Ch 8 of AN OKIE'S RACIAL RECKONINGS. Slaughtering Families for Parley, Brigham, and Jesus-- But Holding Some Little Children for Ransom

 

26 June 2022

Copyright 2022 by Hershel Parker   

                  

 

Ch. 8--Slaughtering Families for Parley, Brigham, and Jesus--

But Holding Some Little Children for Ransom

 

Hershel Parker

 

         Into this tumultuous Salt Lake City on 23 June 1857 came news of the assassination in Arkansas of the Mormon Apostle Parley Parker Pratt, the notorious horndog, a distant cousin of mine. In “Mormonism Exposed” (1852) John Hardy, a “back out” (what Mormons called a Hell-bound apostate from the sect), 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 Parley’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 12^th wife (or was it only the 9^th or so?). From San Francisco he sent her and her three children far away from their father. Ordinary people did not do that sort of traveling but you could do that in a matter of weeks if you had or were given money, thanks to fast if unsanitary ships and the hazardous new railroad across the Panama isthmus. This time, early in 1857, the injured husband and father pursued the terrified Pratt, who skulked his way through Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas, into the Cherokee Nation.

         The New York Herald on 28 May 1857 printed a letter Pratt had written (as if from P. Pratt Parker) on 14 April 1857 to “Mrs. Lucy R. Parker” from “near Fort Gibson, Cherokee nation”: “McLean is in St. Louis; he has offered a reward for your discovery, or your children or me. The apostates have betrayed me and you. I had to get away on foot, and leave all to save myself. If you come to Fort Gibson, you can hire a messenger and sent him to Riley Perryman’s mill on the Arkansas river, twenty-five miles from Fort Gibson, and let him inquire for Washington N. Cook, Mormon missionary, and when he has found him he will soon tell where elder Pratt-Parker is. Do not let your children or any friend know that I am in this region, or anywhere else on the earth; except it is an elder from Texas who is in your confidence.”

         Hector McLean (or McLain) found both Pratt and Eleanor Jane McComb McLean there at Fort Gibson and wrote on 7 May (as printed in the Lancaster PA Express 25 May 1857): “I arrested Pratt and E. J. on a charge of larceny--in stealing the clothing on the children when kidnapped--in value $8 or $10. This is the only way I could reach them in these Territories. When I fail before the U. S. Commissioner at Van Buren, I mean to have Pratt arrested for having fled from justice from St. Louis, Mo., and get a requisition from the Governor of Missouri for him.” This did not work out. The U. S. Commissioner in Van Buren asked a few questions and dismissed Pratt, a free man, who immediately took horse for Indian Territory.  McLean rode after him and killed him in Arkansas still, near the border. The New York Herald on 28 May 1857 picked up news from the Van Buren, Arkansas Intelligencer. This had been “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!!!!”

         The Jonesboro, Illinois Gazette (6 June 1857) published something written by a man who knew Pratt’s history of seduction: “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 come 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, many thought.

         “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. Was Mrs. Hum the only one who fell off all the lists?)

         Just after Pratt’s murder (maybe later the same day) Eleanor sat down for some hours and wrote a very detailed history of her travels and trials. She made people listen to her, starting with local Arkansas bystanders: “I also observed to the gentlemen that I had composed a song on the death of P. P. P. and if they would indulge me, it would be a mournful consolation to sing it. They said they would be glad to hear it, and I sang as follows.” That is, she sang a very long song, and then read them what she had written--a two hour performance--the first of her public performances? The men listened to the whole article she had written for the local paper and then (she said) “they craved it to carry to the Editor,” and they did so. After it appeared in the Van Buren Arkansas Intelligencer (22 May 1857), it was widely reprinted as an example of a delusory debauched woman’s confession.

         In the article was Eleanor’s poem calling for vengeance: “Oh, God of Israel let the cry / Of Parley’s blood come up on high / And let his wounds before thee plead, / For wrath on him who did the deed.” On the Arkansas River heading for the Mississippi the steamboat captain promised to protect her “from insult & injury” but knowing her sexual history, sure that she was available, having prostituted herself to the Mormon, he “grossly insulted” her the same night. She rebuffed him and left him a reproachful message, and a challenging couplet: “I’d rather a man should pierce my heart, / Than call me with pure virtue’s gems to part.”

         Cousin Eleanor made herself notorious, a lamenting itinerant poetess in a black dress with three flounces grieving her way from Van Buren to Napoleon to New Orleans (where she had disastrous contacts with her family) to St Louis and westward. She was funded by men more than willing to see her off to her next destination, for her fanaticism was hard to bear. If a woman spoke kindly to her, she might drop at her door a grateful poem written just for her. But vengeance became the theme. Parley’s dying cries “reached the Throne of God, / And Elohiem himself did take his mighty rod, / And said I’ll cut them down and blot them from the earth, / Who’ve slain my prophets on the soil that gave them birth!” She was the avenging fury:

 

         The blood of Parley shall not long before me plead,
         For wrath on him or them who did the hellish deed,
         And ere it cease to cry, that nation shall atone,
         For every widow’s tears & every orphans moan,-
         And every drop of guiltless blood they ever shed,
         Shall quickly come upon their own devoted head,
         For I have once sworn by myself and by any throne,
         That in the Book of life their names shall n’er be known!

 

My vengeful cousin now took a steamboat up the Missouri River from St. Louis to Florence (since absorbed by Omaha), the Winter Quarters home of the Mormons bound for Utah. From there she took a stagecoach, apparently to Laramie, just over into what became Wyoming, then on. Astonishingly fast, my peripatetic cousin Eleanor McLain (now calling herself the Widow Pratt), arrived in Salt Lake City on 23 July 1857, we know from the journal of Elias Smith.  At some point she was joined in the coach by Porter Rockwell, who had founded an express line, presumably this one. Rockwell was Brigham Young’s chief bodyguard and Destroying Angel, the man who early in his murderous career had done his best to assassinate Governor Boggs of Missouri.

         The fact that Cousin Eleanor arrived with Porter Rockwell was “buried so deeply” from history that even Will Bagley’s dear friend Harold Schindler, “who spent forty years turning up everything available on ‘Port,’ never learned about it.” Shown the entry in the Elias Smith diary, Bagley was amazed: “Although I’m very much a one-damn-thing-after-another historian, the discovery that such a telling fact had been so carefully suppressed convinced me that the massacre was a conspiracy. I’m sure the Mormon church’s historians will argue that Eleanor’s arrival was an insignificant detail, but it wasn’t: it gave away the ball game.” Bagley saw her arrival as proof of a cover-up: “Why do you suppose Mormon diarists tore so many pages from their 1857 journals? Why are so many documents and letters missing from Mormon records?” (In Innocent Blood Bagley and Bigler list pages missing from the 1857 journals of Preston Thomas, Isaac Coombs, the 1859 journal of John D. Lee, and the autobiographies of Jacob Hamblin and Nephi Johnson as well as Brigham Young’s letters with Isaac Haight and William Dame.) The massacre at Mountain Meadows already had “Brigham Young’s fingerprints all over it,” and missing record of Pratt’s murder was further proof.

         So Eleanor for days had ridden hundreds of miles with the Destroying Angel. Imagine, as Bagley did, the woman overflowing with grief and crazed for vengeance and the Mormon who claimed. “I never killed any one but needed killing.” (If Brigham willed it, then God willed it, and the man deserved death.) With those two on board the coach or wagon, the eastern mail had arrived in Salt Lake City after the fastest trip on record, on 23 June, hurrying to get there before the 24^th, the Patriot’s Day anniversary.  Do you think Eleanor and “Port” rested their jolted bones in bed the next day? Or do you think they were the sensation at the celebration, where she told her tragic story of the way Arkansawyers had murdered Apostle Pratt? (She did not have to tell the humiliating way Pratt had hidden his identity by “calling himself Parker”: she could tell her version.) She had her story memorized but she had new elements to try out. She and Rockwell had passed the slow-moving Fancher-Baker emigrant train on their way into Salt Lake City, a train Eleanor would have learned was from Arkansas. She may have learned that the wagon train had left Arkansas long before Pratt was killed near Van Buren. That did not matter.

         Eleanor got the attention of Utah. She was not as competent a versifier as my cousin through the Clarkes, Henry Longfellow (who was beginning the “Courtship of Miles Standish” that year), but she was compelling. A wandering lawyer, present at the hearing in Van Buren in May 1857, remembered in a Greenville, Mississippi paper in 1875: “she was a woman of fine personal appearance. Her high, fair forehead, oval features, queenly deportment and dignified behavior in giving her testimony were overpowering: ‘For five long years she had endured the drunkard [Hector McLean or McLain] in the silence of her chamber,’ and now she had determined to share with the apostle the trials of life in Utah.’” That’s high flown and maybe dubious, but she was in fact compelling. In the intervening weeks after Pratt’s murder, Cousin Eleanor had practiced her literary skills and her public rhetoric, and now triumphantly ensconced herself in Salt Lake City, teaching some of Brigham’s children, home for the rest of her life.

         In Mormons hatred of people from Illinois and Missouri still festered, and after 23 or 24 June 1857 no Mormon in Utah could forget that the Apostle Parley Parker Pratt had been murdered in Arkansas. On the 23^rd Wilford Woodruff noted the news in his diary: “we learn that all Hell is boiling over against the saints in Utah we also are informed that Elder Parley P. Pratt was Murdered By [here Woodruff space left for a first name] McLain who shot him in Arkansas this was painful news to his family the papers of the United States are filled with bitter revilings against us the devil is exceeding mad.” The Deseret News had the story on July 1, 1857, by which time the Fancher-Baker train was near or passing through Salt Lake City on its slow way down into the Territory. Woodruff on 1 August “called upon Eleanor Pratt & got an account of the death & burial of Elder P. P. Pratt who was murdered by McLain.”

         Who else was Eleanor seeing and what was she saying? In his 1873 Rocky Mountain Saints T. B. H. Stenhouse remembered Eleanor’s arousing people in Salt Lake against the Arkansas emigrant train that was slaughtered on 11 September: ‘Mrs. McLean Pratt is said to have recognized one or more of the emigrants as being present at the murder of the apostle.’” In fact, she could not have seen any of them at the murder of Apostle Pratt, but she could have claimed to recognize someone she had seen around the court house in Van Buren, improbable as that was. One grieving woman’s vindictive delusion or holy falsehood was enough to stoke self-righteous fervor in the “militia” that had already been harassing the emigrant train. Bagley was right. The alliance of Eleanor and Port forged in the jolting vehicle for many hours was not sundered once they reached Salt Lake City.

         When Fitz Hugh Loftus (1813-1878) was in Salt Lake with Albert Bierstadt in 1863, he saw much of Rockwell. This is from his article in the April 1864 Atlantic Monthly: “Porter Rockwell is a man whom my readers must have heard of in every account of fearlessly executed massacre committed in Utah during the last thirteen years. He is the chief of the Danites, a band of saints who possess the monopoly of vengeance upon Gentiles and apostates. If a Mormon tries to sneak off to California by night, after converting his property into cash, their knives have the inevitable duty of changing his destination to another state, and bringing back his goods into the Lord’s treasury. Their bullets are the ones which find their unerring way through the brains of external enemies. They are the heaven-elected assassins of Mormonism, —the butchers by divine right. Porter Rockwell has slain his forty men. This is historical. His probable private victims amount to as many more. He wears his hair braided behind, and done up in a knot with a backcomb, like a woman’s. He has a face full of bulldog courage, but vastly good-natured, and without a bad trait in it. I went out riding with him on the Fourth of July, and enjoyed his society greatly, though I knew that at a word from Brigham he would cut my throat in as matter-of-fact a style as if I had been a calf instead of an author, he would have felt no unkindness to me on that account. I understood his anomaly perfectly, and found him one of the pleasantest murderers I ever met. He was mere executive force, from which the lever, conscience, had suffered entire disjunction, being in the hand of Brigham. He was everywhere known as the destroying Angel.” And he would sacrifice Loftus the Mormon way, by slitting his throat.

         In his 1870 The Heart of the Continent Loftus elevated his portrait: “In his build he was a gladiator; in his humor, a Yankee lumberman; in his memory, a Bourbon; in his vengeance, an Indian. A strange mixture, only to be found on the American Continent.” Loftus in 1870 went on: “Having always felt the most vivid interest in supernatural characters of that species, I was familiar with most of them from the biblical examples of those who smote Egypt, Sodom, and Sennacherib, to the more modern Arab, Azrael . . . . He was that most terrible instrument which can be handled by fanaticism; a powerful physical nature welded to a mind of very narrow perceptions, intense convictions, and changeless tenacity. In his build he was a gladiator; in his humor, a Yankee lumberman; in his memory, a Bourbon; in his vengeance, an Indian. A strange mixture, only to be found on the American Continent.” Or was he “in his vengeance a Mormon,” not an Indian, at the 1857 Pioneers Day? Jolted mile after mile, speaking loudly over the noise of the hooves and wheels, making common purpose with the woman demanding vengeance for the murder of Parley Parker Pratt?

         In the 1850s Rockwell was keeping his hand in. The Bucyrus, Ohio Weekly Journal 1 July 1858. In November 1857 an Indian pulled back a quilt from a wagon dripping blood and found “the dead bodies of two men, whom he recognized at once as two of those he had seen going in the other direction with Porter Rockwell a few days before.” They were killed for being Americans--probably the Aiken brothers, who disappeared in Utah Territory without another trace, not even of Thomas Aiken’s ivory-handled pistol. I hope they were not Aiken cousins of mine from the South Carolina Aikens, but I have Rockwell’s word that they deserved to die.

         The “Sufferer” in another (6 June 1857) piece in the Washington States also knew what he was talking about: “Recent accounts from Utah confirm all I have published concerning the Mormons. The Federal officers have been driven out from the Territory; the public archives have been burned by the mob; the United States court has been invaded, and the judge insulted on the bench; the Federal Constitution has been trampled in the dust, its authority denied, and the right to the soil claimed; and the commissions of Government officials have been tauntingly thrown back into the fact of the President of the United States.” Today, he said, “The Federal Government is without law and without recognition in the Territory of Utah. Brigham is king of his people and country.”

         Many Mormons born abroad had never become citizens, and those born in the United States no longer considered themselves Americans. Americans were “enemies,” Brigham Young told his people, especially Americans from Missouri and Illinois (where Mormons had established little military theocracies before they were driven out). Now emigrants from Arkansas had joined Missouri and Illinois as from a hated enemy state. A few days before the massacre, Major-General Stewart Van Vleit arrived in Salt Lake City to prepare the Mormons for United States troops who were being sent out to protect emigrants to California. Brigham Young told him that “the Mormons had been persecuted, murdered, and robbed in Missouri and Illinois, both by the mob and State authorities,” and now “troops on the march for Utah should not enter the Great Salt Lake Valley” (so the long-lived Vleit informed T. B. H. Stenhouse, much later). For weeks Young had been denying the Arkansas wagon train food and water, and he knew that they were in the extreme southwest of the Territory, almost free to take their chances on the desert to California. Just a the time Young was blustering to Van Vleit, men from his “Nauvoo Legion” were talking to the Arkansawyers angelically, man to man, confidentially, “stealthily insinuating” that they could protect them from the unpredictable Indians.

         The New York Times on 17 November 1857, quoted the Los Angeles Star (10 October 1857): “a general belief pervades the public mind here that the Indians were instigated to this crime by the ‘Destroying Angels’ of the church, and that the blow fell on these emigrants from Arkansas, in retribution of the death of Parley Pratt, which took place in that State.” For many Mormons, anyone from Arkansas should be killed for murdering the Apostle. The killing of the revered lecherous Mormon preacher Pratt in Arkansas seems to have been the diabolic sealing of the fate of the Fancher-Baker train. Missourians had been enemies of their religion, Mormons remembered. In Utah, one of the few overland routes from the East to California, Mormons had robbed, beaten, and sometimes killed Missourians (and others) as they tried to make their way to or from California. Arkansas was the new Missouri.

         The Philadelphia Inquirer (9 February 1863) gave “the substance” of the speech John Cradlebough, now a representative from Nevada, was not able to give in the House of Representatives on the 7^th, while the Mormons were making their third push for statehood: “Mr. Cradlebough then gave his experience as one of the former Associate Justices of the Territory of Utah. Sitting as a committing magistrate, complaint after complaint was made before him of murders and robberies, among which he mentioned, as peculiarly and shockingly prominent, the murder of Forbes, the assassination of the Parrides [d?] and Potter, of Jones and his mother, of the Aiken party, of which there were six in all, and, worst and darkest in this appalling catalogue of blood, the cowardly, cold-blooded butchery and robbery at the Mountain Meadows. At that time [1859] there still lay, all ghastly under the sun of Utah the unburied skeletons of one hundred and nineteen men, women, and children, the hapless, hopeless victims of the Mormon creed. Time would not allow that he should read the affidavits taken. He should publish a portion as an appendix to these remarks, that it might be seen that he was justified in charging that the Mormons are guilty; aye, that the Mormon Church is guilty of the crimes of murder and robbery as taught in their books of faith. The motive the Mormons had in the massacre was in seeking revenge for the killing of Purley [Parley] Pratt, a leading Mormon, while in the act of running another man’s wife and children through Arkansas to Utah. He was overtaken by the outraged husband and slain; the Arkansas Courts refusing to punish the perpetrator, vengeance is visited on the heads of these poor emigrants by the Mormons, who, in addition, no doubt, were also actuated by the great amounts of stock and property belonging to the emigrants, supposed to be worth sixty or seventy thousand dollars. This was emphatically ‘getting the Lord’s property,’ as Heber Kimball expresses it, ‘without getting in debt the the Lord’s enemies for it.’”. . . What a commentary upon the condition of affairs in our country! Mormonism reveling upon the spoils obtained by murder, while seventeen orphan children are turned penniless upon the world.” Cradlebough had affidavits which he had bravely gathered and was certain that the massacre was revenge for the murder of Parley Pratt.

         The three authors of Massacre at Mountain Meadows note that the murder of Pratt is the “stock explanation” for the Mormon’s choosing to kill all the men and women and most of the children in this Arkansas-Missouri train. Sometimes the stock reason is true or at least mainly true. Californians (many of whom had managed to come through Utah Territory by the skin of their teeth) immediately believed this “stock explanation” that Pratt’s murder caused the Mormons to massacre these Arkansawyers. Even if they came by ship, all Californians knew people lucky to have gotten through Utah with their lives, however they had been mistreated. On the basis of California articles in the Los Angeles Star, the San Francisco Bulletin, and the Sacramento Bee, newspapers all over the states from the Mississippi River region east soon declared that the massacre of the Arkansas wagon train was in Mormon vengeance for the killing of Pratt. The Greenville, Mississippi Democrat-Times on 14 August 1875 contained a letter from a man who had been in Van Buren after Pratt’s death. He remembered a “dark-haired, stout young man,” who “seemed to adore the Apostle, and predicted vengeance for the act when he should report to Brigham Young. . . . In the fall I heard of the Mountain Meadow massacre.” The Waterloo, Iowa Courier (28 April 1875) remembered what was said in 1857, “the Brigham Young ‘prophesied’ that the death of his apostle would be avenged in the ratio of a hundred lives for one.” The ratio was higher.

         Californian editors were months or even years ahead of many eastern papers in understanding that Paiutes had not massacred the Fancher-Baker train. For Californians, the murder of Pratt determined the Mormons on vengeance against Arkansawyers at the Mountain Meadows Massacre. 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 [San Francisco], 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 was certain 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 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 do doubt that such thoughts, such intentions as these, are prevalent among those saintly villains, adulterers and seducers, 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 great plunder after slaughter, and Mormons had been going unpunished for years.

         As James Lynch testified in 1859, after there had been 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, Young said, “Because God told me so.” There was no challenging Young’s divine revelation.

         Both God and Jesus were kept busy justifying Mormon behavior. 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--these made 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 routinely robbed travelers and killed a few of them. Still, M’Murdy 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 “as, with one bullet, he sent two of the wounded emigrants into eternity,” this ferocious prayer, “‘O, Lord, my God, receive their spirits; it is for Thy kingdom that I do this.’” 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. Gibbs quotes M’Murdy at the massacre, “O, Lord, my God, receive their spirits; it is for Thy kingdom that I do this.”  They were slaughtered for God’s kingdom, but all their riches stayed in Utah.

         In his autobiography (Chapter 51, 466) Parley Parker Pratt weighed whether or not to consider “theft, robbery, murder, etc.” as crimes, “provided these crimes were committed on the Gentiles, and in favor of the Church treasury, etc.” Blood-lust was stimulated avarice and avarice, then profited from slaughter. 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. Remember what Josiah Gibbs quotes M’Murdy from at the massacre, “O, Lord, my God, receive their spirits; it is for Thy kingdom that I do this.” William Alexander Linn in 1902 says, "It was in accordance with Mormon policy to hold every Arkansan accountable for Pratt's death, just as every Missourian was hated because of the expulsion of the church from that state."

         In September 1857 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 and anxious to appease, not oppose. With luck, it would all blow over, leaving Easterners more willing than ever to exterminate those pesky, root-eating and sometimes downright murderous Indians in the West and to leave the bones of the Dunlap and Wood and Coker and Baker and Mitchell and Prewitt and Cameron and Huff and other families, some with names unknown, to be shifted by wolves, coyotes, or travelers and the hair of the females to blow for hundreds of yards until tangled in sagebrush, there for years if not forever.

 

                 The Slaughter and the Field of Slaughter

         What sort of manly Arkansawyer hands over his weapons to friendly white strangers who promise to protect him from his true enemies, the Indians? Fancher and the others were straight-talkers who expected the white men who claimed to be protecting them to be equally honest. They did not deal in “stealthily insinuating” suggestions. They were, in short, not equipped to deal with “studied refinement in atrocity” But “lying, seductive overtures” were adeptly employed by many of the higher ranked Mormons, and the Arkansawyers were beguiled into their deaths.

         The guns they handed over to the Mormons were their best weapons for daily use, hunting rifles, but also other guns they treasured because they had been used by their grandfathers or uncles in the Revolution and their 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 back in Arkansas gave affidavits of what weapons the emigrants took with them--“guns, firearms, knives,” “guns, pistols, and knives,” “guns, pistols, and Bowie knives.” The emigrants had been prepared to protect themselves from Indians or marauders on the way to California and perhaps had hoped become great hunters again, once they settled there. Yet they trusted the Mormons.

         The Mormons had their own guns but they must have picked up many of the emigrants’ guns and handled them to find which felt most comfortable in their hands. The divine irony would be to use some of the guns to shoot the “Americans” down, men first, before shooting the women and children or slitting their throats. At Mountain Meadows the Mormons dragged the wounded out of wagons before shooting them or slitting their throats so they would shed their blood on the ground, not on the quilts they had been lying on. Even pausing in the carnage to carry aside a woman (or girl) and rape her, as Elder Lee seems to have done, took little time. This was systematic business. They stripped the women on orders of Elder Dame (who looked at their bodies in the boiling heat and described them as polluted). Rotten from the pox, said Lee. Some of the murderers wiped off the dark paint they had smeared on to look like Indians (who got the blame). They separated the bloodiest bedding and clothing, John Cradlebaugh saw and smelled for himself in 1859, as explained in the Philadelphia Inquirer (9 February 1863): “A great portion of this property was taken to Cedar City, deposited in the tithing office and then sold out. So much of the clothes, especially the bed-clothes [the bloody quilts] upon which the wounded had been lying, and those taken from the dead[ again, the bloodiest ones], were piled in the back room of the tithing office and allowed to remain for so great a length of time that when he (Mr. Cradlebaugh) was there eighteen months after [April 1859?], the room was still offensive.”

         What took the murderers longest was the meticulous looting. They had to strip the men to pull out prized gold watches and chains (Elder Lee said the hat he started with was not an adequate container), to search money-belts and pockets and to seize jewelry from the women even if it meant slicing off fingers or ears. They rode away on the fine horses which were to be the basis of a new equine lineage in California. They hitched horses or mules to a few elegant chariots (which blessed the families of a few Mormons) and hitched up oxen to the sturdy wagons, built to serve in California for decades. They left in the wagons whatever the wounded had been lying on, part of the precious piles of hand-sewn quilts which for many years served many an Elder’s family. Some gorgeous heirloom quilts and even some utilitarian quilts made for daily use must survive in Utah today. Now they piled other loot onto a few of the wagons, including small family pieces like chests and chairs. Oxen did not move away rapidly, but the slowest work was driving off the 1,000 or so cattle. Descendants of the Fancher animals must still live in Utah, possibly 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 must be kept oiled and shined, treasured still. Mormons profited financially from the slaughter at Mountain Meadows and still disguise what happened there. They let the Indians take some of the clothing, especially what they stripped from women and girls.

         You can never ignore the power of spiritual fanaticism in a militarized theocracy, the sort of madness that lets you justify freeing a soul to be damned to hell or, if is better than you thought, to go straight to God. Yet however disguised, greed, whether  celestial cupidity or blatant mundane avarice, was a motive for the robbing and murdering of travelers, not just at Mountain Meadows. Avarice began at home all through Utah Territory. The Deseret News 18 February 1857 quoted my cousin Elder Parley P. Pratt on what Elder Brigham Young (another cousin) 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, South Carolina 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, a manly fellow who accompanied the timid 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 needs to be emphasized that the loot would have had the purchasing power of 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.” Forney had been deluded (seduced), almost totally co-opted by the Mormons, so that probably 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.

         An eyewitness gave a report to the San Francisco Bulletin (23 April 1859). The report goes on for three paragraphs here: 

        “While I was residing at Cedar City, I was called upon by Messrs. Isaac Hight, John D. Lee, and John Higbee—all three Mormon military officers—to go a few miles out south of the city, which I did. There I found 30 or 40 others, selected from different settlements. We were addressed by the above officers, who told us that they had sent Canosh, the Paravant Chief, with his warriors, to destroy the Arkansas company, and that if he had not done it we must; and that if any of us refused, or betrayed them to the Americans, they would take good care of him hereafter. Here we were all ordered on the quick march to the Mountain Meadows, where we found the emigrants, with their wagons formed into two circles, with their families in the midst, trying to defend themselves against the merciless and blood-thirsty savages, who lay around in ambush, killing them as opportunity presented.

         “Hight and Lee formed their men into two companies, and made a precipitant rush at the poor defenceless victims. The men inside of the circles rose up, but instantly fell dead or mortally wounded, under the fire of the wretched who so cruelly sought their lives. Nothing remained to be done, except to kill the frightened females and their innocent children clasped in their arms. Others clung with desperation to their bleeding dying husbands, pleading in vain for mercy at the hands of the ‘Christians’ who controlled the no more savage Indian assailants.

         “John D. Lee now sent to the Indian chief, and his men in ambush, to come out and finish the survivors, directing him to spare only the little children, who could not talk. The savages came instantly, with knives drawn, and speedily finished the bloody work. The scene beggars description. The demoniac yells of the savage monsters, mingled with the shrieks and pray[er]s of helpless mothers and daughters, whilst the death-blows were dealing with unflinching hands, and scalps were torn from hears which bloomed with beauty and innocence but a few hours before. Now the work of butchering ended. The murderers threw the dead into two heaps, covered them slightly with earth, and left them, “to feed the wolves and birds of prey;” and returned home with their booty of cattle, and wagons, and a great quantity of goods, etc.”

         The Mormons left the bodies of men, women, and many children strewn around the ground, blood drying. Over the next days and years body parts were spread far away, dragged by wolves and coyotes and other animals, gnawed by birds and vermin. Curious visitors could find that men’s femurs made a good man-sized club to carry along as they looked for an area where there were no more skulls in sight. Forgot your walking stick? Try a Fancher femur!

         Wilford Woodruff’s journal for 29 September 1857 records the arrival in Salt Lake City with Elder John D. Lee “with an express” and an “awful tale of blood”--blood that he had shed. Woodruff recorded the news without realizing (or admitting?) that the account was full of lies that blackened the Americans and justified the murders: “A company of California emigrants of about 150 men, women and children, many of them belonged to the mob in Missouri and Illinois. They had many cattle and horses with them as they travelled along south. They went damning Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, and the heads of the Church, saying that Joseph Smith ought to have been shot a long time before he was. They wanted to do all the evil they could, so they poisoned the springs of water; several of the saints died. The Indians became enraged at their conduct and the surrounded them on a prairie and the emigrants formed a bulwark of the wagons and dug in entrenchments up to the hubs of the wagons, but the Indians fought them 5 days until they killed all their men about 60 in number. They then rushed into their corral and cut the throats of their women and children, except some 8 or 10 children, which they brought and sold to the whites. They stripped the men and women naked and left them stinking in the boiling sun. When Brother Lee found it out, he took some men and went and buried their bodies. It was a horrid awful job. The whole air was filled with an awful stench. Many of the men and women were rotten with the pox before they were hurt by the Indians. The Indians obtained all their cattle, horses, and property and guns, etc.” This farrago of lies was what Elder Lee said in Woodruff’s presence, but surely not what he said when he was alone reporting to his adopted father Brigham Young. Blaming the Indians was believed in many eastern newspapers in the next years and continues in some Mormon publications to this day.

         By the time Brother Lee left his slaughtering at the Meadows, perhaps, and certainly by the time he reached Salt Lake City, he had the official Mormon version of the massacre in its perfect form, even to the claim that Mormons had paid the Indians for a few children (and would need to be reimbursed with a bonus when they relinquished them to Americans). The terrifying part of Lee’s body count of eight or ten is that he may have assumed several of the children he had left alive would be dead when he returned. There’s a report that ten or so shorter bodies were left all together, as if that many half grown children were murdered at one time. Maybe they had been herded together and kept alive a while then killed after Mormons reflected a little on the danger of keeping them alive.

         Brother Lee, the purveyor of these lies, was the only Mormon among the murderers who was ever executed for slaughtering this “mob” of people from states which (years before) had opposed the Mormons, Illinois and Missouri. Was he deliberately not identifying the emigrants as Arkansawyers? Woodruff as well as Young knew Eleanor McLain Pratt’s lust for vengeance for Pratt. Did he believe any or all of what Lee said? Routinely, Mormons charged that travelers who where robbed and killed had made disrespectful comments about Mormons. Lee fantasized that these evil emigrants had recklessly spewing hatred toward Mormon leaders. They had poisoned of springs of water (thereby killing several Mormons). Somehow, they had persisting far southwest from Salt Lake despite being eaten alive by their syphilis and other sexual diseases. No wonder Elder Dame surveyed the naked women under the hot sun and pronounced them polluted! If the Indians had not killed the emigrants, they would have died of their diseases onward along the road to California. This is what Brigham Young heard from Lee in the presence of Woodruff. Young did not correct any part of Lee’s lies in the presence of others. He heard more in private.

         Did Young hear from Lee that the Nauvoo Legionnaires had made two prepubescent Arkansas girls dance naked around the dozens of bloody bodies before raping and killing them? Lee and Brigham were on sexually intimate terms: remember Emmeline and the over-frigged Louisa: they could say anything to each other. The youthful Arkansawyers had to be killed because they would remember everything about the massacre. So much for my stalwart healthy cousins, and Roger V. Logan’s stalwart healthy cousins, all the “mob” of them adventurous pioneers, California-bound, ready to use their riches or just their strength and intelligence wisely there in the Golden State, hopeful folk, even my young Prewett cousins and my young Wood cousins, and the “well-grown” adolescents and seven or eight year old children.

         George Powers, who had tried to catch up with the Fancher-Baker train, and later passed near the site of the massacre, knowing what had happened, arrived in San Bernardino on the first of October. San Bernardino was a Mormon town; some of my Roberds (so-spelled) cousins, Boyd descendants, had left Mississippi to become pioneers there a little earlier. The people Powers met were Mormons who warned him not to talk of what he had seen. There he heard “many persons express gratification at the massacre.” The driver Captain Hunt, then 24, was a distant cousin of mine through the English Symes family (Sims in later American usage). Master of the express that carried the U.S. mail (that is, whatever mail the Mormons let through), Hunt “occupied the pulpit” on Sunday and “said that the hand of the Lord was in it; whether it was done by white or red skins, it was right! The prophesies concerning Missouri were being fulfilled, and they would all be accomplished.”

         John Aiken (not the one of that name murdered in Utah in 1858) gave an affidavit on 2 November after getting through to San Bernardino on 30 October. Everyone had known of the massacre since Orson Hyde arrived at the start of the month. Aiken wasted no time putting his experiences in Utah Territory in legal form. “After leaving Painter Creek, and arriving at the field of blood, I discovered several bodies that were slain, in a state of nudity and a state of putrefaction. I saw about twenty wolves feasting upon the carcasses of the murdered. Mr. Hunt shot at a wolf, they ran a few rods and halted. I noticed that the women and children were more generally eaten by the wild beasts than the men. Although Cap. Baker and a number of others of the slain party were my acquaintances, yet I dared not express my sentiments in the company of Hunt and his companions, knowing that I was traveling with enemies to my country and countrymen.” He had grim words about John Hunt the express driver, well known in San Bernardino: “Mr. Hunt and his companions often laughed, and made remarks derogatory to decency, and contrary to humanity, upon the persons of those who were there rotting, or had become the food to wild beasts.--Although this terrible massacre occurred within six miles of Painter Creek settlement, and thirty from Cedar City, yet it appears that the Mormons are determined to suffer their carcasses to remain uncovered, for their bones to bleach upon the Plains.”

         The San Francisco Herald story of 5 November was picked up by the New York Herald on 30 November 1857, “The Mormons and the Late Massacre”: “Three emigrant families arrived yesterday in Sacramento, by the Carson Valley route. They report, says the Union, many sad evidences of outrage and murder at different points along the route, particularly in the vicinity of Goose Creek. Near this creek their attention was attracted by the appearance of a human foot protruding from the ground, and on examining the spot the remains of three murdered men were found buried only three or four inches below the surface. Upon another grave there lay two dogs, alive but much emaciated, and so pertinacious in retaining their lonely resting place that no effort could entice or drive them from the spot. Their master was, most probably, the occupant of that grave, and their presence there, under such circumstances, was a touching exhibition of canine instinct and devotion. A few miles further on, they came upon another scene of murder, where upon the ground were strewn a few bones, and also knots of long glossy hair, torn from the head of some ill-fated women.”

         The writer in Harper’s Weekly in 13 August 1859 (a man who had conversed with the living people in the wagon 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 by the Indians: “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.” Californians knew the Mormons were guilty.

         The Harper’s writer paid what respect he could to the victims of the Mountain Meadows massacre: “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 United States Army 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.” Perhaps innocently, Carleton’s letter went missing but was at last recovered: see the New York Herald 9 February 1868.

         On 17 August 1859 James Lynch gave an affidavit in Camp Floyd: “For more than two square miles the ground is strewn with the skulls, bones, and other remains of the victims. In places the water has washed many of these remains together, forming little mounds, raising monuments, as it were, to the cruelty of man to his fellow-man. Here and there may be found the remains of an innocent infant beside those of some fond, devoted mother, ruthlessly slain by men worse than demons; their bones lie bleaching in the noonday sun, a must but eloquent appeal to a just but offended God for vengeance. I have witnessed many harrowing sights on the fields of battle but never did my heart thrill with such horrible emotions as when standing on that silent plain contemplating the remains of the innocent victims of Mormon avarice, fanaticism and cruelty. Many of these remains area now in possession of Mr. Rogers, a gentleman who accompanied us on the expedition.”

         Yes, the Mormons in the early 1850s perfected the technique of blaming travelers for offending local beliefs or damaging local property. 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. The murderers kept aside a few of the children so they could charge the United States even more than what they falsely claimed they had paid the Indians for the children, and make a good many dollars extra for their trouble in negotiating their freedom.

         Families of the slaughtered still grieve. The Prewitt boys strike at my heart because six years later at Limestone Cove, Tennessee, men from northwest North Carolina trying to join the Union army were massacred. My young Sparks cousin John died with his brains exposed but his brother William survived. Two other youths, Jacob and Matthew Prewitt, survived being shot, but young were shot but survived, but young Cousin Preston Prewitt died there. My Slimp [Schlemp] cousin Frederick wrote about the massacre in a military history but ended with this: “We have omitted some details of cruelties in the foregoing account, it being bad enough in the mildest form we are able to relate it.” Roger V. Logan, Jr., and I and hundreds of others are haunted by images of bones and living cousins.

 

                                  A Captivity Narrative

         A few years before the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a Bell cousin of mine published one of the last American classic captivity narratives, about his time as a prisoner in Mexico after the Mier Expedition. Well, the story of the children left alive in Utah is still another captivity narrative. Brother Lee’s proud tale of his treatment of two of the little boys is chilling. He made at least one child kneel to pray like a Mormon, a day or a few days after the boys had seen all the grownups they knew shot or hacked to death. Then Lee (before Woodruff and Young) accused these little boys of swearing like pirates, when they might have spoken gibberish if at all, traumatized as they were. One child, Betty Baker, remembered astonishing sadism: “She said the Mormons would take the children to the battleground once a day for three or four days to see the dead bodies. Each time she recognized her mother, who had long, beautiful hair, which hung down to her sides. The last time that she saw her her hair was all torn loose and scattered about.” All this happened in the days after 11 September, well before Brother Lee arrived in Salt Lake City on the 29^th.

         On the day of the massacre the Indian Agent Gaylord Hurt, in my mind the noblest white man in Utah, was at Spanish Fork, where he was teaching the Indians to farm. There he heard stories of the massacre and decided on the 17^th to send an Indian boy, Pete, “by a secret route” to find out the truth of the stories. The first non-Mormon to investigate and determine what had happened at Mountain Meadows, he was risking his and other lives. Every Mormon and many Indians were spies for the Mormon bishops and for Young himself. In talking to Piedes (Indians of the Cedar City but often used to include all Paiutes), Pete quickly discovered that Elder Lee “and the bishop of Cedar City, with a number of Mormons” had “approached the camp of the emigrants, under pretext of trying to settle the difficulty, and with succeeded in inducing the emigrants to lay down their weapons of defense and admit them and their savage allies inside of their breastworks, when the work of destruction began.” Hurt’s boy Pete learned the whole story, including John D. Lee’s lies which persuaded the Indians to help in the attacks on the emigrants. Pete even learned that fifteen or sixteen children had been taken away alive by the Mormon Bishop. Hurt knew Utah Territory and understood the persuasive wiles of the Mormons.

         Hurt’s  phrasing, “lying, seductive overtures,” shows just how acutely he associated the Mormon genius for seducing women with the Mormon genius for convincing Americans to give up their weapons. Where is Thomas Aiken’s ivory-handled pistol? Where are the weapons of the Arkansas emigrants? Why did Young think Colonel Edmund B. Alexander would surrender all of his arsenal? Because sometimes the trick worked. Why not try it again? Hurt’s detective work marked him at once as in danger, Pete was back at Spanish Farm on the 23^rd. Hurt knew he had to flee. Brigham Young was demanding that no one leave Utah without his giving a passport, and Hurt had absolutely refused. Young’s demand was not just humiliating, as Hurt told General Albert Sidney Johnston, but treasonous for any American, particularly for an employee of the United States, and a way of getting Hurt into his hands so he could be killed. He knew too much.

         What happened is clear: Brigham Young learned that Pete had been asking questions and decided that he had to have Hurt murdered. He sent 75 or 100 armed dragoons to a position in sight of Spanish farm and sent hundreds more to seize Hurt. Indians rushed into his office crying, “‘Friend! friend! the Mormons will kill you!’” Pete and two others got him out the back way and for a month he endured extreme cold and hunger. The “Sufferer” safe in Washington was sure that Hurt would “not be allowed to escape unless rescued by the United States army,” but in a perilous month-long adventure Hurt (brave and resourceful) escaped, with help of Indians, to the safety of General Johnston’s army, which welcomed him but did not have to rescue him. Hurt, a rare honest and brave man in this narrative, had rescued himself, knowing Young was going to kill him because he knew the Mormons had murdered the “Americans.”

         HuHrt wrote an enthralling account, as well as a full report in an official paper the first week of December--a report he passed on to Jacob Forney, the newly-appointed Superintendent of Indian Affairs. Forney arrived with the new Governor, Albert Cumming, both of them determined to stop General Johnston from fighting with Mormons and to placate Brigham Young in every possible way. Forney passed Hurt’s report on its slow way to Washington without calling attention to it, perhaps without bothering to read it more than a bit of it. Juanita Brooks knew that in early December Forney had written his first report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and that in the letter he had commented on Hurt’s own long report which included his account of what in the meantime had been called the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Therefore, she thought, Forney by that point knew that fifteen or sixteen children were still alive but did not mention the massacre in his own letter. Forney was busy supervising the construction of a “cabin” where he would be kept warm all winter. I think it is clear that Forney read the opening pages of Hurt’s report, which was about agriculture, but possible that he did not read on to see the report of the massacre. That’s assuming that Forney was sloppy rather than that he was heartless.

        Word that some children had survived came to California with the news of the massacre (blamed on Indians). Around the first of October, only three weeks after the massacre, Orson Hyde arrived in the Mormon enclave of San Bernardino claiming that he had come to the site “just in time to gather up the fifteen infants, which he brought in to San Bernardino.” Well, he did not bring them to California, but (aside from the likelihood that he participated in the slaughter) his number suggests that not many small children were killed after the main massacre. There are references to bones of ten children in one pile, children who were not killed in the first hours (this is Lee 1872), and there are allegations that a parlous boy may have been taken out and killed because he had boasted of his memory of the massacre. The good news is that Hyde did not report that 50 children had been “spared” by the Indians.  Somewhere around 15 was the word. When he reported to Salt Lake City Brother Lee may have thought only 8 to 10 would be alive when he went back south.

         The 12 October 1857 Sacramento Bee printed the Mormon version that the Paiutes slaughtered all the emigrants “with the exception of fifteen infant children, that have since been purchased, with much difficulty by the Mormon interpreters.” To claim “much difficulty” set the Mormons up to demand much more when they were to ask ransom for any living children. And oh, the trouble the negotiations took! On 31 October the Los Angeles Star printed the lies in extravagant form. Nothing “would lead a rational or unprejudiced mind to believe, or even suspect, that any of the Utah inhabitants were instigators” of the massacre. On the contrary, “the Mormon interpreters have used every means, and all due diligence so far as they know, in obtaining the children, as well as to procure information respecting the circumstances of the catastrophe.” Having put forward such effort, beyond “due diligence,” in saving the children from the Indians, the inhabitants, the Mormons, deserved all the ransom they could obtain from the Americans. There was nothing that could not be turned to a profit.

         Some people cared. When word got to Arkansas at year’s end, William C. Mitchell, a state senator, father of victims, tried at once to get federal troops to rescue the children. Earlier, on 29 November 1857, the New Orleans Delta used a striking phrase: “We are getting ‘our mad’ up here about Utah.” They were fighting mad: “There are thousands here who are boiling over with fight, and in case our good Uncle Sam does to forth to battle with Brother Brigham, he can count on us for half a dozen regiments of a thousand men each if he wants them.” Uncle Sam did not call on men from Louisiana.

         On 4 December 1857 the Chicago Tribune reported that on 12 October citizens had met in Los Angeles to express their outrage. One of their resolutions (reported in the Los Angeles Star) was to hope that the hapless, aloof President of the United States might “exert the authority vested in him by the Constitution, that prompt measures may be taken for the punishment of the authors of the recent appalling and wholesale butchery of innocent women and children.” They also wanted the Governor of California “to enforce its laws upon the people” by ending in San Bernardino the “open violation of one of the most important and sacred laws of our State”--the law against polygamy. The citizens would hold themselves ready to respond to the call of proper authorizes to enforce obedience to the laws. They would be ready. Or not, not without being led by the government.

         Nothing happened. When the United States Congress finally got around to funding money $10,000 to rescue the children a senator’s brother-in-law took half of and set off to Panama, bound for a vacation in California: “What should be done with men who thus misapply a donation, made for the benefit of poor orphans, who are children in fact, who are in a strange place, among a strange people, and which was given for the purpose of returning them to the land of their birth, where are relatives who might take care of them, and guide their tender footsteps in the ways of righteousness? In the whole long and dark catalogue of official back-sliding, we have heard of nothing worse--no, not even so bad, as this.” (Sacramento Bee, 10 May 1859, quoting the DC National Era.)

         Forney’s qualification as Superintendent of Indian Affairs was having been a low-level supporter of Buchanan in 1856. People who looked at Forney were contemptuous. The writer in the Sacramento Union on 25 August 1862, who threw up his hands: “There is no use in alluding nicely to the administration of Superintendent Jacob Forney.” When a clique “got up a Commission to examine into his affairs,” Old Buck, as he called Forney, “concluded that it was best to quit.” Worse: “It was an awful mess, and revealed the most abandoned profligacy. Whisky, sardines and oysters were the synonyms of blankets, paints and other fixings. How true was perhaps not proven; but an $8,000 item, under the entry of blankets, etc., was charged by the accusers as the private account covering a year’s bacchanalism.” Cattle, he continued, “were brought in droves for the Indians, and were sent out to the Indian farms; so said the vouchers, but the poor Indian never saw a tithing of them.”

         On 10 August 1850 the New York Tribune printed a Special Dispatch from Washington: “The Malfeasance of Jacob Forney”: “The correspondence hence to The Herald intimates that the charges of malfeasance in office against Jacob Forney, late Superintendent of Indian Affairs in Utah, are conceived in the malice of politicians. This dodge will have its day, and its intended effect; but I can assure you that the proper officials here are confident that the testimony against him is reliable. It will be remembered that the charges are that he paid less, by a very heavy percentage, for mules and stores, than his vouchers show; also, that, against positive instructions, he drew drafts upon the Government to the amount of $30,000 or $40,000, which were dishonored by the Department of the interior.”

         Captain James Lynch saw Forney not in action but in inaction. Forney was “as much a friend of the Mormons as Gov. Cummings, and has also an eye to speculation, selling Government mules and other stock at very reasonable prices, considering that the property costs him nothing, and the profits to his own pockets are clear gains. What are we to think of an Administration that appoints such officers as these?--that permits American citizens to be murdered in this cold-blooded and irresponsible manner!--that makes friends with Mormon traitors and rebels as against peaceable, law-abiding citizens? Will such an Administration be rebuked by the people! It remains to be seen.” Forney, Lynch thought, had been co-opted by the plausible Mormons he had met. A simple man, he had been “completely disarmed of all suspicion by the most superficial kindness.” He was not an old man, but physically weak. (His dates were 2 March 1815-16 January 1862.) When Forney died back in Pennsylvania, a friend, L. M. S., summed up his affair with the children with a string of lies: “To collect together and return to their friends in Arkansas the surviving children, was one of his first acts, and to this he devoted all his spare time and energies.” (Harrisburg Patriot, 30 January 1862).

         Forney arrived at Camp Scott late in 1857 along with Albert Cumming, the titular, putative, pretender of a new Governor. Cumming cow-towed to Brigham Young and Forney abased himself before all Mormons, quickly sure that he had (my italics) “never been treated kinder than by these people.” The Commissioner Charles Mix wanted Forney to “instruct the several agents in the Territory of Utah to make all inquiry which may tend to discover these children, who may be in the possession and keeping of some of the Indians, and, if they can be discovered, to use every effort to get possession of them; if recovered, they must be maintained and taken care of until they can be turned over to their friends.” If Forney had been doing his job in December 1857 he would have known that children survived: he had held Hurt’s report in his hands.

         On 4 March 1858 Mix wanted action--Forney should get possession of the children, maintain them and care for them until they could be send home. Forney asked a few questions and learned that a “gentleman” named Jacob Hamblin had one of the children and knew where 15 others were. Hamblin, as Will Bagley sweetly says, was not a party to the massacre but “was deeply involved in covering up the crime.” Oblivious to the man’s history, Forney paid Hamblin very well. Forney was happy to report that they were in the care of a respectable family at Santa Clara, Hamblin’s. On 10 September 1858 Forney claimed to have found ten of the children, who were now in his possession. They were not in his possession. Forney was congratulating himself in leaving the children in the custody or under the eye of a Mormon he was paying. Forney dawdled, finding excuses, not recruiting “the persons necessary to drive the several teams” along “with a guide and interpreter.” He had time to write a slanderous report on the honest and downright heroic Garland Hurt while he himself was mishandling government funds. At last Forney set forth, but his Mormon companions, those people who had treated him more kindly than anyone had ever done, deserted him. The Mormons wanted to keep him away from the children. They let him know, kindly, that Brigham Young and God and Jesus might require them to cut his testicles off if he went on south.

         Forney would have been stranded, helpless (but with both testicles), without the arrival of an Mexican War veteran, James Lynch (a connection of mine through the Cokers and his late marriage to a survivor of the massacre, Sarah Dunlap). This is Lynch’s account: “I left Camp Floyd in March last, in charge of thirty-nine men emigrating to Arizona. About the 27th of that month we came up with Dr. Forney at Beaver City, who there informed me that he was enroute to the scene of the Mountain Meadows massacre and Santa Clara, to procure evidence in relation thereto, and to secure the surviving children. He informed me that all his men had left him, being Mormons, and who, before leaving, had informed him, Forney, that if he went down South that the people down there would make an eunuch of him, and asked us for aid and assistance.” Forney understood that threat.

         Decades later, we know from the Memphis Commercial Appeal in January 1913), when he was married to Susan, one of the Dunlap survivors, Lynch stayed overnight with William Baker, another survivor, and told him about the rescue: “Captain Lynch wore old, ragged clothes into the settlement where it was thought the children were located,” pretending “to be traveling and that some of his wagons needed repairing.” While camping “in a desirable location” he learned “the exact location of the children,” and ordered the Mormons “to produce them or suffer what might follow.” A more detailed story is in the Memphis Commercial Appeal for 9 April 1905--one with a large image of Lynch. It involves a trick: Lynch disguised himself and his men as emigrants going far West and got inside the Mormon “fort” by saying his wagon needed repair. It took some of his men to drag it into the shop: “They were visited immediately by the ruling bishop. They were no sooner in his presence than Capt. Lynch gave a sign to his men who drew their guns and in an unmistakable voice demanded of the bishop the immediate surrender of the bondaged children “or his life would then and there be the forfeit. The bishop had no alternative but to comply, which he did reluctantly enough.”

         The daring adventurers secured fifteen of the children in the fort, picked up the other two at a nearly ranch and hastened away to their compadres who had waited impatiently.” Then came something more painful: “The gentlemen found the children dirty, nearly naked, and almost starved. The soldiers parted with their own garments to make clothes for the little sufferers, washed them and fed them on the bank of a nearby creek.” The youngest was Sarah Dunlap, one arm shattered by a bullet and her eyes blinded. Lynch and his men got the children to Salt Lake City, where he turned them over to “the government authorities,” perhaps Forney. The “parting of the little children from their brave leader was touching, indeed. “They clung to him with heard-rending cries and weeping’s. Had he not been father, mother, savior, all to them?”

         After Lynch got him his first sight of several of the children, Forney (4 May 1859) whined about “a very laborious and difficult trip but declared that he had “in his possession” sixteen children. (Sacramento Bee 19 May 1859). Flattering his murderous Mormon friends, Forney said the children appeared "contented and happy, poorly clad, however. I will get them fixed up as soon as possible. All the children are intellectual and good looking, not one mean looking child among them, they average from three and a half to nine years old. Most of them know their family names, and a few recollect the place of their former homes, others have some recollection of it.” He took full credit for their return and appeased any Mormons who would see his letter. Contented and happy children!

         On 17 August 1859 Lynch made an affidavit at Camp Floyd, U. T.: “James Lynch, of lawful age, being duly sworn, states on oath: That he was one of the party who accompanied Dr. Jacob Forney, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, in an expedition to the Mountain Meadows, Santa Clara, in the months of March and April last, when we received sixteen children, sole survivors of the wholesale massacre perpetrated at the former place in the month of September, 1857. The children, when we first saw them, were in a most wretched and deplorable condition, with little or no clothing, covered with filth and dirt. They presented a sight heartrending and miserable in the extreme.”  Lynch sent a fuller report, part of a long affidavit, [check texts] to California (27 August 1859, Marysville, CA National Democrat): “we proceeded to the residence of the man Jacob Hamblin, a Mormon, in whose possession the children were. We found them in a most wretched condition, half starved, half naked, filthy, infested with vermin, and their eyes diseased from the cruel neglect to which they had been exposed.” In three days at Santa Clara he had clothing made and returned with Hamblin to pick up more children in other towns. They were mocked: “When we passed through Beaver City, some of the Mormon men hooted at the children, and called them the survivors of Sebastopol and Waterloo.”

         Lynch had nothing but contempt for Hamblin, whom Forney had been paying, and who seems to have been spying on Forney for the Bishops. Lynch: “Some of these implanted are and have been in the confidence and under employment of the superintendent of Indian affairs, Bishop Hamblin, for instance, who is employed by Dr. Forney among the Indians down South, who knew all the facts, but refused to disclose them, who falsely reported to Dr. Forney that the children were brought away, were recovered by him from some who had bought them from Indians, and who knew that what he reported was false and was so done to cheat the government out of money to again reward the guilty wretches for their inhuman butcheries. It is pretended that this man is friendly toward the United States government, yet is a well known fact that he screened some of the murderers about his house from justice.” At last realizing that the children had not ever been taken by the Indians, Forney rejected some of the absurdist bills submitted to him for rescue and care of the children. He paid out $2961.77, less than half of the claims the local Mormons made. Some of the claimants were murderers of the parents. They were without shame.

         Forney, only in his mid 40s, was, Lynch thought, “a more veritable old granny than whom, in my opinion, never held an official position in this country.” Forney showed no warmth of heart even when they arrived at Fillmore, on the 27th April 1859 with sixteen of the children, survivors of the Mountain Meadows massacre. He proposed “to leave the children at the Spanish Fork Farm,” until he could “secure more comfortable quarters at or near Salt Lake City.” It was strangely insensitive to think of leaving them at Spanish Fork Farm, which was occupied by Indians. Having left the children with Mormons for months, now he proposed leaving them with, mainly, Indians (Sacramento Bee 19 May 1859). Forney was oblivious to how the children might feel as he dined convivially with murderers of their parents (Brother Lee was one) and their own captors and later left them around Indians, some of whom might have helped kill their families. Inhumane--inhuman, Forney kept two of the children behind in Salt Lake City for several months rather than sending them home with the others.  Macbeth: “He has no children.” (In January, 1860, Forney took them to Washington to testify about the massacre, and Maj. John Henry, of Van Buren, took them from there to Carrollton, Arkansas.)

         Someone in Salt Lake City interviewed old Elizabeth Worley in May 1877 and sent this to the New York Herald (22 May 1877): “The children who were brought to Salt Lake City were put in the charge of Mrs. Worley, with whom I conversed at her house last evening. She describes their appearance, when the wagon containing them stopped at her gate, as most piteous. Not more than one or two of them had received decent care since the massacre. Many of them had sore eyes. Most of them were unwashed, unkempt and afflicted with vermin, and their clothing was scanty, filthy and ill-fitting. Mrs. Worley was at once compassionate and energetic. She took these little ones, who arrived early in the afternoon, and by evening had thoroughly washed and decently dressed them, and so fed them with food and tenderness that when Dr. Forney called to see them in the evening he was struck with astonishment. While she had charge of the children Mrs. Worley was too much engaged in making them comfortable and in modifying the wild and almost savage manners which some of them had acquired to question them about the circumstances of the massacre.”

         The Salt Lake City Valley Tan reported on Wednesday 29 June, 1859: Eighteen [fifteen?] little children from 2 to 8 years old, the survivors of the Mountain Meadow massacre, left here on Tuesday for the States. The first arrangements contemplated their transportation to the States with ox teams; but Gen. Johnston kindly and promptly responded to a request from Dr. Forney, and has furnished for their better accommodation, three spring ambulances, and one baggage wagon with teams of six mules each.” (Albert Sidney Johnston, born in 1803, died at Shiloh on the first day, in 1862.) The Valley Tan continued: “They will travel with and are under the protection of Capt. R Anderson, 2d dragoons, who is en route to Ft. Kearney with his command. Mrs. Worley, Mrs. Nash, and two other ladies have been engaged as matrons to attend to the wants of the little ones and three men also accompany the party as camp assistants.” In 1913 William Baker remembered that on the trip they all wore red flannel suits. The fifteen of them were placed in charge of Maj. Whiting, United States Army, who reached Fort Leavenworth August 25, 1859. There they were taken in charge by William C. Mitchell, special agent of the Government, who saw for himself than no grandchild of his was among the children. He had brought a woman to help him. “Mrs. Railey, the woman that assisted in bringing the survivors home, now lives near the ‘Old Camp Ground,’ three miles from Lead Hill, Boone County, Ark. She is a very old lady and the event of her life was that trip to Fort Leavenworth and back when the rescued little ones were returned to their relatives. Mrs. Railey always speaks of the survivors as ‘my children,’ and the aged lady tells many interesting stories of that memorable journey from Fort Leavenworth to Carrollton, Ark., with the orphan band. She has always desired to have a reunion of the Mountain Meadows survivors, but could never get the ‘children’ together.”  (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 8 September 1895.)

         Mitchell and the fifteen reached Carrollton 16 September 1859. Two other children, John C. Miller and M. Tackett, cruelly detained in Utah as potential witnesses, in January, 1860, were taken to Washington by Dr. Forney, and from there they were taken to Carrollton by Maj. John Henry, of Van Buren. The Post-Dispatch in 1895 said of Mitchell’s arrival: “The scene which characterized the reception of the surviving orphans at Carrollton is described by those who witnessed the event as one of the most affecting spectacles ever known and the old men and women who still tell the story seldom get through with the incidents without shedding tears. Some of the  children were recognized by their relatives and claimed at once. Others could not be clearly identified, as they were too young.  The survivors found homes among kindred or the friends of their parents, and each one of them became an object of especial interest to all of the people of the surrounding country.”

         The Little Rock True Democrat noted a “Public Meeting” on 16 September 1859 to welcome the children. The citizens “resolved” that “Col. W. C. Mitchell, who made the first movement, and who has persevered with unremitting interest for nearly two years to recover and have restored the captive children . . . has displayed address and ability in the management of this important affair, and the goodness of a heart that is delicately sensitive to the cries of distress and the appeals of suffering; and that he deserves the lasting gratitude of his fellow citizens, and especially of those who are connected by blood with said children.”

         Meanwhile, denials of Mormon guilt continue. There are deliberate and unconscious ways of obscuring or obliterating. A century ago, in 1921, there was a monstrous obscenity in Pomona, California, near San Bernardino, when a new and extremely profitable Golf Course was opened as the Mountain Meadows Golf Course. In California and elsewhere, what Mountain Meadows means to most people today is a very famous golf course. But the families remember.