Oh What a Slaughter (9 page)

Thus, in the summer of 1857, Brigham Young and Mormons throughout Utah were gearing up to defy both the president and the army. The Mormons had been pushed steadily westward, from New York state to Illinois, Missouri, and now Utah; they didn't intend to be pushed any farther, and they didn't want to be told how they might order their theocracy. They were no strangers to mob violence. Though forbidden by their creed to shed innocent blood—a moral prohibition that was to have large consequences later—they did subscribe to a doctrine of blood atonement, which instructed them to shed the blood of gentiles—that is, non-Mormons. The Fancher party consisted entirely of gentiles, and had, moreover, the added stigma of having come from Arkansas, where, very recently, the popular Mormon prophet Parley Pratt had been murdered.

The Fancher party was already on the road when Parley Pratt was killed—by an outraged husband whose wife the prophet coveted for his own purposes. This woman, Eleanor Mc-Comb
McLean Pratt, though in appearance an unlikely Helen of Troy, was soon recovered sufficiently from her grief to proclaim the evil of gentiles and appeal for vengeance. The Fancher party, though innocent, became the prime candidate for the enactment of the doctrine of blood atonement.

Parley Pratt

Thus there were two stressful elements in the Mormon communities in the late summer of 1857: the approach of the army and the outrage over the death of Prophet Parley. The Fancher party well knew that they were not popular. Though well financed, they were often refused supplies, and those they did manage to purchase were priced to the skies. Since it was a large party, with a herd of cattle numbering between six hundred and one thousand head; and since the country ahead was desert, both supplies and forage were important. When they got to Mountain Meadows it was the abundant forage that prompted them to stop. Mountain Meadows is no longer grassy, but in 1857 it was abundantly grassed, and the party paused—as any herds-men would—to allow the cattle to graze their fill before starting into more difficult country. Though they were close to being out of Utah, stopping was an eminently practical move for any group with hundreds of livestock to maintain.

The Paiutes and other desert Indians, who were subsisting on very little, not unnaturally wanted those cattle. A number of Mormon farmers and ranchers wanted them too. (These cattle were said to be longhorns, a breed not previously seen in Utah but abundantly available to the Arkansas party from the thousands that ran loose in nearby Texas at the time.)

Though the approach of the army was widely known and much talked about, the army, as it turned out, was having supply problems of its own. The command unit that was to march on Salt Lake City was still in far-off Laramie; the unit was not yet equipped to make the long journey across the plains with fall
upon them—on those particular plains, especially what's called the Bridger Plateau, fall can be hard to tell from winter. Both can produce bitter cold.

By the time the Fancher party was attacked, on September 11—a date that might be said to favor massacres—Brigham Young had learned that he had nothing to fear from the U.S. Army that year. The supply problem was so severe that no troops would reach Salt Lake City in 1857. The big fight, if there was to be one, would not occur until the spring of the following year.

In fact, the Mormons never had to fight the army: the differences of opinion between the U.S. government and the Mormon authorities were mostly worked out in negotiations. The army did come on to Utah in 1858, but the Utah War, so called, was a big fizzle, an outcome only known long after the Fancher party had been reduced to the condition of a meat shop.

It was, though, the immigrants' misfortune to arrive in wild, lawless southwestern Utah just at a time when the Mormons were most highly stressed. It was only a day or two before the massacre that Brigham Young realized he would not soon be under attack.

Despite this element of relief, the Mormons remained stirred up. Even so, the Fancher party, had it just kept moving, might have passed through Mormon territory unmolested and gone on to the promised land of California, but for the temptation of that tall, waving grass. By stopping to let their cattle graze they made themselves an irresistible target, both to Indians and Mormons.

Six days after the massacre Brigham Young penned an entry in his diary about the likely behavior of the Indians:

A spirit seems to be taking possession of the Indians to assist Israel [the Mormons]. I can hardly restrain them from exterminating the Americans.

In fact, he didn't restrain them, and yet the very day before the massacre Young claimed to have dispatched a letter by fast courier to Elder Isaac Haight, the leader of the southern Mormons. The letter read in part:

We do not expect that any part of the Army will be able to reach here this fall … they are now at or near Laramie. … So you see that the Lord has answered our prayers, and again thwarted the blow which was aimed at our heads. In regard to the emigration trains passing through our settlements, we must not interfere with them
until they are first notified to keep away
. You must not meddle with them. The Indians we expect will do as they please, but you should try and preserve good feelings with them. There are no other trains going through that I know of. If those who are there will leave, let them go in peace.

That seems plain enough, and yet little in this history is exactly as it seems. The provenance of this letter, as Caroline Fraser has pointed out, is uncertain. In the best of circumstances it would have arrived in the south too late to save the Fancher party, but whether it was delivered at all is an open question. The Mormons are among the world's most efficient record-keepers, and yet the original of this letter is lost. Brigham Young admits this in a deposition given in 1875. A copy, sworn to and notarized by Nephi W. Clayton, turned up in a church letter book in 1884; but Hamilton Gray Park, one of Brigham Young's assistants, made a note claiming that the letter was in answer to a plea from the south for instructions as to what to do about the Fancher party.

The request for instruction and Brigham Young's answer were both entrusted to the courier James Haslem, who sped from
the south to Salt Lake City and then back to the south, a distance said by some to be a round-trip of 496 miles, which he made in one hundred hours. Assuming that relays of horses were made available that does not seem especially fast to me, although Young had pleaded with the courier to ride night and day, insisting to Haslem that “that company [the Fancher party] must be protected from the Indians if it takes every LD Saint in Iron County to do it.”

There are problems in regard to Brigham Young's letter and Hamilton Gray Park's memo about it that historians have so far not convincingly explained.

Was Brigham Young, relieved of the immediate threat of attack by the U.S. Army, sincere in his desire to save the Fancher party? Though the army was delayed, it was still coming; might it be that he wanted to be careful not to give them a new excuse to invade? However cynical he may have been about the immigrants themselves, he might not, at this juncture, have wanted to throw fuel on a smoldering fire.

Of course it's possible that this famous letter might not have been the only message he dispatched to the south. The nice letter may have been intended as cover in case things went wrong.

In an army report made by Major James H. Carleton (the same officer, who, just a few years later, commanded Kit Carson to go round up the Navaho), it was stated that the Paiute chiefs claimed that letters ordering the destruction of the emigrant train came from Brigham Young. The copious and meticulous Mormon archives are absent any such letters.

Where one stands on the several vexed questions having to do with the Mormon leader's involvement in the destruction of the Fancher party finally depends on what one believes about Brigham Young himself. The letter of September 10 instructing Elder Haight not to meddle with the immigrants could be
shrewd political disinformation, something he could show to the army to prove his good intentions, if that became necessary. All his urgings to the fast rider, Haslem, could have sprung from the same motive. He wanted to appear to be doing his best to save the immigrants. Did he know that Haslem couldn't possibly get there in time?

On the other hand, once told of the massacre, not long after it happened, Brigham Young is said to have had the immediate and uncomfortable intuition that this massacre was something that would haunt the Mormon church forever—which, so far, it has.

He had this intuition, and then, for eighteen years, did his best to stonewall—and his best, considering his lofty position, was pretty good. Though he was told in some detail by Jacob Hamlin and John Doyle Lee what had happened at Mountain Meadows, he publicly insisted, for nearly two decades, that the Indians had done it, not the Mormons. It was only in 1875, in a deposition, that he finally admitted when he knew what he knew. It is clear that he used the power of his position as church leader to keep the truth from coming out, a practice that has been followed by many church leaders since.

Brigham Young had been aware of the Fancher party for some time. Had he wished, he would not have needed to wait until the last minute to instruct Elder Haight not to molest them.

The corresponding question that might be asked is whether Elder Haight and the Mormons of remote southern Utah would have executed all these travelers without the explicit approval of Brigham Young and the other Mormon authorities in Salt Lake City.

My own feeling about this is that the Iron County Mormons were raring to go for the immigrants. No doubt they would have welcomed a go-ahead from Brigham Young, but Salt Lake City was a long way off; the Iron County Mormons were in a mood to kill, and kill they did, on that plain with the seductive grass.

Doctrinally, in the eyes of the Mormon leaders, the majority of the immigrants—that is, the adults—were
not
innocents. They were, in Mormon terms, gentiles, enemies of the faith, perfect candidates for the enactment of blood atonement.

The council of elders held in southern Utah before the attack contained few if any moderate voices. What the elders seemed mainly to concern themselves with was rounding up enough Indian allies to help them at their bloody task. This proved not hard to accomplish—the sight of all those cattle was enough to tempt the Paiutes. Once the Fancher party paused to graze their herds, the stage was set; the Mormons and the Indians were ready.

Early on the morning of September 7, while the immigrants were at breakfast, the firing began.

The Fancher party, as I have said, was no pushover. Once bullets started whizzing into the breakfasting camp the wagons were immediately circled. Soon formidable breastworks were constructed. Had the party been camped a little closer to a nearby spring, so as to have an adequate water supply, they might have mounted a lengthy siege. The Paiutes did not like long battles, preferring to overcome their enemies in a wild rush or else pick them off one by one over a long stretch of time.

Though several immigrants were killed in the initial attack, the immigrants held off this first assault. They had not made it all the way from Arkansas to fold at the first sign of trouble. Also, they were not long in observing that a number of the “Indians” who were attacking them showed patches of white skin underneath their war paint. The attacking party probably numbered about 250 strong: two hundred Indians and perhaps fifty white people. They were not strong enough to overrun the barricade of wagons and breastworks. Butchering and booty-gathering were obviously going to take some time. Council had to be taken and taken quickly. The battle took place on an established trail. Other immigrants might show up, and, even if they didn't, the Paiutes might tire of the siege and drift off to other pursuits.

The immigrants, of course, soon recognized that they were
in a bad situation, in a remote and pitiless place. When night fell they sent scouts to the west, hoping that they might slip through to California quickly and bring help.