Their part in each topic
The Mountain Meadows Massacre
Child survivor
Six years old at the massacre, Rebecca Dunlap lost both parents and older siblings and begged not to be separated from her sisters Louisa and the infant Sarah; Jacob Hamblin took the three of them into his house. She returned to the site weeks later and found the dead still unburied and scavenged. Interviewed in 1897, she flatly denied the claim that the children had been kindly treated, saying they were half fed, half clothed and harshly used.
In the timeline
5 events across 1 topics, chronological. Only events this person was actually part of — present at, responsible for, or the subject of — not every event where the name comes up.
The first attack and the siege beginhinge
At dawn the emigrants were fired on in their camp at Mountain Meadows. Several were killed and others wounded; the company circled and dug in, banking earth against the wagon wheels, and held out for days with no access to the spring. Attackers had painted themselves; survivors later said they saw the paint washed off in the creek. James Haslam left Cedar City for Salt Lake City between five and six that evening.
The massacrehinge
William Bateman carried a white flag to the corral. Lee entered and offered terms: give up the weapons, load the wounded into wagons, and walk out under militia escort. The emigrants, out of water and low on ammunition, accepted. The youngest children and wounded went first in two wagons, then the women and children on foot, then the men, each walking beside an armed militiaman. At a prearranged signal the militiamen turned and fired. Roughly 120 people were killed. Seventeen children, all six or under, were spared.
The children at the Hamblin ranch
Klingensmith gathered seventeen small children and carried them to Jacob Hamblin's house at the north end of the valley, where Rachel Hamblin took them in; one one-year-old girl had been shot through the arm. Lee wanted to separate the wounded Dunlap girl from her sisters and Rachel persuaded him not to. The next morning Haight and Dame came to the ranch and, at the massacre site, quarrelled over who had ordered what.
Jacob Forney recovers the seventeen children
Acting on instructions from Washington, Forney collected sixteen surviving children in July 1858 and the seventeenth in April 1859. He reported that none of them had lived among Indians at all: they had been taken from the field the evening of the massacre, driven in a wagon to Hamblin's house by Lee and Daniel Tullis, and distributed the next day among Mormon families at Cedar City, Harmony and Santa Clara.
The children are returned to Arkansas
Congress appropriated funds to locate the survivors and carry them home. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs reported in November 1859 that fifteen of the seventeen had been brought back and restored to relatives in Arkansas, with the remaining two on their way. They reached home shortly before the Civil War began.
Appears alongside
People who share the most dated events with Rebecca Dunlap Evins.
This page is generated from the same topic records as the rest of the database, so a correction made once shows up here too. All key players · How this is built