds,” Los Angeles Times, June 9, 2006,
also reprinted in “Killings in Iraq by ‘Bad Apples’? Probably Not,” Deseret
Morning News, June 18, 2006. These perspectives are those of Yale Univer-
sity psychologist Stanley Milgram, whose famous experiments, conducted in
1961, have been repeatedly confirmed in many cultures.
83. Cited in Lauren Green, “The Problem of Evil: Why Do ‘Good’ People
Do Bad Things,” Apr. 11, 2007, Fox News, http://www.foxnews.com/
story/0,2933,265314,00.html (accessed Nov. 7, 2007). See also Philip
Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New
York: Random House, 2007); Staub; Peck.
Chapter 10
1. See Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball to “the Saints in Parowan and
Cedar Cities,” [May 1852], Outgoing Correspondence, YOF.
2. Erastus Snow, letter to the editor, Dec. 21, 1852, in Deseret News, Dec. 25,
1852.
3. Janet Burton Seegmiller, A History of Iron County: Community above Self (Salt
Lake City: Utah State Historical Society/Iron County Commission, 1998),
64; TF, 373–81, 409.
4. Christopher J. Arthur, “Records of Christopher J. Arthur, 1860–1900,” type-
script, 1937, pt. 1, 16, copy at BYU.
5. Hoth, Oct. 2–7, 1856; Cedar Stake Journal, July 29, Aug. 19, 1855, Jan. 13,
27, Feb. 10, Mar. 16, May 4, 1856, William R. Palmer, Collection, Special
Collections, Gerald R. Sherratt Library, Southern Utah University, Cedar
City, UT. On counsel not to sell grain, see chap. 4, n. 53.

6. Kim S. Whitehead, “William and Elizabeth Tait: A History of Their Life,” [18],
unpublished family history, copy in MMMRF; TF, 317, 325–26, 328, 372, 377,
397; Isaac Chauncey Haight, Journal, 1852–62, May 1, Dec. 1, 1857, photocopy
of manuscript, CHL. For the use of the terms “Old Town” and “New Town,”
see Christopher J. Arthur, AJ2; Daniel S. Macfarlane, AJ2; Elias Morris, state-
ment, Feb. 2, 1892, CM; Clewes; John Henry Willis, JDL1-BT 4:39.
7. Martin Slack and George K. Bowering, dispatch, in “Celebrations of the 24th
of July,” Deseret News, Aug. 19, 1857; Cedar Stake Journal, July 24, 1857,
Palmer Collection; John D. Lee to Brigham Young, Nov. 4, 1856, Incom-
ing Correspondence, YOF. For examples of using the slogan “terror to evil
doers,” see “More of the Doings on the 24th,” Deseret News, Aug. 8, 1860;
Fancher, 136. The biblical reference is Romans 13:3. Young men in Ogden,
Utah, carried the slogan on their banner on July 24, 1855. “Anniversaries,”
Deseret News, Aug. 1, 1855.
8. Palmer, 3; JHM, Aug. 2, 1857, 130. Brooks2, 52, has Haight making the
statement on Sept. 6, 1857, after the Arkansas company passed through
Cedar City. She cites “ ‘Cedar City Ward Records,’ now reported to be in the
archives of the Latter-day Saints church historian.” Bagley, 120, 407, follows
Brooks. The record in question, however, was never sent to “the archives
of the Latter-day Saints church historian.” A set of minutes from the Cedar
City Ward for 1857 is in the William R. Palmer collection at Southern Utah
University but lacks the quote in question. Palmer reported that Brooks got
her information on Haight’s speech from him but misdated it:
Mrs. Brooks . . . has her meetings mixed. Perhaps I am partly to blame for that
for I think it was I who gave her the substance of Haight’s speech. The time
element was not important to me then, but his speech was. She assumes that
this speech was directed at the Fancher party. This is a mistake. The speech
was made before the Fanchers were ever heard of. It was not aimed at any
traveling party but rather at the coming Johnston’s Army.
In the lefthand margin, Palmer wrote that his source was a “Cedar City
lost minute Book.” William R. Palmer to Dabney Otis Collins, Dec. 16,
1958, Palmer Material, First Presidency General Administration Files. The
“lost” minute book may be one burned by Kate Carter, longtime head of the
Daughters of Utah Pioneers. See Russell R. Rich, “The Mountain Meadows
Massacre,” in Russell R. Rich, Collection, BYU; Peter M. Hansen, “The
Mountain Meadows Massacre,” Feb. 1974, 5, Rich Collection.
9. Smith, Sept. 13, 1857, in “Remarks”; Wells to Johnson, Aug. 13, 1857, Letter
Book, p. 97, Nauvoo Legion (Utah) Adj. Gen. Records, 1851–70, CHL.
10. William R. Palmer to Joseph Anderson, Oct. 16, 1959, Palmer Material.
11. See Acts and Resolutions Passed by the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Utah,
during the Sixth Annual Session, 1856–57 (Salt Lake City: James McKnight,
1857), 19; Gardner, 318–24; George A. Smith, Sept. 13, 1857, in “Remarks,”
Deseret News, Sept. 23, 1857.
Notes to Page 131 337

12. Higbee, deposition, June 15, 1896, 2, in CM; OIMD; MRIMD; Morris,
statement, Feb. 2, 1892, CM; Cedar City Utah Stake, General Minutes, Nov.
6, 1856, CHL.
13. Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:41, 45; John W. Bradshaw, JDL1-BT 4:74;
Hawley, 15; PSHR, Aug. 28, 1857, 2nd sec., 34.
14. George Powers and P. M. Warn, in “Horrible”; S. B. Honea, in “Outrages”;
George B. Davis, in “Letter from San Bernardino,” San Francisco Daily Eve-
ning Bulletin, Nov. 12, 1857; James Pearce, JDL1-BT 4:100–2; MU, 219.
15. Joel White, JDL1-BT 4:5, JDL1-PS 4:29–30; Mary S. Campbell, AJ1.
According to Harmony resident Benjamin Platt, word of the poisoning had
also reached John D. Lee. Benjamin Platt, Reminiscences, 5, typescript,
CHL. Rumors, including false rumors of poisoning, have contributed to
group violence throughout history. See, e.g., Donald L. Horowitz, The Deadly
Ethnic Riot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 74–88; Bau-
meister, 86–87, 259. Rumors can taint perceptions and become self-fulfilling
prophecies. “The bad report that reached Cedar in advance of the company
naturally stirred up the anger of the citizens,” Mary Campbell claimed. “And
when finally the company came along, they behaved every bit as badly as they
were reported to have acted in the other settlements through which they had
previously passed.” Campbell, AJ2; Campbell, AJ1.
16. Campbell, AJ1; Campbell, AJ2. Campbell may have misremembered the
sequence of events. Philip Klingensmith, a perpetrator who turned state’s
evidence, was asked under oath, “Did you have any counsel in which this
emigrant train was referred to previous to the arrival of the emigrant train, or
previous to their passing through Cedar City?” He replied, “No, sir.” JDL1-
BT 3:48, JDL1-PS 3:21–22. If Klingensmith was correct, then Haight’s
statement may have been made not long after the emigrants passed through
the city.
17. “Horrible.”
18. “BY.” Another man later claimed he overheard an early 1870s conversation of
John M. Higbee, full of formulaic phrases, in which Higbee admitted a con-
spiracy between himself, Klingensmith, and Haight to “make some money
easily and quickly.” Sam Gould, statement, undated, typescript, Juanita
Brooks Collection, USHS.
19. Bowering, 230. Evidence on the date of their arrival is conflicting. Mormons
situated at Mountain Meadows uniformly recalled that the emigrants arrived
there by Saturday evening at the latest. See D. W. Tullis, AJ1; Rachel Ham-
blin, statement, May 20, 1859, in Carleton, 10; Ellott Willden, AJ2; Corr2.
Because the emigrants spent two nights camped between Cedar City and the
Meadows, they must have passed through the city no later than Thursday.
Lee placed the emigrants’ arrival on Wednesday or Thursday. “LC”; “LLC.”
SAJ puts the emigrants at or near Parowan on Thursday, Sept. 3, meaning
they would have arrived in Cedar on Friday. Smith may have kept a daybook
in fall 1857 and used it to record dates to which he later added details and

additional comments, but internal evidence indicates that the extant diary was
penned after 1861. Also supporting a Friday passage is Philip Klingensmith,
JDL1-BT 3:47–48.
20. Bowering, 230; Charles Willden Sr., deposition, Feb. 18, 1882, CM; Chat-
terley; Fish, 57; Map of Cedar City, AJ1. Bowering’s journal recorded that
the Arkansas company had between twelve and fourteen wagons. Willden
remembered the emigrants having twenty.
21. Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:2, 58–59, JDL1-RS 2:19; Argus, open let-
ter to Brigham Young, July 20, 18[71], in “History of Mormonism,” Corinne
(UT) Reporter, July 22, 1871. On the location of Samuel Jackson’s farm, see
Iron County Recorder, Deeds, 1851–1961, Book A, 138, Series 6205, Utah
State Archives, Salt Lake City, UT. At Lee’s first trial in 1875, Jackson could
not recall the transaction. Samuel Jackson Sr., JDL1-BT 5:327, JDL1-PS
11:2, JDL1-RS 9:27.
22. Fish, 57–58. Fish was reporting what he heard from Stephen Barton in
Paragonah on Sept. 11, 1857. See also T. S. W., “Mountain Me[a]dow Mas-
sacre,” 17, Articles Pertaining to the Mormons in Utah, ca. 1860, CHL.
23. Bowering, 230. Parker2, 11, confirms that the grain was ground by a local
miller. See also Argus, open letter to Brigham Young, July 20, 18[71], in
“History of Mormonism”; Willden, deposition, Feb. 18, 1882, CM.
24. Bowering, 230; Willden, deposition, Feb. 18, 1882, CM; Pitchforth, Sept. 9,
1857. Additional Mormon reminiscences—most of them hearsay—recount
taunts, threats, and near-fights when the emigrants passed through Cedar
City. Morris, statement, Feb. 2, 1892, CM; JHM1907; James H. Martineau
to Susan [Martineau], May 3, 1876, James Henry Martineau, Collec-
tion, CHL; “LC”; “LLC”; MU, 218–19; Laban Morrill, JDL2-BT 1:6, 9;
Christopher J. Arthur, AJ1; Fish, 57–58.
25. NJ1908; Bowering, 230; Fish, 57–58.
26. Christopher J. Arthur, AJ1. On the location of the store, see Map of Cedar
City, AJ1.
27. Annie Elizabeth Hoag, JDL1-BT 4:26–27, JDL1-PS 5:16–17, JDL1-RS 4:12.
28. Annie Elizabeth Hoag, JDL1-BT 4:26, JDL1-PS 5:17, JDL1-RS 4:12; Philip
Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:3, JDL1-PS 2:34, JDL1-RS 2:19.
29. Ordinance enacted on Jan. 8, 1856, noted in Acts, Resolutions, and Memori-
als, Passed by the First Annual, and Special Sessions, of the Legislative Assembly
of the Territory of Utah, Begun and Held at Great Salt Lake City, on the 22nd
Day of September, A. D., 1851 (Salt Lake City: Brigham H. Young, 1852), 89;
“Bill for an Ordinance in Relation to Profanity & Drunkenness,” Cedar City
Council Ordinance Book, 1853–56, 1900–21, film 497772, FHL; Evelyn
K. Jones and York F. Jones, Mayors of Cedar City (Cedar City: Southern
Utah State College, 1986), 17. Profanity laws originated in early America
and continue in some parts of the country today. See, e.g., The Code of 1650,
Being a Compilation of the Earliest Laws and Orders of the General Court of
Connecticut . . . (Hartford: Silas Andrus, 1822), 32; Laws of the State of New York,

Passed at the First Meeting of the Eleventh Session of the Legislature of the Said
State, 681; Statutes of the State of Ohio . . . (Columbus: Samuel Medary, 1841),
257, paragraph 128; The Revised Statutes of the State of Missouri . . . ( Jefferson:
James Lusk, 1856), 630, sec. 30. On the Mormon practice of fining emigrants
for perceived offenses, see Unruh, 326; J. W. Goodell, letter to the editor, in
Portland Oregonian, Apr. 3, 1852, published in David L. Bigler, ed., A Winter
with the Mormons: The 1852 Letters of Jotham Goodell (Salt Lake City: Tanner
Trust Fund, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, 2001), 70–71;
Diary of Dr. Thomas Flint: California to Maine and Return in 1851–1855, 2nd
ed. (Hollister, CA: Evening Free Lance, n.d.), 79.
30. “LC”; “LLC.”
31. Morris, statement, Feb. 2, 1892, CM; Notes regarding Mountain Meadows
Massacre, undated, AJ1.
32. Campbell, AJ1; Morris, statement, Feb. 2, 1892, in CM. Elias Morris and
Daniel Macfarlane later claimed the emigrants also insulted children and
other women in Cedar City. Morris, statement, Feb. 2, 1892, in CM; Daniel
S. Macfarlane, AJ2.
33. Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen, Culture of Honor: The Psychology of
Violence in the South (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 5; Bertram
Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 53–54. In an 1872 interview about
the massacre, John D. Lee said that an emigrant man insulted “the widow
Evans, this side o’ Corn Creek,” and that “her folks got out with guns and
swore revenge on the whole outfit.” Beadle1. “The widow Evans” appears to
be a pseudonym for Barbara Morris. That the published interview employs
pseudonyms becomes obvious from its use of “the widow Tomlinson” for a
wife of John A. Ray whose arm became infected and crippled after skinning
cattle. See Ray.
34. Morris, statement, Feb. 2, 1892, CM; Christopher J. Arthur, AJ1; Annie
Elizabeth Hoag, JDL1-BT 4:26, JDL1-PS 5:16–17, JDL1-RS 4:12; “LC”;
“LLC”; PSHR, Sept. 7, 1857, 2nd sec., 34; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT
3:3, JDL1-PS 2:34, JDL1-RS 2:19; Notes regarding the Mountain Meadows
Massacre, undated, AJ1; MU, 219.
35. See Mary H. White, AJ1; John Hamilton Jr., JDL1-BT 5:313–14, JDL1-RS
9:15–18. MU, 219, said that “after leaving Cedar City the emigrants camped
by the company, or cooperative field, just below Cedar City, and burned a
large portion of the fencing, leaving the crops open to the large herds of
stock in the surrounding country.” According to TF, 169, the cooperative
fields were west of the city.
36. Pitchforth, Sept. 9, 1857. Pitchforth was recording news conveyed by
Mormon expressman James Haslam, who was riding north to Salt Lake City.
For testimony that Bishop Klingensmith was in Cedar City and saw the
emigrants, see Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:2, 47–48, JDL1-PS 2:34,
JDL1-RS 2:19; Joel White, JDL1-BT 3:120–21.

37. Cedar City Ward, Parowan Stake, Relief Society Minute Book, Sept. 10,
1857, CHL.
38. “Church History,” Times and Seasons 3, no. 9 (1842): 709; Revelation recorded
July 12, 1843, published in Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1876), 425–27 (current
D&C 132:19–27).
39. Woodruff, Mar. 15, 1856.
40. On the role of rumors in sparking violence, see Donald L. Horowitz, The
Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 74–88;
Tambiah, 281–82.
41. Martineau to Susan, May 3, 1876, Martineau Collection; JHM1907; Ordi-
nance for creating a police force for Cedar City, Aug. 4, 1855, Ordinance
Book No. 1, Cedar City, quoted in Jones and Jones, Mayors of Cedar City, 16.
42. Chatterley.
43. JHM1907; Martineau to Susan, May 3, 1876, Martineau Collection. Martineau
left Parowan to scout for U.S. troops on Friday, Sept. 4, after the council meeting
had taken place. JHM, Sept. 4, 1857; Joseph Fish, Reminiscence and Journal,
Aug. 26–Sept. 8, 1857, Joseph Fish, Collection, CHL; Fish, 55–57.
44. George A. Smith to Geo. C. Bates, November 22, 1874, Letterpress Copy-
book, Bleak Papers, 1861–1989, CHL. Smith said John D. Lee shared
Haight’s contempt for Dame.
45. Staub, 237.
46. Baumeister, 254.
47. Brigham Young, Discourse, Aug. 16, 1857, reported by George D. Watt, in
Historian’s Office, Reports of Speeches, CHL.
48. E. H. Blackburn, in PGM, Aug. 30, 1857; Elias Smith, Journal, Aug. 11,
1857, CHL; JHM, Aug. 24, Sept. 4, 1857, 133; Fish, 53; James C. Snow,
remarks, in PGM, Aug. 30, 1857.
49. Diarist Samuel Pitchforth recorded that news of the speech had reached
Nephi by Aug. 19, 1857. Pitchforth, Aug. 19, 22, 1857.
50. MU, 219; Ellott Willden, AJ2; Ellott Willden2, AJ2; Ellott Willden, AJ1. The
Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., defines brush as “a forcible rush, a hostile
collision or encounter.”
51. Thomas T. Willis, JDL1-BT 4:32, JDL1-PS 5:21–22, JDL1-RS 4:15. For
William Willis’s status as a veteran, see Norma Baldwin Ricketts, The Mor-
mon Battalion: U.S. Army of the West, 1846–1848 (Logan: Utah State Univer-
sity Press, 1996), 21, 48, 70, 79, 240–44, 249. As a member of the Mormon
Battalion in the Mexican War, Willis trained for battle but never saw any real
action.
52. Conversation with Samuel Knight, recorded in Cannon, June 13, 1895; Ellott
Willden, AJ1.
53. Hoth, Oct. 13–15, 1856.
54. Holt, 19–22, 39–42, 48–51, 70–71; Knack, 34–36, 39–47; Nuwuvi, 39–42,
48–51, 70–71; Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indian Empires in the

Early American West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 7,
57–58, 84–86, 108–11, 120, 136, 141–43, 148; Carling I. Malouf and John
M. Findlay, “Euro-American Impact Before 1870,” in William C. Sturtevant,
ed., Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 11, Great Basin (Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1986), 506; George Q. Cannon, Journal,
Nov. 3, 1849, in Michael N. Landon, ed., To California in ‘49, vol. 1, The
Journals of George Q. Cannon, ed. Adrian W. Cannon and Richard E. Turley
Jr. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1999), 41; George A. Smith to Franklin
D. Richards, Apr. 19, 1854, reprinted in “Foreign Intelligence—Deseret,”
Millennial Star 16 (1854): 584.
55. Ardis E. Parshall, “ ‘Pursue, Retake & Punish’: The 1857 Santa Clara
Ambush,” Utah Historical Quarterly 73 (Winter 2005): 64–86; [Brigham
Young] to Aaron Johnson, Feb. 3, 1857, Letterpress Copybook 3:352, YOF;
Brigham Young to Bishops & Presidents South, Feb. 6, 1857, Letterpress
Copybook 3:387, YOF; Wayne Gard, Frontier Justice (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1949), 190, 192.
56. Parshall, “ ‘Pursue, Retake & Punish,’ ” 74–75, 74–75n24, 79.
57. Chad Foulger and Chad M. Orton, “February 1857, Attack on John Tobin,”
Oct. 18, 2007, MMMRF.
58. Ellott Willden, AJ1.
59. Ellott Willden, AJ2; Ellott Willden2, AJ2; Unattributed notes, likely from
discussion with Ellott Willden, AJ1.
60. “LC”; “LLC”; OIMD; MRIMD. Lee dated his visit with Haight as Saturday,
Sept. 5.
61. Rachel Lee, interview, Dec. 27, 1874, in “Mountain Meadow Massacre: The
Herald’s Special Correspondent Interviews the Noted Rachel, Wife of John
D. Lee,” Salt Lake Daily Herald, Jan. 1, 1875.
62. After Lee’s arrest in 1874, Rachel Lee claimed that Haight had Lee “thrown
out of all offices—church, territory, county and militia.” Lee, interview,
Dec. 27, 1874, in “Correspondent Interviews the Noted Rachel.” Though
the people at Harmony had voted to remove Lee as their presiding elder in
1856, in Sept. 1857 Lee was still a militia major and a government-appointed
farmer to the Indians. Documents of the period also show Haight defend-
ing Lee and interacting amicably with him. John D. Lee to Brigham Young,
Aug. 22, 1856, Incoming Correspondence, YOF; Isaac C. Haight to Heber
C. Kimball, Aug. 20, 1856, Divorce and Family Difficulties Files, YOF;
HBM, July 4–5, 24, 1857; JHM, Aug. 16, 1857, 132.
63. Haight Journal, 1852–62, Mar. 4–8, 1856.
64. Ellott Willden, AJ2; Mary S. Campbell, AJ1; Mary S. Campbell, AJ2;
D. W. Tullis, AJ1; Ellott Willden, AJ1; McGlashan; Whitney, 1:699.
65. Ellott Willden, AJ1. Jenson routinely omits the “e” in “the” in his field notes.
We have supplied them throughout the book for readability.
66. Ibid.
67. Mary S. Campbell, AJ2; Mary S. Campbell, AJ1.

68. Conversation with Samuel Knight, in Cannon, June 13, 1895; Samuel
Knight, AJ1. On Knight’s position as counselor, see Santa Clara Ward,
St. George Stake, Manuscript History and Historical Reports, 1857, CHL.
69. Knack, 2, 10–17.
70. PKS; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:5–6, JDL1-PS 2:35–36, JDL1-
RS 3:20–21; OIMD; MRIMD. On Klingensmith’s zealousness, see Laban
Morrill, JDL2-BT 1:9; Ellott Willden, AJ1. White testified that he and
Klingensmith left the day after the emigrants passed through Cedar City. See
Joel White, JDL1-BT 3:120–21, 4:3.
71. Joel White, JDL2-BT 1:15. Compare similar words in White, JDL1-BT
3:120–21; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:5, 69. Under close question-
ing at Lee’s trial, Klingensmith virtually conceded that the Indians did not
need to be pacified because they were not stirred up in the first place. Philip
Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:50–51.
72. Joel White, JDL2-BT 1:15–16; Joel White, JDL1-BT 3:121–22; Philip
Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:5–6. See also PKS.
73. MU, 217–18.
74. “LC”; “LLC”; MU, 226.
75. Joel White, JDL1-BT 4:3–4; Joel White, JDL2-BT 1:16, 28; Philip
Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:6.
76. Joel White, JDL1-BT 3:122.
77. Richard S. Robinson, JDL1-BT 5:320. Robinson did acknowledge receiv-
ing a letter that had been delivered to Amos Thornton, but it was the letter
delivered the following week by Joseph Clewes. See Richard S. Robinson,
JDL1-BT 5:320, 324; Clewes; Richard S. Robinson, AJ1.
78. Joel White, JDL1-BT 3:122–23; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:54.
79. Joel White, JDL2-BT 1:16, 18; Joel White, JDL1-BT 4:4; Philip
Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:6; PKS.
81. PKS; Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:6–7.
82. White, JDL1-BT 4:5–6.
83. MU, 218.
84. “LC”; “LLC”; MU, 218–19. In MU, 218, the location of the meeting is
changed to the iron works. On the location of Haight’s house, see Philip
Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:7, 40.
85. MU, 219–20; “LC”; “LLC.”
86. Staub, xi, xiv, 5.
87. MU, 220. See also “LC”; “LLC.”
88. See John D. Lee, in PGM, Sept. 27, 1857; Woodruff, Sept. 29, 1857; John
D. Lee to Brigham Young, Nov. 20, 1857, Incoming Correspondence, YOF;
David Tullis and [Albert] Hamblin, interviews, Apr. 1859, in J. Forney to
A. B. Greenwood, Aug. 1859, in SDoc42, 76–78; Carleton, 8–15.
89. Morris, statement, Feb. 2, 1892, CM. See also NJ1908; NJ1910.
90. MU, 218–20. However, “LC” merely says that he “did just as [he] was ordered.”

91. OIMD; MRIMD; Acts and Resolutions Passed by the Legislative Assembly of the
Territory of Utah, during the Sixth Annual Session, 1856–7 (Salt Lake City:
James McKnight, 1857), 32, sec. 14.
92. See, e.g., MC, 1:181–82, Sept. 15, 1858. Haight and Lee “were both like
bull dogs, too proud to yield.” Journals, 216, June 12, 1859.
93. MU, 221.
94. Extracts from Jacob Hamblin’s journal, in Jacob Hamblin to Brigham
Young, Nov. 13, 1871, General Office Files, President’s Office Files, YOF;
Jacob Hamblin, statement, Nov. 28, 1871, General Office Files, President’s
Office Files, YOF.
95. Annie Elizabeth Hoag, JDL1-PS 5:16–17, JDL1-RS 4:12, JDL1-BT
4:26–27; MU, 220. See also “LC”; “LLC.”
96. Annie Elizabeth Hoag, JDL1-BT 4:26, JDL1-PS 5:16, JDL1-RS 4:11–12;
Mary S. Campbell, AJ1.
97. Baumeister, 254.
98. John D. Lee to Brigham Young, Sept. 24, 1853, Incoming Correspon-
dence, YOF.
100. “LC”; “LLC”; MU, 219–20.
101. MU, 226; Mary S. Campbell, AJ1.
102. Wells to Johnson, Aug. 13, 1857, Letter Book, 97, Nauvoo Legion (Utah)
Adj. Gen. Records.
103. Woodruff, Sept. 1, 1857; Brigham Young, President’s Office Journal, Sept.
1, 1857, YOF; DBY, 71, Sept. 1, 1857; Huntington, Sept. 1, 1857.
104. HOJ, Aug. 25, Sept. 1, 1857; Huntington, Sept. 1, 1857.
105. Huntington, [Aug. 31], 1857.
106. Ibid., Sept. 1, 1857.
107. Bagley, 112–14.
108. Ibid., 379. See also Brooks2, 41–42. Bagley also places into his narrative the
report that James Gemmell, a frontier adventurer and Mormon convert, was
in Young’s office on Sept. 1 and overheard Hamblin tell Young of the mis-
conduct of members of the Arkansas party, whom he had met at Corn Creek
while traveling with George A. Smith. “If he (Brigham) were in command
of the Legion he would wipe them out,” Young supposedly said. See Bagley,
285. To give credibility to the incident, Bagley suggests Gemmell may have
tried to blackmail Young and was forced to flee from Utah in order to save his
life. The details in the sources he gives, however, are contradictory, and some
appear to be anachronistic. See Richard E. Turley Jr., “Parley P. Pratt and the
Mountain Meadows Massacre,” symposium paper, Religion & Reaction: The
Life, Times, and Legacy of Parley P. Pratt, Fort Smith, AR, Apr. 21, 2007.
109. See, e.g., Furniss, 139, 142–44.
110. Huntington, Sept. 1, 1857.
111. D. B. Huntington, Voucher No. 17, Sept. 11, 1857, Superintendent’s
Vouchers, Superintendent of Indian Affairs Files, YOF; U.S. Congress,

House, Accounts of Brigham Young, Superintendent of Indian Affairs in Utah
Territory, 37th Cong., 2nd sess., 1862, H. Doc. 29, 85.
112. William H. Hooper, Voucher No. 27, Sept. 12, 1857, Superintendent’s
Vouchers, Superintendent of Indian Affairs Files, YOF; House, Accounts of
Brigham Young, Doc. 29, 90.
113. Both Dimick Huntington (Huntington, Sept. 10, 1857) and Wilford
Woodruff (Woodruff, Sept. 16, 1857) mention Tutsegavits’s ordination,
but George A. Smith wrote in a letter on “Sunday evening,” Sept. 13, “We
ordained Tutsegabbotts an Elder this Evening.” George A. Smith to Wil-
liam H. Dame, Aug. [Sept.] 12[–13], William H. Dame, Papers, CHL.
114. Jacob Hamblin, Journal, 1854–58, 82, Jacob Hamblin, Papers, CHL.
115. Woodruff, Sept. 16, 1857.
116. “Lee Trial.”
117. Hurt, 203.
118. MU, 220; “LC”; “LLC”; Annie Elizabeth Hoag, JDL1-RS 4:12, JDL1-PS
5:16, JDL1-BT 4:26.
119. MU, 226; “Execution of Lee!” Pioche Weekly Record, Mar. 24, 1877.
120. MU, 226; “Execution of Lee!”
Chapter 11
1. Washington County Court Records, Book A, 1854–72, 7, June 2, 1856, film
484840, FHL; Knack, 10–11.
2. D. W. Tullis, AJ1.
3. Ellott Willden, AJ1; Mary S. Campbell, AJ2; McGlashan.
4. Tullis, interview with Jacob Forney, Apr. 13, 1859, in Jacob Forney to
A. B. Greenwood, Aug. 1859, SDoc42, 76; Tullis, AJ1; McGlashan; Rogers.
Rogers mistakenly identifies Tullis as Carl Shirts.
5. Rachel Hamblin, statement, May 20, 1859, in Carleton, 10.
6. Samuel Knight, JDL2-BT 1:32.
7. Samuel Knight, JDL2-BT 1:19; William Hartley, Stand by My Servant
Joseph: The Story of the Joseph Knight Family and the Restoration (Salt Lake
City: Deseret Book and Joseph Fielding Smith Institute, 2003), 198–99,
424–25; Arthur Knight Hafen, “Samuel Knight, 1832–1910: Frontiersman,
Indian Missionary, Early Southern Utah Pioneerman and Churchman,”
in Joyce Wittwer Whittaker, History of Santa Clara Utah: “A Blossom in the
Desert” (St. George, UT: Santa Clara Historical Society, 2003), 133–39;
Robert Hafen Briggs, “Samuel Knight and Events Incident to the Utah
War, 1857–1858: A Preliminary Study” (unpublished paper written for
the Swiss Days Celebration and Samuel Knight Reunion, Sept. 21–23, 2001,
Santa Clara, UT), 3, copy in MMMRF; Robert Hafen Briggs, “Research-
ing Samuel Knight: A Preliminary Study” (unpublished paper written for
the Swiss Days Celebration and Samuel Knight Reunion, Sept. 21–23, 2001,
Santa Clara, UT), 7, 10, copy in MMMRF; Robert Hafen Briggs, “The
Missing Memoir of Samuel Knight: A Preliminary Study” (unpublished

paper written for the Swiss Days Celebration and Samuel Knight Reunion,
Sept. 21–23, 2001, Santa Clara, Utah), 5, copy in MMMRF. On the cool
climate of the Meadows and surrounding area, see Pearson H. Corbett, Jacob
Hamblin: The Peacemaker (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1952), 95–96.
8. Conversation with Samuel Knight, recorded in Cannon, June 13, 1895;
Samuel Knight, JDL2-BT 1:19, 32; Samuel Knight, AJ1. According to
Cannon’s account of his interview with Knight, “some of the emigrants were
very boastful and seemed to be filled with a wicked spirit.”
9. Albert Hamblin, statement, May 20, 1859, in Carleton, 12–13.
10. Marcy, 57, 61–62, 67–68, 133.
11. Forney to Greenwood, Aug. 1859, SDoc42, 78; McGlashan; Jacob Hamblin,
statement, in Carleton, 6. Overlooking the area of the emigrants’ campsite on
Sept. 11, 2007, Richard Wilson, a cattle rancher and third-great grandson of
Alexander Fancher, observed that the draw would be the ideal place to keep cat-
tle for the night. Richard Wilson to Barbara Jones Brown, Oct. 18, 2007, email.
12. Forney to Greenwood, Aug. 1859, SDoc42, 78; J. Forney to Elias Smith,
May 5, 1859, in “Visit of the Superintendent of Indian Affairs to South-
ern Utah,” Salt Lake City Deseret News, May 11, 1859; J. Forney to Kirk
Anderson, May 5, 1859, in Salt Lake City Valley Tan, May 10, 1859; Shirts.
13. McGlashan; Parker2, 12; Stenhouse, 427.
14. Rachel Hamblin, statement, May 20, 1859, in Carleton, 10.
15. Ellott Willden, AJ2; Ellott Willden, AJ1; Mary S. Campbell, AJ2.
16. Ellott Willden, AJ2; Whitney, 1:699; “Mountain Meadows,” notes of discus-
sion with an unnamed informant, undated, AJ1.
18. D. W. Tullis, AJ1.
19. Conversation with Knight, in Cannon, June 13, 1895; Samuel Knight, AJ1.
20. Conversation with Knight, in Cannon, June 13, 1895; Knight; Samuel
Knight, AJ1; Samuel Knight, JDL2-BT 1:23.
21. “Gilbert Morse,” Salt Lake Daily Tribune, Sept. 28, 1876; Benjamin Platt,
Reminiscences, 1899–1905, typescript, 5–6, CHL; Annie Elizabeth Hoag,
JDL1-PS 5:16.
22. Annie Elizabeth Hoag, JDL1-BT 4:25–27, JDL1-PS 5:15–17, JDL1-RS
4:11–12; HBM, [Sept. 6], 1857; MU, 219.
23. Annie Elizabeth Hoag, JDL1-RS 4:12, JDL1-PS 5:17, JDL1-BT 4:25–27.
On Hoag’s relationship to Peter Shirts see, “The Lee Trial,” Pioche (NV)
Daily Record, July 29, 1875; “Chronology of Peter Shirts,” Nov. 1856, in
Mary Elizabeth Robinson Adams, Compiled information on Peter Shirts, ca.
1950–60, CHL; William W. Bishop, Closing argument, JDL1-PS 12:39.
24. Chatterley; “Gilbert Morse.”
25. Shirts.
26. Chatterley.
27. Gibbs, 53–54. Comanche, born around 1830, was living in the “Indian
Village located in the Suburbs of Cedar City” when the census taker came

through in June 1880. Utah, Iron County, Cedar City, 1880 U.S. Census,
Population Schedule, 375.
28. George W. Armstrong to Brigham Young, Aug. 29, 1857, Incoming Corre-
spondence, YOF; Huntington, Sept. 1, 1857, CHL; Jacob Hamblin, Journal,
1854–57, 81–82, in Jacob Hamblin, Papers, CHL; JH, Sept. 1, 1857. Cf.
James Lynch, affidavit, July 27, 1859, enclosed in S. H. Montgomery to
A. B. Greenwood, Aug. 17, 1859, USBIA.
29. HBM, [Sept.] 6, 1857.
30. “Gilbert Morse”; Platt Reminiscences.
31. Hoag said she believed most of the men from Harmony accompanied “John
D. Lee and the Indians” as they left the fort. Annie Elizabeth Hoag, JDL1-
BT 4:27. Other witnesses identify only Lee and Shirts as leaving with the
Indians. In addition, men who were at the Meadows during the week of the
massacre gave the names of more than fifty participants, but the only three
Harmony residents identified were Shirts, Lee, and his Indian ward, Lemuel.
32. “LC”; “LLC.”
33. D. W. Tullis, AJ1; Whitney, 1:699–700.
34. James Pearce, JDL1-BT 4:100.
35. William Young, JDL1-RS 4:30–32, JDL1-BT 4:56–57, JDL1-PS 5:41;
“Gilbert Morse.”
36. Hawley, 15. Hawley arrived in Parowan no later than Aug. 28 when the
PSHR, 2nd sec., 34, records a piece of news that he brought from Salt Lake
City. Given his speed, it is unlikely he knew about events at Corn Creek.
37. William Young, JDL1-BT 4:56–57.
38. Elias Morris, statement, Feb. 2, 1892, CM; Laban Morrill, JDL2-BT 1:3–4,
6–9; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:4–5; Joseph Sudweeks, “Concerning
Myself: The Life of Laban Morrill,” typescript, 10, in MMMRF; NJ1917;
Mary H. White, AJ1. Sudweeks includes a parenthetical statement about
Indians being present, which may be an editorial addition to Morrill’s origi-
nal statement. On the composition of the Cedar City high council, see CSM;
Isaac C. Haight to Erastus Snow, June 9, 1855, in St. Louis Luminary, Aug.
18, 1855. Elias Morris places the meeting on “Sunday morning.” Morris also
incorrectly identifies Samuel McMurdy as one of Klingensmith’s counselors.
McMurdy had been released in Oct. 1856, and Whittaker, his replacement,
was serving as Klingensmith’s counselor in Sept. 1857. Philip Klingensmith,
JDL1-BT 3:40; Cedar City Stake, General Minutes 1856, Oct. 19, 1856,
CHL.
39. Gibbs, 22; Sudweeks, “Life of Laban Morrill,” 10, 16–17, MMMRF.
40. CSM, 61.
41. Laban Morrill, JDL2-BT 1:4, 9, 15.
42. Ibid., JDL2-BT 1:3–4, 6; Sudweeks, “Life of Laban Morrill,” 10, MMMRF.
43. Morris, statement, Feb. 2, 1892, CM; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:4–5,
JDL1-PS 2:35; Laban Morrill, JDL2-PS 2:15–17, 18–19, JDL2-BT 1:6, 8–9;
NJ1917.

44. Sudweeks, “Life of Laban Morrill,” 10, MMMRF; Laban Morrill, JDL2-BT
1:3–4, 6.
45. Laban Morrill, JDL2-BT 1:10–11, JDL2-PS 2:20–21.
46. JHM1907.
47. Morris, statement, Feb. 2, 1892, CM; Laban Morrill, JDL2-BT 1:6–7, 9–11,
JDL2-PS 2:15–17, 19–21; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:4–5; NJ1917.
48. Morris, statement, Feb. 2, 1892, CM; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:4–5.
49. See Mary S. Campbell, AJ1; MU, 226; Daniel S. Macfarlane, AJ2; William
C. Stewart to Wilford Woodruff and Council, Nov. 1, 1890, in Wilford
Woodruff, General Correspondence Files, 1887–98, CHL; William Barton,
AJ1; Morris, statement, Feb. 2, 1892, CM.
50. Laban Morrill, JDL2-BT 1:9.
51. Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:4.
52. Laban Morrill, JDL2-PS 2:16–18, JDL2-BT 1:6–8. Morrill probably had
similar feelings to those of his neighbor, Nephi Johnson, who was not at the
meeting but told Haight to put off attacking the train “until He Rec[eived]
Word from President Young for I was satisfied What His Answer Would Be.”
NJ1910.
53. Laban Morrill, JDL2-BT 1:6–8.
54. The telegraph would not reach southern Utah for another decade. John
C. Clowes to Brigham Young, Feb. 18, 1867, in Historian’s Office, History
of the Church, manuscript, 1867, 175–78, CHL.
55. Sudweeks, “Life of Laban Morrill,” 12, MMMRF. In another version of
Sudweeks, “Life of Laban Morrill,” Daniel Macfarlane and Joseph H. Smith
are the names given of the men who left early. Liston, another high council
member who later claimed to oppose Haight, reported that he felt the same
danger. “But the Lord showed me my way and I walked in it, and he pre-
served me,” Liston said, without giving details. Commodore Perry Liston,
Autobiography, photocopy of typescript, 6, 7, BYU.
56. Laban Morrill, JDL2-BT 1:6.
57. Willden saw the two men early Monday morning at the Meadows. Ellott
Willden, AJ2. See also Clewes. White would later conflate this mission with
his earlier mission to stir up the Indians. Joel White, JDL1-BT 3:120–23,
4:3–6, JDL2-BT 1:15–18, JDL1-PS 4:18–21, JDL1-RS 3:26–29.
58. John M. Higbee, affidavit, June 15, 1896, 4, CM.
59. Whitney, 1:699–700; Ellott Willden, AJ2; Gibbs, 53–54.
60. Unattributed notes, likely from discussion with Ellott Willden, AJ1.
61. Gibbs, 53–54. Lee’s journals are full of his dreams and interpretations. See,
for example, MC, 1:61, 148, 151–53, 205, July 18, 1848, Feb. 5, 19, 1858,
Mar. 30, 1859.
62. See, for example, Bull Valley Snort, statement, Feb. 1894, CM; CHC, 4:152;
Leland H. Creer, Utah and the Nation (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1929), 201–2; David S. King, Mountain Meadows Massacre: A Search
for Perspective (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Corral of the Westerners, 1970),

13. “Bull Valley Snort” is a pseudonym for John M. Higbee, who wrote his
account of the massacre in 1894 while evading prosecution.
63. MU, 226–27; “Lee’s Confession,” New York Herald, Mar. 22, 1877; “LC”;
“LLC”; “Execution of Lee!” Pioche Weekly Record, Mar. 24, 1877; Beadle1. Lee
was probably also the person responsible for falsifying the county court minutes
that showed him at Harmony doing judicial duties on the same day. Washington
County Court Records, Book A, 1854–72, 23, Sept. 7, 1857, film 484840, FHL.
64. Shirts; Samuel Knight, AJ1; Samuel Knight, JDL2-BT 1:20–21. As early as
1853, one observer noted that the Paiutes at Harmony “appear to be perfectly
under the control of Major J D Lee . . . They reverence Colonel J D Lee as
the Mormon Chief & are willing to obey him.” William Wall, Report “of a
Detachment of the Nauvoo Legion Cavalry on the Expedition, to the extreme
Southern Settlements of the Territory of Utah,” Apr. 24–May 11, 1853, Utah
Territorial Militia Records, Series 2210, Utah State Archives, Salt Lake City,
UT. On the possible participation of other white men, see note 77 below.
65. Shirts; McGlashan. See also S. N. Carvalho, Incidents of Travel and Adven-
ture in the Far West; with Col. Fremont’s Last Expedition (New York: Derby &
Jackson, 1857), 176.
66. Beadle1; Hamblin, statement, in Carleton, 8. For Paiute use of skin paints,
see William Bright, ed., The Collected Works of Edward Sapir, vol. 10 (Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter, 1992), 817; James G. Bleak, Annals of the Southern
Utah Mission, ca. 1898–1907, 34, CHL. For the Indians at the massacre
being painted, see John Hamilton Sr. and John Hamilton Jr., JDL1-BT
5:311, 318; William Young, JDL1-BT 4:60.
67. Beadle1; Shirts; Jacob Hamblin, statement, in Carleton, 8; Terry, 48–49.
68. Shirts; Beadle1; Jacob Hamblin, statement, in Carleton, 8.
69. Beadle1; Jacob Hamblin, statement, in Carleton, 8; Shirts.
70. “Lee’s Confession,” New York Herald, Mar. 22, 1877; “Execution of Lee!”;
MU, 226–27; Jacob Hamblin, statement, in Carleton, 8; McGlashan.
71. “Children”; McGlashan.
72. “LC”; “LLC”; NJ1909; Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:45; Philip Klingen-
smith, JDL1-BT 3:29, 98, JDL1-PS 3:9, JDL1-RS 2:37; James Pearce,
JDL1-BT 4:114; Joel White, JDL1-BT 4:14; Jacob Hamblin, statement, in
Carleton, 8; McGlashan; Palmer, 8. Klingensmith called the Indians Bill and
Tom. Each man was hit in the thigh, “not an inch difference in the location
of the wounds.” McGlashan; Shirts.
73. Terry, 49. See also Rogers. Rea, 28–45, recorded Terry’s account without the
edits of the “professional writer,” and did not include this language.
74. Jacob Hamblin, statement, in Carleton, 8; Carleton, 30; Rogers.
75. Rachel and Albert Hamblin, statements, May 20, 1859, in Carleton, 11, 13.
76. Ellott Willden, AJ1; Ellott Willden, AJ2; “LC”; “LLC.”
77. The weight of evidence suggests Lee was the only white man among the
attackers but is not conclusive. Lee’s co-conspirators in the killings later in
the week admitted their presence at the final massacre but said Lee was the

only white in the Monday assault. See, e.g., Corr1. In 1874, Lee’s wife Rachel
claimed that four friends of “nerve, courage and discretion” had secretly gone
to the Meadows with her husband, and Lee reiterated this detail just before his
death. Rachel Lee, interview, Dec. 27, 1874, in “Mountain Meadow Massa-
cre: The Herald’s Special Correspondent Interviews the Noted Rachel, Wife
of John D. Lee,” Salt Lake Daily Herald, Jan. 1, 1875; “The Lee Execution,”
New York Herald, Mar. 25, 1877. The identity of these four has been a matter
of speculation but might include Willden and his fellows at Hamblin’s ranch
that morning, though Lee never said that they actually assisted in the attack.
Another possibility is that men from Harmony were with Lee at the time of
the first attack and returned to Harmony with some of the emigrants’ best
horses before the men from Washington and Cedar City arrived later in the
week. JDL1-BT 4:12–13; NJ1908. Deputy William H. Rogers published an
account in 1860 that purported to rely on a confession from an unidentified
participant. It maintained that “a large number” of whites from Cedar City and
other settlements were assigned to go to the Meadows for the Monday morn-
ing attack, where they painted and disguised themselves as Indians. See Rogers.
Rogers’s story may be a conflation of information in Carleton and Cradlebaugh
that hinges on what Paiute headman Jackson told officers who confronted him
in 1859. Jackson, however, was not present for the Monday attack, and his
account conflicts with the earliest known Paiute testimony. Hurt, 203.
79. Ibid.; “LC”; “LLC”; Ellott Willden2, AJ2; Ellott Willden, AJ1; Philip
Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:77; Beadle1.
80. Rogers; Jacob Hamblin, statement, in Carleton, 8; Forney to Greenwood,
Aug. 1859, in SDoc42, 78; Forney, 371; Forney to Smith, May 5, 1859, in
“Visit of the Superintendent of Indian Affairs”; Forney to Anderson, May 5,
1859, in Valley Tan, May 10, 1859; “LC”; “LLC”; “Execution of Lee!”; MU,
230; McGlashan; “Cates”; JHM1907.
81. Parker2, 12; Mitchell, 10–11, 15, 18; Whitney, 1:700–1; MU, 240.
82. Terry, 48, 94–95; “Children”; McGlashan.
83. Beadle1; Orson Welcome Huntsman, Diary, Jan. 20, 1898, 220, CHL; John
W. Van Cott, Utah Place Names (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press,
1990), 54–55; “Mountain Meadow Massacre,” Daily Union-Vedette, July 27,
1866. See also Orson W. Huntsman, A Brief History of Shoal Creek, Hebron
and Enterprise (St. George, UT: Dixie College, 1929), 3.
84. “LC”; “LLC.”
85. MU, 227.
86. “LC”; “LLC”; Shirts. See also Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:45; Jacob Hamblin,
JDL2-BT 1:87, JDL2-PS 3:3; Knight; Samuel Knight, AJ1; Clewes; MU, 229.
87. “Mountain Meadows,” notes of discussion with an unnamed informant,
undated, AJ1.
88. “Execution of Lee!”; MU, 226–27; “LC”; “LLC”; Conversation with Samuel
Knight, in Cannon, June 13, 1895; Samuel Knight, AJ1.

89. Knight; Samuel Knight, AJ1; Conversation with Samuel Knight, in Cannon,
June 13, 1895; “LC”; “LLC.” In his 1904 affidavit, Knight recalled that the
meeting occurred at 10:00 p.m. In earlier testimony at Lee’s second trial,
Knight remembered the encounter as near dusk. Samuel Knight, JDL2-
BT 1:20–21. On Leavitt being a counselor in the Southern Indian Mission
presidency, see Santa Clara Ward, St. George Stake, Manuscript History
and Historical Reports, 1857, CHL.
90. Samuel Knight, AJ1.
91. “Mountain Meadows,” notes of discussion with an unnamed informant,
undated, AJ1; Samuel Knight, JDL2-BT 1:20–22; Samuel Knight, AJ1;
Knight; Conversation with Samuel Knight, in Cannon, June 13, 1895.
Albert Hamblin said, “Dudley Leavett came up from Santa Clara in the
night, while the emigrants were camped here.” Carleton, 13.
92. MU, 227–28; “LC”; “LLC”; “Lee’s Confession,” New York Herald, Mar. 22,
1877; “Execution of Lee!”; Samuel Knight, JDL2-BT 1:22.
93. James Haslam, JDL2-BT 1:11–12. Haslam, 3, said, “Word came up to
Mr. Haight from John D. Lee, stating that the Indians had got the emi-
grants corralled, on the Mountain Meadows, and wanted to know what they
he should do.”
94. Clewes; Ronald W. Walker, “ ‘Save the Emigrants’: Joseph Clewes on the
Mountain Meadows Massacre,” BYU Studies 42, no. 1 (2003): 140–41.
95. “Made Gallant Ride to Prevent Massacre: Death of James H. Haslam,
Who Carried Dispatches at Time of Mountain Meadow Horror,” Deseret
Evening News, Mar. 15, 1913; John Stewart to Brian Reeves, June 22, 2002,
MMMRF; Dabney Otis Collins to William R. Palmer, Oct. 18, 1958, in
William R. Palmer Material, First Presidency, General Administration Files,
1923, 1932, 1937–67, CHL; OIMD; MRIMD.
96. Collins to Palmer, Oct. 18, 1958, in Palmer Material.
97. Haslam, 4; Clewes.
98. Clewes; Extracts from Jacob Hamblin’s journal, in Jacob Hamblin to
Brigham Young, Nov. 13, 1871, General Office Files, President’s Office
Files, YOF; Pitchforth, Sept. 9, 1857; Jacob Hamblin, statement, Nov.
28, 1871, General Office Files, President’s Office Files, YOF; Hurt, 202;
Haslam, 4–5; Charles B. Hancock, Autobiography, ca. 1882, CHL.
99. Hurt, 202; Brooks2, 49, 62, 65.
100. See for instance the calculations of William Palmer, notes on back page of a copy
of James Haslam, testimony, United States v. John D. Lee, Palmer Collection; Dab-
ney Otis Collins, Great Western Rides (Denver, CO: Sage Books, 1961), 246–72.
101. Retained draft of William H. Dame, express, Sept. 7, 1857, William H.
Dame, Papers, BYU; Haslam, 6. The retained draft shows that Dame either
recycled an identical letter sent a month earlier or initially misdated it Aug.
7. “Aug” was subsequently crossed out in pencil and redated “Sept.” Also,
“Duplicate” was written across the page, suggesting that Dame retained the
draft and sent the finished copy with Haslam.

102. Clewes; James H. Haslam, JDL2-BT 1:12–14. Haslam and Clewes differ on
who left first, but the two left at nearly the same time.
103. Clewes.
104. Clewes; Richard S. Robinson, AJ1; Ellott Willden, AJ1; Richard Robinson,
JDL1-BT 5:320, 324.
105. Lee later confirmed the critical role of Aden’s killing in the decision making
leading to the massacre. It was all “brought to a head by the killin’ of the
man at the spring,” he said. Beadle1; “LC”; “LLC.”
106. NJ1910. Paiute tradition was that those with plentiful harvests would
share their crops “freely with relatives and friends.” Based on Mormon
professions of friendship, Paiute women may have assumed they could
freely partake of the bountiful 1857 harvest. A year earlier in Las Vegas,
Paiute women, “perhaps taking missionary protestations of friendship at
face value,” similarly “entered the missionaries’ fields but were driven out,
‘which miffed some of them very much.’ ” Knack, 88.
107. NJ1910. NJ1908 recites, “I . . . advised him to wait until he received the
letter, or the answer, as it was a great responsibility to kill so many people.”
Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:59, does not mention this conversation but
portrays Johnson as unwilling to speak boldly to superiors.
108. NJ1908; NJ1910.
Chapter 12
1. JHM1907; James H. Martineau to Susan [Martineau], May 3, 1876, James
Henry Martineau, Collection, CHL; Retained draft of William H. Dame,
express, Sept. 7, 1857, William H. Dame, Papers, BYU; Haslam, 6.
2. William Barton, AJ2; William Barton, AJ1.
3. Brigham Young, Discourse, Aug. 16, 1857, reported by George D. Watt,
in Historian’s Office, Reports of Speeches, ca. 1845–85, CHL; Daniel
H. Wells to A. Johnson, Aug. 13, 1857, Letterpress Copybook, 97, Nauvoo
Legion (UT) Adj. Gen. Records, 1851–70, CHL.
4. SAJ, Sept. 8, 1857; George Powers, in “Horrible”; George A. Smith to
Brigham Young, Aug. 17, 1858, Incoming Correspondence, YOF, copy
in Historian’s Office, Letterpress Copybook 1:885–91, CHL; William
Barton, AJ1.
5. SAJ, Sept. 8, 1857; Jesse N. Smith, JDL1-BT 5:216–17; “Parowan,” notes
regarding the Mountain Meadows Massacre, undated, AJ1. On Edward Dal-
ton, see Jenson, 4:609; William C. McGregor, letter to the editor, Dec. 23,
1886, in “Slanders against the Dead and Living Refuted,” Deseret Evening
News, Dec. 27, 1886; Mark Ardath Dalton, John Dalton Book of Genealogy
(Long Beach, CA: Dalton Family Organization, 1964), 51.
6. SAJ, Sept. 8, 1857; Jesse N. Smith, JDL1-BT 5:216–17.
7. Ellott Willden, AJ2; Clewes; James Haslam, JDL2-BT 1:11.
8. “LC”; “LLC”; Ellott Willden, AJ2; Clewes; MU, 230; Bull Valley Snort
[ John M. Higbee], statement, Feb. 1894, typescript, 2, CM. Lee could

remember only six of the men but suggested he met a slightly larger com-
pany. “Another Confession,” New York Herald, Mar. 24, 1877; MU, 230.
A young man in Cedar City remembered seeing eight or ten armed men
leave the city early in the week. McGlashan. Information on Tait being a
British army officer comes from Bowering, 227–28.
9. “LC”; “LLC.”
10. Clewes.
11. Willden, AJ2; Willden2, AJ2; Ellott Willden, AJ1. Willden said he later saw
the two emigrants’ bodies “carried over a ridge” to conceal the killing. Lee
said that on Tuesday evening two Paiutes told him “they had seen two men
on horseback come out of the emigrants’ camp under full speed, and that
they went toward Cedar City.” Lee did not specify whether these emigrants
escaped Monday or Tuesday. “LC”; “LLC.” The fact that the two emigrants
did not stop at Hamblin’s ranch or Pinto for help suggests that they had
taken a different route to Leach’s Springs.
12. Clewes.
13. Isaac C. Riddle, JDL1-BT 4:122.
14. Ellott Willden, AJ2; Whitney, 1:699; “Mountain Meadows,” notes of discus-
sion with an unnamed informant, undated, AJ1.
15. “LC”; “LLC”; William Young, JDL1-BT 4:59–60, JDL1-RS 3:33–35.
16. “LC”; “LLC”; Jacob Hamblin, JDL2-BT 1:100–1.
17. Rogers; Carleton, 19–21.
18. Jacob Hamblin, JDL2-PS 3:16; Annie Elizabeth Hoag, JDL1-RS 4:13,
JDL1-PS 4:18.
19. “LC”; “LLC.”
20. Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-RS1:36, JDL1-PS 3:8, JDL1-BT 3:101; Nels
Anderson, Desert Saints: The Mormon Frontier in Utah (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1942), 192n31.
21. John A. Lee to L. W. Peterson, Aug. 4, 1938, CM.
22. M1877-10; M1877-12; M1911.
23. NJ1908.
24. Clewes; Jacob Hamblin, JDL2-BT 1:89; Clew/Will.
25. “LC”; “LLC”; MU, 229.
26. Ibid.
27. NJ1908; Samuel Knight, JDL2-BT 1:21–22; Jacob Hamblin, JDL2-BT
1:86–87, 99, JDL2-PS 3:2–3; Hoag, JDL1-BT 4:27–29, JDL1-PS 5:18,
JDL1-RS 4:13; Clew/Will.
28. Hurt, 203.
29. Jacob Hamblin, JDL2-PS 3:16. In the original shorthand “getting them
into the” is crossed out. Crossed-out phrases are common in the Patterson
shorthand, but there is no way of knowing by whom or when they were
crossed out.
30. Annie Elizabeth Hoag, JDL1-RS 4:13, JDL1-PS 4:18.
31. “LC”; “LLC”; MU, 229.

32. MC, 2:214, Oct. 7, 1872; MU, 229; Beckwith, 119–21. For another explana-
tion of how Lee got his nickname, see Rogers.
33. “LC”; “LLC.”
34. James M. Mangum, deposition, July 5, 1875, MBB.
35. NJ1910.
36. “LC”; “LLC.”
37. MU, 229; “LC”; “LLC”; “Execution of Lee!” Pioche (NV) Weekly Record, Mar.
24, 1877. According to MU, the messenger “was either Edwards or Adair.” In
“LC,” Lee says “I think his [the messenger’s] name was Edwards.” The only
Edwards known to have gone to the Meadows was fifteen-year-old William
Edwards of Cedar, who did not see Lee there until Wednesday afternoon at
the earliest—after the time that Lee says he sent the message. Washington
militiaman George Adair came to the Meadows on Monday night, later said
he had seen messages at the Meadows, and was a mail carrier by profession.
See David O. McKay, Diary, July 27, 1907, UofU.
38. “LC”; “LLC”; NJ1908; NJ1909; Jacob Hamblin, JDL2-BT 1:88.
39. “LC”; “LLC”; MU, 231.
40. “LC”; “LLC.”
41. Mary S. Campbell, AJ1.
43. Clewes; Clew/Will.
44. Clew/Will; Clewes.
45. Ibid. Willden later identified himself as the “Wilson” in Clewes’s account.
Clew/Will.
46. Clewes.
47. Clew/Will; Clewes.
48. Clewes.
49. Bull Valley Snort [Higbee], statement, Feb. 1894, 2–3, CM.
51. Bull Valley Snort [Higbee], statement, Feb. 1894, 3, CM; “LC”; “LLC”; MU,
229; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:82; Samuel McMurdy, JDL2-BT 1:33;
Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:55.
52. “LC”; “LLC”; MU, 230; Joel White, JDL1-BT 3:124, 4:8–10, 14; James
Pearce, JDL1-BT 4:105; Samuel Pollock, JDL1-BT 5:183–84.
53. Albert Hamblin, statement, May 20, 1859, in Carleton, 13.
56. Rogers.
57. Joel White, JDL1-BT 4:10–11.
58. Ellott Willden, AJ2; “LC”; “LLC.”
59. “LC”; “LLC.”
60. Ibid.
61. Elias Morris, statement, Feb. 2, 1892, CM.
62. Jesse N. Smith, JDL1-BT 5:216–17; SAJ, Sept. 8–9, 1857.

63. Welch; J. Ward Christian, statement, Oct. 18 1857, in “The Late Outrages on
the Plains—Another Account,” Los Angeles Star, Oct. 31, 1857; S. B. Honea, in
“Outrages”; Willson Gates Nowers, note to Andrew Jenson, AJ1. On Fillmore’s
bishop, see “Statement of G. W. Davis,” Daily Alta California, Nov. 13, 1857.
64. Farnsworth; Honea, in “Outrages”; Christian, Oct. 18, 1857, in “Late Out-
rages on the Plains”; Welch; Willson G. Nowers, AJ1; Philo T. Farnsworth,
JDL1-BT 5:279–80. See also “How Indian Creek Came by Its Name,”
in Monuments to Courage: A History of Beaver County, ed. Aird G. Merkley
(Beaver County, UT: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1948), 17–18.
65. Farnsworth; Christian, Oct. 18, 1857, in “Late Outrages on the Plains”; Welch.
66. Farnsworth; Honea, in “Outrages”; Welch; “William A. Wilson,” in An
Illustrated History of Los Angeles County, California (Chicago: Lewis Publishing,
1889), 676–77.
67. Honea, in “Outrages”; Farnsworth; Welch; Knack, 41–44.
68. Honea, in “Outrages”; Welch.
69. Welch; Honea, in “Outrages”; Monuments to Courage, 17–18, 22–25;
Farnsworth.
70. Honea, in “Outrages”; Welch; PSHR, Sept. 10, 1857, 2nd sec., 34; Willson
Gates Nowers, note to Andrew Jenson, AJ1.
71. Farnsworth.
72. Silas S. Smith, JDL1-BT 5:222–25; Farnsworth; Willson Gates Nowers, note
to Andrew Jenson, AJ1; SAJ, Sept. 9, 1857; Willson G. Nowers, AJ1.
73. Powers, in “Horrible”; William Mathews, letter to the editor, Oct. 8, 1857, in
San Diego Herald, Oct. 17, 1857; William Mathews, JDL1-BT 4:45–46; Dan
L. Thrapp, Encyclopedia of Frontier Biography (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark,
1988), 1401; John Ward Christian, Dictation, [1886], H. H. Bancroft
Manuscript Collection, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, CA, microfilm copy
located at CHL.
74. Powers, in “Horrible”; SAJ, Sept. 8–9, 1857; Mathews, letter to the editor,
Oct. 8, 1857, in San Diego Herald, Oct. 17, 1857; William Mathews, JDL1-
BT 4:45–47; E. C. Mathews, JDL1-BT 4:97–98; William Barton, AJ1; Chris-
tian Dictation, [1886]. Powers remembered the date as Sept. 18, but other
events in his narrative show his dating was off.
76. William Barton, AJ2; William Barton, AJ1.
77. Powers, in “Horrible”; Willson Gates Nowers, note to Andrew Jenson, AJ1;
Silas S. Smith, JDL1-BT 5:222–25; SAJ, Sept. 9, 1857; Willson G. Nowers,
AJ1; William Barton, AJ1; PSHR, Sept. 10, 1857, 2nd sec., 34; Farnsworth.
78. Farnsworth; William Mathews, JDL1-BT 4:47, JDL1-PS 5:33, JDL1-RS
4:24; Huntington, Sept. 1, 1857.
80. Ronald W. Walker, “Wakara Meets the Mormons, 1848–52: A Case Study
in Native American Accommodation,” Utah Historical Quarterly 70 (Summer
2002): 215–37; Farnsworth.

82. William Barton, AJ2; William Barton, AJ1; SAJ, Sept. 8–9, 1857. Cf. Jesse
N. Smith, JDL1-BT 5:216–17.
83. Barton, AJ2; Barton, AJ1; Morris, statement, Feb. 2, 1892, CM; “Parowan,”
notes regarding the Mountain Meadows Massacre, undated, AJ1.
84. Morris, statement, Feb. 2, 1892, CM.
85. Barton, AJ1; Morris, statement, Feb. 2, 1892, CM. In Higbee’s self-serving
account, which shifted blame for the massacre primarily to Lee, Higbee
claimed that during the meeting Dame wrote out orders and that he, Higbee,
delivered them to Lee at the Meadows. No council participants, however,
mentioned written orders. According to Higbee, the orders read: “Com-
promise with [the] Indians If Possible by letting them take all the stock and
go to their Homes and let [the] Company alone but on no Conditions you
are not to Precipitate a war with Indians while there is an Army M[a]rching
Against our People. As Indian Farmer and a Major in the Legion I trust you
[Lee] will have Influence enough to restrain Indians and Save the Company.
If not Possible Save Wimen and Children at all Hazards. Hoping you will be
able to give a good account of the Important duty Entrusted to your Charge.
I Call upon all good Citizens in That Part of the District to help you Cary
out the above Orders. In helping to Make Peace between the two Parties.”
Bull Valley Snort [Higbee], statement, Feb. 1894, 4, CM. The double nega-
tive in Higbee’s manuscript—“on no Conditions you are not”—is almost
certainly an unintentional writing error.
86. Barton, AJ1. On Morris’s involvement, see William C. Stewart to Wilford
Woodruff and Council, Nov. 1, 1890, in Wilford Woodruff, General Cor-
respondence Files, 1887–98, CHL. Dame said their conversation began again
at a “Second Mound,” four miles west of town. He claimed to follow Haight
through the night, hoping to dispel any misunderstanding. [Josiah Rogerson],
“Review of John D. Lee’s Life and Confessions,” typescript, 21–22, CM.
87. See [Rogerson], “Review of John D. Lee’s Life and Confessions,” 21, CM;
“LC”; “LLC”; MU, 256; Beadle1.
88. Powers, in “Horrible”; William Mathews, JDL1-BT 4:46, JDL1-PS 5:31–32,
JDL1-RS 4:23.
89. Willden, AJ1.
90. Extracts from Jacob Hamblin’s journal, in Jacob Hamblin to Brigham Young,
Nov. 13, 1871, General Office Files, President’s Office Files, YOF. The same
information, in a more formal statement, is in Jacob Hamblin, statement,
Nov. 28, 1871, General Office Files, President’s Office Files, YOF.
91. Macfarlane, AJ2.
92. William Mathews, JDL1-BT 4:47, JDL1-PS 5:32, JDL1-RS 4:24; John
H. Henderson, AJ1.
93. Farnsworth.
94. Morris, statement, Feb. 2, 1892, CM.
95. Macfarlane, AJ2.

96. NJ1917; John W. Bradshaw, JDL1-BT 4:75, 84–85; Samuel Pollock,
JDL1-BT 5:180; Samuel McMurdy, JDL2-BT 1:33; Nephi Johnson,
JDL2-BT 1:44.
97. Corr2. Cedar City militiaman Samuel Pollock testified he was told to take
a shovel or pick, as well as a gun, and that there were “spades, shovels and
picks in the wagons” when he went to the Meadows. JDL1-BT 4:68, 5:182.
98. John W. Bradshaw, JDL1-BT 4:75, 82, 85–86.
99. NJ1910; NJ1908; Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:43–44, 54–55, 59–61, 76–77,
JDL2-PS 2:66, 78–79.
100. NJ1909; NJ1908; NJ1917.
101. [ Josiah Rogerson], “Excerpts—From Bishop’s Confessions of John D. Lee,”
undated, 7, CM.
102. Hamilton Wallace, Reminiscence, undated, Collection of Mormon Diaries,
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., microfilm copy at CHL.
103. Jerrold J. Myrup to Brian Reeves, [June 2002], MMMRF.
104. The man said to have avoided the massacre by feigning fever was David
Tullis. Verda Tullis, “David Wilson Tullis,” ca. 1953, 4, copy in MMMRF;
Leila Mangum Bradford, “David Wilson Tullis,” May 30, 1988, 7, unpub-
lished manuscript, MMMRF; Sharon M. Bliss, ed., “Autobiographies/
Biography of Tullis, Mangum, Pulsipher, Maughan, Davenport, Dahle,
Griffin, etc.,” typescript, [1995], copy at FHL; “David Wilson Tullis,” entry
submitted by Leilani Grange, in Sons of Utah Pioneers, Conquerors of the
West: Stalwart Mormon Pioneers ([Sandy, UT]: Agreka Books, 1999), 4:2600–
2602. Two witnesses, however, placed Tullis at the scene of the massacre.
[James] Lynch, statement, in “The Mountain Meadows Massacre: Surviving
Daily Evening Bulletin, May 31, 1859; Albert Hamblin, statement, May 20,
1859, in Carleton, 14; [Albert] Hamblin, interview with Jacob Forney, in
J. Forney to A. B. Greenwood, Aug. 1859, in SDoc42, 78.
105. [ Josiah Rogerson], untitled document, June 17, 1911, 30, CM.
106. OIMD; MRIMD.
107. NJ1917; PKS; NJ1908.
108. Cedar City Ward, Relief Society Minute Book, Sept. 10, 1857, CHL.
109. Charles B. Hancock, Autobiography, ca. 1882, CHL; Haslam, 6. Haslam
said he changed horses and ate breakfast at Nephi, changed horses again at
Payson—taking only a few minutes—and spent an hour at Provo.
110. Haslam, 8–9; HOJ, Sept. 10, 1857, CHL; James Haslam, JDL2-BT 1:12.
111. Dame, express, Sept. 7, 1857, Dame Papers; Haslam, 6; James Haslam,
JDL2-BT 1:12.
112. Haslam, 9.
113. Extracts from Hamblin’s journal, in Hamblin to Young, Nov. 13, 1871,
General Office Files, President’s Office Files, YOF; Hamblin, statement,
Nov. 28, 1871, General Office Files, President’s Office Files, YOF;
Haslam, 9–12.

114. HOJ, Sept. 8–10, 1857; Brigham Young, Office Journal, Sept. 8–10, 1857,
YOF; Brigham Young to Orson Pratt, Sept. 12, 1857, Letterpress Copybook
3:844–45, YOF; DBY, 76–79, Sept. 8–10, 1857; Editorial, Deseret News, Sept.
16, 1857. Brigham Young to Lewis Robinson, Sept. 7, 1857, Letterpress
Copybook 3:822–23, YOF, mentions Van Vliet, but apparently was started
on the 7th and not finished until a later date, as the second paragraph con-
tradicts an earlier paragraph, showing a time lapse and a change of thought.
Brigham Young to William I. Appleby, Sept. 12, 1857, Letterpress Copy-
book 3:834–35, YOF.
115. Extracts from Hamblin’s journal, in Hamblin to Young, Nov. 13, 1871,
General Office Files, President’s Office Files, YOF; Hamblin, statement,
Nov. 28, 1871, General Office Files, President’s Office Files, YOF. The
Nov. 13 letter shows editing marks, perhaps in preparation for the formal
statement. The portion of the letter quoted in the text does not include the
edits. The following is the cited portion of the letter including the edits:
“While in S. L. City on business having accompanied Geo. A. Smith there,
an express came from Iron Co, asking what should be done with a certain
Company of Emigrants, that had behaved verry mean while passing through
the differant Towns, the spirit of the Express, rather or the expressman
asked the privilege to chastize them. . . . President Young answered them
rather haistily, saying No, they have a perfect right to pass, when I want
Marshal Law proclaimed, I will let you know or You will know it!”
116. DBY, 68–69, 80–81, Aug. 30, Sept. 1, 1857. Although scholars once debated
whether Young issued two martial law proclamations—one in early Aug.
1857, the other in Sept.—the evidence shows that the purported Aug.
document was actually a Sept. document with a typesetting error. See
Will Bagley, “If the Document Is Authentic, How Can We Explain Weird
Dates?” Salt Lake Tribune, Aug. 10, 2003.
117. Haslam, 9–12; James Haslam, JDL2-BT 1:11–14, JDL2-PS 2:22; HOJ,
Sept. 10, 1857.
118. Brigham Young to Isaac C. Haight, Sept. 10, 1857, Letterpress Copybook
3:827–28, YOF. A clerk’s draft of this letter also has been preserved in
Incoming Correspondence, YOF.
119. Young to Haight, Sept. 10, 1857, Letterpress Copybook 3:827, YOF.
120. DBY, 62, Aug. 19, 1857.
121. Young to Haight, Sept. 10, 1857, Letterpress Copybook 3:827, YOF.
122. Ibid.
123. Carleton, 6.
124. Young to Haight, Sept. 10, 1857, Letterpress Copybook 3:827–28, YOF.
125. Hamilton G. Park, statement, Oct. 1907, typescript, CM; Hamilton
G. Park, statement, ca. 1910, CHL; Haslam, 9–12; James Haslam, JDL2-
BT 1:12.
126. Park, statement, Oct. 1907, CM.

Chapter 13
1. Philip Klingensmith, testimony, July 23, 1875, in “The Lee Trial,” Salt Lake
Daily Tribune, July 24, 1875; NJ1909; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:8–9;
Samuel McMurdy, JDL2-BT 1:33.
2. NJ1909; NJ1908. Leadership among Paiutes was often situational. Knack,
22–24. The Paiute leaders best known to the whites had gone north to meet
with Brigham Young, and Joel White said “there was no very high chief or
noted chief among Indians there” at the Meadows. Joel White, JDL1-RS 4:3,
JDL1-BT 4:12.
3. Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:7–9, 72–87, JDL1-PS 2:37–39, JDL1-RS
3:2–3; “LC”; “LLC”; NJ1917; PKS.
4. NJ1909; NJ1908; Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:76–77. See also Daniel S.
Macfarlane, affidavit, June 29, 1896, CM; William Tait, affidavit, June 30,
1896, CM.
5. Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:76–77; NJ1908. In his trial testimony, Johnson
said Lee told him to tell the Paiutes that the militia “would get the emigrants
out some way so they could have their guns and horses.”
6. “Execution of Lee!” Pioche (NV) Weekly Record, Mar. 24, 1877; NJ1909; Philip
Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:8–10, JDL1-PS 2:38–39, JDL1-RS 2:23; Clewes;
“LC”; “LLC”; MU, 232–33; Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:56–57. Joseph
Clewes said they were “sitting in something of a circle,” going through
“something sacred”—language that later interpreters claimed to be a prayer
circle. Clewes. Ellott Willden said “it was no prayer circle; the men only hap-
pened to sit in a circle on the ground as they talked, for convenience sake.”
Clew/Will. On Mormon prayer circles, see George S. Tate, “Prayer Circle,”
in Encyclopedia of Mormonism, ed. Daniel H. Ludlow (New York: Macmillan,
1992), 3:1120–21.
7. See “LC”; “LLC.”
8. “LC”; “LLC”; Jacob Hamblin, JDL2-BT 1:87–88, 107; MU, 233–34.
9. Staub, 83, 147. See also Baumeister, 29.
10. NJ1909; “LC”; “LLC”; “Execution of Lee!”; Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT
1:76–77.
11. “LC”; “LLC”; Jacob Hamblin, JDL2-BT 1:87–88, 107; MU, 233–34; Philip
Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:7, 9, 59, 72–73. Euphemistic language often plays
a role in both the planning and carrying out of large-scale killings. “Euphe-
mistic language serve[s] to deny reality and distance the self from violent
actions and their victims. Denial of obvious reality, though it consumes much
psychological energy, allows perpetrators to avoid feeling responsibility and
guilt.” Staub, 29.
12. “LC”; “LLC”; MU, 243. “How is it that a person who is not basically evil
may participate in monstrous evil without the awareness of what he has
done?” psychiatrist-author M. Scott Peck asked. He concluded that “when-
ever the roles of individuals within a group become specialized, it becomes

both possible and easy for the individual to pass the moral buck to some
other part of the group.” As a result, “not only does the individual forsake
his conscience but the conscience of the group as a whole can become so
fragmented and diluted as to be nonexistent.” Peck, 118, 218–20. Staub
writes, “Even in a society that fosters individual moral responsibility, there is
no guarantee that individuals will oppose the group. Resisting is extremely
difficult.” Staub, 149.
13. MU, 243.
14. Beadle1. Roy F. Baumeister explains how people fail to express reservations
during this rationalization process: “It may often happen that the members
harbor private doubts about what the group is doing, but they refuse to say
them, and the group proceeds on its course of action as if the doubts did not
exist.” Baumeister, 303.
15. MU, 290–91; Josiah Rogerson, “Speech of John D. Lee at Mountain Mead-
ows,” CM; C. J. S., Mar. 25, 1877, in “Shooting of Lee!” Salt Lake Daily
Tribune, Mar. 30, 1877.
16. MU, 237; NJ1908; Carleton, 21; Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:76–77.
17. Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:9–10, JDL1-PS 2:38–39, JDL1-RS 2:23.
18. Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:10–11, JDL1-PS 2:39–40, JDL1-RS
2:23–24; Clewes. Klingensmith alone testified of the hollow square. In reality
the formation may have been informal.
19. OIMD; MRIMD; James Pearce, JDL1-BT 4:114; Laban Morrill, JDL2-BT 1:9.
20. See Appendix C.
21. Gardner, 314. For the local organization, see OIMD; MRIMD.
22. OIMD; MRIMD; Appendix C.
23. See, for instance, NJ1908; Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:53, 60; Petition to
E. V. Higgins on behalf of John M. Higbee regarding People of the United
States v. John M. Higby, Feb. 27, 1896, CM; John W. Judd to Jabez G. Suther-
land, Feb. 4, 1896, and J. G. Sutherland to John W. Christian, Feb. 5, 1896,
in Florence Spilsbury Higbee, John M. Higbee and Mountain Meadows Mas-
sacre Papers, CHL, also in CM; William Edwards, affidavit, May 14, 1924,
USHS; Unattributed notes, likely from discussion with Ellott Willden, AJ1.
24. See Appendix C; Michael Shamo, “Militia Profiles,” 2007, MMMRF. These
statistics reflect those men designated as clearly participating in or witnessing
the killing of emigrants at or near the Meadows. On respectable citizens partic-
ipating in mob violence, see W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South:
Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993),
38; Richard Maxwell Brown, Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American
Violence and Vigilantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 120; Dallin
H. Oaks and Marvin S. Hill, Carthage Conspiracy: The Trial of the Accused Assas-
sins of Joseph Smith (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 6–29.
25. “LC”; “LLC”; MU, 236–37; Conversation with Samuel Knight, in Cannon,
June 13, 1895; Clewes; PKS; Joel White, JDL1-BT 3:126; Philip Klingen-
smith, JDL1-BT 3:13, 74–76.

26. MU, 237.
27. James Pearce, JDL1-BT 4:101–5; NJ1908; Daniel S. Macfarlane, AJ2; Joel
White, JDL1-PS 5:4, JDL1-BT 4:12; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:8;
Samuel Pollock, JDL1-BT 4:64.
28. Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:75; Ellott Willden, AJ1; Whitney, 1:708–9;
Clewes; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:11; Bull Valley Snort [ John
M. Higbee], statement, Feb. 1894, typescript, 5, CM.
29. NJ1908.
30. Clewes.
31. NJ1908; “LC”; “LLC”; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:10–11, 28, 31,
JDL1-PS 3:11, JDL1-RS 2:38; MU, 237; Jacob Forney to A. B. Greenwood,
Sept. 22, 1859, in SDoc42, 79; Carleton, 9, 14, 21; Knight; Conversation
with Samuel Knight, in Cannon, June 13, 1895.
32. MU, 237; “LC”; “LLC”; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:72–74; Wilford
Woodruff, Sept. 29, 1857; Wilford Woodruff, statement, manuscript, 1882,
CM.
33. NJ1909; NJ1908; Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:47–49.
34. Juanita Brooks, “Speech Given at the Dedication of a Monument Honoring
the Victims of the Massacre at the Mountain Meadows,” reprinted in “An His-
torical Epilogue,” Utah Historical Quarterly 24 ( Jan. 1956): 72–73, also printed
in Carroll County Historical Quarterly 10 ( June 1965): 8–9; Brooks1, 12–15.
35. See Knack, 28–29; James McKnight, letter to the Daily Wisconsin, Aug. 10,
1858, printed in “Interesting Letter from Utah: The Mormon Exodus—The
Indians,” Weekly Wisconsin, Sept. 24, 1858, Historian’s Office, Historical
Scrapbook, 10:126, CHL.
36. See Appendix D; Applied Urban Field School, University of Wisconsin–
Parkside, Nungwu-uakapi: Southern Paiute Indians Comment on the Intermoun-
tain Power Project, Intermountain-Adelanto Biopole I Transmission Line (Kenosha,
WI: University of Wisconsin–Parkside, 1983), 57.
37. “Lee Trial.”
38. Joel White, JDL1-BT 3:124, 127–28, 4:15, JDL1-PS 5:6–7, JDL1-RS 4:5;
Bull Valley Snort [Higbee], Feb. 1894, 3, CM; John M. Higbee, affidavit,
June 15, 1896, CM; Samuel Pollock, JDL1-BT 4:67–68.
39. NJ1909; Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:72.
40. Clewes.
41. Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:28, 97, 116.
42. Carleton, 19–20.
43. Hurt, 203.
44. Nuwuvi, 80.
45. Samuel Pollock, JDL1-BT 5:191; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:10–11,
15–16, 19, JDL1-PS 2:39–40, JDL1-RS 2:23–24, 28; Samuel McMurdy,
JDL2-BT 1:33–34; Samuel Knight, JDL2-BT 1:25–26, JDL2-PS 2:36–37;
Samuel Knight, AJ1; MU, 240. Timing deduced from Clewes; “LC”; “LLC.”
Gibbs, 35, puts Higbee on horseback. MU, 237, mentions three men on

horseback, but does not specifically name Higbee. Klingensmith saw Higbee
during the massacre, but did not mention his being on a horse. Philip
Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:7, 17, 81.
46. Samuel McMurdy, JDL2-BT 1:33–34; Samuel Knight, JDL2-BT 1:23–24;
Samuel Knight, AJ1.
47. McGlashan; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:15, JDL1-PS 3:1, JDL1-RS 2:26.
48. James Pearce, JDL1-BT 4:105–6; William Young, JDL1-BT 4:51–52;
Samuel Pollock, JDL1-BT 4:64–65.
49. NJ1908; James Pearce, JDL1-BT 4:100; Joel White, JDL1-BT 3:124–25;
“LC”; “LLC.”
50. “Cates”; Samuel Pollock, JDL1-BT 4:64–65, 5:192–93; James Pearce, JDL1-
BT 4:107.
51. Samuel Knight, JDL2-BT 1:25; “LC”; “LLC”; Samuel McMurdy, JDL2-BT
1:34–35; William Young, JDL1-BT 4:50–51, 5:205–6, JDL1-PS 5:36, JDL1-
RS 4:27–28; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:78; NJ1908; NJ1909; NJ1917;
Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:46; MU, 238; OIMD; MRIMD; Henry Lunt,
Diary, Aug. 1, 1852, microfilm, CHL.
52. “LC”; “LLC”; Samuel McMurdy, JDL2-BT 1:34–35; William Young, JDL1-
BT 4:50–51, 5:205–6, JDL1-PS 5:36, JDL1-RS 4:27–28; Samuel Pollock,
JDL1-BT 4:64–65, 5:192–93, JDL1-RS 4:38–39; Samuel Knight, JDL2-BT
1:24–25, JDL2-PS 2:36–37; MU, 238–39.
53. NJ1908 (“Captain F[a]ncher was killed in the third attack”); “Cates”; Mitch-
ell. Though Nephi Johnson said there were two or three emigrant represen-
tatives who came out of the corral, he was not an eyewitness of the event.
Eyewitnesses, including Lee, uniformly reported that one emigrant man
came out of the corral. NJ1909; NJ1917; Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:46.
54. MU, 238; Gibbs, 13, 32; Appendix A.
55. Bagley, 145.
56. MU, 238–39; “LC”; “LLC”; Samuel McMurdy, JDL2-BT 1:34–35; Samuel
Pollock, JDL1-BT 4:64–65, 5:192–93, JDL1-RS 4:38–39; Samuel Knight,
JDL2-BT 1:24–25; William Young, JDL1-BT 4:50–51, 5:205–6, JDL1-PS
5:36, JDL1-RS 4:27–28.
57. MU, 239; Samuel Knight, JDL2-BT 1:23; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:79.
58. MU, 239–40; “LC”; “LLC.”
59. MU, 239–40.
60. Rogers; Forney, 371.
61. [ James] Lynch, statement, in “The Mountain Meadows Massacre: Surviving
Daily Evening Bulletin, May 31, 1859; “Cates”; Rogers. Lynch incorrectly
identified the negotiator as “Bishop H[a]ight of Cedar City.”
62. “LC”; “LLC”; NJ1909; MU, 240.
63. MU, 236; Carleton, 21; Albert Hamblin, statement, May 20, 1859, in
Carleton, 14; NJ1909; McGlashan; PKS.
64. “LC”; “LLC”; Beadle1; Ellott Willden, AJ2; Ellott Willden2, AJ2.

65. NJ1909; NJ1908; NJ1917; “LC”; “LLC”; MU, 235.
66. NJ1908; NJ1909.
67. Annie Elizabeth Hoag, JDL1-BT 4:28, JDL1-PS 5:18, JDL1-RS 4:13.
68. Although some sources say that the emigrants were able to get water safely
during the siege, more reliable sources suggest they endangered their lives by
doing so. “Horrible Massacre of Emigrants!” Los Angeles Star, Oct. 10, 1857;
“Massacre of One Hundred Emigrants!” Sacramento Daily Union, Oct. 13, 1857;
Hamilton Wallace, Reminiscence, undated, 1, Collection of Mormon Diaries,
Library of Congress, microfilm copy at CHL; Carleton, 20; McGlashan;
“Butchery”; “Surviving Children of the Murdered Fix the Crime”; Rogers.
69. MU, 240; McGlashan; Rea, 34.
70. NJ1908; NJ1909; “Butchery”; Mitchell, 15.
71. “LC”, “LLC”; MU, 239.
72. “LC”; “LLC.”
73. Samuel Knight, JDL2-BT 1:25–26, JDL2-PS 2:37–38; Samuel McMurdy,
JDL2-BT 1:35.
74. Conversation with Samuel Knight, in Cannon, June 13, 1895; Samuel
Knight, AJ1; Samuel Knight, JDL2-BT 1:25–26, JDL1-PS 2:37–38; Collins
R. Hakes, statement, Apr. 24, 1916, CM.
75. Samuel McMurdy, JDL2-BT 1:35, JDL1-PS 2:45–46; William Young, JDL1-
BT 4:51, 5:206, JDL1-PS 5:36; Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:46–47; Mitchell;
“LC”; “LLC.”
76. Samuel Knight, JDL2-BT 1:26.
77. Samuel McMurdy, JDL2-BT 1:36, JDL2-PS 2:46–47.
78. William Young, JDL1-BT 4:51; Forney, 371; NJ1908.
79. Carleton, 21; Joel White, JDL1-BT 3:125–26, JDL1-PS 4:22. Other esti-
mates would vary on the length of the meeting. Samuel Knight, JDL2-BT
1:25; Samuel Pollock, JDL1-BT 4:65, JDL1-RS 4:39; Philip Klingensmith,
JDL1-BT 3:12, 79.
80. Corr1; Whitney, 1:706, 706n†.
81. For the pressure the men felt under orders, see Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT
1:75. On killing quickly, Baumeister, 257, writes: “Another way of helping
people cross the line into committing violence is to keep them in ignorance
of what they are doing for as long as possible. . . . If the instructions become
clear only moments before the deed is to be done, then there is minimal time
or opportunity for protest.”
82. “LC”; “LLC”; MU, 240; L. W. Macfarlane, Yours Sincerely, John M. Macfarlane
(Salt Lake City: By the author, 1980), 37, 49–50, 55–56.
83. “LC”; “LLC”; MU, 240; Samuel Knight, JDL2-BT 1:26; Samuel McMurdy,
JDL2-BT 1:35–36; Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:47; Samuel Pollock, JDL1-
BT 4:66; William Young, JDL1-BT 4:51–52, JDL1-PS 5:36–37. Cf. Philip
Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:12–13.
84. Corr1; Joel White, JDL1-BT 3:126, 4:16–17, JDL1-PS 4:23, JDL1-RS 3:30;
MU, 240–41; William Young, JDL1-BT 4:51, JDL1-PS 5:36–37; Nephi

Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:47–48, JDL2-PS 3:56; Daniel S. Macfarlane, AJ2;
Samuel Pollock, JDL1-BT 5:194.
85. MU, 240; Joel White, JDL1-BT 3:126, 4:16–17, JDL1-PS 4:23,
JDL1-RS 3:31.
86. “LC”; “LLC”; MU, 239. The number wounded is given as an improbable
forty-six in “LC.” MU placed the number at seventeen, of which three had
died. MU, 239. Cradlebaugh said “ten or twelve of the emigrants were killed
or wounded.” Cradlebaugh, 18. Jacob Hamblin said the Indians told him of
“killing and wounding fifteen at the first discharge.” Jacob Hamblin, state-
ment, in Carleton, 8.
87. Ellott Willden, AJ2; Ellott Willden2, AJ2; “Mountain Meadows,” undated
notes, AJ1; Whitney, 1:699, 704; “LC”; “LLC”; Jacob Hamblin, JDL2-BT
1:107–8, JDL2-PS 3:23; McGlashan; Carleton, 24–25. Nephi Johnson and
Joel White estimated the number of emigrant men killed in Friday’s massacre
was twenty-five to thirty. Philip Klingensmith and William Young placed the
number at twenty to thirty men. Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:48; Joel White,
JDL1-BT 3:129; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:79; William Young,
JDL1-BT 4:53.
88. For various estimates of the numbers of militiamen, see Nephi Johnson,
JDL2-BT 1:55, 70, 74–75; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:10; MU,
379–80; Carleton, 19–20; Samuel Pollock, JDL1-BT 4:63; Appendix C. For
men who stayed behind at the militia camp, see William Young, JDL1-BT
4:52, 5:210, JDL1-PS 5:38, JDL1-RS 4:28; James Pearce, JDL1-BT 4:105–6;
Samuel Pollock, JDL1-BT 5:182, 185. In addition to the fifty to sixty mem-
bers of the militia at the Meadows, the Mormons had some herdsmen and
Indian wards there, too. “There were more militia men than emigrant men.”
Corr2; Corr1.
89. NJ1909; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:17, JDL1-PS 3:2, JDL1-RS 2:27;
“Execution of Lee!”
90. Daniel S. Macfarlane, AJ2; Whitney, 1:706n*.
91. Corr2; Corr1; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-RT 1:108, JDL1-RS 3:7,
JDL1-PS 3:43.
92. MU, 240; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:17, JDL1-PS 3:2, JDL1-RS 2:27.
93. MU, 240; Joel White, JDL1-BT 3:126, 4:12; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT
3:17; Corr1.
94. MU, 240; PKS; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:81; Joel White, JDL1-BT
3:128.
96. Samuel McMurdy, JDL2-BT 1:36; Samuel Knight, JDL2-BT 1:23, 27; “LC”;
Joel White, JDL1-BT 4:18–19; Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:47.
97. “LC”; “LLC.” Klingensmith said the final distance between Lee at the head
of the line with the wagons and his own position with the men was two to
three hundred yards. Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:81.
98. Samuel McMurdy, JDL2-BT 1:36.

99. Albert Hamblin, statement, May 20, 1859, in Carleton, 13–14; “LC”;
“LLC”; [Albert] Hamblin, interview with Jacob Forney, in Jacob Forney
to A. B. Greenwood, Aug. 1859, in SDoc42, 78; MU, 240; Samuel Knight,
JDL2-BT 1:27. For descriptions of where the Indians hid, see Forney, 371;
Carleton, 21; Knight.
100. Clues on the timing of the massacre come from Clewes; Elias Morris, state-
ment, given to Andrew Jenson, Feb. 2, 1892, CM; Christopher J. Arthur,
AJ1; Albert Hamblin, statement, May 20, 1859, in Carleton, 13.
101. See Daniel S. Macfarlane, AJ2; NJ1908; “LC”; “LLC”; Knight. What
early settlers called the Rim of the Basin was likely the point at which the
California road crested the hill and dropped down into the northern part
of the Meadows. This point was east of the headwaters of the Magotsu and
therefore technically south of what some modern cartographers designate as
the Rim of the Basin.
102. Corr2; Corr1; Whitney, 1:706n†; Gibbs, 35.
103. Corr2; Corr1; Whitney, 1:706; Jacob Hamblin and Albert Hamblin, state-
ments, in Carleton, 9, 14; Forney to Greenwood, Aug. 1859, in SDoc42, 79.
104. Corr2; Corr1.
105. Corr2; Corr1; Whitney, 1:706n†; NJ1908; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT
3:81; Joel White, JDL1-BT 3:126–27, JDL1-PS 4:23–24, JDL1-RS 3:30–31;
Chatterley. Others who confirmed that Higbee spoke the order include
George Washington Adair, in David O. McKay, Diary, July 27, 1907, UofU;
NJ1917; Rogers; Carleton, 21. “The fatal signal . . . consisted of calling out in
a loud tone the word, ‘halt’ (not ‘do your duty’).” Corr2.
106. Samuel Pollock, JDL1-BT 5:196.
107. Jacob Hamblin, statement, in Carleton, 9; Charles Brewer to R. P. Campbell,
May 6, 1859, in SDoc42, 17; Shannon A. Novak and Derinna Kopp, Osteo-
logical Analysis of Human Remains from the Mountain Meadows Massacre (Salt
Lake City: Department of Anthropology, University of Utah, 2002), 32–33.
108. Ellott Willden, AJ2; Ellott Willden, AJ1; NJ1909; William Edwards, affida-
vit, May 14, 1924, USHS; Bull Valley Snort [Higbee], statement, Feb. 1894,
5, CM. Ellott Willden said, “The supposed reason why the three or four
men escaped was that som[e] of the militia men fired in the air, unwilling
to do the part assigned them.” Corr1. John M. Higbee later asserted that
Lee had given a back-handed approval for the men to drop down instead
of shoot. Those who chose to do so, Lee reportedly said, were cowards.
Bull Valley Snort [Higbee], statement, Feb. 1894, 5, CM. Baumeister, 206,
points out that even some trained soldiers in combat settings find it difficult
“to aim and shoot . . . during a battle.”
109. Corr2; Corr1; McGlashan; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:15–16.
110. Ellott Willden, AJ1; Corr2; “Lee’s Confession,” New York Herald, Mar.
22, 1877; Conversation with Samuel Knight, in Cannon, June 13, 1895.
White repeatedly feigned innocence in his testimony. Joel White, JDL1-BT
4:6, 19, 21.

111. Corr2; MU, 236–237; Daniel S. Macfarlane, AJ2; “Execution of Lee!”;
Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:15–16, JDL1-PS 3:1, JDL1-RS 2:26.
112. Joel White, JDL1-BT 3:129–30, JDL1-PS 4:24–25, JDL1-RS 3:32.
113. Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3: 82–83.
114. Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:17–18, JDL1-RS 2:27, JDL1-PS 3:2–3.
115. Lyman, Sept. 21, 1895. On the Indians having guns, see Samuel Pol-
lock, JDL1-BT 4:70–71, JDL1-RS 5:5; Jimmie Pete, interview with Alva
Matheson, Jan. 15, 1968, in American Indian Oral History, Duke Collec-
tion, UofU.
116. Albert Hamblin, statement, May 20, 1859, in Carleton, 14; William Young,
JDL1-BT 5:210–11, JDL1-PS 5:38–39; Corr2; “Cates.”
117. Shirts. Other mentions of varied Indian weapons are in Jacob Hamblin and
Albert Hamblin, statements, in Carleton, 9, 14; [Albert] Hamblin, interview
with Jacob Forney, in Forney to Greenwood, Aug. 1859, in SDoc42, 78;
Samuel Pollock, JDL1-BT 4:69, 70–71, 5:195–96, 201; Parker2, 18.
118. William Young, JDL1-BT 4:53–54, 5:211, JDL1-PS 5:39.
120. Albert Hamblin, statement, May 20, 1859, in Carleton, 14; Corr2; MU, 242.
121. “LC”; “LLC.”
122. “Cates”; Albert Hamblin, statement, May 20, 1859, in Carleton, 14; Corr2.
123. William Young, JDL1-BT 4:53, 5:211.
124. “Butchery.” Rebecca Dunlap later insisted the rescuer was Jacob Hamblin,
but Hamblin was in Salt Lake City on Sept. 11, 1857.
125. Kearny; Carleton, 26. Cf. Cradlebaugh, 20.
126. Samuel Pollock, JDL1-RS 5:5.
127. Congressional Record Containing the Proceedings and Debates of the Fifty-Ninth Con-
gress, Second Session (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1907), 91:2687, Feb. 11, 1907.
128. “Cates.”
129. Samuel McMurdy, JDL2-BT 1:37; Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:48–50, 67.
130. Samuel Knight, JDL2-BT 1:28; Samuel McMurdy, JDL2-BT 1:37.
131. Samuel McMurdy, JDL2-BT 1:37; Samuel Knight, JDL-BT 1:28; MU, 242;
“LC”; “LLC.” These posthumously published accounts have Lee saying
that he killed no one during the massacre because his pistol jammed, though
he begrudged, “I fully intended to do my part of the killing.” MU, 242.
132. Mitchell.
133. Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:49–50, 67.
134. C. J. S., Mar. 25, 1877, in “Shooting of Lee!”; Hakes, statement, Apr. 24,
1916, CM; Dispatch, Mar. 23, 1877, in “Territorial Dispatches,” Deseret
Evening News, Mar. 24, 1877; “The Last of Lee,” San Francisco Daily Evening
Post, Mar. 24, 1877; Jacob Hamblin to Brigham Young, Nov. 13, 1871,
YOF; Annie Elizabeth Hoag, JDL1-BT 4:27–29, JDL1-PS 5:18–19, JDL1-
RS 4:13–14; Jacob Hamblin JDL2-BT 1:86–108; Shirts.
135. “Lee’s Confession,” New York Herald, Mar. 22, 1877; Samuel Knight, JDL2-
BT 1:28; Samuel McMurdy, JDL2-BT 1:37.

136. MU, 241–42; “LC”; “LLC.”
138. Samuel Knight, AJ1; Samuel Knight, JDL2-BT 1:23, 26, 28.
139. John D. Lee to Emma B. Lee, Sept. 21, 1876, HM 31211, JDLC.
140. Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:63; Samuel Knight, JDL2-BT 1:29–31. The
man may have possibly been Daniel Macfarlane or David Tullis. “Mormon
Assassins: Another List of Men Who Were at Mountain Meadows,” New
York Herald, June 26, 1877; MU, 254; “Surviving Children of the Murdered
Fix the Crime”; Albert Hamblin, statement, May 20, 1859, in Carleton, 14;
Carleton, 10, 12; [Albert] Hamblin, interview with Jacob Forney, in Forney
to Greenwood, Aug. 1859, in SDoc42, 78.
141. Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:30; “LC”; “LLC”; Samuel Knight, JDL2-BT
1:50, 67.
142. MU, 242; Annie Elizabeth Hoag, JDL1-BT 4:29–30, JDL1-PS 5:20, JDL1-
RS 4:14.
143. Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:50; NJ1909.
144. NJ1908.
145. Lyman, Sept. 21, 1895. Johnson’s statement was in response to one from
George Adair, who said that very few people were killed by whites. Lyman,
Sept. 19, 1895. Adair did not have the perspective of viewing the entire
scene during the massacre, as Johnson did. Johnson, who directed the
Indians in the Friday attack, may have answered as he did to downplay his
own role.
146. Samuel Pollock, JDL1-BT 4:67.
148. Sources differ on this issue, ranging from no scalps taken to only a few.
Robert Keyes, JDL1-BT 3:2–3; Joel White, JDL1-BT 3:130; Corr1. In
her examination of the bones of some massacre victims, Shannon A. Novak
reported, “There was no evidence for the use of knives to scalp, behead,
or cut the throats of the victims.” Shannon A. Novak, House of Mourning:
A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre (Salt Lake City: Uni-
versity of Utah Press, 2008), 173.
149. Jacob Hamblin, statement, in Carleton, 9. See also Brewer to Campbell,
May 6, 1859, in SDoc42, 16–17.
150. “LC”; “LLC”; Robert Keyes, JDL1-BT 3:1–2, JDL1-PS 2:29; Asahel
Bennett, JDL1-BT 3:4; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:14, 20, JDL1-PS
3:4; Appendix A.
151. William Young, JDL1-BT 4:54.
152. Pete, interview, Jan. 15, 1968, in American Indian Oral History, Duke
Collection; “LC”; “LLC.”
153. Annie Elizabeth Hoag, JDL1-PS 5:19, JDL1-BT 4:29, JDL1-RS 3:13–14;
Corr1; MU, 241. Other versions of the story include slight variations in
details. Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of Utah, 1540–1886 (San Francisco:
History Company, 1889), 26:554; Shirts.

154. Annie Elizabeth Hoag, JDL1-BT 4:28–29, JDL1-PS 5:19, JDL1-RS
4:13–14. On Lee’s calling his experience a dream, see Shirts.
155. Shirts.
156. Corr1; Corr2.
157. Albert Hamblin, statement, May 20, 1859, in Carleton, 14; Shirts; Jacob
Hamblin, JDL2-BT 1:94–98.
158. William Young, JDL1-PS 5:38, JDL1-BT 4:53.
159. Jacob Hamblin, JDL2-BT 1:94–98; Jacob Hamblin, statement, in Carleton,
8; Albert Hamblin, statement, May 20, 1859, in Carleton, 14; Shirts. Albert’s
role may have been larger than he later admitted. Two surviving children
told Jacob Forney that Albert was “an Indian whom they saw kill their two
sisters.” Carleton, 15; “Surviving Children of the Murdered Fix the Crime.”
160. Shirts. See also Gibbs, 36–37. Another lurid story suggested the girls had
been forced to dance nude before they died. Joseph C. Walker, “History of
the Mormons in the Early Days of Utah,” Joseph C. Walker Papers, BYU.
161. Beadle1. Lee again denied the rapes the morning of his execution. Dispatch,
Mar. 23, 1877, “Territorial Dispatches,” Deseret Evening News, Mar. 24, 1877.
162. McKay Diary, July 27, 1907.
163. “LC”; “LLC”; MU, 244; Hurt, 203; Carleton, 18, 22.
164. “Gilbert Morse,” Salt Lake Daily Tribune, Sept. 28, 1876.
165. Martineau, 62; Kaibab; “Paiute,” 136.
166. Pete, interview, Jan. 15, 1968, in American Indian Oral History, Duke Collection.
167. Jacob Hamblin, statement, in Carleton, 8; “LC”; “LLC”; Albert Hamblin,
statement, May 20, 1859, in Carleton, 15; [Albert] Hamblin, interview
with Jacob Forney, in Forney to Greenwood, Aug. 1859, SDoc42, 78;
E. C. Mathews, JDL1-BT 4:99.
168. Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:68.
169. Ibid., JDL2-BT 1:70–72; NJ1908. Cf. NJ1909.
170. See “S.,” June 12, 1858, in “Interesting from Utah,” New York Times, July 8,
1858; Carleton, 23; Rogers.
171. PKS. Sources vary on who drove the wagons with the children to Hamblin’s
Ranch. Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:16–18, 20, 85–86, JDL1-PS 3:1–4,
JDL1-RS 2:26–28; “LC”; “LLC”; MU, 243; Rachel and Albert Hamblin,
statements, in Carleton, 11, 14; [Albert] Hamblin, interview by Jacob For-
ney, in Forney to Greenwood, Aug. 1859, in SDoc42, 78; “Reminiscences of
John R. Young,” Utah Historical Quarterly 3 ( July 1930): 85.
172. NJ1908. Cf. Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:102–3.
173. “Cates.”
174. Rachel Hamblin, statement, May 20, 1859, in Carleton, 11–12; William
C. Mitchell to A. B. Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860, USBIA; “Children”; Samuel
Knight, JDL2-BT 1:19; Bowering, 230; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT
3:20–21; Rogers; “Butchery.”
175. Albert Hamblin, statement, May 20, 1859, in Carleton, 14; Rachel Hamblin,
statement, May 20, 1859, in Carleton, 11.

176. Albert R. Lyman, Biography of Francis Marion Lyman, 1840–1916 (Delta,
UT: Melvin A. Lyman, 1958), 37. In her biography of Lee, Juanita Brooks
created a similar setting, mentioning the moon and coyotes. Brooks1, 217.
177. “LC”; “LLC.”
178. Lee’s mantra much of the rest of his life was that he had done nothing
designedly wrong. See, e.g., MU, 290; Josiah Rogerson, “Speech of John
D. Lee at Mountain Meadows,” CM; C. J. S., Mar. 25, 1877, in “Shooting
of Lee!” “Tragically human beings have the capacity to come to experi-
ence killing other people as nothing extraordinary. Some perpetrators may
feel sick and disgusted when killing large numbers of people, as they might
feel in slaughtering animals, but even they will proceed to kill for a ‘good’
reason, for a ‘higher’ cause.” Staub, 13.
179. Baumeister, 11, writes that “sensitive perpetrators often suffer nightmares,
anxiety attacks, debilitating guilt, gastrointestinal problems, and many other
signs of stress.” Some of the Mountain Meadows Massacre participants fit
well the description found in Peck, 67: “Forever fleeing the light of self-
exposure and the voice of their own conscience, they are the most fright-
ened of human beings. They live their lives in sheer terror. They need not
be consigned to any hell; they are already in it.”
Chapter 14
1. Elias Morris, statement, Feb. 2, 1892, communicated to Andrew Jenson,
CM; Clewes; Christopher J. Arthur, AJ1.
2. Clewes. Morris said the message was not written. Arthur said they car-
ried Brigham Young’s express that James Haslam had brought, but that
was impossible because Haslam did not return to Cedar City until Sept.
13. See Morris, statement, Feb. 2, 1892, CM; Christopher J. Arthur, AJ2;
Christopher J. Arthur, AJ1.
3. See Morris, statement, Feb. 2, 1892, CM; William Barton, AJ1; Daniel
S. Macfarlane, AJ2; Christopher J. Arthur, AJ1.
4. George W. Powers, in “Horrible”; William Mathews, JDL1-BT 4:45–46;
E. C. Mathews, JDL1-BT 4:97; Clewes.
5. William Mathews, JDL1-BT 4:46–47; JDL1-PS 5:32–33, JDL1-RS 4:24.
6. William Barton, AJ1; William Mathews, JDL1-BT 4:47, JDL1-PS 5:32–33,
JDL1-RS 4:24; John H. Henderson, AJ1; PSHR, Sept. 10, 1857, 2nd sec., 34.
7. William Mathews, JDL1-BT 4:46–47, JDL1-PS 5:32–33, JDL1-RS 4:24;
E. C. Mathews, JDL1-BT 4:97; MU, 245; Powers and P. M. Warn, in
“Horrible”; Gardner, 329; William Barton, AJ1; OIMD. Parowan militia pri-
vates Beason Lewis and Barney Carter were the other two men who accom-
panied Dame from Parowan to Cedar City. William Barton, AJ1; OIMD.
8. William Mathews, JDL1-BT 4:47–48, JDL1-PS 5:32–33, JDL1-RS 4:24. See
also E. C. Mathews, JDL1-BT 4:97–98, JDL1-RS 5:38; Warn, in “Horrible.”
9. Powers, in “Horrible.” Although the Indian runner reported only five or six
emigrants dead by Friday morning, Mathews was also present at the arrival

of Joseph Clewes. Mathews conflated the two messages in his Oct. 8, 1857, letter
to a California newspaper editor: “On our arrival at Cedar City we ascertained,
from reports brought by friendly Indians, of the utter destruction of the train
ahead.” San Diego Herald, Oct. 17, 1857. For evidence that Lee and Haight were
reporting most of the emigrants dead by Tuesday evening, see “LC”; “LLC.”
10. Clewes; William Mathews, JDL1-BT 4:47–48, JDL-PS 5:33, JDL1-RS 4:24.
11. Ronald W. Walker, “ ‘Save the Emigrants’: Joseph Clewes on the Mountain
Meadows Massacre.” BYU Studies 42 (2003): 142.
12. William Mathews, JDL1-PS 5:33, DL1-BT 4:47–48, JDL1-RS 4:24.
13. William Mathews, JDL1-BT 4:47, JDL1-PS 5:33, JDL1-RS 4:24; Powers
and Warn, in “Horrible”; MU, 245; William Barton, AJ1.
14. Warn, in “Horrible”; William Mathews, JDL1-BT 4:47, JDL1-PS 5:33,
JDL1-RS 4:24; E. C. Mathews, JDL1-BT 4:98, JDL1-RS 5:38.
15. E. C. Mathews, JDL1-BT 4:98. George A. Smith and James McKnight
reported that Dame and Haight went out “to endeavor to put a stop to the
fight.” Smith and McKnight, “The Emigrant and Indian War at Mountain
Meadows, Sept. 21, 22, 23, 24 and 25, 1857,” Aug. 6, 1858, in Historian’s
Office, Collected Historical Documents, CHL.
16. Laban Morrill, JDL2-BT 1:6–7; William Mathews, JDL1-BT 4:47.
17. John H. Henderson, AJ1; Corr1; Smith and McKnight, “Emigrant and
Indian War.” Klingensmith said he saw Haight “the evening of” the massacre
“at Hamblins ranch.” JDL1-BT 3:66–67.
18. PKS. On the smoldering resentment, see Clewes.
19. “LC”; “LLC.” Cf. MU, 245, which says Lee “was unable to hear what they
were quarreling about.”
20. Conversation with Samuel Knight, in Cannon, June 13, 1895.
21. NJ1909; Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:68–70, JDL2-PS 2:72–74; NJ1908.
22. MU, 245–46; “LC”; “LLC”; William Young, JDL1-BT 4:55–56; Samuel
Pollock, JDL1-BT 5:185; Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:68–72, JDL2-
PS 2:72–75; Cannon, June 11, 1895. See also Bull Valley Snort [ John
M. Higbee], Feb. 1894, typescript, 6, CM, also published in Brooks2, 231;
Albert Hamblin, statement, May 20, 1859, in Carleton, 15.
23. “LC”; “LLC”; MU, 246–47; Cannon, June 11, 1895.
24. William Young, JDL1-PS 5:40, JDL1-BT 4:55–56 (“Haight made the
lamantation.”); Bull Valley Snort [Higbee], Feb. 1894, 6, CM; “LC”; “LLC”;
MU, 246–47.
25. NJ1908; Corr2; Corr1; Joel White, JDL1-BT 3:130, 134; Nephi Johnson,
JDL2-BT 1:44, 73; “LC”; “LLC”; MU, 247; William Young, JDL1-BT 4:55;
James Pearce, JDL1-BT 4:107.
26. Samuel Pollock, JDL1-BT 4:67, 71, 5:182, JDL1-RS 4:40; MU, 247; Smith
and McKnight, “Emigrant and Indian War”; Corr1. An excellent early
description of the three groupings is Charles Brewer to R. P. Campbell, May
6, 1859, in SDoc42, 16–17; also in Cradlebaugh, 32–33. See also McGlashan;
Jacob Forney to Kirk Anderson, May 5, 1859, in Salt Lake City Valley Tan,

May 10, 1859; Jacob Forney to Elias Smith, May 5, 1859, in “Visit of the
Superintendent of Indian Affairs to Southern Utah,” Deseret News, May 11,
1859; Jacob Hamblin, JDL2-BT 1:98.
27. NJ1908. Despite the fiery rhetoric that preceded the massacre, the atroc-
ity was almost universally a matter of deep regret. Investigative reporter
C. F. McGlashan interviewed sources ranging from the Latter-day Saint
“ ‘First Presidency’ down to the humblest farmer” and concluded: “While they
all attempt to soften the wiry edge of public opinion by mentioning the provo-
cation which brought on the deed, I must bear witness that the Mormons
repudiate the crime. From no one have I obtained a single word of approval,
or aught that could be construed into a sanction of the massacre.” McGlashan.
28. “LC”; “LLC.” Baumeister, 212–13, writes: “Humor is one defense against a
shocking or disgusting task. . . . Laughter may also arise from nervousness or
uncertainty about how to react.”
30. Hamilton Wallace, Reminiscence, undated, Collection of Mormon Diaries,
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., microfilm copy in CHL.
31. Conversation with Samuel Knight, in Cannon, June 13, 1895; Jacob Hamb-
lin, statement, in Carleton, 8; Corr2; Corr1; Whitney, 1:707; “LC”; “LLC”;
MU, 247. Lee later supposed that some corpses were unearthed by rains that
washed out the soft soil of the ravines. Other sources, however, refute this
claim. Corr2; Whitney, 1:707; Corr1. Powers went through the Meadows at
night under wagon cover and did not see the bodies. “From what I heard,” he
said, “I believe the bodies were left lying naked upon the ground, having been
stripped of their clothing by the Indians.” “Horrible.” The Turner-Dukes
company did not rebury the dead because Dame routed them around the
Meadows. “Outrages.” U.S. Army surgeon Charles Brewer reported seeing
scattered remains even at the corral where the emigrants buried their own
dead. Brewer to Campbell, May 6, 1859, in SDoc42, 16–17; Cradlebaugh,
32–33. Brewer’s report seems to confirm Ellott Willden’s supposition “that
all the bodies were exhumed by wolves even those the emigrants themselves
buried in their corral.” Corr2. Emigrants frequently encountered bodies
exhumed by wild animals on overland trails. Merrill J. Mattes, The Great
Platte River Road: The Covered Wagon Mainline Via Fort Kearny to Fort Laramie
(Nebraska State Historical Society, 1969), 88, notes: “Succeeding emigrants
were greeted, not only with scattered bones, buttons, and bits of clothing, but
hands, feet, and various other parts of the human anatomy in varying stages
of decomposition, with ‘prairie wolves howling over their loathsome repast.’ ”
32. Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:77–79, JDL2-PS 2:80–81. In Lee’s posthumously
published memoirs, edited by his attorney, the following passage appears:
After the dead were covered up or buried (but it was not much of a burial,) the
brethren were called together, and a council was held at the emigrant camp. All
the leading men made speeches; Colonel Dame, President Haight, Klingensmith,

John M. Higbee, Hopkins and myself. The speeches were first—Thanks to
God for delivering our enemies into our hands; next, thanking the brethren for
their zeal in God’s cause; and then the necessity of always saying the Indians
did it alone, and that the Mormons had nothing to do with it. The most of the
speeches, however, were in the shape of exhortations and commands to keep the
whole matter secret from every one but Brigham Young. It was voted unani-
mously that any man who should divulge the secret, or tell who was present, or
do anything that would lead to a discovery of truth, should suffer death.
The brethren then all took a most solemn oath, binding themselves under
the most dreadful and awful penalties, to keep the whole matter secret from
every human being, as long as they should live. No man was to know the facts.
The brethren were sworn not to talk of it among themselves, and each one
swore to help kill all who proved to be traitors to the Church or people in this
matter. (MU, 247–48.)
This passage, however, does not comport with other sources. Despite
purportedly swearing not to discuss the massacre even among themselves,
many of the participants discussed it with others and never came to harm
for breaking the supposed death oath. See Annie Elizabeth Hoag, JDL1-BT
4:27–29, JDL1-PS 5:17–19, JDL1-RS 4:13–14; Shirts; Hawley, 16; Wallace
Reminiscence; Thomas T. Willis, JDL1-BT 4:33; Jacob Hamblin, JDL2-BT
1:85–114.
33. Joel White, JDL1-BT 4:15–16, JDL1-PS 4:7–8, JDL1-RS 4:5–6. See
also PKS.
34. NJ1909; Nephi Johnson, affidavit, Nov. 30, 1909, edited version, in Brooks2,
224–26; NJ1917. See also NJ1908. In all these documents except his trial
testimony, Johnson places this conversation on Friday afternoon, “about one
half hour after” Johnson arrived at the wagons to prevent the looting; but
in trial testimony, Johnson stated that Lee and Haight reached the emigrant
wagons Saturday morning. Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:68–71.
35. At Lee’s second trial, Johnson portrayed himself as “a boy” who hesitated to
speak boldly to his superior officers. JDL2-BT 1:59.
36. See, for example, “LC”; “LLC”; Carleton, 22–23.
37. For accounts of the supposed offspring of emigrant cattle, see Orson
Welcome Huntsman, Diary, Jan. 20, 1898, CHL; John W. Van Cott, Utah
Place Names (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1990), 55; Beadle1;
“Mountain Meadow Massacre,” Daily Union-Vedette, July 27, 1866; Juanita
Brooks, “The Cotton Mission,” Utah Historical Quarterly 29 ( July 1961): 214.
On animals dying during early assaults or being taken away before the final
massacre, see Bull Valley Snort [Higbee], February 1894, in CM; Smith and
McKnight, “Emigrant and Indian War”; George A. Smith to Brigham Young,
Aug. 17, 1858, Incoming Correspondence, YOF, copy in Historian’s Office
Letter Book 1:885–91, CHL; “LC”; “LLC”; Albert Hamblin, statement, May
20, 1859, in Carleton, 15; James Pearce, JDL1-BT 4:105; Carleton, 21.

38. Daniel S. Macfarlane, AJ2; Samuel Pollock, JDL1-BT 4:69–70. Pollock said
he understood that the driving of the stock and wagons was under Klingen-
smith’s supervision, but he apparently conflated two legs of the trip, the first
one from Mountain Meadows to Iron Springs, and the second one a few days
later from Iron Springs to Cedar City.
39. Daniel S. Macfarlane, AJ2.
40. Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:51, 69–73, 77–78; Albert Hamblin, statement,
May 20, 1859, in Carleton, 14–15. As he approached his home at the Moun-
tain Meadows two and a half weeks after the massacre, Hamblin encountered
young herdsmen “driving two or three hundred head of cattle, going to the
Iron Springs.” Later, he “saw them on the Harmony Range” and “learned
that Mr. Lee took them.” Jacob Hamblin, JDL2-BT 1:93, 111–12. Klingen-
smith described Iron Springs as being “seven miles from Cedar City on the
old emigrant road” that was used “in the early days.” Philip Klingensmith,
JDL1-BT 3:24.
41. Rachel Hamblin, statement, May 20, 1859, in Carleton, 11–12.
42. Rogers. See also Rachel Hamblin, statement, May 20, 1859, in Carleton,
11–12. On the practice of Mormons buying children from Indians, see
Robert M. Muhlestein, “Utah Indians and the Indian Slave Trade: The Mor-
mon Adoption Program and Its Effect on the Indian Slaves” (master’s thesis,
Brigham Young University, 1991); Juanita Brooks, “Indian Relations on the
Mormon Frontier,” Utah Historical Quarterly 12 ( Jan.–Apr. 1944): 1–48. In
the Howard version of his “Confessions,” Lee portrays himself during the
massacre as having no part in the killing but instead rushing about saving
children. At one point, he claims that he saved a little girl. “I rescued her as
soon as I could speak,” he wrote. “I told the Indians that they must not hurt
the children—that I would die before they should be hurt; that we would buy
the children of them.” “LC.”
43. Rogers. Lee’s version became the accepted account for some time. Smith and
McKnight, “Emigrant and Indian War,” reported, “The Indians had killed
the entire company, with the exception of a few small children, which were
with difficulty obtained from them.” Nearly fifteen years after the massacre,
Lee was still telling the same story. Though admitting limited white involve-
ment, he attributed the killing largely or entirely to Indians and claimed,
“I told them I would buy the children of them, and seventeen children were
saved.” Beadle1.
44. Rachel Hamblin, statement, May 20, 1859, in Carleton, 12; Rogers; “Butch-
ery”; Jacob Forney to C. E. Mix, May 4, 1859, in SDoc42, 58; Kearny;
Carleton, 27; Wm. C. Mitchell to Elias N. Conway, Oct. 11, 1860, in Carleton,
32. For the full names and ages of the emigrant children, see Appendix A.
45. PKS.
46. See Appendix A.
47. Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:21–22, 88–89; Kearny; Mitchell to Con-
way, Oct. 11, 1860, in Carleton, 32; Wallace Reminiscence; Carleton, 27.

One child was still at Pinto when Forney picked up the surviving children in
1859. According to James Lynch, who accompanied him, Forney picked up
ten children in Santa Clara and then went on “to Cedar City, there obtained
two more, and another at Painter Creek [Pinto].” [James] Lynch, statement,
in “The Mountain Meadows Massacre: Surviving Children of the Murdered
Fix the Crime upon the Mormons,” San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, May
31, 1859; Marion Jackson Shelton, Diary, Apr. 21, 1859, CHL, transcription
by LaJean Carruth in MMMRF.
48. “The Emigrant Children Were Brought First to My Parents’ Home,”
typescript, Caroline Parry Woolley Collection, Special Collections, Gerald
R. Sherratt Library, Southern Utah University, Cedar City, UT; Philip
Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:22, JDL1-PS 3:5, JDL1-RS 2:29; PKS. On the
location of Hopkins’s home, see Plat A of Cedar City, in Lehi Hintze, My
Jones Ancestors: A History of My Mother’s Welsh, and English Mormon Ancestors
(Provo, UT: By the author, 2001), 4. On Lydia Hopkins’s role as president
of the society, see Cedar City Ward, Relief Society Minute Book, 1856–75,
CHL. Evidence suggests strongly that at least some leaders among the Cedar
City women knew the truth. Klingensmith testified that when he brought
surviving children to Lydia Hopkins’s home, “I told her I had so many chil-
dren got from that place [the Meadows]. I didn’t tell her any particulars about
it; though she perfectly well understood that because her husband [massacre
participant Charles Hopkins] was in and out.” Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-
BT 3:22.
49. “Emigrant Children Were Brought First,” Woolley Collection; Philip
Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:21–22, 89, JDL1-PS 3:5, 47–48, JDL1-RS 2:29,
3:10–11; Samuel McMurdy, JDL2-BT 1:42–43, JDL2-PS 2:52–53; Mary S.
Campbell, AJ1.
50. “Emigrant Children Were Brought First,” Woolley Collection.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. “Mary Ann and Ann Marie,” Woolley Collection. See also “The Emigrant
Children Were Brought First,” Woolley Collection.
54. Kearny; Carleton, 26–27. Kearny and Carleton both report that Mary was
obtained from John Morris. At the time, Isaac Haight was in hiding to avoid
arrest and may have shifted the child to Morris in order to divert atten-
tion away from himself and his family. Additional evidence that the child
kept by the Haights was Mary Miller comes from Haight family tradition.
Mary Miller went to live in Tennessee. Haight’s grandson, Isaac Parry, went
on a mission to Tennessee and saw her there. “Mary Ann and Ann Marie,”
Woolley Collection.
55. “Cates”; Forney to Mix, May 4, 1859, in SDoc42, 58; Mitchell to Conway,
Oct. 11, 1860, in Carleton, 32; Carleton, 27; Thomas T. Willis, JDL1-BT
4:34–35. Huff later moved with the Willises to Toquerville. Kearny.

57. Kearny; Mitchell to Conway, Oct. 11, 1860, in Carleton, 32; John
W. Bradshaw, JDL1-BT 4:79–80, JDL1-RS 4:27.
58. Kearny; Forney to Mix, May 4, 1859, in SDoc42, 58; Mitchell to Conway,
Oct. 11, 1860, in Carleton, 32; Carleton, 27.
59. Kearny; Forney to Mix, May 4, 1859, in SDoc42, 58; Carleton, 26; Mitchell
to Conway, Oct. 11, 1860, in Carleton, 32; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT
3:89; Thomas T. Willis, JDL1-BT 4:34–35; John W. Bradshaw, JDL1-BT
4:79–80. Kearny, Forney, and Carleton call the boy Ambrose Miram Taget.
60. Kearny; John W. Bradshaw, JDL1-BT 4:81.
Oct. 11, 1860, in Carleton, 32; Carleton, 27. Kearny and Forney both list the
boy’s name as Elisha Huff. Carleton called him William W. Huff.
62. Kearny; Mitchell to Conway, Oct. 11, 1860, in Carleton, 32; Carleton,
26. Kearny reports that some of the other children called her Demars;
Carleton says Demurr. Curiously, the Smiths’ firstborn child was a baby girl
named Tryphenia who died as an infant in 1846. Tryphenia Fancher later
remembered that the Mormons called her Annie. James C. Wilson to Jacob
P. Dunn, Mar. 13, 1885, JPDC.
Oct. 11, 1860, in Carleton, 32; Carleton, 27; Mary S. Campbell, AJ1; Names
of Participants, AJ1. In a church service on Apr. 28, 1858, the child was
blessed as “Angeline Jewkes.” Cedar City Stake, Record of Children Blessed,
1856–63, CHL.
64. Kearny; Forney to Mix, May 4, 1859, in SDoc42, 58; Mitchell to Con-
way, Oct. 11, 1860, in Carleton, 32; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:22.
See also Thomas T. Willis, JDL1-BT 4:34–35; John W. Bradshaw,
JDL1-BT 4:80.
65. Bowering, 230.
66. MC, 1:199, Mar. 2, 1859; MU, 242–43; Kearny; “LC”; “LLC”; Forney to
Mix, May 4, 1859, in SDoc42, 58; Mitchell to Conway, Oct. 11, 1860, in
Carleton, 32; Carleton, 27. “LC” and “LLC” call the boy William. In report-
ing the “Indian” massacre to Brigham Young on Sept. 29, 1857, Lee claimed
he had taken in an emigrant boy and girl. Attempting to justify the massacre,
Lee vilified the emigrants and their children, claiming that “Charley” refused
to kneel at the family’s prayers and ridiculed the emigrant girl when she did.
“They would sware like pirat[e]s,” he claimed. Woodruff, Sept. 29, 1857.
Other accounts, including those of Lee, say that he only had one emigrant
child, Kit Carson Fancher. Annie Elizabeth Hoag, JDL1-BT 4:29, JDL1-PS
5:20, JDL1-RS 4:14; MC, 1:199, Mar. 2, 1859; MU, 243.
Oct. 11, 1860, in Carleton, 32; Annie Elizabeth Hoag, JDL1-BT 4:29–30;
Carleton, 26, 27.
68. Kearny; Jacob Forney to C. E. Mix, May 30, 1859, in SDoc42, 59–60; Jacob
Forney to Hon. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, June 16, 1859, in SDoc42,

60; Mitchell to Conway, Oct. 11, 1860, in Carleton, 32; Rogers; Mary
S. Campbell, AJ1.
70. Elizabeth Ann [Shirts] McDonald, “Story of John D. Lee and Mountain
Meadows Massacre,” oral history, Feb. 26, 1936, in Kimball Young, Research
Notes, photocopy of typescript at BYU.
71. Annie Elizabeth Hoag, JDL1-BT 4:29–30, JDL1-PS 5:20, JDL1-RS 4:14;
John W. Bradshaw, JDL1-BT 4:81; Mary S. Campbell, AJ1; Argus, open
letter to Brigham Young, Aug. 3, 1871, in “History of Mormonism,” Corinne
(UT) Reporter, Aug. 5, 1871, which asserts that two children who made
dangerous remarks were killed. See also “The Mountain Meadow Massacre,”
Visalia Weekly Delta, Oct. 22, 1874; “The Massacre,” Salt Lake Daily Tribune,
Aug. 10, 1875, quoting Helena Independent.
72. “Massacre.” See also Annie Elizabeth Hoag, JDL1-BT 4:29–30, JDL1-PS
5:20, JDL1-RS 4:14.
73. Mary S. Campbell, AJ1.
74. PGM, Sept. 27, 1857. See also Rachel Hamblin, statement, May 20, 1859,
in Carleton, 11; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:85; “The Lee Trial:
Klingensmith Takes the Witness Stand and Tells It All,” Salt Lake Daily Tri-
bune, July 24, 1875.
75. Kearny; Forney to Anderson, May 5, 1859, in Valley Tan, May 10, 1859; Forney to
Smith, May 5, 1859, in “Visit of the Superintendent of Indian Affairs”; Carleton,
26–27; Rogers; Forney to Mix, May 4, 30, 1859, in SDoc42, 57–58, 59–60;
Forney to Hon. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, June 16, 1859, in SDoc42, 60;
Jacob Hamblin, JDL2-BT 1:98. Some of these sources report finding only sixteen
children, but they were made before Joseph Miller was found. See Rogers.
76. Joel White, JDL1-BT 4:15–16, JDL1-PS 5:8, JDL1-RS 4:6. See also PKS.
77. Annie Elizabeth Hoag, JDL1-BT 4:27, JDL1-PS 5:17–18, JDL1-RS 4:12–13;
HBM, Sept. 13, 1857.
78. McDonald, “Story of John D. Lee and Mountain Meadows Massacre.”
79. John Hamilton Sr., JDL1-BT 5:308–12, JDL1-RS 9:13–15. John Hamilton
Jr. gave similar testimony. JDL1-BT 5:313–19.
80. Thomas T. Willis, JDL1-BT 4:33–34, 38, JDL1-PS 5:22–23, 26, JDL1-RS
4:17, 19. Thomas’s elder brother, John Willis, testified, “I saw the Indians
have some stock that I supposed came from there; that was the report around
town, both horses and cattle.” John Henry Willis, JDL1-BT 4:41, JDL1-PS
5:28, JDL1-RS 4:21. For information regarding relations between the settlers
and local Paiutes, see TF, 286, 321; Knack, 93–94.
81. Powers, in “Horrible”; John Ward Christian, Dictation, [1886], H. H. Bancroft
Manuscript Collection, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, CA, microfilm copy
located at CHL.
82. “Horrible”; Mathews, letter to the editor, Oct. 8, 1857, in San Diego Herald,
Oct. 17, 1857. Mathews said the meeting took place “some few miles from
the place of massacre.”

83. Powers, in “Horrible”; Mathews, letter to the editor, Oct. 8, 1857, in San Diego
Herald, Oct. 17, 1857; William Mathews, JDL1-BT 4:47; E. C. Mathews,
JDL1-BT 4:98, JDL1-RS 5:38–39. One newspaper reported that William
Mathews told Powers not to “grieve or take on” as the emigrant “women were
all prostitutes.” Mathews reportedly said that Dame had seen their bodies,
which supposedly showed signs of sexual disease. For Mathews, the massacre
was “the beginning of long delayed vengeance” on the wicked. “Horrible.”
Lee later told Brigham Young that members of the company were rotten with
“the pox,” the nineteenth-century term for syphilis. Woodruff, Sept. 29, 1857.
Forensic anthropologist Shannon Novak, who examined the bones of some of
the victims in 1999, concluded that none showed signs of the disease. Shannon
A. Novak, House of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows
Massacre (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008), 106–9; Richard
E. Turley Jr. to Shannon Novak, email, February 10, 2004; Shannon Novak
to Richard E. Turley Jr., email, Feb. 12, 2004. The impugning of the female
victims’ virtue would offend victims’ relatives for generations.
84. Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-PS 3:4–5, JDL1-BT 3:21–22, 86–87, JDL1-RS 2:29.
85. E. C. Mathews, JDL1-BT 4:97–99. Also testifying at trial, William Mathews
claimed he did not remember seeing much of anything at all. See William
Mathews, JDL1-BT 4:48, JDL1-PS 5:33–34, JDL1-RS 4:24–25.
86. Albert R. Lyman, Biography, Francis Marion Lyman: 1840–1916, Apostle,
1880–1916 (Delta, UT: Melvin A. Lyman, 1958), 37; E. C. Mathews,
JDL1-BT 4:96.
87. Powers, in “Horrible”; Carleton, 19; William Mathews, JDL1-BT 4:48,
JDL1-PS 5:33, JDL1-RS 4:24–25; E. C. Mathews, JDL1-BT 4:99.
88. Powers, in “Horrible”; Carleton, 19.
90. Beadle2, 500–501; PGM, Sept. 27, 1857. In 1859, Carleton, 24, reported:
“Hamblin says three men escaped. They were doubtless herding when the
attack was made, or crept out of the corral by night.” After interviewing Willden
and others, Andrew Jenson recorded, “Two or three had escaped during the
siege som[e] time and had started for California.” Corr1. The most detailed
account of what happened to the three messengers appears in McGlashan. Sent
to Utah by an editor who had sworn to avenge the massacred emigrants’ deaths,
McGlashan had access to a wide variety of sources while writing his story, which
earned him a national reputation for news reporting. Both McGlashan and
Beadle give the time of the escape as Thursday night. McGlashan; Beadle2,
500. These three who escaped should not be confused with (1) William Aden
and his companion, who were northeast of the Mountain Meadows gathering
stray cattle when the first attack occurred on Monday, (2) the emigrants who
went to make pine tar before Monday’s attack, or (3) or with two others who left
the encampment on Tuesday and went toward Cedar City for help. See Jacob
Hamblin, JDL2-BT 1:88–89, 107–8, JDL2-PS 3:23–24, Ellott Willden, AJ2.
91. McGlashan; Beadle2, 500.

92. Mormon scout Ira Hatch, who helped track down the men, identified one of
them as “young Baker.” S. B. Honea, in “Outrages.” Abel, age nineteen, best
fits this description.
93. Bagley, 142, reasons that the other two were “perhaps” either Jesse or
Lorenzo Dunlap and John Milum Jones. Paiute leader Jackson reportedly
had a journal in his possession with the inscription “Wm. B. Jones, Caldwell
county, Missouri.” Yo Mismo, Oct. 24, 1857, in “Our Los Angeles Corre-
spondence,” San Francisco Daily Alta California, Oct. 27, 1857. Bagley reads
the name as “a garbled reference to Milum Jones of Carroll County.” It is
also possible, however, that there really was a William Jones from Missouri
traveling with the Arkansas company. Other Arkansas emigrants saw Missou-
rians camped with the Fanchers, Camerons, and Dunlaps in Salt Lake City
before the doomed company started south. “Massacre.” Another possibility
is an otherwise unidentified emigrant named Williams. “Mountain Meadow
Massacre,” Daily Union-Vedette, July 27, 1866, reports that in the “valley
of the Muddy . . . was killed the only adult, a man by the name of Williams,
who escaped from Mountain Meadows.” George Calvin Williams, who was
probably related to the Bakers, said he had relatives killed in the massacre.
See G. C. Williams to J. N. Smith, Jan. 28, 1895, enclosed in Jesse N. Smith
to President Woodruff and Counselors, Feb. 19, 1895, in First Presidency,
Court Cases and Related Matters, 1887–1915, CHL, photocopy in MMMRF.
Beadle reported that an old man from one of the wagons carrying the
wounded escaped and was never found, though it is unlikely anyone escaped
in daylight on the final day of the massacre. Beadle2, 500; J. H. Beadle,
Polygamy: or, the Mysteries and Crimes of Mormonism (Philadelphia: National
Publishing, 1882), 172–73.
94. PGM, Sept. 27, 1857.
95. McGlashan. The informant was most likely Hamblin, since McGlashan says
that this man later buried the unearthed skeletons of the emigrants, which
Hamblin reported doing. Jacob Hamblin, JDL2-BT 1:85–86. If Hamblin was
the informant, he was either unaware of the incident in 1859 when talking to
Brevet Major James Henry Carleton or chose not to disclose it. See
Carleton, 24.
96. McGlashan. If Hamblin was the source of this information, he either learned
about it after his interview with Carleton in 1859 or chose to withhold the
information from him, likely the former since he reported the deaths of the
two other messengers in some detail. Regarding this messenger, however,
Carleton reports that Hamblin told him: “The fate of one of those he had
never learned. He must have been murdered off the road, or perished of
hunger and thirst in the mountains. At all events, he never went through to
California, or he would have been heard from.” Carleton, 24. On Paiute cre-
mation practices, see Isabel T. Kelly and Catherine S. Fowler, “Southern Pai-
ute,” in William C. Sturtevant, ed., Handbook of North American Indians, vol.
11, Great Basin, ed. William L. D’Azevedo (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian

Institution, 1986), 380; Edward Sapir, The Collected Works of Edward Sapir,
vol. 10, Southern Paiute and Ute Linguistics and Ethnography, ed. William
Bright (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1992), 910.
97. Beadle2, 501; Beadle, Polygamy, 172; McGlashan.
98. McGlashan; Beadle2, 500; Honea, in “Outrages.” J. H. Beadle wrote that
Hatch and the Indians found the emigrants “asleep on the Santa Clara
Mountain, and killed two as they slept.” Beadle2, 500.
99. McGlashan; Beadle2, 500. Cf. Carleton, 24. McGlashan says the man trav-
eled fifty-four miles, Carleton says he traveled forty-five miles.
100. Carleton, 25; McGlashan; Beadle2, 500–501; Lynch, in “Surviving Children
of the Murdered Fix the Crime.” See also Powers, in “Horrible”; Honea,
in “Outrages”; J. H. Beadle, Life in Utah; or The Mysteries and Crimes of
Mormonism (Philadelphia: National Publishing, 1870), 184; David Tullis,
statement, in Jacob Forney to A. B. Greenwood, Aug. 1859, in SDoc42,
77; Forney to Anderson, May 5, 1859, in Valley Tan, May 10, 1859; Forney
to Smith, May 5, 1859, in “Visit of the Superintendent of Indian Affairs.”
Beadle calls the boys “John M. Young and another.” A letter published
years later in the Corinne Weekly Reporter claimed that “a man named Boyle
was sent on a mission to the Mojave crossing well armed, and with a key to
prevent any suspicious mail matter from reaching San Bernardino, and to
pick off any one who by any possibility might have escaped and got along
that far.” Argus, open letter to Brigham Young, Aug. 10, 1871, in “History
of Mormonism,” Corinne Reporter, Aug. 12, 1871. Henry and McCan Young
were no relation to Brigham Young or to massacre witness William Young.
101. [ Josiah Rogerson], “Excerpts—From Bishop’s Confessions of John. D Lee,”
undated, 6, CM; Hamilton G. Park, statement, ca. 1910, CHL; JHM, Sept.
12, 1857, 136; Haslam, 4, 12–14; James Haslam, JDL2-BT 1:11–14.
102. Brigham Young to Isaac C. Haight, Sept. 10, 1857, Letterpress Copybook
3:827–28, YOF; James Haslam, JDL2-BT 1:11–14; Haslam, 4, 12–14;
Charles W. Penrose, Supplement to the Lecture on the Mountain Meadows
Massacre: Important Additional Testimony Recently Received (Salt Lake City:
Juvenile Instructor Office, 1885), 83–104; NJ1908; CSM, Sept. 13, 185[7].
Epilogue
1. Instructions of H. Douglas to George T. T. Patterson, Mar. 20, 1877, as
cited in George T. T. Patterson to H. Douglas, Mar. 26, 1877, enclosed in
H. Douglas to E. D. Townsend, Mar. 28, 1877, RG 94, file 1013 AGO 1877,
U.S. Department of War, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
2. C. J. S., Mar. 25, 1877, in “Shooting of Lee!” Salt Lake Daily Tribune, Mar. 30,
1877; “Through the Heart,” Salt Lake Daily Herald, Mar. 24, 1877; George
T. T. Patterson to H. Douglas, Mar. 26, 1877, enclosed in H. Douglas to
E. D. Townsend, Mar. 28, 1877, RG 94, file 1013 AGO 1877, U.S. Depart-
ment of War, National Archives.
3. Patterson to Douglas, Mar. 26, 1877.

4. Ibid.
5. “Miscellaneous: John D. Lee to Be Shot on Friday, Mar. 23d,” Salt Lake Daily
Tribune, Mar. 8, 1877; Patterson to Douglas, Mar. 26, 1877; C. J. S., Mar. 25,
1877, in “Shooting of Lee!”; “Through the Heart.”
6. “Mountain Meadow Massacre: The Jury Cannot Agree and Are Discharged,”
Salt Lake Daily Herald, Aug. 8, 1875; “The Verdict,” Salt Lake Daily Tribune,
Aug. 8, 1875; Dispatch, Sept. 20, 1876, in “The Lee Trial,” Salt Lake Daily
Tribune, Sept. 21, 1876.
7. “Lee and Young,” New York Herald, Mar. 23, 1877. See also “Territorial
Dispatches: Execution of John D. Lee,” Deseret Evening News, Mar. 23, 1877;
Dispatch, Mar. 22, 1877, in “Lee’s Last Moments,” San Francisco Daily Eve-
ning Bulletin, Mar. 23, 1877; “Through the Heart”; “The Last of Lee,” Salt
Lake Daily Tribune, Mar. 24, 1877; “M. M. M.,” Salt Lake Daily Herald, Mar.
25, 1877; “Sight-Seeing,” Provo Enquirer, Mar. 21, 1877.
8. C. J. S., Mar. 25, 1877, in “Shooting of Lee!” On the Stokes relationship, see
Josiah Rogerson, “Speech of John D. Lee at the Mountain Meadows,” CM;
Collins R. Hakes, statement, Apr. 24, 1916, CM.
9. “LC”; “LLC.”
10. Woodruff, Sept. 29, 1857; MC, 2:151–52, Dec. 29, 1870.
11. See “The Place of Execution,” Deseret Evening News, Mar. 24, 1877; “The
Execution of John D. Lee,” Carson City Appeal, Mar. 24, 1877.
12. See “John D. Lee,” Salt Lake Daily Tribune, Feb. 21, 1877; “John D. Lee,”
Salt Lake Daily Tribune, Feb. 14, 1877; “John D. Lee Sentenced,” Salt Lake
Daily Tribune, Mar. 9, 1877.
13. Beadle1; MC, 2:164–65, 203, 369, 378, 382, 386, 452–53, 462, ca. July 20,
1871, July 4, 1872, Sept. 24, Oct. 16, 31, Nov. 7, 1875, Apr. 6–7, 1876.
14. “The Lee Execution,” New York Herald, Mar. 25, 1877; “Territorial Dis-
patches,” Deseret News, Mar. 24, 1877; “Retribution!” Sacramento Daily
Record-Union, Mar. 24, 1877; “Shooting of Lee!” Salt Lake Tribune, Mar. 30,
1877.
15. See, e.g., Brigham Young, Mar. 8, 1863, in JD, 10:110; Woodruff, Dec.
23, 1866; Brigham Young, sermon, December 23, 1866, George D. Watt,
Papers, CHL, transcription by LaJean Purcell Carruth; Brigham Young, in
“The Celebration of the Twenty-Fourth,” Deseret Weekly News, July 27, 1870;
Brigham Young to Wm. W. Belknap, May 21, 1872, Letterpress Copybook
13:81–82, YOF; A. Karl Larson and Katharine Miles Larson, eds., Diary of
Charles Lowell Walker, vol. 1 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1980), 427,
June 11, 1876.
16. Edna Lee Brimhall and Anthon H. Lee, interview with Anthony W. Ivins,
July 28, 1931, in Edna Lee Brimhall, comp., “Gleanings of John D. Lee,”
14–15, Arizona Historical Society, Library and Archives, Tucson, AZ, copy at
CHL; A. W. Ivins to Mrs. G. T. Welch, Oct. 16, 1922, First Presidency Let-
terpress Copybook, vol. 64, CHL; “John D. Lee’s Last Days of Life,” Daily
Nevada State Journal, Mar. 21, 1877. On the distance between St. George

and Mountain Meadows, see Jesse W. Fox, Table of distances, n.d., General
Office Files, President’s Office Files, YOF.
17. Rogerson, “Speech of John D. Lee at the Mountain Meadows,” CM.
Rogerson’s shorthand record of Lee’s final words is not extant. Rogerson did
not report most of the second Lee trial, although a few pages in his hand
are extant.
18. Hakes, statement, Apr. 24, 1916, CM; Patterson to Douglas, Mar. 26, 1877;
Orson Welcome Huntsman, Diary, Mar. 23, 1877, CHL. For a lower esti-
mate, see “Execution of John D. Lee,” Provo Semi-Weekly Enquirer, Mar. 24,
1877. References to Mormons at Mountain Meadows on the day of Lee’s
execution include Anthony W. Ivins to Mrs. G. T. Welch, Oct. 16, 1922,
First Presidency Letterpress Copybook, vol. 64; Henry D. Holt, biographi-
cal questionnaire, 1939, in “Utah Pioneer Biographies,” 13:94, FHL; Sharon
M. Bliss, ed., “Autobiographies/Biography of Tullis, Mangum, Pulsipher,
Maughan, Davenport, Dahle, Griffin, etc.,” typescript, 3, [1995], copy at
FHL; Hamilton Wallace, Reminiscence, undated, 1, Collection of Mormon
Diaries, Library of Congress, microfilm copy at CHL.
19. “Lee Execution”; “Execution of John D. Lee,” transcript, CM; “Through the
Heart”; “M. M. M.”; Henry Inman and William F. Cody, The Great Salt Lake
Trail (New York: MacMillan, 1898), 143.
20. Rogerson, “Speech of John D. Lee at the Mountain Meadows,” CM; C. J. S.,
Mar. 25, 1877, in “Shooting of Lee!”; “Lee Execution.”
21. District Court (2nd) Criminal Case Files, Series 24291, Utah State Archives,
Salt Lake City, UT; MBB, 429, 438, 444, 452–53; Minute Book 1, 1874–77,
494–95, Utah Second District Court (Beaver County), Court Records,
1865–81, microfilm 485239, FHL, original at Beaver County Recorder’s
Office, Beaver, UT; “Territorial Dispatches,” Deseret News, weekly edition,
Nov. 25, 1874; “Territorial Dispatches,” Deseret News, weekly edition, Nov.
10, 1875; “An Assassin Arrested,” Salt Lake Daily Tribune, Aug. 29, 1876.
22. Sumner Howard to Charles Devens, Mar. 26, 1877, RG 60, National
Archives, copy in CHL.
23. MC, 1:xxiii.
24. C. J. S., Mar. 25, 1877, in “Shooting of Lee!”; “Lee Execution”; Rogerson,
“Speech of John D. Lee at the Mountain Meadows,” CM.
25. “Lee Execution.”
26. Rogerson, “Speech of John D. Lee at the Mountain Meadows,” CM; “John
D. Lee,” San Francisco Daily Bulletin, Mar. 24, 1877.
27. Lorraine Richardson Manderscheid, Some Descendants of John D. Lee
(Bellevue, WA: Family Research and Development, 2000); Brooks1, 378–84.
28. “Lee’s Execution,” Wilkes-Barre (PA) Record of the Times, Mar. 24, 1877;
“Vengeance,” New York Herald, Mar. 24, 1877; “John D. Lee’s Full Speech,”
Sacramento Daily Union, Apr. 7, 1877.
29. Rogerson, “Speech of John D. Lee at the Mountain Meadows,” CM; “John
D. Lee’s Full Speech.”

30. Joseph F. Smith, Journal, Oct. 8, 1870, CHL; MC, 2:151–52, Dec. 29, 1870.
31. David John, Journal, May 6, 186[3], BYU, microfilm at CHL.
32. MC, 2:338, Apr. 8, 1874.
33. “Vengeance,” New York Herald, Mar. 24, 1877.
34. “Lee Execution”; “John D. Lee’s Full Speech.”
Appendix A
1. Ages are approximated from federal census records and other available family
history resources.
2. Sidney B. Aden to Brigham Young, Mar. 14, May 30, 1859, Incoming Cor-
respondence, YOF; Brigham Young to S. B. Aden, Apr. 27, July 12, 1859,
Letterpress Copybook 5:116, 185, YOF; “Information Wanted,” Salt Lake
City Valley Tan, June 22, 1859; Gibbs, 12; Tennessee, Henry County, District
1, 1850 U.S. Census, population schedule, 241. According to William Aden’s
father, Sidney B. Aden, William stood six feet tall, was between 160 and 175
pounds, and had a fair complexion, blue eyes, and dark, curly hair. “Sup-
posed to be Murdered in Mormondom,” San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin,
Aug. 8, 1859.
3. “Meeting”; Mitchell to Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860, in USBIA; Joseph
B. Baines, William C. Beller, John H. Baker, and Irvin T. Beller, depositions
regarding the property of George W. Baker, Oct. 23, 1860, PPU; Greenhaw;
“Letter”; Arkansas, Carroll County, Crooked Creek Township, 1850 U.S.
Census, population schedule, 163B.
4. Mitchell, 11.
5. Mitchell to Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860, in USBIA; Mitchell to Elias
N. Conway, Oct. 11, 1860, in Carleton, 32; Kearny; Terry, 43–49, 94–96;
Greenhaw; Arkansas, Boone County, Crooked Creek Township, 1900 U.S.
Census, population schedule, E. D. 26, sheet 2, 154; “Lives 83 Years after
Surviving Massacre, Mrs. Martha E. Terry,” as published in Boone County
Historian 11, no. 1 (1988): 58.
6. Mitchell to Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860, in USBIA; Mitchell to Conway, Oct.
11, 1860, in Carleton, 32; Mitchell, 10–11, 15, 18; Kearny; Arkansas, Boone
County, Jackson Township, 1900 U.S. Census, population schedule, E.D. 22,
sheet 11, 11B; Oklahoma State Death Certificate for Sarah Frances Mitchell,
#14766, Oct. 4, 1947, Muskogee, OK.
11, 1860, in Carleton, 32; Kearny; “W. T. Baker, Survivor of Famous Mas-
sacre, Dies at Leslie Home,” Marshall (AR) Mountain Wave, Feb. 5, 1937.
8. “Butchery”; “Meeting”; “Extract”; S. B. Honea, in “Outrages”; Mitchell to
Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860, in USBIA; Mary Baker, John H. Baker, John
Crabtree, and Hugh A. Torrance, depositions regarding the property of John
T. Baker, Oct. 22, 23, 1860, PPU; “Letter”; “Cates”; Parker2, 4; Arkansas,
Carroll County, Crooked Creek Township, 1850 U.S. Census, population
schedule, 163B.

9. “Meeting”; “Extract”; Mitchell to Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860, in USBIA;
Logan1, 26, 29; Arkansas, Carroll County, Crooked Creek Township, 1850
U.S. Census, population schedule, 163B. Mormon scout Ira Hatch identified
one of the three men as “young Baker,” and Abel Baker seems the most likely
candidate. “Outrages.”
10. S. C. Turnbo, Ozark Frontier Stories, indexed by Mrs. Carrie Basch (n.p.,
1979), 1:138–39. John Beach is identified as John Burch in Logan1, 26.
11. William C. Beller and John H. Baker, depositions regarding the property
of George W. Baker, Oct. 23, 1860, PPU; Mitchell to Greenwood, Apr. 27,
1860, in USBIA; Arkansas, Carroll County, Crooked Creek Township, 1850
U.S. Census, population schedule, 162.
12. Joseph B. Baines, William C. Beller, and John H. Baker, depositions regard-
ing the property of George W. Baker, Oct. 23, 1860, PPU; Mitchell to
Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860, in USBIA; Arkansas, Carroll County, Crooked
Creek Township, 1850 U.S. Census, population schedule, 162.
13. “Meeting”; Mitchell to Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860, in USBIA; M1877-10;
M1877-12; M1911; “Mrs. M. Thurston Has Passed Away,” Stockton Daily
Evening Record, Dec. 15, 1921; Arkansas, Carroll County, Crooked Creek
Township, 1850 U.S. Census, population schedule, 159. The 1955 Harrison,
Arkansas, monument (based on William C. Mitchell’s list of victims given
in the Apr. 27, 1860, letter to Greenwood) indicates that five children of
William Cameron and his wife were killed in the massacre but does not give
their names.
14. M1877-10; M1877-12; M1911. The name Tillman was also spelled Tilghman.
15. James Knox Porter to Minnie Alma Porter Wright, Mar. 7, 1916, typescript
in possession of Nell Porter Howle, Brownwood, TX; Texas, Shelby County,
1850 U.S. Census, population schedule, 34B.
16. A headstone inscription at Latimer Hill Cemetery, Bloomfield, CT reads,
“Wm. E. Cooper, June 4 1828. He and wife were murdered in Mountain
Meadow Massacre—Utah, Sept. 11, 1857”; Iowa, Scott County, Davenport
Township, 1856 Iowa State Census (Iowa: Census Board, n.d.), 646.
17. “Meeting”; Mitchell to Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860, in USBIA; James
Deshazo, Hugh A. Torrance, and Lorenzo D. Rush, depositions regarding
the property of Allen Deshazo, Oct. 23, 1860, PPU; Tennessee, Hickman
County, 1850 U.S. Census, population schedule, 45.
18. Mitchell to Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860, in USBIA; James D. Dunlap, deposi-
tion, Oct. 26, 1860, PPU; “Butchery”; Parker2, 5; Logan2; Arkansas, Johnson
County, Mulberry Township, 1850 U.S. Census, population schedule, 129B.
The Harrison monument indicates that six children of Jesse Dunlap and his
wife were killed in the massacre but does not give their names. The three
surviving children of Jesse Dunlap, however, are mentioned by name.
19. Jacob and Albert Hamblin, statements, May 20, 1859, in Carleton, 8–9, 14;
Shirts; Jacob Hamblin, JDL2-BT 1:94–98; William Young, JDL1-PS 5:38,
JDL-BT 4:53.

20. Mitchell to Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860, in USBIA; Mitchell to Conway,
Oct. 11, 1860, in Carleton, 32; Kearny; “Butchery”; Rebecca Evins, listed
in Arkansas, Calhoun County, Polk Township, 1880 U.S. Census, popula-
tion schedule, E. D. 21, 97; “Descendants of Joshua Wharton,”
http://us.geocities.com/schiebert/gen006.htm.
11, 1860, in Carleton, 32; Kearny; Census record for her married name, Eliza
Linton, in Arkansas, Pope County, Liberty Township, 1880 U.S. Census,
population schedule, E. D. 133, 17; “Children”; Robyn Chambers Carr,
telephone interview with David Putnam, Jan. 16, 2002.
11, 1860, in Carleton, 32; Kearny; “A Romantic Marriage,” Southern Stan-
dard, Jan. 4, 1894; Arkansas, Pulaski County, Big Rock Township, 1880 U.S.
Census, population schedule, E. D. 148, 417; Arkansas, Calhoun County,
Polk Township, 1900 U.S. Census, population schedule, E.D. 27, Sheet 9,
74; “Descendants of Joshua Wharton,” http://us.geocities.com/schiebert/
gen006.htm.
23. Mitchell to Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860, in USBIA; William C. Mitchell,
deposition regarding the property of Lorenzo Dunlap, Oct. 26, 1860, PPU;
Parker2, 5; Logan2; Arkansas, Johnson County, Mulberry Township, 1850
U.S. Census, population schedule, 129B. The Harrison monument names
L. D. Dunlap and five children as victims of the massacre without giving the
children’s names. L. D. Dunlap’s wife is not identified as a victim on the same
monument, even though she is mentioned in Mitchell’s letter. The Harrison
monument, as well as Frank E. King in Gibbs, 13, names a Rachel and Ruth
Dunlap, though no other known records confirm persons with those names
were traveling with the group.
11, 1860, in Carleton, 32; Kearny; “Koen Family Bible,” Austin Genealogical
Society Quarterly 5 (Dec. 1964): 141; Mary C. Moody, 1890 Hamilton County,
Texas Census: Uniquely Reconstructed & Annotated (Arlington, TX: Blackstone
Publishing, 1996), 51.
Oct. 11, 1860, in Carleton, 32; Kearny; Arkansas, Boone County, Sugar
Loaf Township (Lead Hill), 1880 U.S. Census, population schedule, 608;
“McWhirter,” Dallas Morning News, Sept. 23, 1920.
26. Gibbs, 12.
27. Honea, in “Outrages”; Logan2.
28. Lair, 12; “Meeting”; Mitchell to Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860, in USBIA;
Parker2, 5; James C. Wilson to J. P. Dunn, Mar. 13, 1885, in JPDC; Califor-
nia, San Diego County, 1850 U.S. Census, population schedule, 280; Hill,
95–96; Fancher, xvi, 46.
11, 1860, in Carleton, 32; Kearny; Wilson to Dunn, Mar. 13, 1885, in JPDC;

Hill, 96; Arkansas, Carroll County, Osage Township, 1860 U.S. Census,
population schedule, handwritten, 201.
11, 1860, in Carleton, 32; Kearny; Wilson to Dunn, Mar. 13, 1885, in JPDC;
“Children”; Hill, 96; Arkansas, Carroll County, Osage Township, 1860 U.S.
Census, population schedule, handwritten, 201.
31. “James Mathew, b. in 1832; killed in Mountain Meadow Massacre with his
brother Robert and cousin Capt. Alexander Fancher.” Hill, 53; Fancher, 94.
See also Arkansas, Carroll County, Carrollton Township, 1850 U.S. Census,
population schedule, 128. Both James Fancher and his wife Frances “Fanny”
Fancher are notably absent from the 1860 and subsequent census records.
32. According to a family tradition passed down through the James Polk “Red
Polk” Fancher family and published in Fancher, 94, Matt had “become
entangled with a young lady named Fanny Fulfer. California seemed to be a
safe distance from impending fatherhood.” According to that branch of the
Fancher family, James Matthew Fancher and Fanny Fulfer were not married
previous to the journey west and she did not accompany him.
33. According to John Gibson, ed., History of York County, Pennsylvania (Chicago:
F. A. Battey Publishing, 1886), pt. 2, 20, Henry J. Gresly “had a brother
killed in the Mountain Meadow massacre in Utah.” John Gresly was the most
likely candidate of Henry Gresly’s brothers. According to an entry for John
“Gressley,” York County, PA, Court of Quarter Sessions, Dockets, Book
G, Apr. Session, 1851, 137, 141, he was indicted for “malicious mischief.”
Pennsylvania, York County, North Ward, York Borough, 1850 U.S. Census,
population schedule, 2.
34. MU, 238–39; Gibbs, 13, 32. The 1990 Mountain Meadows monument has
“(Thomas?) Hamilton” listed under “Other Names Associated with the
Caravan.”
35. “Victims”; “Meeting”; Mitchell to Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860, in USBIA;
“Cates”; “A Survivor of the Mountain Meadow Massacre,” Fort Smith
Weekly New Era, Feb. 24, 1875; Missouri, Dallas County, Dist. 26, 1850 U.S.
Census, population schedule, 347B. The Harrison monument identifies the
children of Peter Huff and his wife as Angeline, Annie, and Ephraim W. No
verifiable record shows those to be the names of the Huff children.
Oct. 11, 1860, in Carleton, 32; “Cates”; “Survivor of the Mountain Meadow
Massacre”; Kearny; Arkansas, Yell County, Delaware Township, 1870 U.S.
Census, population schedule, 547; Shirley Pyron, “Grave Found of Massacre
Survivor,” Carroll County Historical Quarterly 52 (Mar. 2007): 6–10.
37. In the article “Cates,” Nancy Saphrona Huff stated that she “had a sis-
ter . . . and four brothers that they killed.” The 1990 monument at Mountain
Meadows and the 1999 memorial service program identified William Huff,
Elisha Huff, and two other sons as victims of the massacre. The 1850 census
records for the Huff family possibly identify the two other sons as John and
Notes to Page 247 385

James. See Missouri, Dallas County, Dist. 26, 1850 U.S. Census, population
schedule, 347B. There is no known record of an Elisha Huff or a fourth Huff
son, who is mentioned on the Mountain Meadows monument and in the
1999 memorial service program. Government agent Jacob Forney misidenti-
fied one of the surviving children, Felix Marion Jones, as Elisha W. Huff and
later, Ephraim W. Huff. See J. Forney to C. E. Mix, May 4, 1859, in SDoc42,
58; J. Forney to A. B. Greenwood, Aug. 1859, in SDoc42, 79.
38. “Meeting”; Mitchell to Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860, in USBIA; Francis
M. Rowan, Fielding Wilburn, and Felix W. Jones, depositions, Oct. 24, 1860,
PPU; Arkansas, Johnson County, Spadra Township, 1850 U.S. Census, popu-
lation schedule, 161B.
39. The 1990 monument at Mountain Meadows and the 1999 memorial service
program say that the Jones child who died in the massacre was a daughter.
11, 1860, in Carleton, 32; Kearny; “F. M. Jones Died Tuesday Afternoon,”
Lampasas ( TX ) Record, June 2, 1932; Forney to Mix, May 4, 1859, in SDoc42,
58; Forney to Greenwood, Aug. 1859, in SDoc42, 79.
41. Francis M. Rowan, Fielding Wilburn, and Felix W. Jones, depositions, Oct.
24, 1860, PPU; “Meeting”; Arkansas, Marion County, 1850 U.S. Census,
population schedule, 328B.
42. Mitchell to Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860, in USBIA; Vicki A. Roberts and
Mysty T. McPherson, comps. and eds., Genealogies of Marion County Families,
1811–1900 (Yellville, AR: Historic Genealogical Society of Marion County,
Arkansas, 1997), 269; A Reminiscent History of The Ozark Region (Chicago:
Goodspeed, 1894), 328; Floydene Sanders Gillihan, Moody, Tippit, McEntire,
Patton, Milam (n.p., [1999]), 8; Arkansas, Marion County, 1850 U.S. Census,
population schedule, 327. Lawson McEntire is likely the Lawson Mitchell
identified on the Harrison monument.
43. Sandra K. Ogle, The Miller Family in California: Being a History of Felix
Grundy Miller, 1814–1892, and His Wife, Susanna Matilda Cisco, 1816–1875
(Baltimore: Gateway Press; Napa, CA: S. K. Ogle, 1985), 16–19; Mitchell to
Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860, in USBIA; M1877-10; M1911; Kearny; Arkansas,
Crawford County, Mountain Township, 1850 U.S. Census, population sched-
ule, 329. Malinda Cameron Thurston’s depositions identified her brother-
in-law’s name as Joseph or Joe Miller, but census and other records show
his name was Josiah. The Harrison monument indicates that three children
of Josiah Miller and his wife were killed at the massacre but does not give
their names. Most sources say the Millers had only four children, despite Lt.
Kearny’s statement that John Calvin had two brothers, Henry and James, and
three sisters, Nancy, Mary, and Martha. See Kearny.
44. McGlashan.
Oct. 11, 1860, in Carleton, 32; Kearny; Arkansas, Yell County, Galley Rock
Township, 1860 U.S. Census, population schedule, handwritten 38; Caroline

Parry Woolley, Collection, bx. 4, fd. 8, item 25, Special Collections, Gerald
R. Sherratt Library, Southern Utah University, Cedar City, UT.
46. Mitchell to Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860, in USBIA; Nancy Malejko to Sidney
Price, Aug. 29, 2003, email; Kearny; Mitchell to Conway, Oct. 11, 1860, in
Carleton, 32; Arkansas, Mississippi County, Chickasawba Township, 1870
U.S. Census, population schedule, 538B; Stanislaus County, California, vital
records, Certificate of Death for William Tillman Miller, May 10, 1940; “Last
Survivor of Massacre is Called by Death,” Modesto Bee, May 10, 1940; Annie
Elizabeth Hoag, JDL1-BT 4:29–30; Cradlebaugh, 20; HBM, Nov. 1, 1857;
Arkansas, Carroll County, Carrollton Township, 1860 U.S. Census, population
schedule, handwritten 722. M1877-10 claimed that one of the Miller children
who survived the massacre was named Alfred. From other statements in her
account, it appears she was referring to John Calvin Miller. Young Joseph
Miller was identified as Josiah Miller in Mitchell to Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860.
47. “Meeting”; “Extract”; Mitchell to Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860, in USBIA;
William C. Mitchell to William K. Sebastian, Dec. 31, 1857, as quoted in
Logan1, 31; William C. Mitchell and Samuel Mitchell, depositions regarding
the property of Charles R. and Joel Mitchell, Oct. 22, 1860, PPU; Logan2;
Arkansas, Carroll County, Crooked Creek Township, 1850 U.S. Census,
population schedule, 162B, 163B.
48. Mitchell to Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860, in USBIA; Arkansas, Marion County,
1850 U.S. Census, population schedule, 325.
49. Mitchell to Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860, in USBIA; Lorenzo D. Rush and
Hugh A. Torrance, depositions regarding the property of Milam Rush, Oct.
23, 1860, PPU; Arkansas, Carroll County, Carrollton Township, 1850 U.S.
Census, population schedule, 126B.
M. Rowan and Fielding Wilburn, depositions, Oct. 24, 1860, PPU; Parker2,
5; Arkansas, Johnson County, Spadra Township, 1850 U.S. Census, popula-
tion schedule, 161B; “Letter.” Although modern memorials of the massacre
use the name “Cynthia Tackitt,” original records from the 1850s refer to her
as “Cyntha” or “Cintha.” The Harrison monument indicates that three chil-
dren of “Cintha Tackett” were killed at the massacre but does not give their
names. A total of eight Tackitt children possibly traveled with the Arkansas
company. Two of those children, Pleasant Tackitt and Eloah Tackitt Jones,
were married and are identified with their own families. Sebron Tackitt
appeared as Sebbyrn Tackitt in the 1850 census.
M. Rowan and Fielding Wilburn, depositions, Oct. 24, 1860, PPU; Arkansas,
Johnson County, Spadra Township, 1850 U.S. Census, population sched-
ule, 161B. The Harrison monument indicates that two children of Pleasant
Tackitt and his wife were victims of the massacre. However, the only known
children of Pleasant and Armilda Tackitt were Emberson Milum and William
Henry, both of whom survived the killings and returned to Arkansas.

52. Ogle, Miller Family in California, 16–19.
11, 1860, in Carleton, 32; Kearny; Arkansas, Carroll County, Osage Town-
ship, 1860 U.S. Census, population schedule, 866; Barbara Baldwin Salyer,
comp., Arizona 1890 Great Registers (Mesa, AZ: Arizona Genealogical Advi-
sory Board, 2001), 318; Arizona, Coconino County, Williams Precinct, 1910
U.S. Census, population schedule, ED 22, sheet 13A. The Harrison monu-
ment named an “Ambrose Tackett” as a victim of the massacre—probably
a mistake for Emberson Milum Tackitt, who survived. He is identified
as Miram Tackett in Mitchell to Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860, in USBIA.
E. M. Tackitt is believed to be the only survivor to revisit the Mountain
Meadows after returning to Arkansas. “Children.”
11, 1860, in Carleton, 32; Kearny; “Children”; Arkansas, Carroll County,
Osage Township, 1860 U.S. Census, population schedule, 866.
55. Mitchell to Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860, in USBIA; Arkansas, Marion County,
1850 U.S. Census, population schedule, 323B; Margaret A. Butler, “Moun-
tain Meadows Massacre Discussion,” http://www.rootsweb.com/~armarion/
marioncoinfo/MMM.html (accessed Apr. 4, 2007); Margaret Butler to Craig
L. Foster, Jan. 16, 18, 21, 2004, email; Arkansas, Marion County, Union
Township, 1860 U.S. Census, population schedule, 539.
56. Mitchell to Greenwood, Apr. 27, 1860, in USBIA; Roberts and McPherson,
Genealogies of Marion County Families, 468–69; Earl Berry, History of Marion
County (Little Rock, AR: Marion County Historical Association, 1977), 273;
Arkansas, Marion County, 1850 U.S. Census, population schedule, 320B.
Because Solomon and William’s first cousin, William “Prairie Bill” Coker
married Alexander Fancher’s first cousin, Arminta Fancher, they would be
kith-laws.
Appendix B
1. Samuel Pitchforth of Nephi, UT, wrote that the wagon train had at least
three hundred head of cattle. Pitchforth, Aug. 15, 1857. James Pearce
passed the train on his way to southern Utah and recalled seeing thirty to
forty wagons. Pearce, JDL1-BT 4:100. Jacob Hamblin, who camped near
the emigrants at Corn Creek recalled four hundred to five hundred head of
horned cattle, twenty-five horses, some mules, several tents, and “not over
thirty wagons.” Hamblin, in Carleton, 6. Robert Kershaw of Beaver, UT,
remembered the train having thirty-one wagons. Kershaw, JDL1-BT 4:90.
E. W. Thompson, also of Beaver, remembered between thirty and forty
wagons. Thompson, JDL1-BT 4:109. Thomas Willis of Cedar City, saw the
wagon train with fifteen to twenty wagons and four hundred to five hundred
head of cattle. Willis, JDL1-BT 4:31. George K. Bowering of Cedar City,
saw five hundred head of cattle—including oxen, cows, and young stock—and
about twelve to fourteen wagons, in addition to horses and mules used in

teams. Bowering, 230. Philip Klingensmith and Joel White passed the train
just east of Pinto and estimated that the emigrants had twenty-five to thirty
wagons pulled by ox, mule, and horse teams. Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:6,
20–21; White, JDL1-BT 3:130–31. David Tullis told Jacob Forney and
William Rogers in 1859 that when the wagon train arrived at Mountain
Meadows, it had seven hundred to eight hundred head of cattle and oxen, “a
considerable number of horses and mules,” and “about forty wagons.” Rogers
(Rogers misidentifies Tullis as Carl Shirts). Nephi Johnson said there were
fifteen emigrant wagons at the emigrant corral after the massacre. NJ1909.
John D. Lee said that the wagon train had eighteen wagons and “over five
hundred head of cattle.” MU, 250.
2. Joseph B. Baines, John H. Baker, William C. Beller, and Irvin T. Beller, depo-
sitions regarding the property of George W. Baker, Oct. 23, 1860, PPU. In
the 1857 tax roll, found in Arkansas Tax Records, 1821–84, Carroll County
taxes for 1857, [1], film no. 1954591, FHL, George W. Baker had one hun-
dred acres of land, six horses, and twelve head of cattle, all valued at $1,650.
3. Estimated at $55 per yoke.
4. Estimated at $15 to $20 per head.
5. Estimated at $100 to $125 each.
6. Joseph Baines gave George W. Baker $700 for the care of Melissa Ann Beller
but said that amount may have been used to purchase stock. Joseph B. Baines,
John H. Baker, William C. Beller, and Irvin T. Beller, depositions regarding
the property of George W. Baker, Oct. 23, 1860, PPU.
7. Mary Baker, John H. Baker, John Crabtree, and Hugh A. Torrance, deposi-
tions, Oct. 22–23, 1860, PPU. According to the 1857 tax roll, Jack Baker had
112 acres, 7 slaves, 6 horses, and 32 head of cattle, valued at $6,567. Arkansas
Tax records, Carroll County taxes for 1857, [1].
8. Estimated at $50 to $70 per yoke.
9. Estimated at $20 per head.
10. Horse estimated at $100 and mules at $125 to $150 each.
11. M1877-10; M1877-12; M1911; John P. Shaver, affidavit in support of H.R.
3945, Dec. 19, 1877, 45th Cong., 2nd sess., National Archives, Washing-
ton, D.C., copy of transcript in CHL; Joel Scott, deposition, May 2, 1911,
Thurston; “Children”; Wm. C. Mitchell to Elias N. Conway, Oct. 11, 1860,
in Carleton, 32.
12. A pure-blood racing mare known as “One-Eye Blaze.”
13. M1877-10; M1877-12; Shaver, affidavit, Dec. 19, 1877; M1911; Scott, depo-
sition, May 2, 1911, Thurston. See also Frederick Arnold and Andrew Wolf,
depositions, May 2, 1911, Thurston. According to the Arkansas Tax Records,
1821–84, Johnson County taxes for 1856, and 1857, film no. 1955327, FHL,
William Cameron’s real property and livestock were valued at a high of $510
and a low of $140.
14. Malinda Cameron Scott Thurston said in her May 2, 1911, statement that
the Camerons traveled with two large wagons and “a small wagon.” Previous

statements mention only the two large wagons. M1911; M1877-10;
M1877-12.
15. The stated value for William Cameron’s wagons appears also to include all
his family’s miscellaneous property, such as camp equipment and provisions.
However, the value may not take into account the “small wagon.”
16. Estimated at $150 to $250 per yoke.
17. M1877-10; M1877-12; M1911; Scott, deposition, May 2, 1911, Thurston.
18. Estimated at $75 to $90 each.
19. Horses estimated at $80 to $150 each and mules at $200 each.
20. According to Malinda Cameron Scott Thurston’s May 2, 1911, statement, her
father told her he had $3,000 in gold coin, which she believed he kept in “a
place mortised under the wagon.” She said she never actually saw the gold to
verify its existence. M1911. See also M1877-10; M1877-12. John Chatterley,
who lived in Cedar City in 1857 but was not at the massacre, reported that
$1,700 in gold coin was found in one of the emigrants’ wagons. Chatterley.
21. James Deshazo, Hugh A. Torrance, and Lorenzo D. Rush, depositions
regarding the property of Allen Deshazo, Oct. 23, 1860, PPU; Arkansas Tax
records, Carroll County taxes for 1857, [7]. The 1857 tax roll lists him own-
ing one horse valued at $50.
22. Deshazo’s cattle was worth $15 per head. According to Hugh A. Torrence,
Deshazo planned on selling it for $25 per head. Hugh A. Torrance, deposi-
tion regarding the property of Allen Deshazo, Oct. 23, 1860, PPU.
23. James D. Dunlap and William C. Mitchell, depositions regarding the property
of Jesse Dunlap, Oct. 26, 1860, PPU. Arkansas Tax records, 1821–84, Carroll
County taxes for 1855, 16, film no. 1954591, FHL. The 1855 tax roll lists Jesse
Dunlap owning forty acres, six horses, and six cattle for a total value of $260.
26. Estimated at $100 each.
27. William C. Mitchell, Samuel Mitchell, James D. Dunlap, Adam P. Dunlap,
Robert H. Mitchell, and Wm. C. Dunlap, depositions regarding the property
of Lorenzo Dunlap, Oct. 26, 1860, PPU.
30. S. B. Honea, in “Outrages.”
31. Stephen B. Honea, who passed through Cedar City shortly after the mas-
sacre, recalled Isaac Haight “riding a large bay horse which he recognized as
having belonged to Mr. Silas Edwards.” Honea, in “Outrages.”
32. The value of Silas Edwards’s horse is not given in the newspaper article.
Horses belonging to other emigrants ranged in value from $40 to $150,
with the exception of Tillman Cameron’s racing mare. Depositions in PPU;
M1877–10; M1877–12; Shaver affidavit, Dec. 19, 1877.
33. H. B. Fancher to James C. Wilson, Aug. 2, 1885, enclosed in James C. Wilson
to Jacob P. Dunn, Aug. 11, 1885, JPDC; Arkansas Tax records, 1821–84,

Benton County taxes for 1856, 9, film no. 1954479, FHL. In the letter from
H. B. Fancher, the amount of property for Alexander Fancher is given, but its
value is not. The value was determined using tax records and value ranges for
other property of the train.
34. Emigrants’ wagon values ranged from $100 to $137.50 each. Depositions in PPU.
35. Work oxen ranged from $50 to $150 per yoke. Depositions in PPU.
36. Cattle ranged from $12 to $20 per head. Depositions in PPU.
37. The value of Alexander Fancher’s three horses was $130, according to the
1856 tax records for Benton County. The mule he owned in 1856 was worth
$75. The most valuable mules from other emigrants in the train were worth
$200. Shaver, affidavit, Dec. 19, 1877. Therefore, $75 to $200 is the value
range given for the eight mules.
38. Arkansas Tax records, 1821–84, Carroll County taxes for 1856, [8], film no.
1954591, FHL. James Fancher owned three horses valued at $120.
39. Arkansas Tax records, Benton County taxes for 1856, 12; Benton County,
AR, Deed records, 1837–56, vol. D, 169, film no. 1034925, FHL. Peter
Huff ’s total value of real property and livestock was $955. He died en route
to Utah on the high plains of modern-day Wyoming. His wife and children
continued to Mountain Meadows. “Victims.”
40. Benton County tax records for 1856 list twenty cows valued at $250.
41. Huff ’s three horses were valued at a total of $150. His mule was valued at $75.
42. According to Benton County, AR, Deed records, 1837–56, vol. D, 169, in
March 1857 Huff sold his 160 acres of land in Benton County for $1,200.
Although this money was likely used to prepare for the western move, it is
unknown exactly how the Huffs allocated this money. The 1856 value of his
160 acres was only $480.
43. Francis M. Rowan, Fielding Wilburn, and Felix W. Jones, depositions, Oct.
24, 1860, PPU. In 1856, John Milum Jones had three horses valued at $50.
Arkansas Tax records, Johnson County taxes for 1856. The Jones brothers
jointly owned the property.
46. William C. Mitchell and Samuel Mitchell, depositions regarding the prop-
erty of Charles R. and Joel Mitchell, Oct. 22, 1860, PPU, 1849–70. In 1855,
Charles R. Mitchell owned two hundred acres, two horses, and two cattle
valued at $1,220. Arkansas Tax records, 1821–84, Marion County taxes for
1855, 15, film no. 1955429, FHL.
48. William C. Mitchell noted that his sons, Charles and Joel, left Arkansas with
sixty-two head of cattle. When they reached Washington County, AR, they
purchased ten more head of cattle and intended to buy two more.
50. The Mitchell brothers left their home with $275 in cash. In Washington
County, AR, they used some of that money to purchase ten to twelve head of

cattle at $12 per head. William Mitchell’s affidavit put his sons’ cash amount
at $275 but did not reduce that figure by the amount used to purchase addi-
tional cattle in Washington County, AR.
51. Their exchange of cash for cattle in Washington County, AR, merely
changed the form in which they held their wealth but not the total value of
their property. They either had seventy-two cattle worth $864 and $155 cash
or they had seventy-four cattle worth $888 and $131 cash.
52. Lorenzo D. Rush and Hugh A. Torrance, affidavits regarding the property of
Milum L. Rush, Oct. 23, 1860, PPU.
54. The Poteet and Tackitt families and at least one person named Basham left
Arkansas with the Jones brothers. Francis Rowan and Fielding Wilburn
noted the group’s property when they camped at Washington County, AR.
55. Although Wilburn saw three wagons with this group, Rowan identified one
of the wagons as Pleasant Tackitt’s. Zero is given as a low-end property value
for the Poteets and Basham to reflect the possibility that all the property, and
perhaps Basham, went to California with the Poteets.
56. Wagon values for the rest of the emigrants ranged from $100 to $137.50
each. Depositions in PPU.
57. Estimated at $20 per head because that is the price of the cattle belonging to
the Joneses, who traveled with the group.
58. Values of the rest of the emigrants’ horses ranged from $40 to $150, with the
exception of Tillman Cameron’s racing mare. Depositions in PPU;
M1877–10; M1877–12; Shaver, affidavit, Dec. 19, 1877.
59. Francis M. Rowan, deposition, Oct. 24, 1860, PPU. According to Arkansas
Tax records, Johnson County taxes for 1856, Pleasant Tackitt owned two
horses and two cattle for a total value of $140.
60. The value for Pleasant Tackitt’s wagon was not provided. However, wagon
values for the rest of the emigrants ranged from $100 to $137.50 each.
Depositions in PPU.
61. Wm. C. Mitchell to Elias N. Conway, Oct. 11, 1860, in Carleton, 32.
62. “Letter”; John H. Baker, deposition, Oct. 22, 1860, PPU; “OBF,” 163;
William Bedford Temple to Wife and Children, May 11, June 2, 1850,
Oregon Historical Society, Portland, Oregon; Washington Peck, Diary, Dec.
5, 1850, typescript, National Frontier Trails Center, Independence, MO;
California, San Diego County, 1850 U.S. Census, population schedule, 280.
63. Robert Glass Cleland, The Cattle on a Thousand Hills: Southern California,
1850–1880 (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1964), 106.
64. W. S. J., June 1, 1857, in “Our Monthly Live Stock Report,” San Francisco
Herald, June 5, 1857; X. Y. Z., May 23, 1857, in “Our Los Angeles Cor-
respondence,” San Francisco Daily Alta California, May 28, 1857; Geo.
F. Lamson, “Los Angeles Price Current,” Los Angeles Star, Jan. 31, 1857.
65. Vouchers 1–8, in U.S. Congress, House, Accounts of Brigham Young, Super-
intendent of Indian Affairs in Utah Territory, 37th Cong., 2nd sess., 1862,

H. Doc. 29, 97–101; John D. Lee to Brigham Young, Nov. 20, 1857,
Incoming Correspondence, YOF; John D. Lee, Account Book, May 1858–
Oct. 1859, HM 31204, JDLC; JHM, Sept. 24, 1857.
66. John Sherrett, JDL1-BT 4:72; Thomas T. Willis, JDL1-BT 4:43–45;
Bowering, 230; McGlashan; Mary S. Campbell, AJ1; Carleton, 21–22; Jacob
Forney to A. B. Greenwood, Aug. 1859, in SDoc42, 79.
67. Utah Territory, Great Salt Lake County, 1850 U.S. Census, population
schedule, 105B; Utah Territory, Iron County, 1850 U.S. Census, popula-
tion schedule, 18 (commenced May 12, 1851); Utah Territory, Washington
County, Harmony Township, 1860 U.S. Census, population schedule, hand-
written 139. In 1850, while he was living in Salt Lake City, Lee’s property
was valued at $2,500. The next year, Lee moved to Iron County where his
property value was stated at $3,000. In 1860 Lee’s real estate was valued
at $40,000, in addition to personal property value of $9,500. Within a few
months after the massacre, Lee purchased a city lot and sixteen acres of land
in Washington City with $150 worth of livestock. MC, 1:150, Feb. 12, 1858.
69. MU, 250; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:90–91, John W. Bradshaw,
JDL1-BT 4:77–78.
70. Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:66; Frank F. Jorden, “A True Story,” ca. 1871,
MMMRF.
71. Philip Kingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:29; John Hamilton Sr., JDL1-BT 5:308–12;
John Hamilton Jr., JDL1-BT 5:316–19; Thomas T. Willis, JDL1-BT 4:33–34,
see also JDL1-PS 5:22–23; George Powers, statement, in “Horrible”; MU, 250.
Appendix C
1. The sources for the militia members’ ranks and places of residence are
OIMD; MRIMD; James H. Martineau report to Adj. Gen. James Ferguson,
listing Iron Military District officers elected July 28, 1857, reproduced in
Gardner, 328–29. See also 1856 Utah Territorial Census; Utah Territory,
1860 U.S. Federal Census; TF, 473–89. The birth and death dates were
obtained from family records and census reports.
2. In 1859 Judge John Cradlebaugh issued thirty-eight arrest warrants for men
tied to the massacre. William Rogers, who assisted Cradlebaugh, said one
witness came forward to give the names of twenty-five to thirty participants.
It is unclear how Cradlebaugh got the other eight to thirteen names. While
most names from Cradlebaugh’s arrest warrants have been identified as
massacre participants by other sources, some cannot be verified, including
William Riggs, [Alexander] Ingram, Ira Allen’s son, Jabes Nomlen [ Jabus
Nowlin], John W. Adair, [Oscar?] Tyler, Samuel Lewis, Sims Matheny, and
Samuel Adair. Two names, Joseph Elang and F. C. McDulange, cannot be
identified as individuals living within the Iron Military District in 1857.
Two other names, E. Welean and James Price, are likely references to Ellott
Willden and James Pearce, respectively. Therefore, only the names that are

supported by other evidence are reflected in this appendix. Cradlebaugh
19–20; Rogers. Additionally, Jacob Forney listed a “Bishop Davis” among
the “names of the persons the most guilty.” Although likely a reference to
William R. Davies, the bishop at Harmony, no eyewitnesses or other known
sources place him at the massacre. J. Forney to A. B. Greenwood, Sept. 22,
1859, in SDoc42, 86.
3. Notes from meeting with George W. Adair, David O. McKay, Diary, July
27, 1907, UofU, photocopy at CHL; Frederick S. Dellenbaugh to Charles
Kelly, Aug. 16, 1934, published in Utah Historical Quarterly 37 (Spring 1969):
242; MU, 228–29, 379; William Young, JDL1-PS 5:35; Lyman, Sept. 19, 21,
1895; Joel White, affidavit, Oct. 9, 1896, CM; Indictment for murder against
George Adair, Sept. 24, 1874, in CCF 31 and MBB, 442–44; Arrest Warrant,
Dec. 4, 1874, MBB, 444–45 (served Nov. 2, 1875); John R. Young, “Reminis-
cences of John R. Young,” Utah Historical Quarterly 3 ( July 1930): 85; Case
dismissal, Sept. 1, 1879, United States v. George Adair Jr., MBB, 452–53; Jabez
Sutherland, JDL1-BT 8:4, JDL1-PS 11:23. Cradlebaugh issued a warrant for
a John W. Adair in 1859. Although there was a John Wesley Adair, George
W. Adair Jr.’s uncle, he was not present at the massacre, and Cradlebaugh’s
warrant was most likely meant for George W. Adair Jr. Cradlebaugh, 20.
4. Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:4, 16, 24, 42–43, 90–91; PKS; John
W. Bradshaw, JDL1-BT 4:77–78; Jabez Sutherland, JDL1-BT 8:4; MU, 232,
379. See also “LC”; “LLC.” Cradlebaugh issued an arrest warrant for “Ira
Allen and son” in 1859. Two of Ira Allen’s sons are listed in the same platoon
as their father: Andrew, age 20, and Simeon, age 18. However, it is unclear
whether either went with Ira to the Meadows since they are not named by
other known sources. Cradlebaugh 19; OIMD; MRIMD.
5. MU, 230, 235, 379; Ellott Willden, Mary S. Campbell, AJ2; Mary S. Campbell,
D. W. Tullis, Ellott Willden, AJ1; McGlashan; Whitney, 1:699; Conversation
with Samuel Knight, in Cannon, June 13, 1895; Corr1; Corr2.
6. Christopher J. Arthur, AJ1; Elias Morris, statement, Feb. 2, 1892, communi-
cated to Andrew Jenson, CM; Clewes.
7. Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:78; William Young, JDL1-BT 4:50, 5:205–6;
Samuel Pollock, JDL1-BT 4:62, 5:180–81; Samuel McMurdy, JDL2-BT
1:34–35; “LC”; “LLC”; MU, 236, 379; “Lee’s Confession,” New York Herald,
Mar. 22, 1877; Henry Higgins, affidavit, Apr. 20, 1859, printed in Cradle-
baugh, 42; Jabez Sutherland, JDL1-BT 8:4. Judge John Cradlebaugh issued a
warrant in 1859 for William Bateman’s arrest. Cradlebaugh, 20.
8. Samuel Pollock, JDL1-BT 4:62, 5:180–81; MU, 232, 379; Jabez Sutherland,
JDL1-BT 8:4.
9. William Young, JDL1-BT 4:49; James Pearce, JDL1-BT 4:103–4; MU, 228,
379; “LC”; “LLC.” In his closing argument for the first John D. Lee trial,
defense attorney Jabez Sutherland contended that Clark remained at the
militia camp during the massacre; however, this assertion is not supported
by the trial testimony of eyewitnesses. Two of those who did remain at the

camp during the massacre, William Young and James Pearce, saw Clark at
the Meadows, but they did not say he stayed behind at the camp during the
massacre. Sutherland, JDL1-BT 8:4; JDL1-PS 11:38–39.
10. Clewes; Clew/Will; Morris, statement, Feb. 2, 1892, CM; Christopher
J. Arthur, AJ1; MU, 232, 379; James Haslam, JDL2-BT 1:13–14.
11. Carleton, 15, 17, 24–25.
12. Samuel Pollock, JDL1-BT 4:62, 5:180–81; MU, 232, 379; Higgins, affidavit,
Apr. 20, 1859, printed in Cradlebaugh, 42; Jabez Sutherland, JDL1-BT 8:4.
Cradlebaugh issued a warrant in 1859 for Curtis’s arrest. Cradlebaugh, 20.
13. William Barton, AJ1; Chatterley; Morris, statement, Feb. 2, 1892, CM; PKS;
JHM1907; William Mathews, JDL1-BT 4:47; Jabez Sutherland, JDL1-BT 8:4;
“LC”; “LLC”; MU, 245–47, 380–81; Indictment for murder against William
H. Dame, Sept. 24, 1874, in CCF 31 and CCF 34; Dispatch, Nov. 18, 1874, in
“Miscellaneous: Colonel Dame, Another of the Mountain Meadows Veterans,
Arrested,” Salt Lake Daily Tribune, Nov. 19, 1874; Case dismissal, Sept. 14,
1876, United States v. William H. Dame, Minute Book 1, 1874–77, 466, Utah
Second District Court (Beaver County), Court Records 1865–81, microfilm
485239, FHL, original at Beaver County Recorders Office, Beaver, UT; J. C.
Y., Sept. 14, 1876, in “The Lee Case,” Salt Lake Daily Tribune, Sept. 17, 1876.
14. Albert Hamblin, in Carleton, 15.
15. MU, 232, 379.
16. William Edwards, affidavit, May 14, 1924, USHS, copy also located in
MMMRF; “LC”; “LLC”; MU, 229, 379. In MU, Lee could not remember
whether a messenger he sent from the Meadows to Cedar City was Edwards
or George Adair. Adair was the likely candidate since Edwards arrived at the
lower end of the Meadows after Lee had sent the messenger. Additionally,
Edwards himself never mentioned being a messenger for Lee. Edwards’s
name does not appear on the militia rosters. OIMD; MRIMD.
17. MU, 232, 379. Columbus’s father, John Freeman, and older brothers William
and John W. Freeman are listed on the June 1857 and Oct. 10, 1857, militia
rosters for Company I, First and Third Platoons, Washington County.
OIMD; MRIMD. Cradlebaugh issued a warrant for Columbus Freeman’s
arrest in 1859. Cradlebaugh, 19.
18. MU, 218–21, 245–47, 381; “LC”; “LLC”; “Lee’s Confession,” New York
Herald, Mar. 22, 1877; PKS; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:4, 33; TF,
386; William Young, JDL1-BT 4:55–56; John W. Bradshaw, JDL1-BT 4:75;
Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:43–44, 57, 60; Chatterley; JHM1907; NJ1908;
NJ1909; William Barton, AJ1; Ellott Willden, AJ2; Mary S. Campbell, AJ1;
Ellott Willden, AJ1; Laban Morrill, JDL2-BT 1:7–10; Morris, statement,
Feb. 2, 1892, CM; James Haslam, JDL2-BT 1:11–14; Haslam, 3–5, 12–13;
Clewes; Jabez Sutherland, JDL1-BT 8:4; Indictment for murder against Isaac
C. Haight, Sept. 24, 1874, BYU. In 1859, Judge Cradlebaugh issued an arrest
warrant for “Jacob Haight, President of the Cedar City stake.” Cradlebaugh,
19. See also Forney to Greenwood, Sept. 22, 1859, in SDoc42, 86.

19. MU, 228–29, 379; “LC”; “LLC”; James M. Mangum, deposition, July 5, 1875,
MBB, 324; William Young, JDL1-BT 5:203; Jacob Hamblin, JDL2-BT 1:100,
see JDL2-PS 3:16. According to a family legend, Oscar’s wife Mary Ann kept
him from participating in the massacre. “Mary Ann, learning there was to be
trouble the next day, gave Oscar a double dose of epicac which induced vomit-
ing and rendered him too ill to be involved in any way.” Shauna Brimhall,
“History of Oscar Hamblin,” typescript, 3, Daughters of Utah Pioneers.
20. Frank F. Jorden, “A True Story,” ca. 1871, 87–88, typescript copy located
in MMMRF; MU, 232, 379; J. G. Sutherland, JDL1-BT 8:4. According to
family tradition, when Richard Harrison was approached about going to
Mountain Meadows he ordered the men off his property. Telephone conver-
sation of Nada Gardner, Aug. 19, 2002, recorded by Brian Reeves, MMMRF.
A warrant for a Harrison was issued by Cradlebaugh in 1859. Cradlebaugh,
20. Although most family history records place his birth date at Mar. 8, 1808,
the Pinto, UT, cemetery records give his date of birth as Apr. 30, 1807. See
Pinto, UT, cemetery records, microfilm, FHL.
21. Carleton, 17, 24–25; McGlashan; Beadle2, 500; Corr1; James Lynch, affida-
vit, July 27, 1859, enclosed in S. H. Montgomery to A. B. Greenwood, Aug.
17, 1859, USBIA; [ James] Lynch, statement, in “The Mountain Meadows
Massacre: Surviving Children of the Murdered Fix the Crime upon the
Mormons,” San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, May 31, 1859; S. B. Honea,
in “Outrages”; Forney to Greenwood, Sept. 22, 1859, in SDoc42, 86.
22. “The Mormon Massacre: Names of All the White Murderers,” New York
Herald, May 22, 1877, also reprinted in “The Massacre: The Names of All
the Whites Who Participated in It,” Salt Lake Daily Tribune, May 30, 1877.
The name “George Hanley” that appears in this newspaper list is likely a
reference to George Hawley. Even though it said George was dead, he had
actually just left Utah. Iowa, Shelby County, Grove Township, 1880 U.S.
Census, population schedule, 8. This list, which claimed to be published
posthumously from a handwritten note by Lee, included several names not
associated with other lists attributed to Lee, nor are the names verified by
other sources. Those names, as listed in the article, are: J. [ Jehiel] McCon-
nel, “two men named Curtis,” J. [ Jonathon] Pugmire [Sr.], Sam Adair, Nate
Adair, George Hanley [Hawley], Hairgraves, and William Hamblin. Ezra
Curtis is known to have lived in southern Utah in 1857 and to have been
identified as a massacre participant by eyewitness accounts. The name Hair-
graves does not resemble the name of any known individual residing within
the jurisdiction of the Iron Military District.
23. MU, 228, 379; “LC”; “LLC”; John Hawley to Joseph Smith III, June 12,
1884, in Saints’ Herald 31, no. 26 (1884): 412; Hawley, 15–16.
24. MU, 228, 379; “Lee’s Book, Names of Participants Corrections,” undated,
AJ1. Legend claimed that William Hawley was chained to a wagon wheel at
the Meadows by fellow militiamen because he opposed the massacre. Frank
Beckwith, “Was William Hawley Chained to a Wagon Wheel?” chap. 2, in

“Shameful Friday: A Critical Study of the Mountain Meadows Massacre,”
HBM 31255, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. None of the
witness accounts mention such an occurrence. Cradlebaugh issued a warrant
for Hawley’s arrest in 1859. Cradlebaugh, 19–20.
25. Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:3–4, 9–10, 15, 17–18, 72–76, 82; Higgins,
affidavit, Apr. 20, 1859, printed in Cradlebaugh, 42; Clewes; Isaac C. Riddle,
JDL1-BT 4:120; MU, 232–33, 236, 379; “LC”; “LLC”; Corr1; Mary Camp-
bell, AJ1; D. W. Tullis, AJ1; Morris, statement, Feb. 2, 1892, CM; Whitney,
1:706n†; Notes from meeting George W. Adair, found in McKay Diary, July
27, 1907; Indictment for murder against John M. Higbee, Sept. 24, 1874, in
CCF 31 and CCF 32. Cradlebaugh issued a warrant for Higbee’s arrest in
1859. Cradlebaugh, 19; Forney to Greenwood, Sept. 22, 1859, in SDoc42,
86; Jabez Sutherland, JDL1-BT 8:4. While still in hiding Higbee released
his account of the massacre under the pseudonym “Bull Valley Snort.” Bull
Valley Snort [ John M. Higbee], statement, Feb. 1894, typescript, CM. After
the charges against him were dismissed, Higbee and a few of his support-
ers released affidavits in his defense. Higbee, affidavit, June 15, 1896, CM;
Daniel S. Macfarlane, affidavit, June 29, 1896, CM; William Tait, affidavit,
June 30, 1896, CM; Joel W. White, affidavit, Oct. 9, 1896, CM. Tait’s and
Macfarlane’s affidavits were almost identical.
26. MU, 230, 232–34, 247, 379; “LC”; “LLC”; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT
3:7–8, 82; Samuel Pollock, JDL1-BT 4:62; Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:57;
Samuel McMurdy, JDL2-BT 1:33. Judge John Cradlebaugh issued a warrant
for Charles Hopkins’s arrest in 1859. Cradlebaugh, 20; Jabez Sutherland,
JDL1-BT 8:4.
27. MU, 379; “Mormon Massacre” (this source simply lists the surname, “Hum-
phrey”); “Mormon Assassins: Another List of Men Who Were at Mountain
Meadows,” New York Herald, June 26, 1877 (“John Humphrey: lived with old
man Woods at Cedar” ); “Lee’s Book, Names of Participants Corrections,”
undated, AJ1; Ann Richey, List of Mountain Meadow Participants, enclosed
in Ernest Cook to Samuel W. Taylor, July 6, 1979, CHL. Ann Richey, born at
Pinto on Aug. 24, 1866, prepared a handwritten list of massacre participants
that was later found in a box of papers owned by Ernest Cook’s wife, Helen,
a descendant of Ann Richey. Cook believed the list was from first-hand
knowledge but admitted he was unsure of its origin. The list contains names
in alphabetical order from A to L. It is unclear whether the other half is in
existence. All but two names on the list can be confirmed as massacre par-
ticipants from other sources. The two exceptions are John Bateman, likely a
reference to William Bateman, and Tom Edwards, who cannot be confirmed
as a resident within the jurisdiction of the Iron Military District.
28. MU, 232, 379; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:24, 90–91.
29. MU, 232, 380; “Lee’s Confession,” New York Herald, Mar. 22, 1877; John
Jacobs, “Not There,” Salt Lake Daily Herald, Mar. 30, 1877; “Lee’s Book,
Names of Participants Corrections,” undated, AJ1.

30. Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:10–11; “Lee’s Book, Names of Participants
Corrections,” undated, AJ1; MU, 232, 380; Jabez Sutherland, JDL1-BT
8:4. Swen is likely the “Irvin Jacobs” named by Lee in the “Confessions”
section of MU. According to family tradition another of the Jacobs brothers,
Christopher, was forced to join the company going to Mountain Meadows.
“He told them they could force him to go but they could not force him to
kill anyone after he got there. This he didn’t do as he wouldn’t fire a gun.”
However, John Chatterley said that at the time of the massacre Christopher
Jacobs was accompanying him on a reconnaissance mission along the Sevier
River, looking for signs of the approaching U.S. army, which was feared to
have taken a southern mountain pass into Utah. See James W. Sorensen,
“Christopher Jacobs: 1819–1907,” MMMRF; Chatterley.
31. MU, 232, 379; “Lee’s Book, Names of Participants Corrections,” undated, AJ1;
Indictment for murder against Samuel Jewkes, Sept. 24, 1874, in CCF 31 and
CCF 33. In 1892, Cedar City resident Mary Campbell told historian Andrew
Jenson that Jewkes was given two children from the massacre. One of those chil-
dren, a girl between seven and nine years old, reportedly pointed out her father’s
killer and “afterwards disappeared.” Campbell, AJ1; Campbell, AJ2. Contempo-
rary records identify only one child given to Jewkes, Prudence Angeline Dunlap.
Because she was five years old at the time of the massacre and seven when she
returned to Arkansas, she was likely the one Campbell remembered and was not
killed as rumored. Cedar City Stake, “Record of Children Blessed 1856–1863,”
CHL; Kearny. During the closing arguments of the first Lee trial, defense attor-
ney Jabez Sutherland pointed out that none of the trial testimony placed Jewkes
at the massacre. Jabez Sutherland, JDL1-PS 11:23, JDL1-BT 8:4.
32. Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:43–85; Lyman, Sept. 19, 21, 1895; NJ1908;
NJ1909; NJ1910; Samuel Pollock, JDL1-BT 5:191, 199 (Pollock recalled see-
ing a white man on a hill above the massacre, who was likely Nephi Johnson);
MU, 220, 232, 237, 243, 380; “LC”; “LLC.” In his testimony at Lee’s second
trial, Johnson claimed he saw the massacre from the hill after he chased his
horse, which had gotten loose after being tied to a tree. Nephi Johnson, JDL2-
BT 1:47, 74, 81. Gibbs, 34, wrote, “Nephi Johnson’s horse had learned the
trick of untying his halter rope when it was carelessly fastened.” Judge John
Cradlebaugh issued a warrant for Johnson’s arrest in 1859. Cradlebaugh, 20.
33. PKS; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:1–118; Joel White, JDL1-BT 4:9;
Samuel Pollock, JDL1-BT 4:69; Laban Morrill, JDL2-BT 1:9; Nephi
Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:47; Jacob Hamblin, JDL2-BT 1:102; “LC”; “LLC”;
MU, 244–45; Mary S. Campbell, AJ1; Ellott Willden, AJ2; Ellott Willden2,
AJ2; Ellott Willden, AJ1; Whitney, 1:704; NJ1908; Forney to Green-
wood, Sept. 22, 1859, in SDoc42, 86; Jabez Sutherland, JDL1-BT 8:4.
Klingensmith himself suggested that at least one of the children died at
Hamblin’s ranch, but from wounds. Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:20.
Nancy Huff, one of the children who survived the massacre, remembered,
“At the close of the massacre there was 18 children still alive, one girl, some

ten or twelve years old they said was t[o]o big and could tell so they killed
her, leaving 17.” “Cates.” Before Klingensmith was sworn in as a witness
in John D. Lee’s first trial, prosecuting attorney William Carey entered a
motion of “nolle prosequi” in his behalf. Indictment for murder against Philip
Klingensmith, Sept. 24, 1874, in CCF 31; William Carey, JDL1-PS 2:32.
34. Samuel Knight, JDL2-BT 1:18–32; Samuel Knight, AJ1; Conversation Sam-
uel Knight, in Cannon, June 13, 1895; MU, 228, 238, 241–43, 380; Nephi
Johnson, JDL2-BT 1: 62–63; “LC”; “LLC”; Knight; Jabez Sutherland,
JDL1-BT 8:4.
35. Juanita Brooks, Dudley Leavitt, Pioneer to Southern Utah (n.p., 1942), 33;
Juanita Brooks, On the Ragged Edge: The Life and Times of Dudley Leavitt (Salt
Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1973), 76–78; Notes regarding the
Mountain Meadows Massacre, undated, AJ1; Samuel Knight, AJ1; MU, 228,
380; “Lee’s Book, Names of Participants Corrections,” undated, AJ1.
36. “LC”; “LLC”; MU, 213–92, 380; NJ1908; Samuel Knight, JDL2-BT 1:20–22;
Samuel Knight, AJ1; Corr1; Benjamin Platt, Reminiscences, 1899–1905,
typescript, 5–6, CHL; Gibbs, 53–54; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:9–10,
72–76; Annie Elizabeth Hoag, JDL1-BT 4:29; Samuel Knight, JDL2-BT
1:28–31; Samuel McMurdy, JDL2-BT 1:34–35, 37, 42; Nephi Johnson,
JDL2-BT 1:45–46, 49–51, 67, 76; Jacob Hamblin, JDL2-BT 1:86–87, 94–97;
Knight; C. J. S., Mar. 25, 1877, in “Shooting of Lee!” Salt Lake Daily Tribune,
Mar. 30, 1877; Indictment for murder against John D. Lee, Sept. 24, 1874, in
CCF 31 and CCF 40; Collins R. Hakes, Apr. 24, 1916, CM; Jabez Sutherland,
JDL1-BT 8:4. Cradlebaugh issued a warrant for Lee’s arrest in 1859. Cradle-
baugh, 19. See also Forney to Greenwood, Sept. 22, 1859, in SDoc42, 86.
37. Higgins, affidavit, Apr. 20, 1859, printed in Cradlebaugh, 42; MU, 232, 380.
Cradlebaugh issued a warrant for Loveridge’s arrest in 1859. Cradlebaugh, 20.
38. Macfarlane, affidavit, June 29, 1896, in CM; Daniel S. Macfarlane, AJ2; MU,
232, 237, 240, 380; “Mormon Assassins”; “LC”; “LLC.” According to MU:
“I remember a circumstance that Haight then related to me about Dan.
McFarland. He said: ‘Dan will make a bully warrior.’ I said, ‘Why do you think
so?’ ‘Well,’ said he, ‘Dan came to me and said, “You must get me another knife,
because the one I have got has no good stuff in it, for the edge turned when
I cut a fellow’s throat that day at the Meadows. I caught one of the devils that
was trying to get away, and when I cut his throat it took all the edge off of my
knife.” I tell you that boy will make a bully warrior.’ ” MU, 254. Cradlebaugh
issued a warrant for Daniel Macfarlane’s arrest in 1859. Cradlebaugh, 19.
39. Cradlebaugh, 20; MU, 232, 380.
40. Samuel McMurdy, JDL2-BT 1:32–43; PKS; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT
3:8, 21; Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:62–63; MU, 232, 238, 241–42, 380;
“LC”; “LLC”; “Lee’s Book, Names of Participants Corrections,” undated,
AJ1; Jabez Sutherland, JDL1-BT 8:4. When asked whether he participated in
the killing of the wounded emigrants, Samuel McMurdy refused to answer,
stating, “I believe I am not on trial.” Samuel McMurdy, JDL2-BT 1:42.

41. Mangum, deposition, July 5, 1875, MBB, 324–25; William Young, JDL1-BT
4:49, 58; William Young, JDL1-PS 5:35, JDL1-BT 4:58. Cradlebaugh issued
a warrant in 1859 for James Mangum. Cradlebaugh, 20.
42. MU, 229, 231, 380; Jabez Sutherland, JDL1-BT 8:4. Cradlebaugh issued a
warrant for John Mangum’s arrest in 1859. Cradlebaugh, 20.
43. MU, 228, 380.
44. Morris, statement, Feb. 2, 1892, CM; William Barton, AJ1. According to
Andrew Jenson’s original notes from his interview with William Barton, the
tan bark council was a “consultation of three consisting of I. C. Haight Wm.
H. Dame and Elias Morris.” Morris’s name was later erased and replaced
with “another man.” In an 1890 letter, William C. Stewart, impoverished and
in hiding, recalled a conversation he had with Mormon apostle Erastus Snow:
“He [Snow] asked me if Elias Morris sent me any money. I said no. He said
if he would lend you $1000 it is nothing but what he aught to do.” Stewart
added, “To save [Morris] & others, I am an Exile. He was I. C. H[aight’s]
Councler & only for him & a few more I would not bee here.” William C.
Stewart to Wilford Woodruff and Council, Nov. 1, 1890, in Wilford Wood-
ruff, General Correspondence Files, 1887–98, CHL.
45. William Young, JDL1-BT 4:56–57; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:10;
MU, 228, 380; Washington Branch Manuscript History, CHL; Hawley, 16;
Jabez Sutherland, JDL1-BT 8:4. Cradlebaugh issued a warrant for Harrison
Pearce’s arrest in 1859. Cradlebaugh, 20.
46. James Pearce, JDL1-BT 4:100–8, 114–15; MU, 228, 380; Philip
Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:10; “Lee’s Book, Names of Participants Cor-
rections,” undated, AJ1; Samuel Pollock, JDL1-BT 5:199; William Young,
JDL1-BT 4:56; Jabez Sutherland, JDL1-BT 8:4. In 1859 Cradlebaugh issued
a warrant for a Jim Price that was likely meant for James Pearce. Cradle-
baugh, 20. Although eyewitnesses William Young and Samuel Pollock verify
Pearce’s claim that he was sick and remained at the militia camp during
the massacre, one legend claimed James was shot at by his father, Harrison
Pearce, for attempting to protect an emigrant girl from the slaughter. The
bullet reportedly grazed the side of his face, creating a noticeable scar.
McGlashan; Frank Beckwith, chap. 6, in “Shameful Friday.” Another version
of this legend that gives no names appears in a newspaper article. “Among
the Mormons: An Interesting Journey to the Southern Settlements,” New
York Herald, June 27, 1877. Juanita Brooks claimed the legend referred to
James Pearce’s twelve-year-old brother, Thomas Jefferson Pearce. Brooks2,
90. No primary evidence confirms either of these legends. Klingensmith
raised the possibility that multiple members of the Pearce family may have
been at the massacre, stating he thought he saw “Jim Pearce and brother
and his sons but I would not be positive.” Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:10.
Klingensmith likely confused James Pearce with his father Harrison Pearce,
since James had no sons in 1857. The available sources do not confirm that
James had any brothers at the massacre.

47. Samuel Pollock, JDL1-BT 4:62–72, 180–203; MU, 232, 380; Higgins,
affidavit, Apr. 20, 1859, printed in Cradlebaugh, 42; Jabez Sutherland,
JDL1-BT 8:4. Cradlebaugh issued a warrant for Pollock’s arrest in 1859.
Cradlebaugh, 20.
48. Ellott Willden, AJ2; Mary S. Campbell, AJ1; Mary S. Campbell, AJ2;
D. W. Tullis, AJ1; Ellott Willden, AJ1; McGlashan; Whitney, 1:699; Samuel
Pollock, JDL1-BT 5:181.
49. Isaac Riddle, JDL1-BT 4:118–21; Ellott Willden, AJ2.
50. Richard S. Robinson, JDL1-BT 5:319–24; Richard S. Robinson, AJ1; Albert
Hamblin, statement, in Carleton, 15; Joel White, JDL1-BT 3:122; Joel
W. White, JDL2-BT 1:15–17; Clewes.
51. MU, 220, 226–28, 380; “LC”; “LLC”; Mangum, deposition, July 5, 1875,
MBB, 324; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:28, 31; “Lee’s Book, Names of
Participants Corrections,” undated, AJ1; Jabez Sutherland, JDL1-BT 8:4.
Although Shirts appeared to carry out his duty as Indian interpreter and
leader, Lee referred to him as “cowardly” and “made him suffer for being
a coward.” MU, 226, 243. Shirts’s son Ambrose said that was because Carl
gave orders to Indians that were in direct contradiction to the orders given
him by Lee. After the massacre, Mary Adoline Lee divorced Carl Shirts with
her father’s help. Ambrose Shurtz, History of Peter Shirts and his Descen-
dants, 93–94, undated family history located in the FHL; MC, 1:258, June
4–6, 1860.
52. MU, 228, 380; William Young, JDL1-PS 5:35, 42, JDL1-BT 4:49, 58; James
Pearce, JDL1-BT 4:103; PKS; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:10–11. In
1859 Judge Cradlebaugh issued an arrest warrant for William Slade. The
warrant could have been intended for either William Rufus Slade Sr. or his
son William Slade Jr. Cradlebaugh 19. In his closing argument for the first
Lee trial, defense attorney Jabez Sutherland contended that Slade remained
at the militia camp during the massacre; however, this assertion is not sup-
ported by the trial testimony of eyewitnesses. Two of those who stayed at the
camp during the massacre, William Young and James Pearce, saw Slade at the
Mountain Meadows but did not say he remained in the camp. Jabez Suther-
land, JDL1-BT 8:4, JDL1-PS 11:38–39.
53. MU, 228, 380; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:10.
54. MU, 380; “Lee’s Confession,” New York Herald, Mar. 22, 1877; “Mormon
Assassins”; Cradlebaugh, 20; Kearny. Cradlebaugh issued an arrest warrant
for Smith in connection with the massacre in 1859, but he may have done
so because a surviving child was recovered from his home shortly before.
Alexander Ingram, who did not participate in the massacre, also had one of
the surviving children in 1859, and shortly thereafter Cradlebaugh issued
an arrest warrant for him. Cradlebaugh, 19; Kearny; Rogers. Ingram, a
Harmony resident, spoke in a church meeting after Lee left Harmony for
the Meadows and was not identified by any of the witnesses as being at the
Meadows. HBM, Sept. 6, 1857.

55. George Spencer to Erastus Snow, Mar. 26, 1867, Incoming Correspondence,
YOF; McGlashan.
56. Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:15–16 (says Stewart was on horseback dur-
ing massacre, though he was more likely on foot); William Young, JDL1-BT
4:49–50; Samuel Pollock, JDL1-BT 4:64; Thomas T. Willis, JDL1-BT 4:33;
“Lee’s Confession,” New York Herald, Mar. 22, 1877; Corr1; Ellott Willden,
AJ2; Ellott Willden, AJ1; MU, 230, 235, 380; “LC”; “LLC”; Conversation
with Samuel Knight, in Cannon, June 13, 1895; McGlashan. See also Jacob
Hamblin, JDL2-BT 1:107–8; Higgins, affidavit, Apr. 20, 1859, printed in
Cradlebaugh, 42; Indictment for murder against William C. Stewart, Sept.
24, 1874, in CCF 31 and CCF 35. Judge John Cradlebaugh issued a warrant
for William Stewart’s arrest in 1859. Cradlebaugh, 19; Jabez Sutherland,
JDL1-BT 8:4.
57. John W. Bradshaw, JDL1-BT 4:85.
58. MU, 232, 380; “Lee’s Confession,” New York Herald, Mar. 22, 1877;
“Mormon Massacre”; “Mormon Assassins.” In some sources he is listed as
Arthur Stratton, but massacre participant Ellott Willden clarified that his
name was Anthony Stratton. “Lee’s Book, Names of Participants Correc-
tions,” undated, AJ1.
59. Tait, affidavit, June 30, 1896, CM; MU, 230, 380; “Lee’s Book, Names of
Participants Corrections,” undated, AJ1; Kim S. Whitehead, “William and
Elizabeth Tait, A History of Their Life,” 2, unpublished family history, copy
in MMMRF; Adonis Findlay Robinson, History of Kane County (Salt Lake
City: Utah Printing, 1970), 535.
60. D. W. Tullis, AJ1; Ellott Willden, AJ1; Clewes; Albert Hamblin, statement,
in Carleton, 15. Cradlebaugh issued a warrant for a Thornton’s arrest in
1859. Cradlebaugh, 20.
61. David W. Tullis, interview with Jacob Forney and William Rodgers, Apr.
13, 1859, in J. Forney to A. B. Greenwood, Aug. 1859, in SDoc42, 76–77;
D. W. Tullis, AJ1; James Lynch, affidavit, July 27, 1859, in SDoc42, 81–85.
Although Lynch claimed that Rebecca Dunlap identified Tullis as her
mother’s killer, according to another account attributed to James Lynch,
“A very intelligent little girl, named Becky Dunlap, pointed out to me at
Santa Clara an Englishman named Tellus, whom she says she saw murder her
father.” Lynch, statement, in “The Mountain Meadows Massacre: Surviving
Children of the Murdered Fix the Crime”; Albert Hamblin, interview with
Jacob Forney, in Forney to Greenwood, Aug. 1859, in SDoc42, 78; Albert
Hamblin, statement, in Carleton, 14; Forney to Greenwood, Sept. 22, 1859,
in SDoc42, 86. A family legend claimed three women from Pinto, know-
ing of the massacre plans, put makeup over Tullis’s upper body, arms and
face, and placed hot bricks around his bed to make him look as if he had a
fever. When militia leaders came to get him, he groaned and acted terribly
ill, thus escaping participation. Yet in the two known statements Tullis made
regarding the massacre, he made no mention of feigning illness to avoid the

massacre. One of the women who supposedly helped Tullis was the wife of
Richard Harrison. The Harrisons were living at Cedar City at the time of the
massacre, and Richard was also implicated as a participant. Sharon M. Bliss,
ed., “Autobiographies/Biography of Tullis, Mangum, Pulsipher, Maughan,
Davenport, Dahle, Griffin, etc.,” typescript, 2, [1995], copy at FHL; Leila
Mangum Bradford, “David Wilson Tullis,” May 30, 1988, unpublished
manuscript, MMMRF; Verda Tullis, “David Wilson Tullis,” ca. 1953, 4, copy
in MMMRF; “David Wilson Tullis,” entry submitted by Leilani Grange,
in Sons of Utah Pioneers, Conquerors of the West: Stalwart Mormon Pioneers
([Sandy, UT]: Agreka Books, 1999), 4:2600–2602.
62. MU, 232, 380; “Lee’s Book, Names of Participants Corrections,” undated,
AJ1; Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:70; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT
3:90–91.
63. MU, 380; “Mormon Assassins.” After interviewing several massacre partici-
pants, Andrew Jenson concluded there was no John Weston at the massacre.
“Lee’s Book, Names of Participants Corrections,” undated AJ1.
64. Nephi Johnson, JDL2-PS 2:54, 62 ( Josiah Rogerson wrote “Weyson” over
shorthand “WSN” or “RSN”; the shorthand omits only vowels and cannot
be read “Western” or “Weston” as appears in the longhand transcriptions);
Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:44, 55 (“Weston”); Nephi Johnson, JDL2-RT
1:72 (“Weston”), 84 (“Western”); MU, 340, 346 (“Western”).
65. According to a family member who interwove family history with fiction,
John Western worked as a distiller in Cedar City, secretly sold five barrels
of whiskey to the Fancher party shortly after it left town, and also provided
whiskey to the militia going to Mountain Meadows as a gift for Paiutes but
did not go to Mountain Meadows himself. Robert E. Jones, From Malaga to
the Mountain: The Story of Matilda ( Las Vegas: Jones & Holt, 1971), 271–74.
66. Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:8; Thomas T. Willis, JDL1-BT 4:32–33.
67. Joel White, JDL1-BT 3:119–34, 4:3–24, JDL2-BT 1:15–18; Philip Kling-
ensmith, JDL1-BT 3:5–6; MU, 230, 235, 380; “LC”; “LLC”; Corr1; Ellott
Willden, AJ1; Jabez Sutherland, JDL1-BT 8:4. Cradlebaugh issued a warrant
for Joel White’s arrest in 1859. Cradlebaugh, 20.
68. MU, 380; “Mormon Massacre”; “Mormon Assassins;” Mary H. White,
AJ1. Samuel White’s name does not appear in the “confessions” Lee gave
to Sumner Howard (“LC”; “LLC”), nor in the narrative portion of what he
gave to Bishop (MU, 213–92).
69. Samuel Pollock, JDL1-BT 4:62, 5:180–82; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT
3:8–9; MU, 232, 380; “LC”; “LLC”; Jabez Sutherland, JDL1-BT 8:4.
70. Indictment for murder against Ellott Willden, Sept. 24, 1874, in CCF 31
and MBB, 431–33; Ellott Willden, AJ2; Clew/Will; Clewes; Corr1; Ellott
Willden, AJ1; Mary S. Campbell, AJ1; D. W. Tullis, AJ1; Conversation with
Samuel Knight, recorded in Cannon, June 13, 1895; McGlashan; Whitney,
1:699; MU, 230, 380; “LC”; “LLC.” Lee refers to Willden as “Alexander
Wilden.” However, Andrew Jenson, who interviewed Ellott, noted that

Alexander and Ellott Willden were the same person. “Lee’s Book, Names of
Participants Corrections,” Mountain Meadows file, Jenson Collection. Judge
John Cradlebaugh issued a warrant for E. Welean in 1859. This may have
been Ellott Willden. Cradlebaugh, 19; Jabez Sutherland, JDL1-PS 11:23,
JDL1-BT 8:4.
71. John W. Bradshaw, JDL1-BT 4:84–85; Joel White, JDL1-BT 3:124; Jabez
Sutherland, JDL1-BT 8:4. Andrew Jenson speculated that Williamson may
have been one who “divulged” information about the massacre to investiga-
tors. “Lee’s Book, Names of Participants Corrections,” undated AJ1.
72. John Henry Willis, JDL1-BT 4:39–45; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:8;
Thomas T. Willis, JDL1-BT 4:32–33.
74. “Cates.” Cradlebaugh issued a warrant for Willis’s arrest in 1859. Cradle-
baugh, 19.
75. William Young, JDL1-BT 4:49–61, 5:203–14; Samuel Pollock, JDL1-BT
5:185, 199; James Pearce, JDL1-BT 4:103, 105; Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT
1:57–58; Jabez Sutherland, JDL1-BT 8:4; MU, 228–29, 380; “LC”; “LLC”;
“Gilbert Morse,” Salt Lake Daily Tribune, Sept. 28, 1876; Annie Elizabeth
Hoag, JDL1-BT 4:25. At least two people remember seeing William Young
with other men from Harmony before Lee left with the Paiutes for Mountain
Meadows. Although Young was among the original settlers of Harmony, by
the late summer of 1857 he made his home in Washington. William Young
and John D. Lee had a history of bad feeling toward each other dating to the
time their church had its headquarters in Nauvoo. See Times and Seasons 3,
no. 16 (1842): 820–21 and 4, no. 4 (1843): 80; Alfred Douglas Young, Autobi-
ography, BYU; Brown, Dec. 3, 1854, Mar. 18, 1855.
Appendix D
1. See pp. 132–209 herein and Appendix C.
2. See pp. 137–209 herein. As anthropologist Martha Knack points out, “South-
ern Paiute culture, political structure, and economy could not have produced
an action like the Mountain Meadows Massacre without Mormon stimulus
and support.” Knack, 79–80.
3. “The people who grew the haweave were the ‘Nuwuvi’ or as they are called
today, the Southern Paiutes.” Nuwuvi, 5. “The term ‘Paiute’ itself, unfor-
tunately, has no clear ethnic or linguistic reference; nevertheless, the term
‘Southern Paiute’ is well established as referring to . . . Numic ‘bands’ or sub-
groups which share a geographical center in southern Utah.” William Bright,
ed., The Collected Works of Edward Sapir, vol. 10 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
1992), 13.
4. The growing body of literature on Southern Paiutes includes Nuwuvi; Holt;
Knack.
5. See pp. 141–42, 145, 147–48, 153–54, herein.
6. See pp. 152, 154, 161–62, herein; Carleton, 19–20; Cradlebaugh, 17.

7. Carleton, 19–20.
8. See, e.g., story attributed to Minnie Jake in Martineau, xiii, 62. For other
examples of this tradition, see excerpts of 1998 interviews with Clifford Jake
and Will Rogers in “Paiute,” 134–36.
9. See, e.g., story attributed to Johnny Jake in Martineau, xiii, 62. See also
account attributed to Joseph Pikyavit in Beckwith, xiii, 120–21.
10. John D. Lee to Brigham Young, Nov. 20, 1857, Incoming Correspon-
dence, YOF.
11. Voucher No. 9, Sept. 30, 1857, Superintendent’s Vouchers, Superintendent of
Indian Affairs Files, YOF. The dates, Sept. 21–26, closely match those given in
a massacre report compiled by George A. Smith and James McKnight in 1858.
Smith and McKnight, “The Emigrant and Indian War at Mountain Meadows,
Sept. 21, 22, 23, 24 and 25, 1857,” Aug. 6, 1858, in Historian’s Office, Col-
lected Historical Documents, CHL. Lee’s Nov. 20, 1857, report gave the date
of the massacre as Sept. 22, eleven days after it actually happened.
12. See Donald R. Moorman and Gene A. Sessions, Camp Floyd and the Mormons:
The Utah War (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992), 133, 303n50;
Bagley, 128, 410n36.
13. Calder notation at the top of Lee to Young, Nov. 20, 1857, Incoming Cor-
respondence, YOF; Jacob Hamblin, Journal, 1854–57, Oct. 7, 1856, 77–78,
in Jacob Hamblin, Papers, CHL; Jacob Hamblin, Jacob Hamblin: A Nar-
rative of His Personal Experience, as a Frontiersman, Missionary to the Indians,
and Explorer (Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor Office, 1881), 38–40; Jacob
Hamblin, Jacob Hamblin: His Life in His Own Words (Provo, UT: Paramount
Books with Stratford Press, 1995), 33–34.
14. MU, 226–27; “LC”; “LLC”; Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:28–29, 98,
101–2, JDL1-RT 1:86, 125, 127, JDL1-PS, 3:10, 4:5, 7, JDL1-RS 2:37, 3:15,
17; Feargus O’Connor Willden, Autobiography, 4, CHL.
15. Willden Autobiography, 4.
16. Gibbs, 53–54. “Indian Comanch” was enumerated in Utah Territory, Iron
County, Indian Inhabitants in Cedar City Precinct, 1880 U.S. Census, popu-
lation schedule, 375C.
respondence, YOF.
18. George W. Armstrong to Brigham Young, Aug. 29, 1857, Incoming Corre-
spondence, YOF; Lynch, affidavit, July 27, 1859, enclosed in Montgomery to
Greenwood, Aug. 17, 1859, USBIA; “City Jottings,” Salt Lake Daily Tribune,
Sept. 1, 1875.
19. Carleton, 8, 11–17; J. Forney to A. B. Greenwood, Aug. 1859, in SDoc42,
77–78; Jacob Hamblin, JDL2-BT 1:97–98; [ James] Lynch, statement, ca.
1859, Records of the Adj. Gen. Office, RG 94, National Archives, copy in
MMMRF.
20. Indian Peak informant #24 (identified as Johnny Jake on page xiii),
Martineau, 62; Clifford Jake, interview, Nov. 18, 1998, in “Paiute,” 134–35.

21. Carleton, 19–20; Cradlebaugh, 17; “Our Los Angeles Correspondence,”
San Francisco Daily Alta California, Oct. 27, 1857; Reuben P. Campbell to
F. J. Porter, July 6, 1859, in SDoc42, 15–16; John R. Young, Memoirs of John
R. Young, Utah Pioneer 1847 (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1920), 111–13;
James H. Martineau, letter to the editor, Aug. 22, 1857, in “Trip to the Santa
Clara,” Deseret News, Sept. 23, 1857; McGlashan; Beadle2, 500–501; Calder
notation at top of Lee to Young, Nov. 20, 1857, Incoming Correspondence,
YOF; Voucher No. 9, Sept. 30, 1857, Superintendent’s Vouchers, Superin-
tendent of Indian Affairs Files, YOF.
22. MU, 242; Annie Elizabeth Hoag, JDL1-BT 4:29–30, JDL1-PS, 5:19, JDL1-
RS, 4:13–14; Brown, Dec. 10, 1854; Kearny.
23. Martineau, Aug. 22, 1857, in “Trip to the Santa Clara.”
respondence, YOF; Thomas L. Kane, Memorandum Book, 1857–58, 19–20,
BYU; Nuwuvi, 8. Kane obtained information at the Spanish Fork Indian farm
from George W. Armstrong, Kanosh, or both.
25. Carleton, 13–14; Robert Hafen Briggs, “Samuel Knight and Events Incident
to the Utah War, 1857–1858: A Preliminary Study” (unpublished paper writ-
ten for the Swiss Days Celebration and Samuel Knight Reunion, Sept. 21–23,
2001, Santa Clara, UT), 3, copy in MMMRF.
26. Brooks1, 221–22; “Paiute,” 146. Brooks spelled Kwi-toos, “Queetuse.”
27. “LLC”; MU, 226, 249. Referred to in MU as “Clem,” Lemuel was the first
Paiute child adopted by Lee in southern Utah. Brooks1, 164; James M. Man-
gum, deposition, July 5, 1875, MBB, 324; Nephi Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:58;
NJ1908; NJ1910; S. F. Atwood, letter to the editor, June 1, 1856, in “Corre-
spondence,” Deseret News, July 16, 1856.
28. “Lee Trial”; “Eastern News: What the Indians Say,” Los Angeles Weekly
Herald, Aug. 7, 1875; “Mountain Meadows,” San Francisco Daily Call, Mar.
24, 1877; MU, 226–27; “LC”; “LLC”; Willden Autobiography, 4; Chatterley;
Journals, 211–12, May 28, 1859; McGlashan; Voucher No. 9, Sept. 30, 1857,
Superintendent’s Vouchers, Superintendent of Indian Affairs Files, YOF;
Calder notation at the top of Lee to Young, Nov. 20, 1857, Incoming Cor-
respondence, YOF; Shirts.
29. “Unveiled,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 24, 1875; “Mountain Meadow
Massacre,” Cumberland (IL) Democrat, Aug. 5, 1875; “A Tale of Horror,” Steu-
benville (OH) Daily Herald, July 24, 1875. The transcripts of Klingensmith’s
testimony do not list the name Myack; Patterson’s shorthand records that
Klingensmith saw a man named “My” cut a boy’s throat. Rogerson’s short-
hand identifies the man as an Indian but does not give his name. Philip
Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:28, JDL1-PS 3:9, JDL1-RS 2:37.
30. Calder notation at the top of Lee to Young, Nov. 20, 1857, Incoming
31. Will Rogers, interview, Dec. 1998, in “Paiute,” 135–36; Carleton, 12–14.
According to Albert Hamblin, “John and I could see where the Indians were

hid in the oak bushes and sage right by the side of the road a mile or more on
their route, and I said to John, I would like to know what the emigrants left
their wagons for, as they were going into a ‘worse fix than ever they saw.’ ”
32. Jimmie Pete, interview with Alva Matheson, Jan. 15, 1968, in Ameri-
can Indian Oral History, Duke Collection, UofU; Nuwuvi, 8, 86; LaVan
Martineau, Southern Paiute Indian Genealogy (Globe, AZ: Martineau Pub.,
1996), 39.
33. Willden Autobiography, 4.
34. Philip Klingensmith, JDL1-BT 3:29, 98; James H. Martineau to George
A. Smith, May 30, 1855, in “Home Correspondence: Iron County,” Deseret
News, July 11, 1855.
35. Carleton, 19; Huntington, Sept. 1–20, 1857; Voucher No. 17, Sept. 11, 1857,
Superintendent’s Vouchers, Superintendent of Indian Affairs Files, YOF;
Voucher No. 9, Sept. 30, 1857, Superintendent’s Vouchers, Superintendent
of Indian Affairs Files, YOF.
36. U.S. Army, George Montague Wheeler, Daniel W. Lockwood, Geographi-
cal Surveys West of the 100th Meridian (U.S.), Preliminary Report upon a
Reconnaissance through Southern and Southeastern Nevada, Made in 1869, by Geo.
M. Wheeler, Corps of Engineers, U.S. Army, Assisted by D. W. Lockwood, Corps of
Engineers, U.S. Army (Washington: GPO, 1875), 37, 47.
37. Tunanita’a was apparently John Seaman’s father. The information on
Tunanita’a came from Dan Bullets, a Paiute. Kaibab, inside front cover.
38. Woodruff, Sept. 1, 1857; Huntington, Sept. 1, 1857; HOJ, Sept. 1, 1857;
S. B. Honea, in “Outrages”; Farnsworth; “Horrible”; Hurt, 202–3. Hurt
reported that a Spoods, a well-known Ute, said that Ammon went to Iron
County to dissuade Paiutes from going to the Meadows, only to be warned
away by one of the white leaders. This story closely resembles events at
Beaver, where Sissix shot at emigrants and was ordered away by Bishop
Philo Farnsworth. Ammon arrived in Beaver from Salt Lake City and helped
resolve the situation.
39. George A. Smith to Brigham Young, Aug. 17, 1858, Incoming Correspon-
dence, YOF, copy in Historian’s Office, Letterpress Copybook 1:885–91,
CHL; William R. Palmer, “Pahute Indian Homelands,” Utah Historical Quar-
terly 6 ( July 1933): 93; Nuwuvi, 8, 86.
40. Huntington, Sept. 1, 1857; HOJ, Sept. 1, 1857; Woodruff, Sept. 1, 1857;
Hamblin Journal, 1854–57, 81, in Hamblin Papers; Dimick B. Huntington,
Voucher No. 28, Sept. 11, 1857, Superintendent’s Vouchers, Superintendent
of Indian Affairs Files, YOF; Elisha Hoopes, JDL1-BT 5:245–73; Nephi
Johnson, JDL2-BT 1:45; Forney to Greenwood, Aug. 1859, in SDoc42,
76; Joe Pickyavit, account, in Beckwith, [119]; Willson G. Nowers, AJ1;
Willson Gates Nowers, note to Andrew Jenson, AJ1; Philo T. Farnsworth,
JDL1-BT 5:293.
41. Woodruff, Sept. 1, 16, 1857; Huntington, Sept. 1, 10, 1857; HOJ, Sept.
1, 1857; Hamblin Journal, 1854–57, 81–82, in Hamblin Papers; Nuwuvi,

72; Calder notation at the top of Lee to Young, Nov. 20, 1857, Incom-
ing Correspondence, YOF; Nuwuvi, 8, 72, 86; Kane, Memorandum Book,
19–20; James McKnight, letter to the Daily Wisconsin, Aug. 10, 1858, printed
in “Interesting Letter from Utah: The Mormon Exodus—The Indians,”
Weekly Wisconsin, Sept. 24, 1858, Historian’s Office, Historical Scrapbook,
10:130, CHL.
42. Huntington, Sept. 1, 10, 1857; Hamblin Journal, 1854–57, 81–82, in
Hamblin Papers; JH, Sept. 1, 1857. Identified as “Young-quick” in Calder
notation at the top of Lee to Young, Nov. 20, 1857, Incoming Corre-
spondence, YOF; also in Voucher No. 9, Sept. 30, 1857, Superintendent’s
Vouchers, Superintendent of Indian Affairs Files, YOF.

Index
Note: In this index MMM refers to Mountain Meadows Massacre, MM for

Mountain Meadows, BY for Brigham Young, JDL for John D. Lee, and GAS for
George A. Smith. Page numbers in bold face indicate an illustration.
Adair, George W., 171, 207, 230, 256 at Salt Lake, 147
Adair, John W., 393n2 biography, 269
Adair, Joseph, 127, 154 halts attack at Beaver, 177–78
Adair, Samuel, 393n2 learned about new Indian policy, 146
Aden, S. B., 126 lived at Beaver, 64
Aden, William A. poisoning story and, 124
biography, 126, 244 ammunition, 83, 91, 161
bought produce, 126 anthrax, 121–23
impact of his killing, 189 Anti-Masonic Party, 29
killed, 160, 197 anti-Mormon clique, 21–22, 30, 99
killing of, reported, 164 anti-religious movements, 29
searched for cattle, 152 apostates, join emigrants, 109–10
adoption, Mormon practice, 61 Arkansas, emigrants leave, 79, 81
Agarapoots (Indian), 267 Arkansas emigrants. See emigrants
Allen, Ira arsenic, 121
biography, 256 Arthur, Benjamin A., 140–41, 149, 256
confirmed attack plans, 142 Arthur, Christopher J., 133, 210–12, 256
planned massacre, 187 Ash Hollow, Nebraska Territory, 37
profited from emigrant property, 254 atrocities, xiv
rode horse at MMM, 193, 201 authorities, abuse of, xiv, 127
American Fork, Utah, 181 Awanap (Indian), 270
American Party, 29
Ammon (Ute Indian) Babbitt, Almon W., 28
at Corn Creek, 118 Bagley, Will, 146, 344n108
Baker, Abel, 78, 80, 224–25, 244 resolved, 179
Baker company poison rumors reached, 121, 124, 132
delayed at Fort Bridger, 85 shooting affray, 175–76
families with, 78–80 tracks near, 72
Indian incidents before Utah, 85 beef industry, California, 75–76
insulted Mormon women, 93 begging, 35
Kelsey traveled with, 87 Bell, William, 97–98
leave Arkansas, 79 Beller, David W., 244
poisoning accusations, 93, 122 Beller, Melissa Ann, 244
seen by others, 101 Beller, William C., 79
wasted gunpowder, 83, 91 Beller’s Stand, Arkansas, 79
See also emigrants Benton County, Arkansas, 80–81
Baker, George W., 78, 194, 203, 244, Bernhisel, John M., 27–30
252, 389n2 Big Cottonwood Canyon, Utah, 33–36
Baker, Jim, 47 Bill (Paiute Indian), 148, 159, 168, 267
Baker, John Henry, 78 Birkbeck, Jane and Richard, 219
Baker, John Twitty “Jack” Bishop, William W., 71
age, 104 bishops, 48
biography, 76–78, 244 Black Ridge Road, 68
killed, 203 Blackburn, Elias H., 108–9, 137
leader in company, 83 blacks, possibly in emigrant company, 80
property, 78, 252 blood atonement, 25
wounded, 194 Blue Springs, Utah, 94
Baker, Manerva Ann Beller, 78, 244 Boggs, Lilburn W., 12
Baker, Martha Elizabeth, 159, 217, 244 Book of Mormon, doctrine on war, 10
Baker, Mary, 77, 79, 315n41 Bowering, George, 219
Baker, Mary Lovina, 244 Boyce, Peter, 120
Baker, Sarah Frances, 78, 203, 208, 217, Bradshaw, John, 179
219, 244 branches, 48
Baker, William Twitty, 217, 219, 244 Bridger, Jim, 47
Barton, William, 178 Brigham City, Utah, 95–96
Basham, man named, 81, 252 Brigham Young Express Company, 38
Bateman, William, 187, 194, 256 Brooks, Juanita, ix-x, xiii, 127
Baumeister, Roy, 137 Brown, Richard Maxwell, 7
Beach, John, 244 Brown, Thomas D., 65–66
Beadle, John H., 207 Brunson, Lewis, 112, 175, 181
Bear River, 95 Buchanan, James, xiv, 27–30, 49
Beaver, Utah Buck (Paiute Indian), 267
assistance sent to, from Parowan, 177 bullwhackers. See cattle drovers
emigrants reached, 123–24 Burr, David H., 28, 42
Indian conflict Bush, J. J., company, 327n23
halted, 177 Buster, M. W., 96
near, 175–76 Buttermilk Fort, Utah, 111–12
410 Index
Caldwell County, Missouri, 10, 92 problems in Utah, 90–91
California range, 86
Bakers lived in, 78 scarce feed, 91
cattle industry, 75–76 value, 253
emigration to, in 1857, 75–76 cattle drovers, 76, 79–80
Fanchers lived in, 80 cattle herders, 80
Cameron, Henry, 245 Cedar City, Utah
Cameron, Isom, 245 conditions, 129–30
Cameron, James, 245 council meeting, 155–57
Cameron, Larkin, 245 emigrant incidents, 132–34
Cameron, Martha, 245 emigrants’ fate discussed at, 135–36
Cameron, Martha (wife of William), emigrants reached, 132
81–82, 104, 244 excited by approaching army, 131
Cameron, Nancy, 245 Female Benevolent Society,
Cameron, Tillman, 82, 169, 245, 252 134–35, 181
Cameron, William, 81–82, 104, 244, 252 founded, 54–55
Camp Floyd, Utah, 3–4 GAS questions Haight at, 72
Campbell, Mary, 132, 134, 145 GAS visited, 67–68
Campbell, Nancy Ann, 82–83, 85 Indian policy news reached, 137
Campbell, Peter, 82 Indians recruited at, 145
Caravan Spring, Arkansas, 79, 315n38 iron industry, 129
Carey, William, 105 massacre perpetrators from, 190
Carleton, James Henry, 2–5, 193 militia, 190
Carpenter, Helen, 87 militia departs from, for MM, 181
Carroll County, Arkansas, 83 minute book, 337n8
Carruth, LaJean Purcell, xii, 234 news of approaching emigrants, 131
Carruthers, Matthew, 63 Pioneer Day, 131
Carter, Kate, 337n8 poisoning rumors reached, 132
Carthage Jail, Illinois, 14–15 rebelled against BY’s directive, 63
Cartwright, Thomas H., 256 reformation, 25
Cass, Lewis, 23 surviving children at, 218–19
cattle Chatterley, John, 136, 153
BY’s directive concerning, 63 Cherokee Trail, 74–75
California industry, 75–76 Cheyenne Indians, 47
diseases, 121–23 Chick-eroo (Indian), 267
disposition of emigrant, 216 children, surviving emigrant, 216–17
drives, 75–76 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
emigrant herd, 104, 161, 254, 388–89n1 Saints. See Mormon Church
Indians given right to take emigrant, City of Rocks, 94
146–47 Clark, John Wesley, 256
killing of, at MM, 169 Clarke, N. S. (General), 3, 5
poisoning accusation, 93 Clarksville, Arkansas, 82
prices, 254 Clewes, Joseph
Index 411
Clewes, Joseph (continued ) argued with Haight about reporting
arrived at Cedar City, 211–12 MMM, 212–13
biography, 256 attack
express ride to Pinto, 163–64 did not approve, 156
met Morris and Arthur, 210 JDL said, approved, 153
ordered back to Cedar City, 192, 198 learned about, 166–67
ordered to return to MM, 167 learned of Cedar City role in,
recruited as express rider, 162 174–75
shot at, 171–72 Monday night council, 176
Coal Creek John. See Tau-gu (Coal no role in planning, 144
Creek John) Wednesday night councils, 175,
Coal Creek, Utah, 55 177–79
Coker, Charity Porter, 245 Beaver requests help from, 176
Coker, Edward, 245 biography, 55–56, 257
Coleman, Prime T., 256–57 drilled militia, 70
Collins, Wilson, 105–6, 176 express message to, 68
See also Turner-Dukes-Collins Indians seen with, 222
company indicted, 230
Columbia, California, 78 massacre
Comanche (Paiute Indian), 154, 267, ordered killing emigrants, 179
346–47n27 saddened at carnage, 214
conformity, 127–28 tried to stop, 211
consecrations, 24 met with Haight in Cedar City, 211
Cooper, Abbey, 245 moved to Parowan, 63
Cooper, William E., 245 opposed trading with emigrants,
Corn Creek, Utah 125–26
camping place, 116 permission to punish emigrants
emigrants camp at, 117–18 denied, 136
Indian farm, 117 recalls flood, 125
poisoning story, 119–21 war preparation, 72
Cottonwood Spring, 225 went to MM, 212
Cove Creek, Utah, 139 wives and, 57
Crooked Creek Township, Arkansas, 77, Danites, 11
80–82 Davies, William R., 394n2
Cropper, Thomas, 112–13 Daviess County, Missouri, 11
Cumming, Alfred, 36, 38 Davis, George W., 112, 119–20
Cummins, R. W., 9, 38 Deseret Iron Company, 58, 133
Cureton, William, 93 Deseret, term, 22
Curtis, Ezra H., 257 Deshazo, Allen P., 245, 252
Devil’s Gate, 74
Dalton, Edward, 136, 167, 174, 177 Dickson, Robert, 257
Dame, William H. diseases, livestock, 121–23
accompanied GAS on tour, 67 Dive, Verulam, 94
angry at Haight, 212 Dixie, land in southern Utah, 68
412 Index
documentation, use, xv-xvi Dutchman
Dominguez-Escalante expedition, 54 escape of, reported, 164
Douglas, Stephen A., 23, 27 escaped being killed, 160
dreams, 157–58 identity, 111
droughts, 35, 74, 91 killed, 205
drovers. See cattle drovers term, 111
Drummond, W. W., 21, 28–30, 41 troublesome, 110–12
Duck, W. B., 82 See also Gresly, John
duels, 8
Dukes party, 175–76 Eaton, William M., 246
See also Turner-Dukes-Collins company ecclesiastical abuse, xiv
Dukes, William, 105–6, 176 Echo Canyon, Utah, 69
Dunklin, Daniel, 10 Edgerly, Thomas, 56
Dunlap, America Jane, 246 Edwards, Silas, 246, 252
Dunlap, Ellender, 245 Edwards, William, 191, 257, 354n37
Dunlap, Georgia Ann, 217, 219, 246 Elang, Joseph, 393n2
Dunlap, James D., 245 emigrants
Dunlap, Jesse, Jr., 79, 104, 245, 252 ages, 104
Dunlap, John H., 246 ambush place for, selected, 137–38, 141
Dunlap, Lorenzo Dow, 79, 104, ammunition, 161, 196
246, 252 apostates join, 109–10
Dunlap, Louisa, 217, 245 begin journey, 82
Dunlap, Lucinda, 206–7, 245 bury dead, 196
Dunlap, Margarette, 245 BY said not to meddle with, 183–84
Dunlap, Mary Ann (daughter of Cedar City incidents, 132–34
Jesse), 245 conflicts en route, 114
Dunlap, Mary Ann (daughter of confused identities, 106, 112
Lorenzo), 246 Corn Creek, 118–19
Dunlap, Mary Wharton, 79, 104, 245 damaged crops, 94
Dunlap, Nancy, 246 escaped from corral, 198, 224–25
Dunlap, Nancy M., 245 errors made by, xiv
Dunlap, Nancy Wharton, 79, 104, 246 fate of, discussed, 135–36
Dunlap, Prudence Angeline, 217, formed united company, 101, 103
219, 246 from Arkansas, 101
Dunlap, Rachel, 384n23 from Missouri, 87–88, 101–2
Dunlap, Rebecca Jane, 202, 205, from Ohio, 82
217, 245 grazing disputes, 108, 110
Dunlap, Ruth, 384n23 in Beaver, 123–24
Dunlap, Sarah Elizabeth, 202, 205, in Fillmore, 113
208–9, 217, 246 in Payson, 109–10
Dunlap, Susannah, 206–7, 245 Indians to ambush, 137
Dunlap, Talitha Emaline, 246 Indian incidents before Utah, 84–85
Dunlap, Thomas J., 246 killed at Leach’s Spring, 167–68, 197
Durfee, Jabez, 257 leaders, 83
Index 413
emigrants (continued ) dead, 194
left Salt Lake City, 104 leader in company, 83, 101
loosely organized, 83 property, 252
list of victims, 243–49 trouble with Dutchman, 111
Mountain Meadows visited California, 80
arrived at, 149–51 Fancher company
camp, 151 families in, 81–82
corralled wagons, 161 Frank King traveled with, 86
decoy plan, 189 in Salt Lake Valley, 87–88
feared a trap, 195–96, 198 leave Arkansas, 82–83
initial attack, 158–59 Missourians with, 82, 88
JDL seen at, 171–72 See also emigrants
killed during initial attack at, 158–59 Fancher, Christopher “Kit” Carson, 217,
number killed, 211 220, 247
number of people/wagons, 104 Fancher, Eliza Ingram, 80–81, 246
ordinary people, 119 Fancher, Frances “Fanny” Fulfer, 247
overland travel, 83–85 Fancher, Hampton, 246
petition for help, 224 Fancher, James Matthew, 81, 194, 247, 252
potential enemies of Mormons, 92 Fancher, John, 80
property, 216, 251–54 Fancher, Margaret A., 246
property value, 105 Fancher, Martha, 246
Provo dispute, 108 Fancher, Mary, 246
purchased supplies, 91–92 Fancher, Robert, 81, 247
quarreled, 85 Fancher, Sarah G., 246
recollections about, after MMM, Fancher, Thomas, 246
115, 125 Fancher, Triphenia, 217, 219, 247
reports of, preceded, 131–32 Fancher, William, 246
seen by others, 101 Farmington, New Hampshire, 56
sexual disease charges, 377n83 Farnsworth, Philo T., 118, 175–77, 179
stampedes, 85 Fayette County, Illinois, 60
surviving children, 208–9, 216–21 federal appointees, 21–22
trading with, 108–9, 125, 127 Female Benevolent Society, 134–35, 181
victims accounted for, 103 Fillmore, Millard, 20
emigration, 1857 season, 74 Fillmore, Utah, 73, 112–14, 181
Emigration Canyon, Utah, 86 Fine, John, company, 327n23
ex-Mormons, expulsion of, 11 First Presidency, xi
extermination order (1838), 12 flag of truce, ix, 189, 194
Ford, Thomas, 16
Fancher, Alexander former Mormons, expulsion of, 11
age, 104 Forney, Jacob, 4, 121, 124
at Cedar City, 133 Fort Bridger, Wyoming, 85
at Corn Creek, 118 Fort Cameron, Utah, 227
biography, 80–81, 246 Fort Harmony, Utah
camped at MM, 119 attack plans announced at, 153
414 Index
conflict with JDL and missionaries at, argued with Dame about reporting
65–66 MMM, 212–13
established, 55 at Cedar City council meeting, 155
GAS preached at, 68 attack
Indian missionaries move from, 67 ambush place selected, 137–38
Indians recruited at, 153 ambush plan, 139
JDL released as presiding elder, 67 claimed little knowledge about, 167
JDL returned to, 221 decided to halt, 157
massacre perpetrators from, 190 enlisted help of Nephi Johnson,
militia, 190 164–65
ruins, 55 express letter sent to BY, 163
surviving children at, 220 faced two options, 174
Fort Johnson, Utah, 155, 190 initial plan, 137
Fort Smith, Arkansas, 82 learned of, 162, 164
Fort Tejon, California, 3 plan to, put in motion by, 140
forts, Mormon, 65 planned with JDL, 144
Freeman, Columbus R., 191, 257 recruited JDL to manage, 142–43
Frémont, John C., 3, 18 regretted killing emigrants, 178
sent dispatch to JDL, 164
Gemmell, James, 344n108 sent men to MM, 167
George (Paiute Indian), 267 sent Riddle home, 168
Gilbert and Gerrish (firm), 91–92 biography, 57–59, 257
Goodale, Tim, 47 conversation with GAS, 70–71
government, Mormon attitude about, 22 emigrants confronted, 133
grain fighting spirit, 72
caches, 69 home, 67, 130–31
livestock needs, 91 hosted GAS, 67
policy, 47–49, 53, 71, 91 Indians recruited by, 145, 265
grazing disputes, 108, 110 Indians seen with, 222
Great Basin, 18 indicted, 230
Great Britain, conversion success in, 18 JDL implicated, 229–30
greed, as MMM motive, 132 JDL rescued, 139–40
Gresly family, 111 law enforcer, 131
Gresly, Henry J., 111 massacre
Gresly, John, 111, 247 called out militia, 179
Groves, Elisha H., 204, 220 enjoined, participants to secrecy, 216
Gunnison, John W., 20–22, 28, 97, 117 ordered Nephi Johnson to report to
gunpowder, 91 MM, 180–81
possibly sent men to halt, 210–12
Haight, Eliza Ann Snyder, 217 received permission to use militia, 179
Haight, Isaac C. saddened at carnage, 214
accompanied GAS on southern meets with Dame in late-night
tour, 68 Parowan councils, 174–75, 178–79
angry at Dame, 212 militia officer, 190
Index 415
Haight, Isaac C (continued ) Hamblin, Rachel, 150–51, 159, 208,
ordered emigrants arrested, 134 216–17
ordered expensive milling rates, 132 Hamblin’s Ranch (Mountain Meadows),
presided at JDL hearing, 67 70, 187, 208–9, 216–17
profited from emigrant property, 254 Hamilton, man named, 194, 247
quick to act, 145 Hamilton, John, Sr., 221
received BY’s message, 226 Hamilton, Thomas, 385n34
rescued by JDL, 139–40 Hamilton’s Fort, Utah, 134, 221
responsibility for MMM, 144 Hancock, Charles B., 109, 181
sought permission to punish Harmony, Utah. See Fort Harmony, Utah
emigrants, 136 Harney, William S., 37–38, 42, 45–47,
surviving child lived with, 218 52, 92, 100, 182
summoned JDL, 139 Harp, Thomas D., 87, 319–20n90
voiced wrongs of emigrants, 132 Harrison, Richard, 254, 258
war readiness, 131 Haslam, James H.
went to MM, 212 brought BY’s message to Haight, 226
Haight, Mary Ann, 218 express ride north, 163, 181–82
Hail, D. C., 95 express ride south, 186, 225
Hamblin, Albert informed Dame of attack, 166
adopted, 217 photograph, 182
at MMM, 198 recruited as express rider, 162–63
biography, 267 Hatch, Ira, 223–25, 258
may have killed emigrants, 368n158 Haun’s Mill, Missouri, 12
saw emigrants arrive at MM, 151 Hawley, George, 258
witnessed killings, 207 Hawley, John Pierce, 110–11, 127, 132,
Hamblin, Jacob 154–55, 258
BY’s directions to, 47 Hawley, William S., 258
at Corn Creek, 118, 185 Henry, Captain, company, 85
established MM ranch, 70 Hicks, George Armstrong, 106
got herding rights at MM, 149 Higbee, John M.
had MMM document, 224 at council meeting, 155
identified MMM burials, 4 biography, 258
in Salt Lake City, 182 consulted with Haight, 173–74
informant, 224 directed bearer of truce flag, 194
interaction with emigrants, 101, 103 directed men to visit emigrants,
learned about decision for MMM, 179 151–52
learned about new Indian policy, 145 indicted, 230
on Haslam’s meeting BY, 182–83 JDL implicated, 229–30
on MMM carnage, 205 killed emigrants seeking aid, 167–68
photograph, 118 massacre
recommended MM to emigrants, 119 blamed, on Paiutes, 172–73
refuted role of GAS in MMM, 71 delayed command to begin, 199
visited BY with Indians, 147 directed militia, 198
Hamblin, Oscar, 169–71, 258, 265 hurried emigrants, 197
416 Index
instructed militia about, plans, 190–92 Huff, John, 247
issued command to begin, 199 Huff, Mary E., 247
leads militia to MM, 181 Huff, Nancy Saphrona, 203, 208,
looted bodies, 207 217–18, 247
planned, 187, 189 Huff, Peter, 81, 85–86, 122, 247, 252,
rode horse at, 193, 201 391n39
militia officer, 190 Huff, Saladia Ann Brown, 81, 247, 252
on advancing troops, 52 Huff, William C., 247
on JDL, 157 Humboldt River, 87, 120
ordered Clewes back to Cedar, 192 Humphries, John S., 258
ordered Clewes to return to MM, 167 hunger, in Utah, 35
photograph, 200 Hunkup, Isaac (Paiute Indian), 267
profited from emigrant property, 254 Hunter, George, 259
recollections, 131 Huntington, Dimick B., 96–97, 145–46
recruited Indians, 145, 265 Huntsville, Utah. See Ogden Hole, Utah
relayed orders to JDL, 187 Hurt, Garland, 116, 193
requested militia help, 173
sent to MM on Tuesday, 167 Illinois
surviving child lived with, 219 emigrant company from, 86
tried to arrest emigrants, 134 Mormon sojourn in, 13–14, 16
Hoag, Annie Elizabeth Shirts, 153, Independence, Missouri, 36
205–6, 221 Indian Creek, Utah, 123, 175
Hofstadter, Richard, 29 Indian Territory, 82
Holden, Utah. See Buttermilk Fort, Utah Indians
home missionary program, 24 attack
Honea, Stephen B., 120 plans for, 143–44
Hoopes, Elisha, 118–19, 121, 124 recruited to, 141–42, 147–48, 152
Hopkins, Charles BY cultivates alliance with, 45
biography, 258 BY’s new policy, 98–99, 137, 176
planned massacre, 187 emigrant mistreatment, 96
requested militia help, 173 gifts disbursed to, 96–98
sent to MM on Tuesday, 167 granted right to take emigrant cattle,
surviving child lived with, 219 146–47
Hopkins, Lydia, 217–19 mission established for, 64
horses mistrusted Mormons, 96
JDL got, 169 Mormon beliefs about, 45
need grain, 91 Mormon friendship with,
One-Eye Blaze, 82, 169 misunderstood, 95–96
value, 253 Mormons mediated disputes, 95
Hoth, Hans, 105, 129–30, 138 northern Utah attacks on emigrants,
Howard, Sumner, 229 94–95
Hoyt, Emily, 73 overland travel incidents, 84–85
Huff, Elisha, 385–86n37 participants in MMM, 265–69
Huff, James K., 247 recruited for guard duty, 69
Index 417
Indians (continued ) ordered to MM, 180–81
rumors of Mormons conspiring with, prepared Indians for, 192
21, 43 saw killings, 203
slave trade, 64, 138 solicited Indians to kill emigrants,
with victim’s property, 221 187
See also Pahvant Indians, Paiute tried to prevent looting, 208
Indians, Southern Indian Mission whereabouts of, at, 198
Ingram, Alexander and Agnes, 220, 393n2 photograph, 202
intoxication, public, 134 recalled emigrant threats, 133
iron industry, 54 Johnson Springs, Utah, 164
Iron Military District, 52, 190 Jones, Daniel W., 126
biographies of participants, 255–64 Jones, Eloah Angeline Tackett, 81,
Iron Mission, 54, 129 159, 247
Iron Springs, Utah, 216 Jones, Felix Marion, 217, 219, 248
Jones, Henry, 329n45
Jackson company, 327n23 Jones, John Milum, 81, 101, 247, 252
Jackson County, Alabama, 77 Jones, Newton, 81, 248, 252
Jackson County, Missouri, 8–10 Jones, William B., 378n93
Jackson (Paiute Indian) Joseph (Paiute Indian), 204, 268
biography, 267–68 Judd, Zadok, 161
brother of, killed, 168–69 judges, territorial, 21–22
GAS visited, 70
killed emigrants, 224 Kahbeets (Paiute Indian), 70, 268
wanted to kill Powers and Warn, 223 Kanarra (Paiute Indian), 268
Jackson, Samuel, Sr., 132 Kane, Thomas L., 18
Jacobs, John, 259 Kanosh (Pahvant Indian), 116–17,
Jacobs, Swen, 259 146–47, 270
Jameson, Charles, 73, 107 Kaskaskia, Illinois, 59
Jenson, Andrew, xi Ke-tant-mah (Indian), 96
Jewkes, Samuel, 219, 230, 259 Kelsey, Eli, 87
Jimmie Pete (Paiute Indian), 205 Kershaw, Robert, 123–24
Johnson County, Arkansas, 81 Killian, John, 92
Johnson, Nephi Killian, Lydia Ann Hopper, 92
biography, 259 Killian, Sarah McClure, 92
from Fort Johnson, 190 killing
guarded emigrant property, 213 innocent blood, 135
Haight sent for, 164 mass, xiv, 127–28, 143
Haight wanted, to recruit Indians, 145 Kimball, Heber C., 35, 44
Indians sent for, 170 King, Frank, 86
massacre King, Volney, 106
informed Indians of plans, 190 Kingdom of God, 22
issued command for Indians to Kinney, John F., 28
begin, 201 Klingensmith, Philip, 131
on secrecy about, 216 at council meeting, 155–56
418 Index
biography, 259 land disputes, 108, 110
emigrants threatened, 133 Landon, Cornelius G., 42, 93, 99
indicted, 230 last days, 44
massacre Latter-day Saints. See Mormons
enjoined, participants to secrecy, 216 law enforcement, 8
killed emigrants, 201 Leach’s Spring, 141, 149, 160, 167, 222
leader at, 190 Leach’s Cutoff, 137, 149
looted bodies, leaders, abuse of power by, xiv
on carnage, 205 Leany, William, 125–26
planned, 187 Leavenworth, Kansas, 74
mill, 132 Leavitt, Dudley, 161–62, 259–60
photograph, 142 Lee, Agatha Ann Woolsey, 60
profited from emigrant property, 254 Lee, John D.
recruited Indians, 141–42, 145, 265 accompanied GAS on southern
requested militia help, 173 tour, 68
saw Haight and Dame argue, 212 attacks
sent to MM on Tuesday, 167 asked Paiutes to stop, 170
sought express rider, 162 avoided injury, 161
surviving children and, 208, 219 botched initial, 158
transported children to Cedar, changed ambush plans, 157–58
217–18, 223 controlled emigrant cattle herd, 169
Knight, Caroline, 150–51 cried, 170
Knight, John (Paiute Indian), 198, 207, discussed, publicly at Harmony, 153
217, 268 excuses, 170–71
Knight, Newel, 150–51 Haight urged JDL to halt, 164
Knight, Samuel halted killing of cattle, 169
biography, 150–51, 259 invincibility claims, 172
drove wagons at MMM, 193, 195–98 learned plans about, 143
killed emigrants, 204 led Tuesday night, 169–70
learned BY had not ordered left Harmony for the, 154
MMM, 213 only white man at, 159, 349–50n77
met emigrants, 151 Paiutes threatened, 170–71
met JDL, 161–62 planned, with Haight, 144
profited from emigrant property, 254 reconnoiters, 171
recruited Indians, 140–41, 152, 265 recruited Indians for, 145, 147–48,
refused to kill emigrants, 162 154, 265
whereabouts of, at MMM, 198 returned to MM on Tuesday, 168
Knowlton, Eleanor F., 120 sent word to Haight to stop, 171
Know-Nothings, 29 sought reinforcements, 161–62
Kwi-toos (Paiute Indian), 268 biography, 59–62, 260
claimed to barter for emigrant
La Grande Saline. See Salina, Oklahoma children, 217
Lamanites, 45 confessed to killings, 228
Lamar, Howard, 23–24 confessions, 228–29
Index 419
Lee, John D (continued ) responsibility for MMM, 144
conflict with Indian missionaries, 65–66 returned home, 221
court trials, 228 sent to southern Utah, 61
critical of Haight, 58–59 settled Fort Harmony, 55
denied meeting White and spiritually adopted by BY, 61
Klingensmith, 141 surviving child lived with, 220
dependable, 139 trial transcripts, xii
emigrant property profits, 254, 393n67 visionary, 65–66
execution Lee, Lemuel (Clem), 148, 170–71,
illustration, 231 190, 268
last speech, 230–31 Lee, Nancy Bean, 61
reached site of, 229 Lee, Rachel, 139
shot, 231 Lee, Rex E., x
taken to site of, 227–29 Leonard, Lyman, 94
Haight recruited, 142–43 Lewis, James, 211
Haight summoned, 139 Lewis, Samuel, 393n2
implicated BY in MMM, 71 Lion House, 182
in Missouri riot, 11 Liston, Commodore Perry, 348n55
in Santa Clara canyon with GAS, 70 Little Pinto Creek, Utah, 160
Indian farmer, 66 Little Soldier (Indian), 96–97
indicted, 230 livestock
interactions with BY, 231 diseases, 121–23
massacre disposition of emigrant, 216
admitted killing emigrants, 203–4 Logan, Roger V., Jr., x
gave orders about looting, 208 Loveridge, Alexander H., 260
instructed militia about, plans, 190–92 Lyman, Francis Marion, 223
killed emigrants, 203–7
left emigrant corral, 197 Macfarlane, Daniel S., 157, 179, 190,
looted bodies, 207 193, 197–98, 260
negotiator in emigrant corral, 194–96 Macfarlane, John M., 260
planned, 187, 189 MacKinnon, William P., 28
rape charges, 207 Madison County, Alabama, 76–77
slept after, 209 Magotsu Creek, Utah, 137, 141, 158, 161
voted on plan, 189 Magraw, W. M. F., 22, 30
whereabouts of, at, 198 mail contract, 36, 38
military march at Harmony, 153 Malad River, 137
militia officer, 63, 190 Mangum, James M., 170–71, 260
nickname, 170 Mangum, John, 261
number of wives and children, 230 Manifest Destiny, 16
paranoid, 66 maps
personality, 157 Mountain Meadows, 188
quick to act, 145 southern route to California, 102
refuted role of GAS in MMM, 71 southern Utah, 130
released as presiding elder, 67 Mariposa County, California, 80
420 Index
markers, MMM. See MMM, memorials Missouri
martial law, 182–83 emigrants from, 82, 101–2
Martineau, James H., 67, 136 Mormon enmity for, 35, 92
mass killing. See killing opposition to Mormons, 8–13
Matheny, Sims, 393n2 “Wild-cats,” 87–88
Mathews, E. C., 212, 223 Missouri River, 74
Mathews, James N., 261 Mitchell, Charles R., 78–79, 248, 252
Mathews, William, 211–12 Mitchell, Joel D., 78–79, 252
See also Tanner-Mathews company Mitchell, John, 248
McDonald, Elizabeth Ann Shirts Mitchell, Lawson, 386n42
McDulange, F. C., 393n2 Mitchell, Sarah C. Baker, 78–79, 219, 248
McEntire, Lawson A., 248 Mitchell, William C., 78–80, 254
McGlashan, C. F., 224–25 Mogo, Charles, 42
McLean, Eleanor. See Pratt, Eleanor Moquetas (Paiute Indian), 147–48, 159,
McLean 168, 268
McLean, Hector, 31–32 moral responsibility, 359–60n12
McMurdy, Samuel, 193, 195–98, 203–4, Mormon Battalion, 18
214, 260 Mormon Church
memorials, MMM. See MMM, memorials formal name, 7
merchants, non-Mormon, 21–22, organized, 6–7
91–92, 99 Mormonism Unveiled (book), xii, 71
microbes, 121 Mormons
migration, mass, 20 characteristics, 6
militia conflicts with emigrants, 95
at MMM, 190–92 desire local rule, 23–24
biographies, 255–64 dissenters, 24
Cedar City, 136 emigrant perceptions, 89
drills, 35, 68, 70, 92 and non-Mormons, 22–23
guns, 193 opposition, 7
haunted by actions, 209 pioneers, 75
in America, 8 reports about, 22–23, 27–28
in southern Utah, 190 threaten to burn homes, 99
milk cows, 254 viewed as traitors, 92–93
millennialism, 39 views about non-believers, 7
Miller, James William, 248 Morrill, Laban, 155–57
Miller, John Calvin, 202, 217, 220–21, Morris, Barbara, 134
248 Morris, Elias, 144
Miller, Joseph, 217, 248 at council meeting, 155
Miller, Josiah (Joseph), 82, 110, 220, 248 attended Parowan council, 178
Miller, Mary, 217–18, 248 biography, 261
Miller, Matilda Cameron, 82, 248 met with Dame, 174
Millers Springs, Utah, 110 mother of, 134
ministers, Christian, 44 surviving child lived with, 219
minorities, reactions against, 29 went to MMM on Friday, 210–12
Index 421
Morris, John, 134, 155 carnage, 205
Morse, Gilbert, 153, 207 command given to begin, 199
Mountain Meadows Dame’s orders, 179, 187
description, 3 Indian/white role in, 204
emigrants arrived at, 149–51 leaders strategize, 187, 189
eroded land, 229 line of procession, 197–99
execution party reached, 229 long wait, 197
GAS traveled through, 70 men killed before, 197–98
Hamblin got herding rights at, 149 men leave corral, 197
Hamblin recommended, to emigrants, men slaughtered, 200–201
119 militia approach corral, 193–94
map, 130 militia informed about plans, 190
Rim of the Basin, 192, 199, 365n101 militia instructed, 191
selected as execution place, 228 militia mustered, 179–80
siege site, 150 Mormon hesitance, 199
spring, 70 number of Indians, 192–93
Tanner-Mathews company at, 222–23 number of Mormons, 193
Mountain Meadows Massacre number slain, ix
approaches to writing about, xii-xiv rescue terms, 194
attacks sinister plan, 199
Aden killed, 160 to destroy all but small children, 187
Dame got news of, 166–67 wagons leave corral, 197
Dame investigated, 167 wagons loaded, 196–97
militia help requested, 173 women and children slaughtered,
Monday morning, 158–59 201–4
reported to Haight, 164 limitations in understanding, xiv-xv
siege site, 150 looting, 207–8
standoff, 172 map, aerial, 188
suspended after Tuesday, 170 memorials
Tuesday morning, 168–69 1859 Carleton monument, 4–5
Tuesday night, 169–70 1990 commemoration, x
wagons circled, 161 motives
bodies disinterred by scavengers, Daniel H. Wells mentioned, 114
214–15 Haight-JDL meeting, 144
burial areas, 214 Parley Pratt’s murder, 32
characteristics of participants, 191 Philetus Warn listed, 114
escape corral, 198, 224–25 poisoning, 124
goal in writing book about, x plunder, 132
histories, xv no justification for, xiii
illustration, 215 perpetrators, 128
impact and interest in, ix-x plans
insights into why it happened, xiii-xiv ambush site changed, 157
killing attempt to halt attack, 157
buried bodies, 214–15 discussed in Parowan, 179
422 Index
initial ambush, 137–39 Northwest Ordinance of 1787, 23
responsibility for crime, 144 Nowers, Willson Gates, 125
portrayed as Indian atrocity, 215–16 Nowlin, Jabus, 393n2
questions concerning, ix
rationalizations after, 115, 132 Ogden Hole, Utah, 96
reporting, to authorities, 212–13 Ohio, emigrants from, 82
search for sources, x-xi Oregon-California Trail, 74–75
secrecy about, 216 overland travel
siege site, 150 BY threatened to impede, 98–99
skeletal remains, 3–5 described, 83–85
survivors ox poisoning story, 119–21
children, 208–9, 216–21 oxen, values, 254
descendants, x
tragic victims, 209 Pacific Springs, 86
trial testimonies, xv Pahvant Indians
writings about, xv Ammon’s influence with, 177–78
The Mountain Meadows Massacre angered, 175
(book), xiii at Corn Creek, 116
Muddy River, 119 attacked Turner company, 175
mules, 91, 253 kill Gunnison, 20, 22
murder, innocent blood, 135 trade with emigrants, 120
Myack (Paiute Indian), 268 Paiute Indians
allied with Mormons, 64
Nauvoo Expositor (newspaper), 13, 57 attack
Nauvoo, Illinois, 13–14, 16 ambush place selected, 137–39, 141
Nauvoo Legion angered at JDL, 169
Illinois, 13 initial plans for, 137
Utah militia, 38 killed, 168–69
drills, 52, 68, 70 Monday morning, 158–59
guard duty, 69 plans for, 143–44
war preparation, 47–48, 131 recruited for, 141, 145, 147–48, 152
See also Iron Military District standoff, 173
Nebeker, George, 110 took emigrant cattle, 161
Nelson, Peter, 180 impoverished, 64
Nelson, William, 227–29 JDL farmer to, 66
Nephi, Utah, 110 massacre
newspapers agreed to kill emigrants, 187
anti-Mormon campaign, 28–30, 41 blamed for, 173, 209, 215–16
public reading, 30 felt cheated by Mormons, 208
Non-cap-in (Indian), 268 killed emigrants, 204
non-Mormons, conflict with Mormons, looted bodies, 207–8
21–22 number of participants, 192–93
North Willow Creek, Utah, 94 participant biographies, 265–69
northern route to California, 50, 120 prepared for, 190, 192
Index 423
Paiute Indians (continued ) pine tar, 152, 168
restless waiting for, 197 Pine Valley, Utah, 152, 162
mistakes made by, xiv Pinto, Utah
Mormon assistance, 64–65 ambush plans changed near, 157
profited from emigrant property, Clewes sent to, 163–64
221, 254 Dame’s men at, 174
Paragonah, Utah, 54, 125, 127, 167 emigrants passed, 149
Park, Hamilton G., 93–94, 103 GAS preached at, 70
Parker, Basil, 78, 83–85, 91, 93–94 Indian missionaries moved to, 67
Parowan, Utah Indians recruited at, 141
city gates, 125 Indians rendezvous near, 154
councils in, 166, 177–78 no MMM participants from, 190
emigrants at, 125, 127 road through, 137
founded, 54 Pioneer Day
GAS at, 52–53, 72 Cedar City, 131
Haight’s comments about, 58 picnic, 33–36, 40
Haslam reached, 166 Pitchforth, Samuel, 110, 134
late-night council, 177–78 plaques, MMM. See MMM, memorials
messenger sent to, 136 plunder, as MMM motive, 132
militia, 190 plural marriage. See polygamy
no MMM participants from, 190 Pocketville, Utah, 220
“tan bark council,” 178–79 poisoning
Tanner-Mathews company at, 176–77 Beaver learns about, 121, 124
trading with emigrants, 125 blamed for MMM, 124
war rumors reached, 127 Corn Creek episode, 119–21
Parrish, Abagail, 109–10 Mormons accused of, 93
Parrish-Potter murders, 109 on northern route, 120
Parrish, William R., 109 police, 8
Patterson, George T. T., 227 Polk, James K., 18
Payson, Utah, 109–10, 181 Pollock, Samuel, 193, 198, 204–5, 214, 261
Pearce, Harrison, 261 polygamy, 6, 25, 29–30
Pearce, James, 109, 127, 154, 173, 191, popular sovereignty, 23, 29
193, 198, 261 Poteet, men named, 81, 252–53
Peck, Washington, 317n52 poverty, in influencing atrocities, xiv
Pendleton, Calvin, 177 Powell, John W., 206
persecution, anti-Mormon, 8–13 Powers, George, 112, 119–20, 124,
Peter’s Leap, road, 68 176–78, 222–23
petition, emigrants’, 224 Pratt, Eleanor McLean, 31, 37
Pettit, Richard, 93, 99 Pratt, Orson, 32
Phelps, John Wolcott, 46 Pratt, Parley P.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, riot, 8 arrested, 31
Pi-bi-gand (Indian), 96 exploring expedition, 54, 64
Piedes. See Paiute Indians Missouri experience, 10
Pierce, Franklin, 22 murdered, 30–32, 37, 82
424 Index
preaching, 24 Rogerson, Josiah, 229
prejudice, anti-Mormon, 29 rumors, 127
preparedness, BY advocates, 48 Rush, Milam Lafayette, 249, 252
presiding elders, 48 Russell, Majors and Waddell freighting
Prewit, William, 248 company, 36, 38
Prince, Henry, 3–4 Russell, William H., 36
profanity, 134
property sacrament, 25
auctioned, 254 Saints. See Mormons
emigrant, 216, 251–54 Salina, Oklahoma, 82
providence, divine, 44 Salt Creek, Utah. See Nephi, Utah
Provo, Utah, 73, 108–9, 126, 181 Salt Lake City, Utah
burning, threatened, 45–46, 99
Quantrill, William, 47 description, 89
Quichapa Lake, Utah, 134, 152 emigrant travel through, 89–90
quoits, 173 emigrants left, 104
emigrants stopped at, 103
Rawson company, 327n23 sold supplies to emigrants, 91–92
Ray, John A., 113, 122 street scene, 90
rebaptisms, 22, 25 tension in, 93
Reeves, Josiah, 140–41, 149, 261 trading constraints, 91
reformation, Mormon (1856–57), Salt Lake Valley, Utah
24–27, 26 herd grounds, 91
Regent Park’s Zoological Gardens, 58 Mormons arrived in, 20, 22
Relief Society. See Female Benevolent safe refuge, 18
Society tension, 93
Republican Party, 29 San Bernardino, California, 47
revivals, religious, 24 San Joaquin Valley, California, 80
Rich, Charles C., 103 Santa Clara River canyon
Richards, Franklin D., 49 ambush place, 137–38, 141
Richards, Willard, 14 GAS traveled in, 70–72
Riddle, Isaac, 168, 261 illustrations, 138, 140
Ridge, Martin, 45 JDL nearly reached, 161
Rigdon, Sidney, 11–12 Tobin ambush, 138–39
Riggs, William, 393n2 Santa Clara, Utah, 65, 69, 161, 190
riots, 7–8 Schwartz, Regina M., 127
roads, 50, 102 Scott, Henry D., 82
See also northern route to California, Scott, Malinda Cameron, 82–83, 104
southern route to California Scott, Winfield, 30
Robinson, Richard S., 141, 262 Seaman, John, 269
Robison, Proctor, 122–23 settlers, southern Utah, xiv
Rockwell, Orrin Porter, 37 Sheppard, George, 47
Rogers, Samuel H., 136 Shirts, Carl. See Shirts, Don Carlos
Rogers, William, 121 (Carl)
Index 425
Shirts, Don Carlos (Carl) Pinto, 70
biography, 262 Santa Clara, 69
halted killing of cattle, 169 Santa Clara canyon, 70, 230
massacre Washington, 69
informed Indians of plans, 190 statehood quest, 27
prepared Indians for, 192 urged government investigate
whereabouts of, at, 198 conditions in Utah, 30
met JDL, 162 war preparation counsel, 52–53
recruited Indians, 145, 148, 154, 265 Smith, Hyrum, 14, 57–58, 93–94
Shirts, Elizabeth Ann, 220–21 Smith, Jesse N.
Shirts, Peter, 65, 153, 206 Haight worried about, 174
shooting, 83 in council meeting, 136, 177
Silver Lake, Utah, 33–35, 39 investigated MM attack, 167
Sioux Indians, 47 reported to Dame, 177
Sissix (Indian), 176 traded with emigrants, 125
Slade, William, Jr., 262 Smith, Joseph
Slade, William R., 262 attacked, 8
slavery beliefs and teachings
factor in anti-Mormon persecution, 9 defense against violence, 11
Indians, 64, 138 God’s justice, 7
Republican stance against, 29 vengeance, 13
Smith, Alf, 234 emigrants boast about murder of,
Smith, Elenor, 219 93–94, 133, 135, 142
Smith, Elias, 122 imprisoned, 12–13
Smith, George A. murdered, 14–15, 57–58
beliefs and teachings organized church, 6–7
impending war, 49 war revelation, 10
war readiness, 73 Smith, Joseph Hodgetts, 219, 262
biography, 51 Smith, Silas, 118–19, 123, 125, 177
camped with emigrants, 118–19 Smoot, Abraham O., 35–38, 41–42
informs BY about war news, 30 Snow, Erastus, 129
learned about new governor, 38 Snow, James C., 107–9
on advancing troops, 41–42 Snow, Lorenzo, 94–96
photograph, 50 soldiers, conflict with Mormons in
purported MMM plan, 70–71 1854, 21
questioned war policy, 49 Sonora, California, 78
southern journey sources, use, xv–xvi
began, 49 South Pass, 74, 89
camped with Paiutes, 70 Southern Indian Mission
Cedar City, 67–68, 131 conflict with JDL, 65–66
Fort Harmony, 68 established, 64–65
Mountain Meadows, 70 Indians recruited from, 145
Paragonah, 54 moved headquarters, 67
Parowan, 52–54, 72 southern route to California
426 Index
described, 50–51, 105 Stoddard, David K., 262
Indian ambushes on, 138 Stokes, George, 228–30
map, 102 Stratton, Anthony J., 263
number of emigrants on, 106 Strong, William, 94
settlements on, 107 strychnine, 121
southern Utah Sumner, Edwin V., 68
formidable land, 68 surveyors, federal, 22, 42–44
guarding against attack, 69
map, 130 Tackett, Ambrose, 388n53
settlers, xiv Tackitt, Armilda Miller, 81, 249
Spanish Fever, 121 Tackitt, Cyntha, 81, 101, 104, 249
Spanish Fork, Utah, 91, 106 Tackitt, Emberson Milum, 217, 219, 249
Spencer, George, 262 Tackitt, James M., 249
Springville, Utah, 109 Tackitt, Jones M., 249
squatter sovereignty. See popular Tackitt, Marion, 249
sovereignty Tackitt, Matilda, 249
stake presidents, 48 Tackitt, Pleasant, 81, 249, 252
stakes, 48 Tackitt, Sebron, 249
Stallcup, Charles, 243 Tackitt, William H., 249
Stampp, Kenneth, 29 Tackitt, William Henry, 217, 219, 249
statehood Tait, William, 167, 263
petitions, 27 “tan bark council,” 178–79
process to gain, 23 Tanner-Mathews company
Staub, Ervin, 137, 143 arrived at Cedar City, 211
St. George, Utah, 229 at Corn Creek, 120
Steele, John, 93–94, 136 halted at Parowan, 176–77
Steptoe, Edward J., 20–21, 44, 87 Philetus Warn traveled with, 113
Stewart, William C. “Bill” traveled to MM, 222–23
at council meeting, 157 Tanner, Sidney, 113
biography, 262 tar, pine, 152, 168
indicted, 230 Tau-gu (Coal Creek John), 206, 208, 269
JDL implicated, 229–30 Taylor, John, 14, 19, 27
killed Aden, 160 Teeter, Daniel, company, 327n23
killed emigrants at MMM, 200 territorial system, 23
looted bodies, 207 “terror to evil doers,” 59, 131
met Clewes, 163–64 Texas Fever, 121
reached MM, 159 theocracy, 23
report at Cedar, 164 Thompson, Jacob, 28–29
sent to MM on Tuesday, 167 Thompson, Joseph, 93, 99
sent to Pinto on Sunday, 157 Thornton, Amos G., 152, 164, 214,
surviving child lived with, 219 217, 263
Stiles, George P., 21, 28 Toanob (Paiute Indian), 269
stock herders. See cattle herders Tobin, John, 138–39
Stockton, California, 78 Tom (Paiute Indian), 269
Index 427
Tonche (Paiute Indian), 269 news
Toshob (Paiute Indian), 269 reported to leaders, 37
Tower of London, 58 reported to picnic attendees, 39
Townsend, George Alfred, 51 southern Utah learned about, 52
Townsend House (Salt Lake City), 87 not expected in Utah, 183
trading, with emigrants, 125 quality of troops, 46
Tulare County, California, 80 rumors about, 52
Tullis, David W., 149, 152, 263 southern attack rumors, 69
Tunanita’a (Paiute Indian), 269 troop threats, 46–47
Turner-Dukes-Collins company Utah Territory
at Corn Creek, 120, 123, 175 conditions in, 30
attacked near Beaver, 175–76 federal officials, 21–24, 38
behind emigrants, 105–6, 114 incendiary reports about Mormons,
caused trouble, 112 22–23
separate travel, 120 legislature, 27
Turner, Nicholas, 92, 105, 176 local rule desired, 23–24, 27–29
Tutsegavits (Paiute Indian), 65, 118, map, 102
146–47, 270 runaway officials, 20
Tutt-Everett War, 80 statehood campaign, 27–28
Tyler, Oscar, 393n2 Supreme Court, 28
Ute Indians, 64
Unruh, John D., Jr., 96
Urie, John M., 213, 263 Van Buren, Martin, 49
Utah Expedition Van Vliet, Stewart, 182–83
accompanied federal appointees, 36 vandalism, 21
BY’s thoughts on, 41 vengeance
camp followers, 46 divine, 13–14
freight wagons observed, 35–36 Mormon desires for, 92
influenced MMM, 114 oath of, 286n48
military orders, 30, 48 victims, dehumanization of, 128
Mormons vigilantism, 8, 11
emigrants equated with troops by, 108 violence
fears, 48 anti-Mormon, 8–13
learn about, 30 group, 137
preachments, 49 in 19th-century America, 7–8
preparations, 48–49, 52, 72–73 in understanding MMM, xiii-xiv
scouts, 92 process that leads to, 127
settlers not alarmed, 72–73 reformation incited, 25, 27
spies, 46 scholarly studies, xiv
strategy, 52–53 Virgin Hills, 225
threats from, 99
to resist troops, 100 wagons
views about, 42, 44–46 emigrant, 388–89n1
war policy, 38, 44–45 illustrations, 19, 75, 90, 106–7
428 Index
taken to Iron Springs, 216 Wiley, Robert, 187, 264
values, 254 Willard, Utah. See North Willow
Wakara (Ute Indian), 51, 63–64 Creek, Utah
Walker, Joseph, 180 Willden, Charles, 133
Walker War (1853–54), 51, 62–64 Willden, Ellott
war, revelation on, 10 biography, 264
wards, 48 explained massacre, 179
Warn, Philetus M., 113–14, 120, 124, 132 indicted, 230
Warsaw, Illinois, 13 on MM initial attack, 159
Washington County, Arkansas, 79 pistols, 159, 163
Washington, Utah sent to MM, 140–41, 149
GAS preached at, 69 shot at, 171–72
Indians recruited at, 154 talked with JDL, 172
massacre perpetrators from, 190 visited emigrants, 151–52, 157
militia leave, for ambush site, 155 Williams, Sarah and David, 219
reinforcements from, 162 Williamson, James, 264
Webb, Ann Eliza, 109 Willis, Frances, 218
Welch, Peyton, 103, 120, 175 Willis, John H., 218, 264
Wells, Daniel H. Willis, Thomas T., 221–22
biography, 38–39 Willis, William, 137
general orders, 47 Wilson, Richard, 249, 346n11
learns about U.S. troops, 37 Wilson, W. H., 42–43
on MMM, 114 Windham, New York, 57
urged war preparation, 131 Wood, Solomon R., 249
warned Dame about troops, 68–69 Wood, William Edward, 249
west, Saints’ plans to go, 16 Woodruff, Wilford, 147
western exodus, 18–19 Woods, Lyman, 108
Western, John, 263
whiskey, sage brush, 132 Young, Brigham
Whitaker, James, Sr., 155 accused surveyors, 43
White, Joel attack on emigrants
at MM, 173 express letter to Haight, 183–86
biography, 263–64 Haight’s letter requesting advice
killed emigrants at MMM, 200 on, 156
met Clewes, 163–64 implicated in MMM, 71
profited from emigrant property, 254 JDL denied BY had role in, 228, 231
reached MM, 159 urged Haslam to ride fast, 186
report at Cedar, 164 becalmed angry Indians, 96–98
returned home, 216 beliefs and teachings
sent to MM on Tuesday, 167 appointed federal officials, 22, 24, 44
sent to Pinto on Sunday, 157 blood atonement, 25
sent to recruit Indians, 141 divine providence, 44
White, Samuel D., 263–64 fairness in war, 183–84
Whitney, Orson F., xi last days, 44
Index 429
Young, Brigham (continued ) pulpit rhetoric impact, 99–100
oppressive government, 18 recalled emigrants, 103
shedding innocent blood, 135 reformation instituted by, 24
biography, 16–18 report of JDL’s execution sent to, 229
desired local governance, 28–29 resolved JDL-missionary dispute, 65
errors made by, xiv sent war policy to GAS, 67–68
express message to Haight, 184–85, 226 sought safe haven for Saints, 18
governor, 20, 30 spiritual adoption of JDL, 61
Indians threatens to stop protecting
government reimbursements, 98 emigrants, 98–99
new policy, 98–99, 137, 145 threats against, 46–47, 110, 112
policy, 62–63 war policy, 38, 44–45
inflammatory reports about, 28 Young, Brigham, Jr., 21
interactions with JDL, 231 Young, Henry, 225
JDL sought approval of, 66 Young, McCan, 225
newspaper campaigns against, 29 Young, William, 65, 154–55, 193, 198,
on advancing troops, 37, 41 201, 214, 264
on anti-Mormon campaign, 30, 41 Youngwuds (Paiute Indian), 146–47,
on Joseph Smith’s death, 14 154, 270
on Parley Pratt’s murder, 32 Y.X. Company. See Brigham Young
photograph, 17 Express Company
Pioneer Day picnic, 33–35, 40
prevented conflict with emigrants, 93 Zion, term, 18, 40
pre-war admonitions/orders, 47–48 “Zion’s Avengers,” 131
430 Index

Massacre at Mountain Meadows

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massacre at mountain meadows

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richard e. turley jr.

Copyright © 2008 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Printed in the United States of America

Prologue: A Picture of Human Suffering

A Picture of Human Suffering

4 Massacre at Mountain Meadows

A Picture of Human Suffering 5

Exiles from Freedom

Exiles from Freedom 7

racial, ethnic, or religious.9 Some Americans reacted even to verbal

8 Massacre at Mountain Meadows

Among the document’s signers were several of the community’s leading

Exiles from Freedom 9

10 Massacre at Mountain Meadows

Exiles from Freedom 11

massacre of mormons at haun’s mill. Charles Mackay, The Mormons, or

12 Massacre at Mountain Meadows

Exiles from Freedom 13

14 Massacre at Mountain Meadows

16 Massacre at Mountain Meadows

“many anxious hours” studying the “Episcopalians, Presbyterians, New

Exiles from Freedom 17

18 Massacre at Mountain Meadows

Exiles from Freedom 19

22 Massacre at Mountain Meadows

24 Massacre at Mountain Meadows

james buchanan. Matthew

28 Massacre at Mountain Meadows

30 Massacre at Mountain Meadows

32 Massacre at Mountain Meadows

No More Submit to Oppression

No More Submit to Oppression 35

Abraham O. Smoot. Several weeks earlier Smoot had been carrying

36 Massacre at Mountain Meadows

No More Submit to Oppression 37

38 Massacre at Mountain Meadows

Ironically, while some Mormons talked about ﬁghting the United

daniel h. wells. Courtesy

No More Submit to Oppression 39

40 Massacre at Mountain Meadows

Avoid All Excitement,

42 Massacre at Mountain Meadows

Avoid All Excitement, But Be Ready 43

44 Massacre at Mountain Meadows

Avoid All Excitement, But Be Ready 45

46 Massacre at Mountain Meadows

Avoid All Excitement, But Be Ready 47

48 Massacre at Mountain Meadows

Avoid All Excitement, But Be Ready 49

telling church and military leaders in the settlements to conserve grain

50 Massacre at Mountain Meadows

Avoid All Excitement, But Be Ready 51

52 Massacre at Mountain Meadows

Avoid All Excitement, But Be Ready 53

Preaching a Military Discourse

Preaching a Military Discourse 55