Copyright 2022 by Hershel
Parker
6 January 2022--a rough draft
The Mountain
Meadows Massacre:
Mormons
Avenge the Blood of Parley Parker Pratt
In 2011, I
bought Roger V. Logan, Jr.’s big expensive The
History of Boone County, Arkansas thinking I might find more about my Coker
kinfolks. I was stunned to find in it Logan’s account of something I had never
heard of––the Mountain Meadows Massacre of the Fancher-Baker wagon-train of
local emigrants bound for California in 1857. This was, William Alexander Linn
said in 1902, “the most horrible massacre of white people by religious fanatics
of their own race that has been recorded since that famous St. Bartholomew’s
night in Paris.” The Catholic massacre of Protestant Huguenots went on for
weeks in 1572, not one night. On their trip as far as Utah Territory the
emigrants from Arkansas had paused on Sundays for Methodist worship, and the
people from Missouri who accompanied them probably joined the worship,
Methodists or Baptists or whatever they were. On 11 September 1857 in extreme southwest
Utah, dozens of Mormons (with help from subservient Paiute Indians) slaughtered
some 120-140 emigrants, mainly from north central Arkansas, a few from nearby
Missouri. This massacre by Mormon “Destroying Angels” was plotted for weeks in excruciatingly slow stages then carried out
in--what? an hour or two? It was an act of religious fanaticism, not worship.
What sort of
Arkansawyer hands over his weapons to smooth talking strangers who promise to
protect you from their true enemies, the Indians? It is almost inconceivable,
but the Mormons persuaded Fancher, Baker, and the others to let the Mormons
hold their guns so they could move peacefully past the Indians. The men from
Arkansas were hunters who had fine weapons for daily use and other guns they
treasured because they had been used by their grandfathers in the Revolution
and fathers in the War of 1812. Alexander Fancher as a youth knew his
Revolutionary Grandfather Richard, who had stories to tell of service under
Francis Marion. His father, Isaac Fancher, had been at the Battle of New
Orleans while Alexander was a baby and later in the Black Hawk War. Much later,
family members itemized what the emigrants took with them--“guns, firearms,
knives,” “guns, pistols, and knives,” “guns, pistols, and Bowie knives.” Frugal
Mormons would have used some of the emigrants’ most accurate guns as they shot
the men down before shooting the women and children or slitting their throats. Even
pausing in the carnage to carry aside a woman and rape, as Elder Lee did, took
little time. This was systematic business, dragging the wounded out of wagons
before shooting them or slitting their throats and stripping the women on
orders of Elder Dame (who looked at their bodies and described them as polluted).
Some of the murderers wiped off the dark paint they had smeared on to look like
Indians (who got the blame).
What took
the murderers longest was the meticulous looting. They had to strip the men to
search money-belts and pockets and to seize jewelry from the women even if it
meant slicing off fingers. They rode
away the fine horses which were to be the basis of a new equine lineage in
California. They threw on the wagons what the wounded had been lying on, part
of the precious piles of hand-sewn quilts (some gorgeous heirlooms and all
utilitarian, some in use in Utah today) which for many years served many an
Elder’s family. They harnessed oxen or horses or mules to a few elegant
chariots (which blessed the families of a few Mormons) and hitched up animals
to the sturdy wagons, built to serve in California for decades. Now they piled
loot onto wagons, big items like quilts (the reason they pulled the wounded
from wagons before shedding their last blood) and small family pieces like
chests and chairs. The longest work was driving off the 1,000 or so cattle. Descendants
of the Fancher animals must still live in Utah, a few grand wagons may be
stored in barns, and gorgeous quilts must lie in chests in moth balls, brought
out to admire and re-fold, the fingers that sewed them fallen from skeletal
hands or hacked off so as to get rings quickly, and some of the finest rifles
and revolvers kept oiled and shined, treasured still.
You can
never ignore the power of spiritual fanaticism in a militarized theocracy, but
it would not do to ignore disguised or open celestial cupidity as a motive for
the robbing and murdering of travelers. Avarice began at home. The Deseret News 18 February 1857 quoted my cousin Elder
Parley P. Pratt on what Elder Brigham Young had said in the morning, that they
“wanted all your gold, silver, and precious things. We not only want your all as
pertaining to gold, silver, &c., but we want you, your wives and children,
and all you have, to be engaged in the work of the Lord.” This is in the
Yorkville SC Enquirer (30 April
1857): “The right of private property among the Mormons is almost unknown.
Whatever the rulers need they always find means to obtain. ‘The Lord needs it’
is a warrant sufficient to enable Young and his Council to seize upon any
property in Utah, and remonstrance or resistance is not only useless but
dangerous.” This is S. H. Montgomery’s affidavit at Camp Floyd, U. T., 17
August 1859: “Crime of every hue and dye is perpetrated here, under the
sanction of the Mormon Church, upon payment to the Church fund of ten per cent;
it is serving the Mormon Lord. Kill, rob, murder, plunder, etc.; if the ten
percent is paid up, all right with the Church and the Mormon Government, and go
ahead.
On 11
September 1857 the Mormons looted an enormous amount of gold and cash, for this
was a phenomenally rich wagon train, as later affidavits, published by Roger V.
Logan, Jr., show in poignant detail. W. H. Rogers, who accompanied Jacob Forney,
the Superintendent of Indian Affairs, to the slaughter ground in 1859, was sure
it was “the richest train that ever passed through this country” and that the
Mormons “took cattle, wagons and horses back to Cedar City and sold them at public
sale.” James Lynch reliably estimated the actual cash alone at $80,000 or
$90,000, money enough to enrich any settlement in the Golden State. It would
have the purchasing power of perhaps many millions of dollars today. Implying
that Forney was the source, the Cincinnati Press
on 21 May 1859 reported that soon after the massacre the loot was divided and
thirty dollars each went to the “leading Church dignitaries.” That meant that
Brigham Young, foolishly appointed Governor of the Territory by Millard
Fillmore, and his higher-placed 12 Apostles shared much more. The most valuable
items never reached the public auction.
The Mormons
left the Fanchers, Tackitts, the Mitchells, the Dunlaps, the Camerons, the
Huffs, the Prewitt boys, the Wood boys, men, women, children (oh, the “well
grown” Dunlap cousins), and others (a Coker couple, who joined belatedly?), strewn
about, blood drying. Over the next months and years body parts were spread far
away, dragged by wolves or toted about by curious visitors as they surveyed the
site. Femurs made a good man-sized club to carry along with you as you looked for
an area where there were no more skulls. The writer in Harper’s Weekly in 13 August 1859 (a man who had conversed with the
living people in the train, in 1857) declared that “empty sockets” from ghastly
skulls told him “a tale of horror and blood.” For “the space of a mile,” he
said, “lie the remains of carcasses dismembered by wild bests; bones, left for
nearly two years unburied, bleached in the elements of the mountain wilds,
gnawed by the hungry wolf.” Not all the everyday clothing had been carried off:
“Garments of babes and little ones, faded and torn, fluttering from each ragged
bush, from which the warble of the songster of the desert sounds as mockery.”
Human hair now strewed “the plain in messes, matted, and mingling with the
musty mould.” The Harper’s writer paid what respect he could: “To-day, in one
grave, I have buried the bones and skulls of twelve women and children, pierced
with the fatal ball or shattered with the axe. In another the shattered relics
of eighteen men, and yet many more await their gloomy resting-place.” Another
witness: “When I first passed through the place I could walk for near a mile on
bones, and skulls lying and grinning at you, and women and children’s hair in
bunches as large as a bushel.”
In May 1859
Major James Henry Carleton focused on one area: “I gathered many of the
disjointed bones of thirty-two persons. The number could easily be told by the
number of pairs of shoulder blades, and of lower jaws, skulls and parts of
skulls.” In June 1859 United States troops went to the scene again: “They
found the ground strewed with the bleaching bones of the emigrants, their
bodies having been left to be preyed upon by the wolves and ravens. One
gentleman brought back more than a bushel of human hair that he gathered from
the ground . . . . He also brought home a number of skulls, some with round
bullet holes in them, and others with ghastly gashes from the axe.”
Kin himself
to murdered Dunlaps, Logan eloquently described not just the immediate grief of
the Arkansas relatives and friends as they learned the news but their
subsequent decades of suffering. Like Logan, I am kin to several victims,
closest to the Prewitt youths and those of Coker blood (the Wood brothers).
This was family history for Logan, and it is family history for me also. I have
just described the aftermath of the slaughter, but I cannot make myself retrace
in detail the story of the slow entrapment before the swift slaughter. You can
read the powerful narrative by Will Bagley, the great historian and Facebook
friend who died while I was writing this chapter. For historians as well as
kin, the suffering still goes on.
Californians quickly learned much of what had happened, but
the story of the treachery and murder was first told in elaborate but deceptive
detail in 1872 by the only Mormon who was punished for the crime. The Latter Day Saints cover-up of the massacre
continues to this day. You cannot trust any document on Google about
individual Mormons involved or about any aspect of the Mountain Meadows
Massacre. You cannot trust Wikipedia, the universal infallible encyclopedia of
our new century! As late as 2007, according to
Wikipedia, the Deseret
Morning News said that Elder Parley Parker Pratt (a 10th
cousin of mine) “was killed . . . by a small Arkansas band antagonistic toward
his teachings.” No! He was killed because he had seduced the wife of one too
many men and then sent the latest one (the latest we know about) far away with
her husband’s children. You have to start from old documents
(weighing one against another) to find the truth. In my account, from the days of
newspaper exchanges (copies routinely sent to other editors), an effective
predecessor of syndication, I use items
from odd places--Bellows Falls, Pomeroy--rather than only New York, Washington,
and Chicago. I want to convey what the rest of the East (and California) were
learning about Utah, and to judge the observations of editors of many local
papers. Every scholar should be grateful for the honest work by rigorous
researchers such as Juanita Brooks (writing early, and later corrected on
details), Will Bagley, and recently by three collaborators, Ronald W. Walker,
Richard E. Turley, Jr., and Glen M. Leonard. No one has done as much accurate
work on the families of the slain as the devoted regional historian Roger V.
Logan, Jr. And you have to hope, as the best scholars do, that the Mormons will
yet release more documents from their archives. We lived with the Big Lie, 2020-2021
and 2022 still. Can the lie of the “Stolen Election” possibly control what is
written for a century and three quarters, as lies about the Mountain Meadows Massacre
have done?
As they were already practiced in doing in Utah, the Mormons
blamed others. For years, little newspaper items show, the Mormons had been
blaming travelers for misbehavior and especially blaming Indians for deeds the
Mormons had incited them to do or had perpetrated themselves. What deeds?
Robbing and murdering many travelers one or two or a few at a time, some never
missed, others named in a stray surviving newspaper that survives by
chance. The New York Herald on 28 February 1858 reported “The
Murder Story of Five Americans in Utah,” two of them brothers named Aiken,
going west with a stake in gold. Imprisoned in Salt Lake City, they were
robbed, and four were killed. The fifth man, wounded, could not write to
California for help “owing to the strict espionage exercised over the Post
Office Department in the revolted Territory.” After Mormons said the Indians had massacred the United States
military surveyor Captain John W. Gunnison in 1853, they produced his
scientific instruments. Gunnison’s widow, right or wrong, was sure the Indians
would not have saved those instruments and that the Mormons had arranged the
killing. In 1857 Mormons blamed the Arkansas emigrants for stirring up trouble,
spreading the ludicrous (and widely reprinted) story that they had poisoned a
well and made uncouth remarks to Mormons they encountered. By these imagined
acts, the emigrants supposedly had somehow aroused the Paiute Indians to kill
them all, or almost all, Indians being noted (the Mormons would have it) for
sparing the very young. For a ransom, the Mormons (cupidity for the church’s
coffers being admirable), could produce a few of the children they claimed to
have bought from the Indians, after heroic negotiation and outlay of large sums
of money. So many lies have been told and are still told that I have to take a
long look at the background of the massacre before doing what I will do in the
next chapter--focus on the afterlives of the children the Mormons did not kill
because they thought they were too young ever to reveal the truth of the
massacre. I look at the background but, as I said, not the actual plotting and
accomplishment of the massacre: for that, go to Bagley.
As
historians we must not let modern political correctness blind us to what we
know of the massacre. We heard that the violent white supremacists in Charlottesville
in 2017 were “very fine people,” that “both sides” were at fault, racists and
non-racists. A news agency’s role as late as 2016 was not to challenge lies or
label them as false but to be even-handed, giving equal time for those who
deplored racism, equal time for violent white supremacists. Not every violent
confrontation features good people on both sides. I am revising these words on
6 January 2022.
In 1857 the
Mormons in Utah (a vast undefined area) were not shiny-clean smartly dressed
young missionaries standing persistently but respectfully at your door. They
were not the perplexed clean-cut young men in the popular movies The Falls and I Am Michael. Many of them spoke most readily northern European
languages other than English. They were not like my good cousins who look like my
father and who are assiduous researchers into genealogy but who distress me
when they “seal” my fiercely Presbyterian Revolutionary ancestors, retrofitting
them into Mormons. The Mormon men in 1857 were not (I think) wearing the male
underwear the configuration of which makes some non-Mormons morbidly or just
uneasily or perhaps jealously curious. Mitt Romney, who might have been
president except for a video of his disdainful comments on 47% of Americans
wanting handouts, shares some DNA but is not identical with his ancestor,
Parley Parker Pratt, whose killing in Arkansas in May 1857 justified the slaughter
of 130-140 male and female emigrants from Arkansas and all their “well grown”
children in September. These were religious fanatics. (Pratt had concealed
himself in last uneasy skulking about the Southwest by “calling himself
Parker,” as he said, but his distant kinship to me--and Mitt’s still more
remote kinship--is through the Dabbs family, not the Parkers.)
In 1850
accidental president Millard Fillmore (a fourth cousin of mine, a few times
removed), the hapless predecessor of the equally hapless Franklin Pierce and
James Buchanan (both my cousins, more remote), appointed Brigham Young (a tenth
cousin of mine) Governor of the Utah area. Young swiftly made it his
militarized theocracy. Fillmore compounded his folly by supporting the Fugitive
Slave Law as part of the Compromise of 1850, which meant that Abolitionists
clashed with authorities through the decade, postponing freedom for the slaves.
Then in 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act superseded the Missouri Compromise of 1820
by opening the West to slavery, if the new inhabitants chose to be in a slave
state. That year the rejected opportunist puppet Fillmore headed the
Know-Nothing party. Know-Nothings dodged the most explosive issues of the day
by spreading the word that soon the Pope might seize the United States in a
coup and make it a Papal colony. After all, they knew for certain that the
Jesuits had been “prowling” as early as the 1830s, before aroused Protestants
had burned a Catholic school in Philadelphia, even before being sloshed by the
wave of immigrants from the potato famine. In the mid-1840s the Irish often
came not in family groups but alone. “Ship Arrivals” in seaport newspapers show
one young man (or more rarely woman) sent away for survival, and perhaps later
to aid the family back home somehow. But any newly arrived young Irishman
(single men being vulnerable to joining conspiracies) might take orders from
the prowling Jesuits and seize the country. In 1854 seemingly frivolous worry
about Catholics distracted the Know-Nothings from concern about slavery and
also from the dangers of letting Mormons obstruct travel to and from California
and prey on travelers. Politicians had let Brigham Young control the best land
route to California.
After the
passage of the Compromise of 1850 a pattern was set: unsettling truths were to
be avoided, or quickly forgotten. Who was Castner Hanway after 1851? Who, after
a little while, was Anthony Burns after 1854? As I type on 6 January 2022 is
our democracy in danger? Oh, no. With state sovereignty legal after 1854, the
land to the east of Utah (there being no Colorado) became Bleeding Kansas,
where reports of horrific crimes were not always believed. Could John Brown and
his sons have hacked to pieces neighboring men and a mere boy in 1856 because
they were not Abolitionists? Oh, no, surely not. The irrefutable truth about
Brown’s guilt at Pottawatomie was publicized swiftly but denied by almost
everyone for two decades, even in the Atlantic
Monthly (April 1872) which had fairly early exposed the Mormon massacre. Transcendentalists
could worship Brown as Emerson did as a new Jesus, his punishment on the
gallows for his 1859 raid on Harper’s ferry a modern equivalent of Jesus’s
suffering on the Cross. Could the Mormons have been polygamists as reports said
in the 1840s? No, surely not, until in the 1850s Mormons not only admitted it
but used it at home and abroad as a recruiting tool. Could the Mormons have
perpetrated the Mountain Meadows Massacre? No, surely not, even though their
guilt was announced almost at once (in California, travelers knew in weeks,
even the names of some of the families slaughtered), but denied even after the
evidence was undeniable to any rational person. Was there a normal tourist
visit of patriotic Americans to the Capitol on 6 January 2021 or was there an
armed murderous insurrection intent on overthrowing a valid election because of
the lies of the losing President and his henchmen? Some lies last longer than
the truth. Some eras have a great supply of manipulative cynics ready to
mislead a great supply of gullible gulls.
Amid all the
political controversy, the 1830s and 1840s had also been a time of extreme
social and religious experimentation, especially in upstate New York. Christian
sects fragmented there partly because the Christian God and Jesus were appearing with some regularity.
Children froze to death in Pennsylvania as families waited up all night in
October 1844 for Jesus’s public return, which He then postponed. Jesus
was especially active and sexually versatile, appearing to Shakers as Mother
Ann, and there were sexual consequences, for the Shakers practiced celibacy
with enough success to put themselves out of business. In the Oneida experiment
of John Noyes, monogamy was rejected and polyamory practiced. Both God and
Jesus visited a poorly educated upstate New Yorker Joseph Smith, then an angel
repeatedly visited him and at last showed him where to find buried golden
plates (subsequently mislaid) inscribed with a very long text of a history of
Pre-Columbian America in an ancient language, “Reformed Egyptian,” which Smith
with angelic assistance transcribed and published as The Book of Mormon in 1830. Today the gilded Moroni, who had an
angelic hand in retrieving and reading the golden plates, stands more than
twice as tall as Joseph Smith as he presides over traffic in Westwood,
California, his back to a center of learning, UCLA.
In the 1840s
many Mormon leaders yielded to an angel’s and sometimes God’s new command to
take multiple wives, then for a decade denied they were not only practicing but
mastering the practicalities of polygamy. Smith’s goal was to bring more women
and their children into God’s kingdom through sealing them to him in libidinal
sanctity, and then “sealing” women to himself and later to his chief followers.
Smith needed, it turned out, to bring 20 wives (or was it 50-some?) into carnal
celestiality.
How did the early Mormon men accrue so many women?
Partly by not being rigorously selective as to age, physical appearance, or frequency
of previous parturition, but mainly by capitalizing (the Chicago Tribune said on 4 March 1857) on the seduction
strategies they soon developed. A good number of bold but awkward converts soon
became eloquent speakers and even smooth religious seducers. Brigham Young,
said the Tribune, “by promises of
happiness and visions of a heaven of sensual bliss which could hardly fail to
entrance the senses of a weak-minded person, together with that easy, personal
address characteristic of the accomplished roué, succeeded in seducing Mrs.
Cobb, the wife of a Boston gentleman, and inducing her to flee with him to ruin
and shame, taking with her a beautiful daughter.” This was Augusta Cobb,
already a mother of seven or so, who insisted that she had “a right to live
together in unlawful intercourse” with Young, If she was going to the devil,
“she would go there with Brigham Young.” Consumed by religious fervor, or
frenzy, she declared, “I never will
forsake brother Young come life or death.” The doctrine “taught by Brigham
Young, was a glorious doctrine; for if she did not love her husband, it gave
her a man she did love.” This “Boston divorcee” was the
“mistress of the house,” said Mrs. B. G. Ferris (wife of the man Fillmore
appointed as Secretary of the Territory of Utah) in her Mormons at Home (1856). Mrs. Ferris had visited Platt in 1853 so as
to see a “Mormon harem.” Mrs. Cobb again became a mother, to children of
Brigham Young. She died in Salt Lake City at 82.
Brigham
Young indeed had the “easy, personal address” of “the accomplished roué,” as
well as a powerful public voice. The writer of “Mormonism Exposed” (Boston Evening Transcript, 24 January 1852)
declared that it would be hard to find even one Mormon leader “who has not only
ruined and thrown into utter degradation, wives and mothers but has supplied
his harem with young girls whom he has seduced, and induced under the disguise
of religion, and by the grossest misrepresentations and falsehoods to leave
father, mother, home, and rush into absolutely slavery and despair.” Was Mrs.
Ferris accurate in her story of Parley’s attempt to “swap” one wife, an English
girl named Martha, to the Indian chief Walker for ten horses? This story may
have been based on rumor which had itself been based on something like truth.
In Missouri
and Illinois, Smith set up military enclaves with a private army of storm
troopers, the Nauvoo Legion or the
Danites, fanatical theological vigilantees organized in the 1838 “Mormon War.”
Under Smith’s successor Brigham Young these were “Destroying Angels.” The
states on the Mississippi River ultimately drove Mormons out after they were
exposed as polygamists and military terrorists. Thereafter the Mormons cursed Missourians, in particular, for
expelling them. Such enemies had no right to live. In 1850 Fillmore
had taken a cowardly way of putting the violent and vulnerable Mormons out of
sight, out of mind, letting them settle in the west near Great Salt Lake, not
acknowledging they might be a barrier to westward travel to gold seekers and
other settlers. Once there, Mormons began sending well-chosen proselytizers
abroad. Over the next years these missionaries imported thousands of new
believers from Europe, many of them willing to push a handcart from Missouri to
Utah, die on their way if they had to. These recruits included some unmarried
women as well as many unmarried men or men with one wife already who were
tempted not only by new revelations from God, Jesus, and angels in the Book of Mormon but also by the dizzying
thought that they might have a religious duty to engage in divinely blessed sex
more frequently with more women than their own fathers had one, however
formidable the fathers had loomed as erotic models.
Forgetting
the militarized Mormon towns of Illinois and Missouri, forgetting the threat of
extermination on Missourians, many conventional Americans were edgy if not
appalled at new evidence of sexual license in their country. The
Sunbury, Pennsylvania Republican (20
June 1857) warned of the progress Mormons were making: “There are organizations
of these Latter Day Saints in most of our principal cities, and leaders are
laboring quietly but surly in their villainous work of breaking up peaceful
families, tearing mothers from their children, and wives from husbands who have
hitherto doted upon them. Even women who have been the ornament of their
peculiar sphere of society are lured from the path of duty and virtue, and
induced to journey with the missionaries of evil, far away to Utah, where, if
their eyes are opened, they are compelled to remain in dreadful captivity.”
Still worse, for the future: “the delusion is not made to operate merely upon
this continent. Almost every week, a vessel lands upon our shores numerous
bands of converted Mormons from European countries, where among the ignorant
peasantry, the missionaries of Brigham Young find an ample field for diffusing
their poison.”
Joseph Smith
and his Apostles had pretty quickly discovered in themselves not just a need to
bring more and more women into celestial union but also an opportunity to yield
themselves the powerful pleasures of rampant God-approved sexual freedom. Smith
began eyeing adolescent (and prepubescent?) girls as candidates for celestial
marriage and appraising even the wives of his chief followers, most of whom got
over their initial perturbation and bewilderment to enjoy for themselves the
new divinely revealed sexual doctrine. These men were not driven by religious
frenzy to seduce women only for the good of God and to retain them for
celestial unity. For many men, religious zeal meant rushing into the sort of
sexual predation I can only call horn doggery. Once the Apostles saw they could
with the blessing of Jesus initiate celestial sex with any woman who came their
way, starting for convenience with wives of other Apostles, they became
licentious, religiosely delusional predatory horn dogs--the best of them
powerful as preachers, irresistible as seducers promising sensuous celestial
unions.
You get some
sense of how Smith’s successor my distant cousin Brigham Young valued his women
in what the Deseret News printed of
his sermonic address to his “own women” on 21 September 1856 (which included
the “women” of other Mormons): “I am going to give you from this day to the 6th
day of October next for reflection, that you may determine whether you wish to
stay with your husbands or not, and then I am going to set every woman at
liberty, and say to them, ‘Now, go your way, my women with the rest; go your
way.’” He was confident that once liberated the women would all say, “‘You can
have as many women as you please, Brigham.’”
Anyone doing
the arithmetic could have seen that this rampaging godly sexuality could not go
on indefinitely. In 1859, looking only at the present-day Utah, the Salt Lake
City correspondent of the Chicago Tribune
counted 387 men in Utah who had seven or more wives and 13 of the 387 who had
more than 19 wives. 730 men had 5 wives, 1100 men had four, and 1400 had two or
three. Papers such as the Bellows Falls, Vermont Chronicle on 29 March 1859 reprinted these statistics. Easterners
knew. But converts were not coming by women-only shiploads. The Nashville Tennessean on 12 May 1858 quoted Apostle
Orson Hyde as smugly boasting “that if he lives ten more years and thrives as
he has been thriving, he will have ‘sons enough to make a regiment by
themselves.’” In an isolated enclave like Utah Territory men would run out of
women to seal in physical and celestial marriages. By the 1860s and 1870s what
were Mormons to do with an Elder’s fifty or sixty sons born in Utah and reared
in households focused on paternal erotic patronage and stewing with banked up
testosterone in more sons reaching puberty week after week? Find them all
multiple wives? At some point (starting in the late 1850s?) there would not be
enough women for every religious man to have four or five, or even two wives.
Sons of the Mormon Apostles would find sexual opportunity unfair--progressively
limited, one generation along. These are not hypothetical numbers and
hypothetical consequences. Secret rural polygamous Mormons in our own time
expel boys at 14 or 15 from their compounds to make their way as prostitutes on
city streets, the writer Betty Webb shows.
Shortage of
women was not the greatest concern in September 1857, or else the Mormons might
have tried their wiles on converting some of the emigrant Arkansas women rather
than merely raping at least one while engaged in killing them all. The
immediate cause of the slaughter at Mountain Meadows was Mormon revenge for the
killing of my cousin the Mormon Apostle Parley Parker Pratt, the notorious horn
dog. In “Mormonism Exposed” (1852) a “back out” (what Mormons called an
apostate from the sect, therefore bound for Hell) cited the case in which Pratt
“took the young wife of Mr Hum . . . unbeknown to him, and they have lived as
husband and wife since.” (In or near Pennsylvania, where Hum was not an unusual
name?) This particular young wife has slipped off the varying lists of my
cousin Pratt’s women. After worldwide proselytizing and worldwide celestial
sexual adventures in the next four or five years, into the mid-1850s, Pratt
“graced his harem with Mrs. McLean, the wife of a gentleman in New Orleans” (Chicago
Tribune 4 May 1857), “taking her as
his 12th wife (or was it only the 9th or so?). From San
Francisco he sent her and her three children far away from their father. You
could do that in a matter of weeks if you had money, thanks to fast if
unsanitary ships and the new railroad across the Panama isthmus. This time,
early in 1857, the injured husband and father pursued Pratt through Louisiana,
Texas, and finally brought him before a court in Arkansas. When Pratt was
freed, McLean rode after him and killed him near the border with Indian
Territory. The New York Herald on 28 May 1857 picked up from the
Van Buren, Arkansas Intelligencer the
story of “Another Startling Tragedy”: “elder
pratt, the mormon, killed--seduction of a wife in California--she deserts her
husband, steals away her children, and is sealed as the ninth concubine to her
debaucher.” The Herald also
quoted the Fort Smith Herald of 16
May 1857: “One Mormon Less!--Nine more
Widows!!--Alas for the Mormon Prophet!!!--If thou hast Power to raise the Dead,
Parley, Raise Thyself!!!!” “A Natural Result of Mormonism,” said the Lancaster,
PA Examiner on 3 June 1857: “The
killing of Parley P. Pratt, one of the Mormon Elders, betrays an episode and a
result perfectly in keeping with the nature of Mormonism. This man, being in
San Francisco becomes acquainted with a devoted wife, the mother of three small
children. With the devilish arts generated by his creed and perfected by
practice he induces her to embrace Mormonism, and elope with him to Utah, where
she becomes his ninth wife.” (Or was
it seventh? It is not flippant to ask who was counting. Where was Mrs. Hum?)
The Jonesboro, Illinois Gazette (6 June 1857) published
something written by a man who knew Pratt’s history: “Imagine an artful
polygamist stealthily insinuating himself into the affections of the wife of an
honorable and highminded gentleman, influencing her to despise and abandon her
own husband and friends, and smuggle off his goods to the Mormon church, and
when their nefarious plans for running off his innocent and beautiful children
were discovered, and the heart-broken father compelled to part with them for
their safety, the villain takes his wife and the mother of his babes to his own
licentious embraces, thus breaking up and destroying the happiness of a family
forever--(as he had done in no less than four instances before)--bringing
sorrow upon the gray hairs of parental affection. And not even content to stop
there--but must cme over the mountains, and by stealth rob the injured husband
and father of his last remaining jewels of affection--to doom them to a life of
infamy and prostitution!” No wonder McLean killed him.
In San Francisco the Alta (that is, higher, northern California) on 9 July 1857 gave
the latest from Arkansas. News had come of “the killing of that
hoary-headed seducer, Parley P. Pratt, who had exemplified the beauties of the
system of which he was one of the most prominent and learned expounders, by
stealing from her husband the affections of a wife, robbing him of his children
and ‘sealing’ to himself in an adulterous union, as his seventh wife, the wife
of another, the mother whose duties were owed to her family. The tool of
Brigham Young, who publishes this treasonable and filthy sheet in this
community, denominates the just retribution, which at the hands of an injured
husband, has overtaken the lecherous old villain, Pratt, as a “murder,” and
blasphemously compared him and his death to our Saviour and his crucifixion,
and calls down the vengeance of the Almighty upon his ‘murderer,’ at the same
time giving rather strong hints that the blood of “Parley” will be avenged, and
that right soon.”
The
writer for the Alta understood that
Mormons would take revenge for the murder of the man they considered angelic.
He speculated: “Whether the hot blood which must now be seething and boiling in
the veins of Brigham Young and his satellites, at Salt Lake, is to be cooled by
the murder of Gentiles who pass through their territory, whether the
‘destroying angels’ of Mormondom, are to be brought into requisition to make,
are prevalent among those saintly villains, adulterers and seducers [ck]
reprisals upon travelers, or whether, as has been done before, ‘Saints’
disguised as Indians are to constitute themselves the supposed ministers of
God’s vengeance in this case, we are not informed, but have no doubt that such
thoughts, such intentions as these, of Salt Lake, who, did they receive their
just deserts, would be where Parley Pratt is now, in a world, where hypocrisy
and saintly fraud will not pass current.” The writer knew of the practice the
Mormons made of attributing all robbery and even murder of emigrants to
Indians. They could do it again with any wagon train that came into Utah,
especially the next one from Arkansas, which happened to be the richest train
yet: there would be treat plunder after slaughter, and Mormons had been going
unpunished. As James Lynch testified in 1859, after some attempts to impose
order: “Murder after murder has been committed in the Territory; the names of
the murderers in many instances ascertained, the witnesses also discovered, and
efforts made to bring them to justice, but the Government itself has frustrated
every endeavor.” The New York Herald
(26 June 1856) quoted Sergeant Gannon, returned from duty in Utah: From the
pulpit Brigham Young called the late President Taylor “a God-damned son of a
bitch” and declared that Taylor was “rotten in hell.” Asked how he knew Taylor
was in hell, he said, “Because God told me so.”
In 1846 Parley
Parker Pratt wrote in a poem to a wife that the Gods “in solemn council” decreed
“A just VENGEANCE!” Now he was revenged. Revenge, Avarice, Religion--a Devil’s
brew. One of the murderers at Mountain Meadows, Sam M’Murdy, was not a petty
man, not a violent repeat rapist, not one of the trail-side thugs who robbed travelers
and killed a few a few of them (although he solemnly accepted his portion of
the loot from the Fancher and Baker train). M’Murdy was one of Brigham Young’s
Destroying Angels, focused on his blood-lusting religious revenge and godly
greed when he cried out, “‘O, Lord, my
God, receive their spirits; it is for Thy kingdom that I do this,’ as, with
one bullet, he sent two of the wounded emigrants into eternity.” Brigham Young
could curse President Zachary Taylor as rotten in Hell, but his devotee M’Murdy
in his religious rapture was more kindly speeding them to Heaven. Others of the
murderers probably felt their slaughter was divinely decreed. The men, women,
well-grown children, and all but the smallest children from Arkansas and
Missouri bled out on the meadow, already rotten in Hell, unless prayers of the
slaughterers like M’Murdy had sent some of their spirits to God. They were
slaughtered for God’s kingdom, but all their riches stayed in Utah.
Brigham Young
behaved defiantly despite the approach of United States troops, a
delusional fanatic who spoke words his followers thought were from God:
“Suppose that our enemies send 50,000 troops here, they will have to transport
all that is required to sustain them over one winter, for I promise them,
before they come, that there shall not be one particle of forage nor one
mouthful of food for them should they come. . . . It will cost them all they
have in this world, and land them in hell in the world to come, while the only
trouble to us is that we have two or three times more men than we need for
using up all who can come here to deprive us of our rights.” (Brigham on 5 July
1857, in the 7 January 1858 Brownville Nebraska Advertiser.) In a sermon on 26 July 1857 (printed in the Baltimore
Sun for 15 September) Young proclaimed his defiance: “But woe, woe to that man
who comes here to unlawfully interfere with my affairs. Woe, woe to these men
who come here to unlawfully meddle with me and this people. I swore in Nauvoo,
when my enemies were looking me in the face, that I would send them to hell
across lots if they meddled with me, and I ask no odds of all hell to-day. . .
. Would it not make any man or community angry to endure and reflect upon the
abuse our enemies have heaped upon us, and are still striving to pour out upon
God’s people?” On 2 August from the pulpit he proclaimed: “The time must come
when this kingdom must be free and independent from all other kingdoms. Are you
prepared to have the thread cut to-day?” He continued: “Now let me tell you one
thing. I shall take it as a witness that God designs to cut the thread between
us and the world when an army undertakes to make their appearance in this
territory to chastise me, or to destroy my life from the earth. I lay it down
that right is or at least should be might with Heaven, with his servants, and
with all its people on the earth. As for the rest, we will wait a little while
to see; but I shall take a hostile movement by our enemies as an evidence that
it is time for the thread to be cut.”
In a sermon on
8 October 1857, Young warned that “Men shall be secreted here and there, and
shall waste away our enemies in the name of Israel’s God.” (the 16 January 1858
Richmond Dispatch). Young was
readying his people to fight a war of attrition: “I know that the comparatively
few scattered here and there over the country and in the mountains, can spoil
their march before they could get here.” Nevertheless, he was also preparing to
be driven out of Utah, as he had been from Missouri. The editor commented: “a
very mysterious journey to the North was made by Brigham Young last summer. He
took a large and well appointed train with him, and was absent nearly two
months. It is reported that he penetrated far into the British possessions on
the north, and may have there settled upon a location for a colony. Neither the
object nor the result of that journey has ever been clearly explained in the
Mormon journal.” Brigham Young knew that there ought to be stern consequences
from the massacre, but he also knew that James Buchanan was ineffectual as well
as distant and distracted. With luck, it would all blow over, leaving
Easterners more willing than ever to exterminate those pesky and sometimes downright
murderous Indians in the West and leaving the bones of the Dunlap and Wood and
Coker and Baker and Mitchell and Prewitt and Cameron and other families, some
with names unknown, to be shifted by wolves or travelers and the hair of the
females to blow for hundreds of yards until tangled in sagebrush, their murders
unpunished.
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