Investigations and prosecutions relating to the Mountain Meadows Massacre
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The pursuit of the perpetrators of the Mountain Meadows massacre, which atrocity occurred September 11, 1857, had to await the conclusion of the American Civil War to begin in earnest.
Evidence as to whether or not Brigham Young ordered the attack on the migrant column is conflicted. Historians still debate the autonomy and precise roles of local Cedar City LDS church officials in ordering the massacre and Young's concealing of evidence in its aftermath.[1] Young's use of inflammatory and violent language[2] in response to the Federal expedition added to the tense atmosphere at the time of the attack. After the massacre, Young stated in public forums that God had taken vengeance on the Baker–Fancher party.[3] It is unclear whether Young held this view because he believed this specific group posed an actual threat to colonists or were directly responsible for past crimes against Mormons. According to historian MacKinnon, "After the war, Buchanan implied that face-to-face communications with Brigham Young might have averted the Utah War, and Young argued that a north-south telegraph line in Utah could have prevented the Mountain Meadows Massacre."[4]
Young's belated message to Isaac C. Haight, acting commander of the Iron Brigade
On September 8, 1857, Capt. Stewart Van Vliet of the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps arrived in Salt Lake City. Van Vliet's mission was to inform Young that the United States troops then approaching Utah did not intend to attack the Mormons, but intended to establish an army base near Salt Lake, and to request Young's cooperation in procuring supplies for the army. Young informed Van Vliet that he was skeptical that the army's intentions were peaceful, and that the Mormons intended to resist occupation.[5]
On September 10, 1857, James Holt Haslam arrived in Salt Lake City, after experiencing long delays during his nearly 300 mile journey, to deliver a message from the acting commander of the Iron Brigade, Isaac C. Haight to the Mormon leader Brigham Young.[6] The letter has yet to be found.[7]
President Young's message of reply to Haight, dated September 10, read: "In regard to emigration trains passing through our settlements, we must not interfere with them until they are first notified to keep away. You must not meddle with them. The Indians we expect will do as they please but you should try and preserve good feelings with them. There are no other trains going south that I know of[.] [I]f those who are there will leave let them go in peace."[8]
Yet, by the time the express rider delivered Young's letter to Haight, ordering that the emigrants not be harmed, the murders at Mountain Meadows had already taken place. According to trial testimony given later by express rider Haslam, when Haight read Young's words, he sobbed like a child and could manage only the words, "Too late, too late."[9]
Historians debate the letter's contents. Brooks believes it shows Young "did not order the massacre, and would have prevented it if he could."[10] Bagley argues that the letter covertly gave other instructions.[11]
Part played by Paiutes
A few days after the massacre, September 29, 1857, John D. Lee briefed Brigham Young on the massacre. According to Lee, more than one hundred and fifty "mob members" of Missouri and Illinois, with many cattle and horses, damned the Saints leaders, and poisoned not only a beef given to the Native Americans, but also a spring which killed both Saints and Native Americans. The Native Americans became enraged and after a long siege killed everyone and stripped the corpses of clothing. The Mormons spared eight to ten children. A second group, with a large cattle herd, would have suffered the same fate had not the Saints intervened and saved them. Wilford Woodruff recorded Lee's account as a "tale of blood."[12]
In fact, seventeen children had survived. The names and ages are recorded in the Carleton report, available online.[13] The Mormons sold the children among each other, as they did the material goods they stole from the emigrants. Carleton reported that immediately after the massacre John D. Lee, Haight, and Philip Smith [Klingonsmith] went to Salt Lake City to ask Brigham Young what should be done with the property. They offered Young the money they had taken from their victims, but he would have nothing to do with it. Brigham gave Lee instructions to divide the cattle and cows among the poor, and left it to him to distribute it as he chose. John D. Lee ended up owning a fancy carriage that had been part of the column; the wagons, rifles and other valuables ended up with the Mormons, which the Paiute pointed out was proof that they had not perpetrated the massacre. Other emigrant property was auctioned in Cedar City, in the tithing office of the church, where the Mormons termed it, facetiously, in Carleton's view, "property taken at the siege of Sebastapol."[13]
On September 30, 1857, Mormon Indian Agent George W. Armstrong sent a letter to Young from Provo with information of the massacre. In his account, the emigrants gave the Native Americans poisoned beef. After many Native Americans died, they "appeased their savage vengeance" by killing fifty-seven men and nine women. There was no mention of survivors.[12]
Decades later, Young's son, 13 years old in 1857, said he was in the office during that meeting and that he remembered Lee blaming the massacre on the Native Americans.[14] Some time after Lee's meeting with Young, Jacob Hamblin said he reported to Young and George A. Smith what he said Lee had related to Hamblin on his journey to Salt Lake.[15] Brigham Young was mistaken when he later testified, under oath, that the meeting took place "some two of three months after the massacre".[16] When Lee attempted to relate the details of the massacre, however, Young later testified he cut Lee off, stopping him from reciting further details.[16]
Rumors of the massacre began to reach California in early October. John Aiken, a "gentile" who traveled with the mail carrier John Hurt through the killing field, reported to the Los Angeles Star that the unburied putrefied corpses of the women and children were more generally eaten than the men.[17]
Confirmation of the massacre was received from the Mormon J. Ward Christian. Christian claimed that the emigrants had cheated the Native Americans who sold them wheat at Corn Creek, put strychnine in water holes and poisoned a dead ox. According to Christian, the party consisted of 130 to 135. All were killed by Native Americans with the exception of fifteen infant children, that have since been purchased with much difficulty by the Mormon interpreters.[18]
And when Brigham Young sent his report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1858, he said the massacre was the work of Native Americans.[19]
Paiute leaders maintain that Mormon accounts of Paiute initiation of the siege are untrue. Stoffle and Evans assert that Paiutes had no history of attacking wagon trains[20] and no Native Americans were charged, prosecuted, or punished by federal officials as a result of the Mountain Meadows massacre. Tribal oral history accounts taken in 1980s and 1990s relate stories of Paiutes witnessing the attack from a distance rather than participating. There are some stories, which relate some Paiute were present, but did not initiate or participate in the killings. A corroborating oral history of Sybil Mariah Frink tells of witnessing the planning of the massacre at her home in Harmony. She contends she followed fourteen Mormons who had disguised themselves as Native Americans to the scene of the massacre. She makes no mention of any Native Americans participating in the attack. Authors Tom and Holt summarize the state of proof regarding the massacre:
The fact that so much evidence, including relevant pages from the journals of many settlers, has been lost or destroyed, testifies to many Native Americans and their sympathizers that much of the official history cannot be considered to be complete or truthful. However, there is certainly some evidence that Native Americans with base camps on the Muddy and Santa Clara Rivers were at least involved in the initial siege of the wagon train."[21]
While Native American Paiutes were present, certainly during the initial attack and siege, historical reports of their numbers and the details of their participation are contradictory.[22] However, Mormon witnesses of the event are unreliable, as Carleton demonstrates, and were attempting to shift the blame onto the Native Americans.
Eyewitness accounts from Mormons that implicate the Paiutes (at first entirely so and then only in part) are set against Paiute accounts that absolve them from participation in the actual massacre. Historian Bagley believes "the problem with trying to tell the story of Mountain Meadows—the sources are all fouled up. You've either got to rely on the testimony of the murderers or of the surviving children. And so what we know about the actual massacre is—could be challenged on almost any point. _ "[23] However, as Carleton mentions in his 1857 report, even Hamblin, the Indian agent who blamed the Paiutes for the massacre, admitted to him that in 1856 the Paiute tribe had only three guns, suggesting that it was incredible for them to have acquired sufficient guns to inflict the number of gunshot wounds evident among the victims, most of whom were killed by gunfire, not, as Mormon witnesses claimed, largely by being hit in the head with stones.[13]
Orchestration by militia
Although militia members put responsibility on the Natives, many non-Mormons began to suspect Mormon involvement and called for a federal investigation.[24] Territorial U.S. Indian Agent Garland Hurt, in the days following the massacre, sent a translator to investigate, who returned on September 23 with the report that Paiutes attacked the emigrants and after being repulsed three time the Mormons tricked the wagon train members into surrender and killed them all.[25] On the September 27, Hurt, the last federal Agent in Utah Territory, escaped more than seventy five Mormons dragoons for the safety of the American Army with the help of members of the Ute tribe of Native Americans.[26]
On Lee's journey to Salt Lake City to report the massacre, he passed Jacob Hamblin going the opposite direction, and according to Hamblin, Lee admitted killing emigrants, including adolescent children, and stated that he acted under orders from officials in Cedar City.[15] Lee later denied making these admissions[27] or breaking his oath of secrecy.[28]
Young first heard about the massacre from second-hand reports,[16] After Lee reached Salt Lake City, Lee met with Young on September 29, 1857,[29] according to Lee, he told Young about Mormon involvement. Young, however, later testified that he cut Lee off when he started to describe the massacre, because he could not bear to hear the details.[16] Lee, however, said he told Young of involvement by Mormons. Nevertheless, according to Jacob Hamblin, Hamblin heard a detailed description of the massacre and Mormon involvement from Lee and reported it to Young and George A. Smith soon after the massacre. Hamblin said he was told to keep quiet, but that "as soon as we can get a court of justice, we will ferret this thing out".[15]
With regard to the new policy to unbridle Natives to steal cattle, roughly at the same time of the massacre Indian agent Hurt received word that militia leadership at Ogden had arranged for the Snake tribe to run off over 400 cattle that were being driven toward California.[30]
Federal investigations in 1859
Jacob Forney (1829–1865)
Maj. James H. Carleton, later-prominent Indian fighter of American Southwest, who investigated the massacre site in 1859 and erected an early marker
The Utah War interrupted further federal investigation and the LDS Church conducted no investigation of its own. Then in 1859, two years after the massacre, investigations were made by Hurt's superior, Jacob Forney,[31] and also by U.S. Army Brevet Major James Henry Carleton. In Carleton's investigation, at Mountain Meadows he found women's hair tangled in sage brush and the bones of children still in their mothers' arms.[32] Carleton later said it was "a sight which can never be forgotten." After gathering up the skulls and bones of those who had died, Carleton's troops buried them and erected a rock cairn.
Carleton's report of May 1859 included verbatim statements from Jacob Hamblin and a young Snake man, aged 17 or 18, who lived with the Hamblins and went by the name of Albert Hamblin. Both attempted to blame the local Paiute Indians, but Carleton analyzed the contradictions between the evidence he encountered and their statements to suggest that their accounts were false in several respects.[13] Carleton tricked Albert Hamblin into revealing the identities of some of the Mormons present, by telling him that Jacob Hamblin had already informed Carleton that John D. Lee and other Mormons had been present. Albert then admitted that, apart from Lee, also present were the Mormons Prime Coleman, Amos Thornton, Richard Robinson, and "Brother" Dickinson from Pinto Creek.[33] Speaking to Paiute Indian chiefs, Carleton was told by Chief "Jackson", head of the Santa Clara band, that a letter from Brigham Young had ordered the emigrants to be killed, and that 60 Mormons, painted and disguised as Indians, led by Bishop John D. Lee and Isaac C. Haight, had fulfilled this order. Another Paiute chief, Touche, then living on the Virgin River, told Carleton that a letter from Brigham Young to the same effect was brought down to his band by a young man named [Oliver B.] Huntington, an Indian interpreter living in Salt Lake City at the time of Carleton's report.
By August 1859, Jacob Forney, Superintendent of Indian Affairs for Utah had retrieved the children from the Mormon families housing them and gathered them in preparation of transporting them to their relatives in Arkansas. He placed the children in the care of families in Santa Clara prior to transportation.[34] Forney and Capt. Reuben Campbell (US Army) related that Lee sold the children to Mormon families in Cedar City, Harmony, and Painter Creek.[35] Sarah Francis Baker, who was three years old at the time of the massacre, later said, "They sold us from one family to another."[36] As early as May 1859, Forney reported that none of the children had ever lived with the Native Americans, but had been transported by white men from the scene of the massacre to the house of Jacob Hamblin. In July 1859 he wrote of his refusal to pay claims by families who alleged they purchased the children from the Native Americans, stating he knew it was not true.[37] Forney had seen to the gathering up the surviving children from local families after which they were united with extended family members in Arkansas and other states.[38] Families received compensation for the children's care, including Jacob Hamblin;[39] some protested that the amounts were insufficient—although Carleton's report criticized the conditions under which some of the children lived.[40]
Forney concluded that the Paiutes did not act alone and the massacre would not have occurred without the white settlers,[41] while Carleton's report to the U.S. Congress called the mass killings a "heinous crime",[42] blaming both local and senior church leaders for the massacre.
A federal judge brought into the territory after the Utah War, Judge John Cradlebaugh, in March 1859 convened a grand jury in Provo, Utah concerning the massacre, but the jury declined any indictments.[43]
1870s prosecutions of John D. Lee
Four of the nine Utah Territorial militiamen of the Tenth Regiment "Iron Brigade" who were indicted in 1874 for murder or conspiracy (Not shown: William H. Dame • William C. Stewart • Ellott Willden • Samuel Jukes • George Adair, Jr.)
Isaac C. Haight was a Southern Utah Church Leader, and militia commander. Spent much of the remainder of his life in hiding, died 1886 in Arizona.
Maj. John H. Higbee, was said to have shouted the command to begin the killings. He claimed that he reluctantly participated in the massacre and originally came to bury the dead who he thought were victims of an "Indian attack."
Maj. John D. Lee, constable, judge, and Indian Agent. Having conspired in advance with his immediate commander, Isaac C. Haight, Lee led the initial assault, and falsely offered emigrants safe passage prior to the massacre. He was the only convicted participant.
Philip Klingensmith, a Bishop in the church and a private in the militia. He participated in the killings, and later turned state's evidence against his fellows, after leaving the church.
Further investigations, cut short by the American Civil War in 1861,[44] again proceeded in 1871 when prosecutors obtained the affidavit of militia member Phillip Klingensmith. Klingensmith had been a bishop and blacksmith from Cedar City; by the 1870s, however, he had left the church and moved to Nevada.[45]
During the 1870s, Lee,[46] Dame, Philip Klingensmith and two others (Ellott Willden and George Adair, Jr.) were indicted and arrested while warrants were obtained to pursue the arrests of four others (Haight, Higbee, William C. Stewart and Samuel Jukes) who had successfully gone into hiding. Klingensmith escaped prosecution by agreeing to testify.[47] Brigham Young removed some participants including Haight and Lee from the LDS church in 1870. The U.S. posted bounties of $500 each for the capture of Haight, Higbee and Stewart while prosecutors chose not to pursue their cases against Dame, Willden and Adair.
Lee's first trial began on July 23, 1875, in Beaver, Utah before a jury of eight Mormons and four non-Mormons.[48] The prosecution called five eye-witnesses: Philip Klingensmith, Joel White, Samuel Pollock, William Young, and James Pierce.[49] Due to an illness, George A. Smith was not called as a witness, but provided deposition testimony denying any involvement in the massacre,[50] as did Brigham Young, who said he could not travel because he was an invalid.[16] The defense called Silas S. Smith, Jesse N. Smith, Elisha Hoops, and Philo T. Farnsworth,[51] who were part of George A. Smith's party on August 25, 1857 when he camped near the Baker-Fancher party in Corn Creek. Each of them testified that they either saw, or suspected, that the Baker-Fancher party poisoned a spring and a dead ox, later eaten by Native Americans.[52][53] The trial ended in a hung jury on August 5, 1875.
Lee's second trial began September 13, 1876, before an all-Mormon jury. The prosecution called Daniel Wells, Laban Morrill, Joel White, Samuel Knight, Samuel McMurdy, Nephi Johnson, and Jacob Hamblin.[54] Lee also stipulated, against advice of counsel, that the prosecution be allowed to re-use the depositions of Young and Smith from the previous trial.[55] Lee called no witnesses in his defense.[56] This time, Lee was convicted.
John D. Lee just prior to his execution (seated next to coffin)
At his sentencing, as required by Utah Territory statute, he was given the option of being hung, shot, or beheaded, and he chose to be shot.[57] In 1877, before being executed by firing squad at Mountain Meadows (a fate Young believed just, but not a sufficient blood atonement, given the enormity of the crime, to get him into the celestial kingdom).[58] Lee himself professed that he was a scapegoat for others involved.
I have always believed, since that day, that General George A. Smith was then visiting Southern Utah to prepare the people for the work of exterminating Captain Fancher's train of emigrants, and I now believe that he was sent for that purpose by the direct command of Brigham Young. The knowledge of how George A. Smith felt towards the emigrants, and his telling me that he had a long talk with Haight on the subject, made me certain that it was the wish of the 'Church authorities', that Fancher and his train should be 'wiped out', and knowing all this, I did not doubt then, and I do not doubt it now, either, that Haight was acting by full authority from the Church leaders, and that the orders he gave to me were just the orders that he had been directed to give, when he ordered me to raise the Indians and have them attack the emigrants.[59]
↑ https://archive.org/details/supplementtolect00penrrich Supplement to the lecture on the Mountain Meadows massacre. Important additional testimony recently received; by Penrose, Charles W. (Charles William), 1832-1925; Juvenile Instructor Office, 1885
↑ Brigham Young to Isaac C. Haight, 10 September 1857, Letterpress Copybook 3:827–28, Brigham Young Office Files, LDS Church Archives.
↑ James H. Haslam, interview by S. A. Kenner, reported by Josiah Rogerson, 4 December 1884, typescript, 11, in Josiah Rogerson, Transcripts and Notes of John D. Lee Trials, LDS Church Archives.
↑ Brooks 1950, pp.67, 170, 172 Klingonsmith claimed that he saw one hundred of them present. Nephi Johnson reports one-hundred and fifty Native Americans present. Hibgee estimates "anywhere from three to six hundred. Lee 1877, p.226 Lee states at least two hundred were present.
↑ Diary of Wilford Woodruff (Brooks 1950, p.104); Affidavit of John W. Young (1884) (saying the meeting took place "in the latter part of September, 1857"). Brigham Young was mistaken when he later testified that the meeting took place "some two of three months after the massacre" Young 1875.
↑ See Message of the President. December 4, 1859. Hurt to Forney. Also see Bagley 2002, p.113.
↑ After the massacre, the decision was made to take the children to the nearby Hamblin home; however, Hamblin was gone at the time of the killings. Hamblin's testimony in this regard is as following (Q=attorney in Lee's trial; A=Hamblin): "Q: What became of the children of those emigrants? How many children were brought there? A: Two to my house, and several in Cedar City. I was acting subagent for Forney. I gathered the children up for him; seventeen in number, all I could learn of. Q: Whom did you deliver them to? A: Forney, Superintendent of Indian Affairs for Utah."
↑ Not the same Philo T. Farnsworth as the inventor born in 1906
↑ Case of the Defense", Salt Lake Tribune, 3 August 1875; Briggs 2006, p.320.
↑ Brooks 1950, p.105 "The poisoned meat story was unlikely, while the poisoned springs was quite clearly fabrication; to poison a running stream of any size would take a great amount of poison, and if several Saints had died, their names and homes and other details would have been given."
↑ "Territorial Dispatches: the Sentence of Lee", Deseret News, October 18, 1876, p. 4.
↑ Young 1877, p.242) (Young was asked after Lee's execution if he believed in blood atonement. Young replied, "I do, and I believe that Lee has not half atoned for his great crime".)
The Mountain Meadows Massacre was a series of attacks during the Utah War that resulted in the mass murder of at least 120 members of the Baker–Fancher wagon train. The massacre occurred in the southern Utah Territory at Mountain Meadows, and was perpetrated by settlers from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints involved with the Utah Territorial Militia who recruited and were aided by some Southern Paiute Native Americans. The wagon train, made up mostly of immigrant families from Arkansas, was bound for California, traveling on the Old Spanish Trail that passed through the Territory.
John Doyle Lee was an American pioneer, and prominent early member of the Latter Day Saint Movement in Utah. Lee was later excommunicated from the Church and convicted of mass murder for his complicity in the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre. He was sentenced to death and, in 1877, was executed by firing squad at the site of the massacre.
George Albert Smith was an early leader in the Latter Day Saint movement. He served in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and as a member of the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Jacob Hamblin was a Western pioneer, a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and a diplomat to various Native American tribes of the Southwest and Great Basin. He aided European-American settlement of large areas of southern Utah and northern Arizona, where he was seen as an honest broker between Latter-day Saint settlers and the Natives. He is sometimes referred to as the "Buckskin Apostle", or the "Apostle to the Lamanites". In 1958, he was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.
The Baker–Fancher party was a group of American western emigrants from Marion, Crawford, Carroll, and Johnson counties in Arkansas, who departed Carroll County in April 1857 and "were attacked by the Mormons near the rim of the Great Basin, and about fifty miles from Cedar City, in Utah Territory, and that all of the emigrants, with the exception of 17 children, were then and there massacred and murdered" in the Mountain Meadows massacre. Sources estimate that between 120 and 140 men, women and children were killed on September 11, 1857, at Mountain Meadows, a rest stop on the Old Spanish Trail, in the Utah Territory. Some children of up to six years old were taken in by the Mormon families in Southern Utah, presumably because they had been judged to be too young to tell others about the massacre.
The history of the Latter Day Saint movement includes numerous instances of violence committed both by and against adherents. Mormons faced significant persecution in the early 19th century, including instances of forced displacement and mob violence in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. Notably, the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, was shot and killed alongside his brother, Hyrum Smith, in Carthage, Illinois in 1844, while Smith was in jail awaiting trial on charges of treason and inciting a riot.
Isaac Chauncey Haight, was a pioneer of the American West best remembered as a ringleader in the Mountain Meadows massacre. An early convert to the Latter Day Saint movement, he was raised on a farm in New York, and became a Baptist at age 18, hoping to become a missionary in Burma. He educated himself, and found work as a schoolteacher. He converted to Mormonism and set out to convert others in his neighborhood, building up a branch with forty members. To escape religious persecution, his family arrived in Nauvoo, Illinois in July, 1842.
Although the Mountain Meadows massacre was covered to some extent in the media during the 1850s, its first period of intense nationwide publicity began around 1872. This was after investigators obtained the confession of Philip Klingensmith, a Mormon bishop at the time of the massacre and a private in the Utah militia. National newspapers also covered the John D. Lee trials closely from 1874 to 1876, and his execution in 1877 was widely publicized. The first detailed work using modern historical methods was published in 1950, and the massacre has been the subject of several historical works since that time.
Mormon public relations have evolved with respect to the Mountain Meadows Massacre since it occurred on September 11, 1857. After a period of official public silence concerning the massacre, and denials of any Mormon involvement, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints took action in 1872 to excommunicate some of the participants for their role in the massacre. Since then, the LDS Church has consistently condemned the massacre, though acknowledging involvement by some local Mormon leaders.
Tutsegabit was a 19th-century leader of the Piede (Chemehuevi) bands of the Paiute tribe.
Kanosh was a nineteenth-century leader of the Pahvant band of the Ute Indians of what is now central Utah having succeeded the more belligerent Chuick as principal chief. His band had "a major camp at Corn Creek." He is remembered for having been "friendly toward early Mormon Pioneer settlers."
The Mountain Meadows Massacre was caused in part by events relating to the Utah War, an armed confrontation in Utah Territory between the United States Army and Mormon pioneers. In the summer of 1857, however, Mormons experienced a wave of war hysteria, expecting an all-out invasion of apocalyptic significance. From July to September 1857, Mormon leaders prepared Mormons for a seven-year siege predicted by Brigham Young. Mormons were to stockpile grain, and were prevented from selling grain to emigrants for use as cattle feed. As far-off Mormon colonies retreated, Parowan and Cedar City became isolated and vulnerable outposts. Brigham Young sought to enlist the help of Indian tribes in fighting the "Americans", encouraging them to steal cattle from emigrant trains, and to join Mormons in fighting the approaching army.
Mormon theology has long been thought to be one of the causes of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The victims of the massacre, known as the Baker–Fancher party, were passing through the Utah Territory to California in 1857. For the decade prior the emigrants' arrival, Utah Territory had existed as a theocracy led by Brigham Young. As part of Young's vision of a pre-millennial "Kingdom of God," Young established colonies along the California and Old Spanish Trails, where Mormon officials governed as leaders of church, state, and military. Two of the southernmost establishments were Parowan and Cedar City, led respectively by Stake Presidents William H. Dame and Isaac C. Haight. Haight and Dame were, in addition, the senior regional military leaders of the Mormon militia. During the period just before the massacre, known as the Mormon Reformation, Mormon teachings were dramatic and strident. The religion had undergone a period of intense persecution in the American mid-west.
The conspiracy and siege of the Mountain Meadows Massacre was initially planned by its Mormon perpetrators to be a short "Indian" attack, against the Baker–Fancher party. But the planned attack was repulsed and soon turned into a siege, which later culminated in the massacre of the remaining emigrants, on September 11, 1857.
There have been several remembrances of the Mountain Meadows Massacre including commemorative observances, the building of monuments and markers, and the creation of associations and other groups to help promote the massacre's history and ensure protection of the massacre site and grave sites.
The Mountain Meadows massacre was a series of attacks on the Baker–Fancher emigrant wagon train, at Mountain Meadows in southern Utah. The attacks culminated on September 11, 1857, in the mass slaughter of the emigrant party by the Iron County district of the Utah Territorial Militia and some local Indians.
In 1857, at the time of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Brigham Young, was serving as President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and as Governor of Utah Territory. He was replaced as governor the following year by Alfred Cumming. Evidence as to whether or not Young ordered the attack on the migrant column is conflicted. Historians still debate the autonomy and precise roles of local Cedar City LDS Church officials in ordering the massacre and Young's concealing of evidence in its aftermath. Young's use of inflammatory and violent language in response to a federal expedition to the territory added to the tense atmosphere at the time of the attack. After the massacre, Young stated in public forums that God had taken vengeance on the Baker–Fancher party. It is unclear whether Young held this view because of a possible belief that this specific group posed a threat to colonists or that they were responsible for past crimes against Mormons. According to historian William P. MacKinnon, "After the war, Buchanan implied that face-to-face communications with Brigham Young might have averted the Utah War, and Young argued that a north–south telegraph line in Utah could have prevented the Mountain Meadows Massacre."
The Jacob Hamblin House is a historic residence and museum located in Santa Clara, Utah. Jacob Hamblin was a Mormon pioneer and missionary who founded Santa Clara in 1854. The home was constructed for Hamblin by missionaries in 1863, following a flood that had destroyed the town, including Hamblin's original dwelling.
Hamblin, now a ghost town, was a Mormon pioneer town along the Mormon Road, from 1856 to 1905. It was located at an elevation of 5,832 feet in Mountain Meadow in western Washington County, Utah, United States.
Over the past two centuries, the relationship between Native American people and Mormonism has included friendly ties, displacement, violence, enslavement, education placement programs, and official and unofficial discrimination. Native American people were historically considered a special group by adherents of the Latter Day Saint movement (Mormons) since they were believed to be the descendants of the Lamanite people described in the one of the faith's book of scriptures called The Book of Mormon. There is no support from genetic studies and archaeology for the historicity of the Book of Mormon or Middle Eastern origins for any Native American peoples.
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