1856–1877 (with an afterlife to the present)

The Mountain Meadows Massacre

The 1857 killing of an Arkansas wagon company by a Utah militia

12 people, ordered by how much of this topic turns on them. Each note describes the person's part in this topic, not a biography — the same person carries a different note on another topic.

BY

Brigham Young

1801–1877

Church president, territorial governor

Young was simultaneously president of the Church, governor of Utah Territory and superintendent of Indian affairs when the massacre occurred. His Reformation sermons and his war-footing instructions of summer 1857 shaped the atmosphere in southern Utah; his 10 September 1857 reply to Isaac Haight told the settlers to let the emigrants 'go in peace,' but it arrived two days after the killings. He blamed Indians publicly for years afterward, and in his 1875 deposition denied any role in planning or in the disposal of the emigrants' property.

Wikipedia Image: Public domain

JL

John Doyle Lee

1812–1877

Militia major, Indian farmer

Lee recruited Paiutes for the initial attack, carried the white flag into the emigrant corral on 11 September and helped direct the killing. He reported the affair to Brigham Young as an Indian action. Excommunicated in 1870, tried twice, convicted in 1876 and shot at the massacre site on 23 March 1877, he was the only person punished. His posthumous confession, published as Mormonism Unveiled, insists he was sacrificed to shield others.

Wikipedia Image: Public domain

IH

Isaac C. Haight

1813–1886

Cedar City stake president, militia major

Haight held ecclesiastical, civil and military authority in Cedar City at once. He asked William Dame's permission to call out the militia against the emigrants and was refused; he then arranged with Lee to have Paiutes attack them, and after the siege went to Parowan to press Dame for authorization to kill the survivors. Walker, Turley and Leonard identify him as the primary architect. He was excommunicated in 1870, rebaptized in 1874, and lived much of the rest of his life as a fugitive.

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WD

William H. Dame

1819–1884

Parowan stake president, district militia commander

As the senior militia officer in the Iron Military District, Dame first refused Haight's request to move against the company, writing that 'words are but wind.' After a private conversation with Haight on 9 September he reversed his council's decision and authorized an attack. He was later indicted but never brought to trial, and the record of what he authorized and when remains one of the sharpest points of dispute.

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PK

Philip Klingensmith

1815–c.1881

Cedar City bishop, participant

Klingensmith ran the Cedar City mill that charged the emigrants an exorbitant price, carried orders for the settlements west of Cedar City, took part in the massacre and gathered up the seventeen surviving children afterward. He later left Utah, turned state's evidence and testified against Lee at the 1875 trial, describing a meeting with Brigham Young about the disposal of the emigrants' property.

Wikipedia Image: Public domain

GS

George A. Smith

1817–1875

Apostle, southern Utah emissary

Smith toured the southern settlements from early August 1857 carrying Brigham Young's war instructions — save the grain, sell nothing to passing emigrants, put the militia on alert. By his own account in the Journal of Discourses his preaching 'partook of the military more than the religious.' Critics read that tour as the transmission of an order; the Church's account reads it as instructions that contributed to a climate of hostility without authorizing the crime.

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JH

James Holt Haslam

1825–1913

Express rider

Haslam carried Haight's dispatch from Cedar City to Salt Lake City and Brigham Young's reply back again. He testified at Lee's second trial that he left Cedar City on 7 September between five and six in the evening, reached Salt Lake City Thursday at eleven in the morning, started back at three, and reached Cedar City about eleven on Sunday morning — two days after the massacre. The timing of his ride is the single most argued-over fact in the case.

AF

Alexander Fancher

1812–1857

Wagon-train captain, victim

Fancher had crossed to California before and was co-leader of the 1857 company that took his name. He knew the southern route from a time when its grazing was open and its settlements few. He was killed with his wife on 11 September; two of his children, Christopher Carson Fancher and Triphenia, were among the seventeen spared.

Wikipedia

JB

John T. 'Jack' Baker

c.1805–1857

Wagon-train co-leader, victim

Baker led the Arkansas contingent that gave the company the other half of its name. His body was one of the few later recognizable at the site: his granddaughter Rebecca Dunlap identified him weeks afterward by his long beard, lying unburied. His widow Mary Baker took charge of three orphaned grandchildren when they were returned to Arkansas in 1859.

RE

Rebecca Dunlap Evins

1851–1930

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.

JF

Jacob Forney

1798–1872

Superintendent of Indian Affairs, Utah

Forney was ordered in 1858 to recover the surviving children and reported in 1859 that sixteen had been collected the previous July and a seventeenth the following April. He established that none of them had ever lived among the Indians — they had been carried from the field to Jacob Hamblin's house the same evening and parcelled out among Mormon families. He began his inquiry expecting to exonerate the whites and concluded instead that whites had directed the affair.

Image: Public domain

JB

Juanita Brooks

1898–1989

Historian, descendant of a participant

Brooks, herself descended from a southern Utah participant, published The Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1950 against the wishes of local church leadership and made it impossible to keep blaming the Paiutes. Her verdict — that Brigham Young and George A. Smith did not order the massacre but preached the sermons and built the conditions that made it possible, and that Young was an accessory after the fact — is still the axis around which the argument turns. Turley and Brown dedicated their 2023 volume to her.

Wikipedia