Mountain Meadows Massacre

#Introduction

Certainly one of the blackest hours in our Church’s history is the massacre of more than 120 unarmed men, women, and children on September 11, 1857, by about four dozen members of a militia comprised of Mormon settlers at Mountain Meadows in southern Utah. It was a truly ugly and despicable event. The Mormons were aided in the atrocity by Paiute Indians. But it was the Mormons and not the Indians who took the lead in this. This incident was an obscenity to all the good and righteous things Mormonism stood for. It cast the Church in an unfavorable light and justifiably tarnished the Church’s image throughout the United Sates, and doubtless throughout the world.

This chapter is part of a book I’ve called Resolving Concerns. The various chapters in this book are intended to do just that—resolve concerns. It is my role as author to write from the standpoint of an apologist. I must try to help those with concerns to understand the truth and feel more comfortable about any criticisms leveled against the Church. How is that possible when the subject is the massacre that occurred at Mountain Meadows? If a member of the Church, or anyone at all, is concerned about the Church’s role in this particular debacle, how is it possible to help resolve his or her concerns?

In spite of all well-justified misgivings, I do feel it is possible to come to an equilibrium with this event. This involves coming to fully accept two premises:

1. The first is that there were circumstances present in southern Utah in 1857 that made the Mormon settlers’ actions more understandable. One example is that they all believed that a U.S. army of some twenty-five hundred men was marching toward Utah led by man know for his ruthlessness and even cruelty. War was imminent, and it was urgent that they be prepared. They looked upon outsiders—“Americans”—as their enemies. They had assumed a “military” mentality and were conditioned to obey any orders, as a good soldier must.

These mitigating circumstances will be carefully itemized and discussed. Regardless, however, of the number and nature of these circumstances, the saints were still far from being justified in what they did.

2. The second premise is more important. Two of the characters in the drama that played out in the late summer of 1857 are, I believe, almost entirely to blame for the occurrence of the incident. Without either of them, the massacre would not have happened. Both of these individuals evidenced spiritual and emotional inadequacies and a degree of personal pride that proved cataclysmically fatal. These men were John D. Lee and Isaac C. Haight. They were both leaders—and they were leaders at a time when it was vital that leaders be obeyed.

Each of these two men was a unique individual. Each had his own issues, problems, situations, responsibilities, and concerns. Neither I nor any other mortal is in a position to judge their culpability relative to the eternal laws of God. Only the Lord can and will do that. I do, however, hold to the notion that the judgments, decisions, and instructions that issued forth from these men in September 1857 were responsible for the massacre at Mountain Meadows.

It is true that several others were directly involved in the massacre including nearly fifty Mormon militiamen and a hundred or so Paiute Indians. It is important, however, to acknowledge that the Mountain Meadows Massacre, as an event, was in no way representative of the moral standards, the character, the motives, the ideals, or the deeply held doctrinal beliefs of the Mormon settlers in that area, including those militiamen most directly involved. The tragedy shouldn’t really reflect in any way on the Church or the church members of that day, save for those two I have identified as being responsible.

Chapter outline:

1. First I will provide a short introductory biography for John D. Lee and Isaac C. Haight.

2. Then, I will summarize what I consider to be the most important circumstances present in 1857 that enhanced the likelihood of the massacre. These are the factors that existed over and above the roles played by Lee and Haight.

3. Finally, I will provide a relatively short narrative detailing the salient happenings in the story of the massacre. This includes those events leading up to and including the massacre. I have told the unvarnished truth. I warn you in advance that it will be one of most awful things you have ever read.

I have intentionally made you, the reader, aware of John D. Lee and Isaac C. Haight in order that you might follow their roles carefully as you study the account of how the disaster developed and played out. The reader is invited to formulate his or her own opinion as to the importance of the roles Lee and Haight shared.

I have utilized as my primary resource the book Massacre at Mountain Meadows by Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr., and Glen M. Leonard (Oxford University Press: New York, N. Y., 2008). This exhaustively referenced work is the most authoritative and credible we have available on the Mountain Meadows massacre.

Since my chapter here is intended only for distribution among family and friends, I have taken the liberty of freely quoting from the book without providing particular references to the primary sources. I invite the reader to consult Walker et al’s book if specific references are desired. For a few of the most important quotes, I have referenced them only as to their location in Massacre at Mountain Meadows (hereafter, MMM). In all quotations, I have corrected the grammatical and spelling errors to bring them up to a modern standard. For any significant conflicts between the book and my brief summary, I take full responsibility.

#Brief Introductory Biographical Sketches of the Main Perpetrators

John D. Lee. He was born in Kaskaskia, Illinois, in 1812 and was therefore 45 years old on the day of the massacre. He suffered a troubled childhood. An intruder beat his mother senseless, leaving her impaired. Lee remembered his father as “a kindhearted generous, noble man” when sober, though he drank heavily and provided poorly. John’s mother died when John was three. Five years later his father “went to Texas.” John was sent to live with his mother’s sister who believed in not sparing the rod. John later reported that he had been “knocked down and beaten . . . until I was senseless, many times.” Conditions were apparently so difficult living with his aunt, that at one point he even considered suicide. At the age of sixteen, he left his aunt’s home and went to work as a mail courier, stage driver, Mississippi River “roust-about” (a wharf laborer), farmer, store clerk, and bartender. He briefly dealt cards and gambled professionally. He married Agatha Ann Woolsey. He then established a small store and farmed in Fayette County, Illinois. Still in his twenties, he acquired 160 acres, two hundred cattle, and a thousand sheep. He found he could easily outtalk, out-trade, and outwork almost anyone.

Lee was converted to the Church after he rescued two frost-bitten Mormon missionaries from a snowstorm. In 1838, he and Agatha Ann gave up their comfortable situation in Illinois to join the main body of saints in Missouri. They then moved to Nauvoo where he built a large home and served as the wharf master and as librarian of the Masonic lodge. He also served as a bodyguard to Joseph Smith and, upon Joseph’s death, to Brigham Young. “I became very popular among the saints,” Lee recalled 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.” Brigham Young took a liking to Lee and agreed to adopt him in a spiritual father-son relationship.

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. Brigham Young may have had another reason for sending Lee south. Both before and during the saints’ westward migration, Lee had trouble getting along with people and found himself called before church tribunals 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 plural wife Nancy Bean in a December 4, 1847 statement. Lee often denied the stories others told about him, calling them outlandish charges aimed to destroy his public character. But Brigham Young and others came to believe that Lee had been guilty of some misconduct and even reproved Lee himself. This incident caused a minor stir. Lee’s reputation had been damaged and possibly his career in the Church as well.

Despite preferring to remain in Salt Lake City, Lee accepted President Young’s assignment to go south “to redeem my standing.” He lived in Fort Harmony, twenty miles southwest of Cedar City. He eventually became militia major in Fort Harmony.

Fort Harmony also became a center for the church-established Indian Mission. The missionaries called to labor in that mission were often at odds with Lee. Lee felt there should only be one “head” at Fort Harmony, and that was he. Lee served as “presiding elder” in Fort Harmony, and often spoke of personal dreams, visions, and revelations that he probably didn’t really have. Finally, a petition against Lee circulated at Harmony and included the signatures of Indian missionaries and settlers. Lee was relieved of his office as presiding elder but maintained his office as major over the militia battalion at Harmony. In all, Lee was a volatile, divisive, and notably proud character.

Isaac C. Haight. He was born at Windham, New York, in 1813. He was converted to the Church and lived in Nauvoo. There he worked as a policeman for the city of Nauvoo. He was a member of the city posse that destroyed the press of the anti- Smith Nauvoo Expositor and was a part of the guard that went with Joseph and Hyrum to Carthage Jail.

Once out west, in Salt Lake City, he accompanied Parley Pratt on his 1849/50 expedition to explore the area of southern Utah. He then served a mission in England for twenty-eight months. On returning, he led a group of emigrants from England to the Utah territory. Shortly thereafter, he was sent to Cedar City by Brigham Young to take charge of the Deseret Iron Company. In addition, he became Cedar City stake president, the Mayor, legislator, and militia battalion major. Few men in Utah seemed to have a brighter future. In 1857 he was forty-four years old.

Like other Utah communities, Cedar City had recently revitalized its militia in response to legislation passed early in the year 1857. Also the rumors of war had accelerated preparations for military action (see “Perception of an imminent war between the United States Government and the Mormons,” below). Haight seemed ready, if not anxious, to defend the city.

#Most Pertinent Precipitators of the Massacre

How could basically good people participate in such a terrible atrocity? The perpetrators were not hardened criminals. Nor were they iniquitous, amoral individuals lacking in common sense. Rather they were ordinary men trying to exist in the difficult rural, environs of southern Utah. Though we will never be able to justify the awful occurrence of the massacre, I believe it will be useful here to summarize those factors that practically played a role in the happenings and were the precipitators of the event. I should warn in advance that we as a people are too much believers in institutional and personal responsibility. We have difficulty blaming the massacre on historical or psychological models. Nonetheless, the following factors cannot be expected to be without consequence.

One Mormon resident of southern Utah at the time of the massacre who did not take place in the killing told his son: “You would not understand if I told you. You know nothing about the spirit of the times. . . . You don’t understand and you can’t understand” (William R. Palmer to Joseph Anderson, October 16, 1959, William R. Palmer Material, First Presidency, General Administration Files, 1923, 1932, 1937-67, Church History Library).

It is clear that the massacre was a complex event in which any people and many forces had a role.

The Turbulent Era. The period from 1830 to 1860 has been called “The Turbulent Era.” During this period the United States was a violent place, particularly for some racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. Indeed, it had been for the Mormons. They had experienced violence in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, and when a U.S. army marched toward Utah Territory in 1857, the Mormons believed they were about to become victims again. One of the great ironies of the massacre was that some of the people who had long deplored the injustice of illegal violence became its perpetrators.

The belief that citizens had the right to take the law into their own hands to protest unjust conditions existed in colonial America, 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. 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” (David Grimstead, “Rioting in Its Jacksonian Setting,” American Historical Review 77 [April 1972]:392-93).

American cities had “labor riots, election riots, anti-abolitionist riots, anti-Negro riots, and anti-Catholic riots. Rural America also had its roughnecks, bushwhackers, and night riders, who put down anybody they strongly disliked. This violence was frequently aimed at unpopular minorities whether racial, ethnic, or religious. Contributing to this problem was poor law enforcement. The system of sheriffs and constables could not keep pace with the rising violence that came with growing populations.

It is little wonder that the saints encountered the violence that befell them in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. They had been taught to “renounce war and proclaim peace” (D&C 98:16). Up until 1857, they had never really lifted a finger in their own defense. They did threaten forcible retaliation in 1835 with the Zion’s Camp march. They did not, however, have an opportunity to exert any force once their arrived in Missouri. Also on Independence Day in 1838, Sydney Rigdon delivered an aggressively worded warning to the Church’s enemies. Other relatively minor skirmishes resulted from the freelance bands of so-called “Danites” made up of young church members. However, actual, well-organized, substantial, retaliatory defense never materialized.

In the setting of colonial America, episodes of violence often began when one people classified another as “the enemy,” stripping them of any humanity and mentally transforming them into objects to be hated and feared. Once the process of devaluing and demonizing occurred, stereotypes took over, rumors circulated, and pressure built to take group action against the perceived threat. When these tinderbox conditions existed, a single incident—even small and ordinary—could spark great violence ending in atrocity.

Perception of an imminent war between the United States Government and the Mormons. The saints had begun arriving in the Utah territory beginning in July 1847 with an understandable passion for self government. During the early days of their settlement, they spoke of a “land of promise held in reserve by the hand of God.” Initially, it seemed the federal government seemed amenable to the idea. In 1851 President Millard Fillmore appointed Brigham Young governor and superintendent of Indian affairs for the Utah territory. However, three of the six other territorial appointees were outsiders and non-Mormons. The outside appointees were hardly in Utah before they left, taking the territory’s congressional appropriation of twenty-four thousand dollars with them. The “runaways” announced that the Mormons had not received them properly and were guilty of “malicious sedition.” These accusations reflected the deeply held feelings on both sides.

A few other incidents fueled the fire between the Mormons and the federal government. In 1853 Pahvant Indians in central Utah killed U.S. Army Captain John W. Gunnison and seven members of his party who were surveying a possible route for a railroad to the Pacific. The following year, Washington ordered Lt. Colonel Edward J. Steptoe and his command to travel to Utah 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 retribution for the killing of Pahvant leader by Missouri emigrants going to California. Critics of the Mormons were enraged. They believed the Mormons had not upheld the nation’s military honor.

The soldiers under Colonel Steptoe’s command further provoked the saints by wooing the Mormon women. One officer tried to seduce a daughter-in-law of Brigham Young whose husband was absent on a mission. 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” (MMM, 21). The incident outraged the Mormons.

The Mormons and the sequence of federally appointed judges had one running battle after another. After a local man was acquitted in federal court, the presiding judge, W. W. Drummond, reportedly physically threatened him. A Mormon-controlled grand jury in turn indicted Drummond and his servant for assault “with intent to kill.” Rowdies broke into the law library of federal 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. Local people also had clashes with other U.S. appointees including surveyors and Indian agents. The federal appointees became united in their strong opposition to Mormonism. These conflicts trashed Mormon hopes for a quiet, independent society in Utah.

During the 1850s, as many as sixteen federal officers left their positions in the territory in frustration, fright, or both. Negative reports began filtering back to Washington, accusing the Mormons and their Church of being “despotic,” “dangerous.” and “damnable.” The Church’s practice of polygamy added fuel to the conflict. The ideas began to grow that the Mormons considered the agents of the federal government as an “obtrusive presence,” and that the Mormons themselves were in a state of rebellion. By 1857 some outsiders thought conditions in Utah were out of control. The Mormons and particularly Brigham Young became fed up with the federally appointed agents sent to Utah, feeling they were often incompetent and corrupt.

Brigham began to insist that the Utah territory should become a state and have a voice in the selection of those who governed them. Brigham Young was so insistent on leaders acceptable to the saints, he began to be regarded by some as a traitor who was declaring war on the federal government. A campaign against the Church began to rage in several newspapers in the eastern United States. Their stories contained many lies and half truths about the Mormons. One example was the New York Tribune which reported to its readers that Utah was full of espionage, rape, robbery, and suicide. “Surely there never was a more atrocious and revolting tyranny,” it said. The New York Times demanded Brigham Young be replaced by a new territorial governor, backed by a military force “to tender the Constitution with one hand, while a drawn sword is held in the other” (MMM, 28-29). By May and June, 1857, rumors grew statewide that Brigham Young was, in fact, going to be replaced.

On July 23-24, 1857, Brigham Young hosted a grand, two-day celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Mormon’s arrival in the valley. It was held near Silver Lake near the top of Big Cottonwood Canyon and included two thousand guests and their families. About noon on the 24th, the idyllic charm of the celebration was broken by an unexpected visit. Five horsemen rode into camp, including Salt Lake City mayor Abraham O. Smoot. He announced to the gathered group that an army of some twentyfive hundred government troops had been ordered to Utah. They were to serve under a newly appointed governor and other new federal appointees to enforce U.S. law and put down a reported Mormon rebellion (MMM, 36). He also announced that the federal government had summarily terminated all mail service in and out of Utah—the kind of action nations take before launching a war. Smoot also had learned that the army was to be led by General William S. Harney, a two-fisted Indian fighter. He was known for his quick temper and violent nature. This suggested that the government was taking severe measures, and it raised the saints’ fears of renewed violence against them.

Brigham Young and other church leaders quickly adopted a general policy. They agreed to accept the new territorial appointees, but only if they “would behave themselves.” However, Harney and the army were different. If Harney crossed the eastern border of the territory, there would be a fight, and “the buzzards should pick his bones,” Brigham Young said. The saints would “no more . . . submit to oppression” (MMM, 38). Clearly, a war posture was established, and the word quickly spread throughout the state.

Rumors began to circulate that the army planned to hang Brigham Young and execute the more prominent men among the Mormons. The approaching army was viewed more as a mob than a military organization.

Brigham Young soon formulated his military strategy. It consisted of the following:

1. He wanted the saints outside of Utah (those in California, present-day Nevada, and in the eastern United States) to join the main settlements in the Utah territory. A war would put them a great risk.

2. He would use a 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. If the United States wanted to fight a war, Young intended that “they shall furnish [us] with arms and ammunition” (MMM, 45).

3. If General Harney made it to Utah, he would find Salt Lake City in ashes. 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 Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. Brigham wanted the army to be without any kind of succor if it got to the Great Basin.

4. The Indians would be recruited to help fight a guerilla war.

During the first week in August, convinced that war was closing upon him, Brigham wrote a series of orders. He told the Mormons in San Bernardino, the largest Mormon settlement outside of Salt Lake City, to come home. He asked his men to cultivate relations with various Indian groups throughout in the state in case they were needed. Nauvoo Legion General Daniel H. Wells had already organized the Utah territory into military districts. He ordered them to be in a high state of readiness. Brigham Young urged the saints to maintain a high level of spiritual readiness and to also garner and stockpile foodstuffs and other supplies in case they would have to live on them for an extended period.

In early August 1857, Apostle George A. Smith began a speaking tour of southern Utah. Though Smith said his tour was “a mission of peace to preach to the people,” his speeches “partook of the military more than the religious” and were full of hostility and virulence. They unmistakably sounded the war cry against the approaching federal army. Brigham Young had instructed Smith that the people were to strictly conserve grain and put the militias on alert. During their tour, Elder Smith’s party was overtaken by a rider carrying a military express carrying an urgent message from

General Daniel H. Wells in Salt Lake City. Before Smith had left Salt Lake City for the south, it was believed the federal army would be unable to reach Utah before winter. But word had come that Colonel Edwin V. Sumner’s First U.S. Cavalry, reported to be chasing Cheyenne Indians, had been spotted on the Sweetwater River just a few hundred miles northeast of Salt Lake City. Mormons suspected that Sumner’s pursuit of the Indians was a ruse to get him closer to Salt Lake 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. Still another said that an army captain had gone to Texas to gather volunteers to make a southern attack. 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. The militias began to carefully watch all possible entries into the Utah Territory, east, west, and south. Plans were discussed as to how any hostile force approaching Salt Lake City would be dealt with.

In the years following the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Smith’s journey to southern Utah became a matter of controversy with some feeling that it clearly set the stage for the massacre. Clearly all of Utah was on a war footing.

An atmosphere of military-style authority and obedience. This allows errant leaders to trump the moral instincts of their followers. John D. Lee and Haight were two of those errant leaders.

The lack of clear messages about what is expected of the followers. A dangerous situation is created when the followers of the leaders are without clear messages from headquarters. Then the followers exist in an atmosphere of ambiguity and wonder just what they should do. They become more subject to peer pressure and rumor.

Poverty increases the likelihood of violence by raising concerns about survival. Certainly deprivation was present in southern Utah. The Arkansas party was probably relatively wealthy by the standards of the day. The total worth of the property is difficult to calculate, but a good guess at 1857 prices would be about fifty thousand dollars. Adjusting for inflation, that amount would be more than a million dollars in today’s economy. This made the emigrants’ train exceptionally well to do. The poor people in southern Utah, struggling to carve out an existence in their frontier settlements must have look upon the train with wonder, and some even with envy.

One account recalled an incident as the Arkansas Party traveled through Fillmore. The emigrants “inquired how far it was to any houses”—an insult aimed at the settlers’ log cabins or their new state house, both in clear view. “The emigrants then in a crowing and insulting matter inquired whether there were any men in the place” (MMM, 113).

When iron production in Cedar City seemed most hopeful, the village had a boomtown population of almost a thousand men, women and children, making it one of Utah’s largest communities at the time. By the middle 1850s, Cedar City’s iron making had floundered and most of the local people lived in dire poverty, often going without shoes and warm clothing. Their homes were a shambles and they lived in ragged attire.

The troublemaker Dutchman. Traveling with the Arkansas company was a man who was described even by people of the company as a “single man who has gvien us all the trouble we have had. He would not obey orders but [is] sassy with officers.” He may have been John Gresly, whose family had emigrated from Germany and settled in York, Pennsylvania. 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. 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.

One account recalls that the Dutchman, after a quarrel with Mormon settlers who refused to sell provisions to the emigrants, was overheard to say, “If [I] had a good riding horse, [I] would to back to Salt Lake and kill Brigham” (MMM, 112). This threat to kill Brigham Young so aroused local passion that the local bishop was recalled to have said, “The only way that he could control his men was that he promised them to set the Indians on the doomed train” (Ibid.).

The “perfect storm.” While there were conflicts on the southern road, the emigrants did not deserve what eventually happened to them at Mountain Meadows. The massacre was not inevitable. No easy absolution for the perpetrators is possible. All the purported wrongs of the emigrants—even if true—did not justify the killing of a single person. The best that might be argued is that the massacre was triggered by a “perfect storm” of circumstances, and some of the Mormons did not match their behavior with their ideals.

Violence is thought to be more than what one person does to another. Violence is the step-by-step process by which the violence is eventually precipitated. It seems the step-by-step circumstances in this particular tragedy all came together in a remarkable “perfect storm” way that finally triggered the massacre. The southern road in late summer 1857 was not just about adverse events along the way. It had become a complex web of fear, misunderstanding, and retribution that prepared normally decent people to kill.

Each of the above precipitators obviously had a role. Consider also these suggested steps that precede violence:

1. As emotions build, the perpetrators become convinced that their opponents are a threat to their people and values. They claim to act defensively, even while they are the aggressors. At this stage rumors are everywhere, and perception becomes reality. The final cataclysm is sudden and almost inexplicable.

The settlers began to see the emigrants as the “other” or enemy, believing the outsiders 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 excitement.

2. Most ordinary people readily allow the dictates of “authorities” to trump their own moral instincts. Impoverished settlers knew the virtues of obeying. Even in hierarchical, theocratic Utah, there were few places like Iron County.

3. The next factor is conformity. Few people have the courage to go against the crowd.

4. Dehumanization of the victims. This need not be intentional. It is allowed to occur at times by the failure of authorities to send clear and unmistakable messages about what is appropriate and moral behavior. This can be as powerful as a direct order.

The region was isolated from Salt Lake City. Mixed signals floated down the trail about emigrant policy. Civil, religious, and military power was dangerously held in the hands of a few.

For the most part, the men who committed the atrocity at Mountain 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 committing 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. “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” (Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil [New York: Random House, 2007], Staub; Peck).

#Story of the Unfolding and Occurrence of the Massacre

Previously told versions of the Massacre have largely taken one of two approaches. One approach consists in portraying the perpetrators as good people and the victims as evil ones who committed outrages during their travel through northern, central, and southern Utah. Some descendants of the perpetrators and several Mormon historians have adopted this approach because it seems to excuse or soften what happened. The second approach emphasizes the innocence of the emigrants and the evil of their killers. The killers are at best described as followers of a misguided religion. Some relatives of the emigrant families, church critics, and many non- Mormons have found this position attractive.

Both of these approaches break down logically. Certainly nothing that the emigrants purportedly did comes close to justifying their murder. The leading men and women among them had been substantial citizens in their Arkansas communities and were determined 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 men with little to distinguish them from other nineteenth-century frontiersmen. Some in fact would have been pillars in any community.

Walker et al.’s book Massacre at Mountain Meadows takes a third approach by navigating between the extremes of the other two. The book attempts to apply common sense by recognizing that both victims and perpetrators were decent but imperfect people whose paths crossed, and a terrible tragedy resulted.

I must warn the reader that this story is told with sufficient candor and detail, that it may well be upsetting to the reader. Again, please pay particular attention to the roles of John D. Lee and Isaac C. Haight in the story.

1857 was a time of many emigrants passing through Utah on the way to California. They believed fortunes could be made in sunny and warm California, not only from gold but by other means as well. The party of emigrants involved in the massacre will be referred to as either “the Arkansas company” or simply “the emigrants’ company.” This group of emigrants consisted of at least two separate larger groups and a several small ones.

1. The first large group was the Baker Party led by John Twitty Baker, generally known by the name of “Jack” or “Captain Jack Baker. He was born in Alabama in 1807. Baker was a colorful character who worked hard, drank hard, and was inclined to be involved in fights. According to his family tradition, he, on one occasion, killed three men. He himself was wounded. After recovering from his wounds, he returned home and found that the angry families of the three men had burned his barn and taken all his cattle. The constant threat of further retaliation led to his moving to Crooked Creek Township, Arkansas—his address at the time he departed for the west. A few of Baker’s sons had previously traveled to California and spoke highly of its possibilities.

“Overlanders” or emigrants typically started their journeys west in April. The Baker party was joined by several families including their own children and friends. Somewhere along the line they met up with two large Dunlap families. They all brought their own cattle, and each family brought along hired men to serve as drovers for the cattle. They hoped to sell the cattle to “hungry gold miners” in California for high prices.

2. The Baker party also was joined by another family grouping led by Alexander Fancher. He was born in Tennessee, but he and his wife settled in Arkansas in the 1840s to raise their nine children. Like the Baker boys, Fancher himself had also been previously to California on two occasions and was impressed by possibilities of selling cattle in the area of central California. He returned to Arkansas in the mid-1850s to drive more cattle to California. In April 1857, Fancher was forty-five years old and seasoned in the ways of the frontier. He had talent and charisma. A family history 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.” His party, like the Bakers, also consisted of extended family and some friends.

The Baker and Fancher parties were eventually joined by several other smaller family groups. Some gave Alexander Fancher the credit for leading the entire group, though others considered Jack Baker the most influential. Actually, these several groups did not cross the plains from Arkansas to Salt Lake City as one cohesive group. They were often separated along the trail for long periods of time.

Successful overland caravans started early in the morning, stopped for several hours in the heat of the day to rest the oxen, and then traveled again in the late afternoon and early evening. On a good day, they could travel sixteen to eighteen miles. Typically they rotated the wagons in the lead. The man driving the lead wagon in the train was responsible for 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. Thus each wagon spent a day in each position in line. The fear of meeting hostile Indians bedeviled many overlanders. This made larger groups of travelers more desirable. At times Indians would steal cattle or horses.

In July after some three months of travel, the Arkansas emigrants approached Utah territory. The Fanchers arrived first in July. Near Salt Lake City, the Baker company was joined by a rough set of men from Missouri, the “wild-cats.” These would become a matter of controversy and trouble among the emigrants. The “wild-cats” camp rang with vulgar songs, boisterous shouting, and coarse swearing. They also spoke of the need to wipe out the Mormons. It is possible that some in this group stayed with the traveling company all the way to Mountain Meadows and perished with the group. This, however, is a matter of controversy. The Bakers and the wild-cats pulled into Salt Lake City on August 3.

Beginning in late July each year, overlanders flooded Salt Lake City’s streets, and the numbers were especially high in 1857. That year there was particular tension between the travelers and the locals. By 1857, two years of drought had left the Mormons’ cattle weak and underfed which made locals especially protective of pasture lands. An even greater problem was the threat of war. As the saints prepared for the army’s arrival, trading with the travelers was a problem. Strict orders from General Daniel H. Wells (head of the Utah militia) and Brigham Young during the first week of August forbade selling grain to outsiders. The policy was a major setback for the travelers. The weariness and diseases of overland travel had taken a toll on the emigrants’ cattle. The emigrants’ mules and horses also needed grain. Also being hoarded that summer in Salt Lake City was powder and lead for ammunition. The Mormons were preparing for war, and all outsiders—whether from Missouri, Arkansas, or elsewhere—were seen as potential enemies. For their part, the emigrants saw the Mormons as expatriates and even traitors. This all led to occasional scuffles and fisticuffs between the emigrants and the Mormon settlers. There were also incidents between the emigrants and local Indians. The Mormons were resented, as they usually sided with the Indians whose friendship they needed in the coming war. It would seem that, from the Mormons’ perspective, the line between the U.S. Army and the emigrants began to blur.

Most trains took the northern trail out of Salt Lake City in 1857. Only a few took the southern route. Among the latter group was the large train later massacred at Mountain Meadows. This group was formed anew in Salt Lake City. It was made up of the Bakers, the Fanchers and several other smaller parties from Arkansas and some from Missouri. Those from Missouri were never identified by name. It is interesting to note that relatives of the 120 victims at Mountain Meadows and historians have been able to document only about three-fourths of the group with the rest being unidentified.

They appear to have chosen Alexander Fancher as their overall leader. While the Baker group had most of the property and people, Fancher had Utah experience. Because of the predominance of Arkansans in the train, it would come to be called “the Arkansas company.” When all its members traveled together—which was only part of the time—the Arkansas train had about 140 people.

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, Alexander Fancher, and a few others in their mid- to late forties and fifties. Most in the company were in their twenties and thirties. The company pulled out of Salt Lake City probably near the end of the first week of August. The train consisted of about twenty wagons and possibly more.

No records from the train itself survived, making it difficult to describe the initial part of the journey from Salt Lake City to Fillmore from the emigrants’ perspective. The Arkansas company was not the only large train on the southern road in 1857. Leaving Salt Lake City twelve or fourteen days behind the Arkansas company were two other large companies whose members came from Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas.

By 1857 there were Mormon settlers living all along the southern trail. This resulted in competition between the overlanders and the settlers for grass and water. Also because of the war posture that prevailed, there were problems trading with the settlers along the way. The settlers had been cautioned to horde their supplies, particularly their grain and ammunition. Some recall that the emigrants cursed the Mormons for refusing to trade with them.

Corn Creek was a settlement and a creek twelve miles south of Fillmore. The area was settled by the Pahvant Indians who were farmers. They routinely collected some compensation from the passing emigrant companies for the use of their grass and water resources. The Arkansas company reached Corn Creek by August 25. That same day two wagons drove into Corn Creek from the south. This was George A. Smith returning from his tour of southern Utah. The captain of the Arkansas company, presumably Alexander Fancher, introduced himself to the Mormon group and asked them a peculiar question. “Would the Indians accept a dead ox that had died in the night?” The Mormons thought the emigrants’ question a bit odd, and it created some suspicion. As the Mormons pulled out of Corn Creek the next morning, they saw the captain of the emigrant party standing over the dead ox with a bottle in his hand. In the coming days a few of the Indians who partook of the ox died. The rumor grew that the emigrants had “poisoned” the ox. In retrospect, it seems likely that the ox had died of anthrax and those Indians who died had acquired and died from anthrax as well. The extent of effects of the spread of the “poisoning” rumor is unknown, though it is felt it did reach the southern Utah communities involved in the massacre.

By the end of August, news was making its way to Cedar City that an emigrant train was coming. This particular train was shrouded in rumors and uneasy anticipations. Local resident Mary Campbell claimed that before the emigrants reached Cedar, Isaac Haight gave an impassioned speech that rehearsed rumored wrongs of the emigrants. She recalled: “The rumors raised the ire . . . of people” (MMM, 132). Campbell recalled Haight’s saying that “the people in southern Utah needed some stock just then, as if he was giving the citizens a hint to get the stock away from the company.” This statement is consistent with a recollection of Philetus Warn that the train “was known to be in possession of considerable valuable property, and this fact excited the cupidity [excessive zeal, greed, avarice] of the Mormons” (Ibid.). Even Brigham Young eventually came to a similar conclusion. Some men had taken advantage of “the disturbed state of the country to accomplish their desires for plunder,” he said in 1877 (Ibid.).

The Arkansas company reached Cedar City around noon on Thursday, September 3, staying only a little over one hour. In that short time they generated a considerable amount of trouble. A local miller sold them about fifty bushels of wheat along with some corn. Waiting for the grain to be ground at the mill, some emigrant men sampled the Mormon “Sage Brush Whiskey” sold at the nearby distillery. They probably drank a bit too much and “they talked very freely.” Trouble broke out when the miller, following the counsel of Isaac 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. 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.” 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.”

Referring to the fact that the United States troops were on the plains en route to Utah, some of them said “the [Arkansas] company would go on to the Mountain Meadows, and wait there until the arrival of the said troops and would then return to Cedar . . . and carry out their threats” (MMM, 133). This statement illustrates the link the residents of Cedar City had made between the emigrants and the U.S. Army. The statements of other Cedar City residents corroborated Willden’s statement, though they also recall that many among the party were respectful. They also recall Captain Fancher’s rebuking the rowdy ones in the company for the threats they made.

Another run-in took place at the Deseret Iron Company store. Store clerk Christopher J. Arthur, Haight’s son-in-law, remembered that some of the emigrants “came in to buy several articles that were not in the store which caused them to act mean.” Using profanity, they vented their anger, and some of them went looking for Haight at his nearby house, perhaps wanting to complain about what happened at the mill and store. One account suggested 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 . . . and “every other damn Mormon in the country” (MMM, 133). Haight slipped out the back door and ordered Higbee, the town marshal, to arrest the men.

A pattern was thus developing. 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 frustration in ways that made the Mormons—already apprehensive about the approaching army—feel even more threatened. At Cedar City, this 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.” 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 matter,” her son later claimed. The man “brandished his pistol in her face” and “made use of the most insinuating and abusive language.” The “man on a grey horse was the most loud mouthed of the lot,” said Mary Campbell, perhaps speaking of the same emigrant. This was likely the Dutchman (see “The troublemaker Dutchman” above.)

Barbara Morris was the mother of Elias Morris—a military captain and Haight’s second counselor—and the wife of John Morris, one of Bishop Klingensmith’s counselors. When Marshall 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. News of the Cedar City disturbances spread up and down the road. It is notable that not one Utah citizen was physically harmed by the emigrant company.

Though the menacing words from the emigrants were probably just idle threats and boasts made out of frustration and in the heat of the moment, in the charged environment of 1857, Cedar City’s leaders took the men at their word. Haight wrote a letter to William Dame in Parowan, the military district commander, requesting permission to use his militia against the emigrants to try to save the face of those in Cedar City who had been offended. Dame wrote back that he saw the Cedar City turmoil for what it was—disturbing but hardly a threat that called for harsh measures. Dame and his war council in Parowan had decided that “all possible means should be used to keep the peace until the emigrants should leave and proceed upon their journey.” Haight did not accept Dame’s direction. Instead he and others moved ahead with a plan to take action against the emigrants.

In Cedar City at the time it was felt that the local Indians, the Paiutes, were natively inclined to take harsh action against anyone that offended them. They were only held back by Brigham Young’s insistence. But Brigham was also rumored to have formulated a new Indian policy. It said that if war begins between the U.S. government and the Mormons, he will allow the Indians to do whatever they wished without interference. It was assume that the Indians would take violent action.

After receiving Dame’s message, Haight and other leaders in Cedar City decided “to arm the Indians, give them provisions and ammunition, and send them after the emigrants” to “give them a brush” and take their cattle. 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 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.”

Haight and other leaders thought they knew just the place for an ambush. One segment of the road through Mountain Meadows descended a very steep incline into the Santa Clara Canyon. The road then wound through groves of trees and below cliffs that provided ideal hiding places for attackers. Their plan was for the Indians to attack the train, 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.

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. Haight summoned Lee to Cedar City, and Haight and Lee discussed the matter all through one night. Haight detailed for Lee all of the terrible things about the emigrants. He also allegedly said that the emigrants had threatened “to return from California with soldiers . . . and kill every d—d Mormon man, woman, and child.” Lee was in complete accord with the plan to attack the emigrants. And the plan to involve the Indians was satisfactory, as it then didn’t matter who or how many were killed. They could then blame the casualties on the Paiutes.

A controversy began after that all-night discussion and continued well after the atrocity. Who had been more responsible for the decisions, Haight or Lee? 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. Lee, the religious zealot, wanted to play a meaningful role in what he supposed to be God’s purpose. The emigrants “were enemies to us, & . . . this was the beginning of great and important events,” he said shortly after the massacre. Haight was caught up by the threat he perceived in the emigrants and wanted “to put them out of the way before they did any more harm.” 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.

The authors of Massacre at Mountain Meadows opined: “The white leaders’ inciting of the generally peaceful Paiutes to participate 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” (MMM, 145).

Apparently John D. Lee persuaded the Paiutes to participate in the massacre by telling 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.” Lee consented to act as their commander during the attack.

On the Friday night, September 4, the Arkansas company had camped at Leach’s Spring, the last camp before they reached Mountain Meadows. Unaware of any plans for attacking them, they left their camp on Saturday morning. Mountain Meadows is a neck-like valley, about a mile and a half wide and six miles long. They entered and traveled through the valley to its southern end where they made camp.

The next morning, Sunday, September 6, in the morning, the emigrants gathered under a large tent to celebrate the Sabbath. The next leg of their journey would take them through the narrow Santa Clara Canyon. Meanwhile John D. Lee was a whirlwind of activity in instructing and gathering Indians from several surrounding areas, including as far away as the settlement of Washington to the south.

While the plan was unfolding everywhere else, it began to unravel in Cedar City. At 4:00 PM on Sunday, following the regular worship service, Haight convened a council meeting to discuss the plan for attacking the emigrant train. 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. Apparently the more radical members of the council favored the use of harsh measures, but no one favored any wholesale killing.

One member of the council was the kindly Laban Morrill, a blacksmith and a resident of Fort Johnson, six miles north of Cedar City. Morrill arrived late to the council meeting and 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 counseling. “To fall upon them and destroy them was the work of savage monsters rather than that of civilized beings of our own enlightened time” (MMM, 156).

Morrill wanted to know “by what authority” Haight and the others were planning such drastic measures. Had something come from Colonel Dame in Parowan? 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. The full truth was that Dame had actually told Haight to let the emigrants alone. 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.

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 consulting him was one way to bring the badly divided men together. Morrill and others likely believed that Young’s answer would end the matter quickly and stop the local conspiracy. The vote for the dispatch to Brigham Young was unanimous. Morrill took pains to have Haight assured him he would send the dispatch the next morning. Utah did not yet have a telegraph system, and an express dispatch from Cedar to Salt Lake City and back would require a week of hard riding.

Morrill returned home “feeling that all was well.” He had stood up to the extremists and prevailed. The Sunday afternoon meeting had worked the way the Mormon system of councils was intended. There had been a thorough discussion that checked extremism.

Following the meeting, Haight decided to send two messengers to Lee. Apparently, his intent was to back Lee off of the plan for attacking the emigrants. There seemed to be enough time to accomplish that since the emigrants were likely to stay in Mountain Meadows for a couple of days to rest and feed their cattle. Once they did break camp, they still had a two-day journey to the Santa Clara Canyon. But Haight was likely haunted by something he knew about Lee. Lee was an aspiring and glory seeking man “who ran before he was sent.”

Sometime Sunday evening Lee decided to make an attack at Mountain Meadows instead of Santa Clara Canyon. Lee later blamed the change in plans on the Indians’— saying that he could not hold them back. It is more likely Lee spearheaded advancing the date of the attack. His plan was to attack the emigrant camp Monday morning, September 7, before daybreak, which was about 5:30 AM. 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, went “to barking.”

The Indians did attack. 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. The emigrants quick regrouped and soon were firing back.

The two messengers Haight had sent out from Cedar City arrived in midmorning. If they had intended to have Lee call off the attack, they were too late. The two learned that two of the emigrants were outside the meadows looking for stray cattle. The two messengers, William C. Stewart and Joel White realized that if the two returned to camp and saw what was happing, they might ride off to repot the attack and get help. Stewart and White asked to borrow two pistols and they went looking for the two emigrants. They 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 a creek near Leach’s Spring. Stewart and White approached the unsuspecting men and struck up a conversation. The Mormons learned that one of the emigrants was the much-talked-of “Dutchman.” The other was a nineteen-year-old, William Allen Aden. William Stewart shot and killed Aden in the head, but the Dutchman put spurs to his horse and fled, dodging bullets. He was wounded but managed to get back to camp.

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. In the wagon circle or “corral” the emigrants had to bury bodies, 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. Just as critical was the lack of water. The springs and brook of the Meadows was just out of reach. The Paiutes began gathering the spoils in the form of the cattle.

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 casualties they themselves had suffered and the failure to achieve the easy victory that had been promised.

Lee knew he needed reinforcements. He left the siege to try to seek help. On the way he met 150 Indians from the Washington settlement who rushed on to help their friends at the siege.

Meanwhile on Monday morning in Cedar City, Haight was trying to manage his own difficulties. Around noon, Haight learned of Lee’s failed attack. He now had to explain and manage a situation that was rapidly getting out of control. How much should Brigham Young be told? And how should the situation at the Meadows be resolved?

This would require two express riders—one for Salt Lake City and another for the Meadows. A messenger, James Haslam, was dispatched Monday morning to ride to Salt Lake and to Brigham Young with a letter requesting Brigham’s counsel. In the letter, Haight said the emigrants had been acting “very mean,” 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 wagons.” Finally, it sought counsel from Young on “what they must do with the Americans.” In other words, the letter said to Brigham, “the Indians have the Americans corralled at the Mountain Meadows, and Lee wants to know what should be done.” This letter obvious omitted key details. This was a first effort at cover up, more of which was to follow.

With the rider to Mountain Meadows, Haight sent a letter instructing Lee to back off. It actually said something like, “You will use your best endeavors to keep the Indians off the emigrants and protect them from harm until further orders.”

The situation was now complicated by 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?

Haight sent a rider on Monday afternoon to Parowan to inform Dame that the emigrants had gotten into a difficulty with Indians at Mountain Meadows. Whether Dame believed the message or read between the lines in unclear. He summoned a council. The council decided to offer assistance to the emigrants if they were to request it. If they did not, then they would have to fight it out on their own. At two o’clock Tuesday morning, September 8, an Indian runner reached Parowan. He was dispatched to summon more Paiutes around Parowan. Dame told the local Paiutes not to go, and he sent one of his trusted friends Jesse N. Smith to Cedar City to ascertain the full truth of the situation. He took with him Edward Dalton, a Parowan man with a well-deserved reputation for moderation and good judgment. They spoke with Haight who was purposefully vague and uncooperative.

Haight also held back the news that he had just sent a delegation of five men under the command of Higbee, the town marshal, to the Meadows. These men were leaders in the Cedar City council and were very much in the aggressive camp. Haight had learned 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. It seems likely he had dispatched his five-man delegation to see to this task. Near Leach’s Spring this group met two men from the emigrant camp heading toward Cedar to obtain help. 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 pleas for aid, some of the Cedar men commenced firing, killing the two emigrants.

Hours before Higbee’s men left Cedar on Tuesday, more violence had erupted at the besieged emigrant camp. The Paiutes, their numbers having been strengthened Monday night by Indian reinforcements from the Washington settlement had attacked the emigrants again, about sunrise on Tuesday. They had had one of their number killed and several wounded. The Indians were upset, as things were not going as Lee had promised when he lured the Paiutes to the Meadows.

The Paiutes had killed dozens of cattle and wanted to kill more in reprisal against the emigrants. Lee succeeded in getting the Indians to desist from killing any more stock that night. Lee had his own designs on the emigrants’ livestock and would eventually get control of the herd.

That was not all that was upsetting the Indians. Following the Tuesday morning attack, Lee received Haight’s message to stop the Indian attacks and wait for further orders. Lee at first told the Paiutes to hold off on further attacks. The white men’s vacillation seemed nonsensical—if not two-faced—to the Paiutes. The Paiutes were angry at Lee and even threatened to kill him. Though Lee later recalled trying to hold off the Indians and being unable to do so, the Paiutes told the story differently. They said Lee, later on Tuesday, prevailed on them to attack three different times, the last of which Lee led personally.

The Tuesday incident gave Lee the excuse he would use the rest of his life. He denied that he participated in the first attack on Monday. 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, particularly Haight, had started.

Apparently there was a time on Tuesday when Lee did try to stop the Indians, but it would seem he readily caved in to the Paiutes’ frustrations at the white men’s duplicitous and actions. Some time on Tuesday, Lee betrayed his ambivalence by sending a message to Haight in Cedar City requesting further instructions.

At noon on Wednesday, September 9, with nothing to do but await Haight’s decision, Lee walked to a vantage point above the emigrants’ wagon fort. Seeing a white man, the emigrants sent two little boys about four years old to meet him and ask for help. Lee hid himself, and the boys turned back. The emigrants persisted in their attempts at communication. They hoisted a white flag in the middle of their fort. The best the emigrants could do was to wait for someone to rescue them, or for their attackers to grow weary and leave. They had run out of kindling, fresh water, and milk for the children.

Meanwhile the firebrand Cedar City marshal Higbee and his four men had arrived. Higbee would later write an account that tried to blame the whole affair on the Paiutes. It bristled with anger. He 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 Country.” The Paiutes were in war paint, he recalled. Higbee wrote, “Lee was trying to pacify [the Indians] and have them scatter and go away and let the emigrants go.”

Higbee and the Cedar City radical council leaders who were with him held a council with Lee. They all agreed that calling out the militia from Cedar City was the only way to end the standoff quickly. They then returned to Cedar City, arriving Wednesday evening. They reported to Haight. The situation had become more tangled than anyone imagined at the outset. People had been murdered and survivors would talk. The emigrants had seen Lee and recognized him as a white man. Even if they hadn’t, the Dutchman would have told of his being attacked and his companion, William Aden, murdered. 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, and do it fast. 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. 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, or they could leave no emigrants alive who were old enough to “tell tales.” The Paiutes could not kill the remaining emigrants on their own. But the militia could not be ordered to commit such an act without the consent of their commanding officer in Parowan, William Dame.

Late Wednesday evening Haight left for Parowan in a light wagon. He had to get Dame to give the order that would bring the Mountain Meadows matter to what he thought was its inexorable conclusion. Haight must have also been worrying about Smith and Dalton, the men Dame had sent from Parowan to investigate the situation. They had undoubtedly learned the real truth—that the Mormons were involved in the Indian attack on the Arkansas party—and had returned to Parowan earlier on Wednesday. By the time Haight reached Dame, the latter would know that the Cedar City leaders had blatantly disobeyed his directive to let the emigrants pass unharmed.

In fact, late Wednesday evening Smith and Dalton did reach 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.

Dame finally retired to his home on Wednesday night, but his long day was not over. Just before midnight, Haight knocked on his door. Dame quickly convened a council. The meeting was the first between Haight and Dame since the crisis began, and everything smacked of insubordination. The council decided that a company should be sent out from Parowan to call the Indians off, gather up the stock for the company, and let them continue their journey in peace. Haight later admitted, “I would give a world if I had it, if we had abided by the decision of the council.” Instead, Haight asked Dame for a private session immediately after the meeting. The two men met near a pile of tanning bark lying near Dame’s barn. It was there and then that the whole program and plan were changed.

What would become known as the “tan bark council” lasted about half an hour. 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 Dutchman making it into the wagon fort after witnessing the murder of his comrade by white men, perhaps even the killing of the two emigrant messengers who asked for help. Mostly the conversation was about covering 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. Also, how long would it be before any of the Californiabound parties of emigrants reached the Meadows and discovered the truth? It was thought to have become necessary to kill all the Arkansas emigrants to silence the rest. Whether it actually occurred or not, Haight later reported that Dame gave him “the final order to destroy the entire company.”

Haight reached Cedar City early Thursday morning, September 10. He felt he must call out the militia and end the matter. He did not want to wait for Brigham Young’s reply which would soon arrive via the horseman. He feared that Brigham would advise them to let the emigrants go.

Haight met with his leaders and the militia was called out “to bury the dead” at Mountain Meadows. Some of them apparently didn’t know they were first going to have to “make the dead.” Some of the militiamen refused to go. This gave rise to a healthy store of folklore—proud families telling 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 (MMM, 180). All told, less than one-fifth of Cedar City’s militiamen went to the Meadows.

The men mustered out on Thursday left for their grim task at the Meadows around midday, led by Major Higbee. As the militiamen set their sights on the Meadows, the messenger, James Haslam was barreling south through the Salt Lake

Valley carrying Brigham Young’s response to Haight. He had had a grueling trip and the exhausted rider had arrived in Salt Lake about noon on Thursday. He had ridden hard but estimated that a third of his sixty-hour trip had been spent trying to obtain fresh horses. Despite a letter he carried from William Dame asking bishops and militia commanders to furnish him horses, some were not eager to lend their best animals to a hard-riding expressman.

In his response letter to Haight, Brigham Young had first tried to comfort him as to the imminent arrival of U.S. troops in Utah. Brigham said that it appeared that no troops would arrive until winter, and Brigham had been reassured that the troops had been instructed to do no harm to the Mormons. He then wrote: “In regard to emigration trains passing through our settlements we must not interfere with them until they are first notified to keep away. You must not meddle with them. The Indians we expect will do as they please but you should try and preserve good feelings with them” (MMM, 184- 85).

Some hours after nightfall on Thursday, the militiamen from Cedar City reached the north end of the Meadows and set up camp. A few key men from the militia met with Lee and some of the chiefs of the Indians. Higbee related 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.” “And if the Indians cannot do it without help, we must help them.”

They then met in council with a larger group to work out the details of the plan. They decided to send a man with a flag of truce and request that the emigrants send out a delegation 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. The more common word used by the plotters to describe the plan was “decoy.” But “deceive” and “double-cross” would have been more apt choices.

Lee said, “Every man now had to show his colors. It was not safe to have a Judas in camp.” Lee had every man in the council “express himself.” Again no one dared to speak against the group. “All said they were willing to carry out the counsel of their leaders; that the leaders had the Spirit of God and knew better what was right than they did.” Each thus passed the moral buck up the line. The first traces of light filled the pleasant valley when the council concluded their meeting.

Although Lee said all the men in the meeting consented to the plan, their support probably ranged from fervent to begrudging. Whatever their ardor, the men had deluded themselves into thinking they were justified in what they were about to do.

After breakfast at the militia camp all militiamen were called together to receive instructions from their leaders. They consisted of about thirty from Cedar City, about twelve from Washington, and a handful from other places. Dame had not sent any out from Parowan. Three of the militiamen were teenagers: fifteen, eighteen, and nineteen years of age. A dozen or so were in their early twenties. More than two-thirds of them were a mature twenty-five years or older. All told, this was a seasoned group of men.

Additional instructions were given. The emigrants were to be told that the Indians were determined on their destruction and that the Mormons dared not oppose the Indians, for they (the Mormons) were at their (the Indians) mercy. Instead, if the emigrants would trust themselves 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 wagons and escort the emigrants to the settlements. The wagons would also carry the small children and wounded. 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, and the Indians were to “dispatch the women and larger children.” 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. When the plan was finally explained, some of the militiamen were stunned. It is likely a good many objected, but they didn’t dare to say anything.

The Indians were instructed as to their role. The Paiutes were to hide in the sagebrush, scrub oak, and rocks near where the group would be when the “halt” order was to be given. They would then rush out and kill the women and larger children. The number of Indians who participated was subsequently a subject of great debate. It is likely that less than one hundred participated.

At about 10:00 AM on Friday, September 11, some four dozen militiamen began moving toward the emigrant wagon fort in an unstructured fashion. Two wagons were also driven to the emigrant camp. The militiamen were a motley bunch, armed with assorted weapons, including revolvers, jaeger (hunting) rifles, shotguns, Kentucky rifles, flint locks, and every imaginable firearm. After a dusty mile or so, the militia stopped and formed a line on the California road opposite the wagon fort.

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. Higbee called William Bateman to carry the militia’s white flag and make the first contact with the emigrants. 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.” 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. Lee walked out next to join the two. The name of the emigrant representative is uncertain. Alexander Fancher was dead, and Jack Baker was wounded. Lee said the man’s name was “Hamilton.” A Fancher family tradition would hold that the primary negotiator was James Mathew Fancher, Alexander’s twenty-five-year-old cousin. Whoever the man was, he met Lee outside the corral and talked. After about fifteen minutes, Lee motioned for a couple of the militiamen to help him move one of the emigrants’ wagons to make an open channel into the corral. It was now about noon, and the September sun stood high in the sky.

Lee entered the corral. 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.” 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. Men, women, and children crowded around Lee. “Some felt that the time of the 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 remembered. “My tongue refused its office”—but not for long. “I delivered my message.”

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 emigrants displayed their arms, it would be seen as an unfriendly act that might renew the attacks. Second, the emigrants must leave behind their cattle and other belongings as payment to the Indians for ending the siege. Third, Lee promised to carry the wounded, a few children, 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. The most extraordinary demand was that the emigrants leave the compound in a specific order. The two 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 militiaman. 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.

The emigrants feared a trap. Because of their 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? “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.” 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 considering the Mormons’ proposals.

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. They finally gave in. Lee offered them hope—the only hope they had.

Both of the militia’s wagons were motioned into the camp. They were loaded to their utmost capacity with people and possessions, including firearms. The people included the wounded and small children. Some babies and other youngsters stayed with their walking mothers. A few older women were given the wagon space that was left.

By now Lee had been in the corral for an hour or more. The negotiation and loading took longer than the impatient militia expected. Would their plan hold together? The hiding Paiutes, about a mile up the road were growing uneasy. One of the waiting militiamen was ordered to go into the 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.

Finally, the two heavily laden wagons led out through the corral turned north onto the California road. Lee walked along between the two wagons. The emigrants followed in the specified order. The numbers of their walking men were significantly depleted by those killed during the siege and those wounded and riding on the wagons. The column of emigrant men and older boys totaled about two dozen, perhaps a few more.

Finally the women and children reached the place where the Indians lay in wait. Higbee, who was to give the order to halt, hesitated. This caused the Indians to have to scurry to keep up with the women and children and still remain in hiding. The woman and children were now about a quarter mile past the planned site of ambush. Higbee, realizing the plan was unraveling, turned his horse across the road and looked back. Finally, he shouted, “Halt!”

The first volley was like “one loud shot,” and the firing went on for a minute or two. When the heavy smoke lifted, blood and horror were everywhere. Several of the Mormon men “shed tears at the sight of the dead lying before them. The leaders had planned for possible runaways. Three horsemen were assigned the duty of rounding in those who might try to escape. 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.

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, the Indians were signaled to fire. They rose up from their hiding places “yelling and whooping.” At first the terrified women and children ran back toward their men. The women and children were knocked down with stones, clubs, and gun barrels, and killed with knives, guns, or arrows.

One Indian was seen to 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. One large woman, yelling for her husband and children somehow made it through to the men only to be shot in the back by one of the militiamen. Other women and children who weren’t initially struck down 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. Another girl was fleeing for her life when an Indian plunged his knife through her. Some of the victims simply clung together in terror. Others fought for their lives. One Indian was seen to kill an infant child with a knife that a woman had in her arms before she fell. Rebecca Dunlap, six years old at the time, remembered the terror. 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 falling 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. 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. 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 a white man, not an Indian, raised his gun to take the life of my mother, she said: “God, have mercy on my children!” Four-year-old Nancy Saphrona Huff, whose father had died on the plains, remembered that Jack Baker was carrying her when he was shot. Baker may have been one of the 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. Lee and probably the wagon drivers killed the wounded men with rifles, pistols, and even knives and clubs.

For the most part, the massacre of the emigrants was over in a few minutes, probably no more than five. The white men had done most of the killing. Though the plan was to spare the young children, at least a half dozen of the young children became part of the terrible carnage. The Dutchman whose role figured so prominently in Mormon accounts about the emigrants 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 stories told about the massacre. The child was not the Dutchman’s but someone else’s. The killer was probably John D. Lee.

After the killing there was considerable looting by the militiamen and the Indians. The dead were divested of anything of value, including their clothes. All of the emigrants’ possessions remaining in their wagons were also divided up. The cattle and oxen were also divided up among the militia and the Indians. As might be expected, the Indians felt that the white men had not been fair in the distribution.

Some seventeen children were allowed to live. They were initially cared for by Rachel and Jacob Hamblin at Hamblin’s ranch, just north of the site of the massacre. Jacob Hamblin had been appointed by Brigham Young to head the church’s Indian mission in southern Utah. The children were then distributed among Mormon families in the area who wanted to care for and even adopt them. In 1859 all seventeen of the children were turned over to federal authorities.

The following day most in the militia stayed to bury the bodies. Most were buried in shallow common graves with several bodies in each. The bodies did not stay buried for long. The scent of rotting flesh in the shallow graves attracted wolves, coyotes, and other scavengers. Within a day or two, many of the bodies had been pulled to the surface, torn into pieces, and scattered across the Meadows. This disinterring of the victims gave rise to a widespread belief that no effort at all was made to bury them.

Haight had remained in Cedar City during the massacre. James Haslam, the express rider Haight had dispatched to carry a letter to Brigham Young requesting instructions, arrived home on Sunday, September 13. He met Haight half way between his house and Haight’s. Haight was coming to Haslam’s house to see if he had yet arrived home. Haslam handed Haight the unsealed letter from Brigham 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.”

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.”

There is some evidence to suggest that Lee’s relationship with Brigham Young was favorable following the massacre. One wonders how candid Lee was with Brigham in recounting all of the circumstances leading up to the massacre. Elder B. H. Roberts suggested that it wasn’t until 1870 when Brigham became fully aware of Lee’s actual role in the tragic affair:

In 1870, through some representations made by Elder Erastus Snow and Bishop L. W. Roundy, who had been meantime investigating the crime of the Mountain Meadows, President Brigham Young became convinced of the absolute responsibility of John D. Lee in that affair. Also of Isaac C. Haight’s responsibility for failing to restrain Lee and to take prompt action against him, since he was Lee’s superior officer in the church. These representations were made to President Brigham Young on the occasion of his visit to the southern settlements in the aforesaid year of 1870; and on his return to Salt Lake City the matter was taken up at the meeting of the twelve apostles, the facts laid before them, and “President Young himself proposed, and all present unanimously voted, to excommunicate John D. Lee and Isaac C. Haight.” “President Young gave instructions at that time that John D. Lee should, under no circumstances, ever be again admitted as a member of the church (See affidavit of Erastus Snow under date of 21st February 1882, in Penrose’s Mountain Meadows Massacre, 67-68). Some mitigating circumstances subsequently were learned respecting Haight’s responsibilities in the matter of not restraining Lee, and he was restored to church fellowship (Comprehensive History of the Church, 4, 178).

The nation watched closely as John D. Lee was tried for his role in the massacre. The first trial occurred in 1875, some eighteen years after the massacre. It ended in a hung jury, and his second, the following year, saw him convicted. On March 20, 1877, almost twenty years following the massacre, the orders came down with instructions to U.S. Army 2nd Lt. George T. T. Patterson and detachment from his company at Utah’s Fort Cameron, two miles east of Beaver. He was told to proceed with “utmost secrecy” to the “appointed place.” There the soldiers were to execute John D. Lee, at the scene of the crime at Mountain Meadows. A posse with Lee in its charge would follow Patterson’s company the next day. Reporters from coast to coast were in Cedar City to attend and report his execution.

Hope also lingered that Lee might implicate Brigham Young, the big game for post-massacre hunters who hoped to destroy Young and end Mormonism. For many Americans, it had become almost an article of faith that Young had a hand in virtually everything going on in “hierarchical, tyrannical” Utah. It seemed to follow then, logically, that Young had a role in the massacre as well. Lee himself affirmed just the opposite even though Brigham Young had excommunicated Lee some years previously for “extreme wickedness.”

On the execution date Brigham Young had been attending a church conference in St. George, less than forty miles away by the roads of the day. He too wanted to know how the final scene would play out. Young was aging. He would be dead within six months. He asked some men to ride through the night to witness the execution and give him a report. 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.

By midmorning Friday, March 23, as many as three hundred onlookers were at the Meadows, many of them Mormons from nearby settlements. Most were kept at a distance.

A grand jury had indicted nine men for their roles in the massacre: John Lee, Isaac Haight, William Dame, John Higbee, Philip Klingensmith, William Stewart, and three lesser known militiamen, George W. Adair, Samuel Jewkes, and Elliott Willden. Most had been arrested. Klingensmith turned state’s evidence. Adair, Dame, Jewkes, and Willden were released for lack of evidence. Haight, Higbee, and Stewart spent most of their lives running from deputies and, like their fellow perpetrators, from their own consciences. Only Lee was tried by a jury and asked to pay with his life.

Lee was taken to the site of execution. There he spoke for five minutes, and he was then executed by firing squad while sitting erect and upright on the edge of his coffin, hands on his head. At exactly 11:00 AM, five balls tore through Lee and left a skipping pattern on the grass behind.

The terrible tragedy of the massacre at Mountain Meadows played out on several levels. The murdered emigrants lost their hopes, their dreams, their property, and their lives. Some lost their very identity, their names forever deleted from human memory. The surviving children were robbed of the warmth and support of parents, brothers, and sisters.

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 families, 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 anyone imagined on the afternoon of September 11, 1857.