American Massacre Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Praise

  Author’s Note

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE - THE GATHERING

  CHAPTER ONE - Palmyra, 1823

  CHAPTER TWO - Kirtland/Far West, 1831

  CHAPTER THREE - Nauvoo, 1840

  CHAPTER FOUR - Winter Quarters— Council Bluffs, 1846

  CHAPTER FIVE - Salt Lake City, August 24, 1849

  CHAPTER SIX - Sevier River, October 26, 1853

  PART TWO - THE PASSAGE

  CHAPTER SEVEN - Harrison, March 29, 1857

  CHAPTER EIGHT - Deseret, August 3, 1857

  CHAPTER NINE - The Southern Trail, August 8–September 4, 1857

  CHAPTER TEN - Mountain Meadows, September 7–11, 1857

  PART THREE - THE LEGACY

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - Deseret, September 12, 1857

  CHAPTER TWELVE - Camp Scott, November 16, 1857

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Cedar City, April 7, 1859

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Mountain Meadows, May 25, 1861

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Mountain Meadows, March 23, 1877

  Acknowledgments

  EPILOGUE

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  ALSO BY SALLY DENTON

  Copyright Page

  For my sons,

  Ralph, Grant, and Carson

  In pursuing the bloody threat which runs through this picture of sad realities, the question of how this crime, that for hellish atrocity has no parallel in our history, can be adequately punished often comes up and seeks in vain for an answer.

  —Brevet Major James H. Carleton, Special Report to Congress, May 25, 1859

  Live in tune with the Holy Spirit. Seek the truth always. Be not afraid to learn the truth of anything, for no truth will be revealed to you as such that will be in conflict with God’s kingdom.

  —Mormon patriarchal blessing

  Acclaim for Sally Denton’s AMERICAN MASSACRE

  “It’s a story told almost as often as the Donner Party’s but never better than when Sally Denton tells it.” —Harper’s

  “One of America’s most respected journalists, Sally Denton . . . painstakingly conjures the cult of personality that founder Joseph Smith developed after he published The Book of Mormon and began attracting followers.” —The Plain Dealer

  “Harrowing in its detail, American Massacre is a brilliantly researched and elegantly written work.” —Douglas Brinkley

  “Riveting. . . . Persuasive. . . . Carefully documented.” —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Denton has written a fascinating and thorough account of the tumultuous event and its aftermath. This is a superb piece of scholarship that reads like a novel.” —BookPage

  “From its first harrowing pages to the potentially explosive discovery described in the epilogue, American Massacre is hard to put down, a vivid account of persecution and paranoia, deceit and self-deception, cruelty and cover-up.” —Geoffrey C. Ward

  “A superbly crafted, blood-soaked tale of the largest civilian atrocity to occur on American soil until the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

  “Sally Denton’s heavily documented account of what happened at Mountain Meadows is presented without bias—the signature of a true historian. This monstrous incident may never be more sharply illuminated.” —Evan S. Connell

  “Crisp and compelling. . . . Highly recommended.” — Library Journal “Like the best works of American literature, American Massacre seems to spring from a sense of outrage at gross evil and negligence.” —Las Vegas City Life

  “American Massacre brilliantly captures a forgotten episode in our country’s history. It is a fascinating story.” —Howard Zinn

  “Denton’s extensively researched account of this atrocity is both convincing and chilling.” —Booklist

  “With eloquence and grace, Denton tells the story of a remarkable episode of bloodshed that remains highly controversial. Her book illuminates the disturbing meeting ground between religion and violence in American history.” —T. J. Stiles

  Author’s Note

  In the following pages, all recorded acts, all thoughts or feelings, all states of mind public or private, all conditions of weather and terrain, and any other circumstance, however detailed, are based on documentary evidence—especially the often literarily elegant and graphically descriptive journals and diaries kept so faithfully in that age. In telling a story so violent and bloody, so controversial, and in many ways so alien to modern sensibility, I have taken no liberties with the factual record. Sources for the narrative and all quoted remarks appear in the notes.

  PROLOGUE

  Jacob Hamblin’s Ranch, September 11, 1857

  It is a late summer afternoon and the valley is at its most beautiful. Just weeks away from the first snows, bitter storms that close suddenly over the rim of the Pine Valley range, the days now are soft and mild, alabaster clouds stark against a sapphire sky. On the nearby ridges, native Paiute families are moving unseen on the shadowed slopes facing the valley to harvest the piñon trees already bulging with cones. The quaking aspen on distant peaks are beginning to turn golden.

  Emigrants along this wagon train trail to California describe their surprise and joy coming upon the pasture. At a six-thousand-foot divide between rivers emptying into the Great Basin and the watershed of the Colorado, the floor of the valley is not large, a few hundred yards wide and less than five miles long north to south. But the lush high-country grasses fed by three strong and clear springs create a precious oasis between the craggy plateaus behind and the great desert ahead to the west. Even seasoned travelers are impressed. “The best grazing tract in Utah Territory,” a respected U.S. Army explorer, Brevet Major James H. Carleton, will say of it when he and his company of dragoons ride onto the site twenty months later. For almost everyone who comes here, Mountain Meadows is a haven, a refuge, a place of life and renewal.

  Hard against the foothills of the northern slope, Jacob Hamblin’s summer home is still unfinished from building begun months earlier. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which Hamblin serves as a devout member and obedient agent, has granted him ten square miles of land here, encompassing the whole of Mountain Meadows, and his new stone and adobe ranch house has a commanding view of the valley. Today, standing expectantly in front of the house, his wife, Rachel, and their hired hands have been listening to some commotion from the fields beyond. Now they can see rocking open wagons straining up toward them on the rutted track from the pasture.

  Hundreds of cattle bray in alarm as they are herded north toward Cedar City. Two hundred horses, most of them valuable Kentucky thoroughbreds, rear and shriek at strange hands and the smoke of blazing pyres nearby. Forty prairie schooners and four ornate carriages rumble and creak under new drivers, coming back up out of the valley on the same trail by which they entered it days before. Buzzards caw impatiently as they circle above, and wolves have already begun to gather and howl at the edge of the valley, waiting for the living to clear out. The enclosing ravines and ridges magnify the din. But as two regimental baggage wagons draw nearer the Hamblin ranch, the screaming and moaning of the more than twenty children they carry drown out every other sound. The children, who range in age from nine months to seven years, are all under the age of eight, young enough to be considered “innocent blood” in the Mormon faith. They have had no fresh water and little to eat for five days. The blood of their parents, sisters, and brothers still wet on their skin and clothes, they are hysterical from what they have just seen. Two of them are severely wounded and one will soon die.

  One of the men walking behind their process
ion up to the Hamblin house, a sun-leathered figure named John Doyle Lee who has commanded and joined in the mass murder that has just taken place, will soon decide how this cargo of terrified children will be distributed along with the other loot, brothers and sisters to be separated as chattel among households in the region. Lee seems untroubled by what has happened. That evening, exhausted by his work in the day’s carnage, he stretches out on a grassy mound beside the ranch house and, using his saddle as a pillow, sleeps easily until the next morning.

  The men left in the meadow that night to guard what has not been hauled to Cedar City are not so fortunate. They huddle silently near their campfires while in the darkness beyond, packs of wolves and coyotes yip with delight at their feast of some 140 unburied corpses. Strangely, unnaturally apart from the wild feeding on the floor of the meadow, one wolf stands at the tree line above them, howling incessantly through the night. Some of the men will stay awake until dawn.

  At the Hamblin ranch, the helpless children exert a kind of hold of their own on their guardians. Rachel Hamblin and the others who have taken them in, the murderers of their families who have escorted them there, sympathizers who ride to the ranch to inspect the scene later that evening—all of them will be haunted afterward by the unbroken sobs and wailing, the inconsolable, unforgettable grief of the young survivors. “The children,” one man will remember, “cried nearly all night.”

  The Cairn, August 3, 1999

  The work has only begun and the morning is already heavy with the heat of the day. A neighbor has come down to watch as the backhoe operator powers his shovel into a hard-packed mound of earth. To the shock and dread of them both, the bucket pulls and lurches and then emerges with more than thirty pounds of human skeletal remains. The driver anxiously jumps down, and the two men, wearing baseball caps and blue jeans, circle warily around the bones, discussing what they know has happened, what they feared. Their first inclination, as one of them would later admit, is to dump the load right back in the hole they made in Mountain Meadows and swear each other to secrecy.

  The once magnificent valley not far off Utah Highway 18 between St. George and Cedar City has turned a dozen shades of brown. Scrub pine and sagebrush dot the low hills. The cottonwoods—or alamosas, as the locals call the huge shade trees that once graced the meadow— are gone. The belly-high emerald grass for which the valley is legendary no longer grows. State officials attribute the blight of the land to over-grazing and torrential floods in 1861 and 1873. But natives of the area say that the meadow was never the same after that day in September 1857 when the emigrants were slaughtered there. Word was passed down from generation to generation around the valley. “We were told never to plant a garden in certain locations,” remembers a great-grandson of a pioneer landholder.

  In the late 1980s, a group of John D. Lee’s descendants—including former interior secretary Stewart Udall—began working to clear their ancestor’s name of the murders at Mountain Meadows. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had long denied any official responsibility for the killings, but others, including most descendants of the victims, had remained unconvinced. Simultaneously, descendants of the victims pressed the federal government to erect a suitable memorial at the site. The church, which controlled the land, decided to restore the site, and built a granite wall on Dan Sill Hill overlooking the meadow containing the etched names of the murdered pioneers, which was dedicated in a private ceremony. The inscription on that monument read: “In Memoriam: In the valley below, between September 7 and 11, 1857, a company of more than 120 Arkansas emigrants led by Capt. John T. Baker and Capt. Alexander Fancher was attacked while en route to California. This event is known in history as the Mountain Meadows Massacre.”

  That wall fell into disrepair, and by the late 1990s descendants were once again pushing for a new monument. Their Mountain Meadows Association—what the Salt Lake Tribune described as “an unusual mix of historians and descendants of massacre victims and perpetrators”— had been meeting annually at the meadow on the anniversary of the atrocity. Increasingly concerned by what they called “the deplorable condition of the site,” the group had begun imploring the church to restore and rebuild the primitive rock-cairn memorial at the location. In 1998, LDS officials agreed to a renovation.

  Brigham Young University archaeologists examined the area before sending in earthmoving equipment. “There are a million different stories about how many victims there were and where their bodies are buried,” a Salt Lake City journalist would explain at the time, “and the last thing the church wanted was to dig up any bones and set off a public controversy.”

  During July 1999, in the weeks before necessary excavation for the refurbished monument began, scientists working for the church used every modern device available for a noninvasive study of the locale— aerial photographs, metal detectors, core soil sampling, and ground-penetrating radar. Forensic geologists and geophysicists searched for anomalies in the soil pattern, such as chemical concentrations of calcium that would indicate where burials had taken place. All the while, church leaders had gone to great lengths to keep the planned renovation secret from the public and the press. Then, on August 3, assured that the digging would reveal no surprises—“the archaeological evidence was one hundred percent negative,” one of the scientists had reported to Mormon headquarters in Salt Lake City—the excavation began.

  But this August morning, the two men at the backhoe, members of the association, were looking at the very discovery the church had gone to such lengths to avoid. Knowing that Utah laws now existed for the handling of human remains unearthed anywhere in the state, they called the local sheriff, who drove out to the valley to meet them. “It was a very humbling experience,” Sheriff Kirk Smith said later. “I saw buttons, some pottery and bones of adults and children. But the children—that was what really hit me hard.”

  Smith reported the findings to church leaders in Salt Lake City. After a flurry of meetings and telephone discussions, Utah state archaeologist Kevin Jones reaffirmed to church and law enforcement officials the legal requirement that any unidentified remains uncovered must be forensically examined, and failure to comply would be a felony. Jones issued the necessary permit for the state and church scientists to examine the remains to determine age, sex, race, stature, health condition, and cause of death. Intrigued by the discovery and aware of the political controversy—what one newspaper editor called Utah’s “unique church-state tango”—a team of anthropologists, archaeologists, and other church and state scientists from around Utah began working long hours poring over the remains. “It was a marathon forensic study,” one of them said.

  As the scientists from around the region gathered, news of the discovery leaked to the national press, unleashing a storm of public controversy over the unexpected skeletons and adding new urgency and tension to the scientific inquiry. Delicately removing hundreds of pieces of bone from the opening dug by the backhoe, the scientists worked eighteen hours a day to determine how and when the victims were killed.

  Before the examination could be completed, however, it was stopped. For descendants of both victims and perpetrators, for institutions of church and state implicated in what the bones signify, the issue was as volatile and ominous as it had been nearly a century and a half before. Utah governor Mike Leavitt, himself a direct descendant of someone who participated in the murders, ordered the bones be reburied as quickly as possible; he then directed state officials to find administrative or other means to do just that.

  U.S. Forest Service archaeologist Marian Jacklin, like many others, fought the state’s decision to halt the inquiry. “Those bones could tell the story, and this was their one opportunity,” she said. “I would allow my own mother’s bones to be studied in a respectful manner if it would benefit medicine or history.” Before the probe came to a standstill, the scientists reconstructed eighteen different skulls and reported publicly that the killings were more complicated than previously believed.
r />   But the dead would not be allowed to speak. Once more, when it seemed there might be new answers to old questions, the voices were silenced. But what happened at Mountain Meadows is hardly a secret.

  PART ONE

  THE GATHERING

  CHAPTER ONE

  Palmyra, 1823

  JOSEPH SMITH knelt in a small upstairs bedroom in rural New York, a farm boy beseeching God to forgive him his sins. Suddenly, he would say later, a light as bright as the midday sun grew around him, and a personage draped in exquisite white robes—“a countenance truly like lightning”—addressed the seventeen-year-old by name. This spirit, Moroni, then delivered the celestial decree: “That God had a work for me to do; and that my name should be had for good and evil among all nations, kindreds, and tongues.”

  This “work,” Smith said he was told, involved locating a book inscribed on golden plates that Moroni had buried on a mound in nearby Cumorah fourteen hundred years earlier. Contained in the leaves was an account of the aborigines of America, a lost tribe of Israel, which included “the everlasting Gospel . . . as delivered by the Savior to the ancient inhabitants.” To assist Smith in translating the Egyptian-like symbols on the tablets would be two sacred seer stones, the Urim and Thummim, fastened to a breastplate and deposited with the book.

  Quoting numerous biblical prophecies regarding the Second Coming of Christ to earth—“For behold the day cometh that shall burn as an oven”—Moroni, Smith said, conveyed the gravity of Smith’s mission. Then, the mysterious light enveloped the angel, who “ascended until he entirely disappeared.” Moroni visited Smith two more times that night—for, as Smith biographer Fawn Brodie wrote, “to be authentic, celestial truth must be thrice repeated.” The visitations on that evening of September 21, 1823, were neither the first nor the last of what Smith would describe as God’s direct communication with him. The tall athletic boy claimed he had received his first prophetic directive three years earlier, when, as a mere fourteen-year-old, he accidentally came upon the New Testament passage that would lead him on his religious journey. Written “to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad,” it read: “if any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.”