Oh What a Slaughter (10 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saw two piles of bodies, one composed of women and children, the other of men. The bodies were entirely nude, and seemed to have been thrown promiscuously together. They appeared to have been massacred. Should judge there were sixty or seventy bodies of women and children: saw one man on that pile; the children were from one and two months up to twelve years; the small children were almost destroyed by wolves and crows; the throats of some were cut, others stabbed with knives; had bullets through them. All the bodies were more or less torn to pieces, except one, the body of a woman, which lay apart, a little southwest of the pile. This showed no sign of decay and had not been touched by the wild animals. The countenance was placid and seemed to be asleep. The
work was not freshly done—suppose the bodies had been there fifteen or sixteen days.

The travelers who discovered the bodies gave testimony and were believed. Soon, as J. P. Dunn reports, the news “flew on wings of the wind” to every part of the country. The people of California asked the president for support—the people of Arkansas were forced to wonder if any of their loved ones were alive. Outrage ran high, as it should have, prompting the Mormons to issue various lame statements—they are still issuing them to this day, as witness President Hinckley's evasions at the dedications of the new monument.

The general thrust of these statements, for the first eighteen years at least, was to put the blame squarely on the Indians.

The first lame line of defense was that the immigrants had angered the Indians by giving them a poisoned cow; there was the suggestion that the Mormons might also have poisoned the spring. But when Dr. Forney, the superintendent of Utah, went south to launch an investigation, the Paiutes themselves immediately gave the lie to these accusations. There was no poisoned cow, and the spring ran as pure as ever. (Of course, with so many animals, a cow might easily have eaten a poisonous weed: the cow might have bloated and died; but the Paiutes, no fools, would have been quick to note any such distemper. A bloated cow is hard to miss.)

Dr. Forney had come south predisposed to believe the Mormons, but only a few days on the ground convinced him that the Mormon story was seriously flawed. Kanosh, the leader of the local Paiutes, flatly disputed all the stories of poisoning.

Meanwhile, in the court of public opinion, the fact that the Mormons had let it be known that they intended to defy the U.S. Army did not sit well. The Mormons were rapidly losing the public relations effort, as, in a sense, they still are.

Dr. Forney didn't press his investigation until the summer of
1859, but, though fooled at first, he soon realized that there was something wrong with the Mormon version of the killings. For one thing, the Mormon account and the Paiute account flatly contradicted each other.

The local Mormons, evidently thinking that Dr. Forney would believe any white man over any Indian, foolishly gathered together sixteen of the surviving children and tried to persuade Dr. Forney that they had been with the Indians all along. Both Kanosh and the children themselves denied it, which didn't stop the Mormons from presenting the superintendent with a bill for $1,700, which is what they claimed it cost them to buy the children back from the Paiutes. Somehow it didn't occur to the local Mormons that they wouldn't be believed.