There are still a lot of myths surrounding the Massacre at Mountain Meadows. How many were killed? Historian Barbara Jones Brown says it could be a few dozen lower than original estimates.
Barbara: You know what’s really interesting about that number is that number comes from Jacob Hamblin who buries the bodies later….He tells federal army officials, federal officials, that it was 120, and then they go with that number. What’s interesting is the earliest sources, the earliest body counts, put the number at 95, 96, which surprised me when started getting into those earliest primary sources because I said, “No, it’s supposed to be 120.” So then I just thought, “Well, where does this number come from?” I looked at all of the sources and they are what I just described to you. So the earliest body counts say about 95 or 96. The number of people who’ve been identified in the train is about the same. It’s about that.
GT: So, it might not be as bad as we thought.
Barbara: It is as bad as we thought. Even if one person, a massacre [is bad.]
GT: That’s true.
Barbara: Yeah. I mean 95, 120–either way. It still is as bad as we thought.
GT: It’s terrible.
Were children under age 8 spared due to Mormon theology? Barbara Jones Brown will give us some of the latest information surrounding the massacre, and it likely is different than you’ve heard.
GT: The other question I wanted to ask, so you said that the oldest child that lived was six? I know that there’s some Mormon theology. Why six years old?
Barbara: So the non-Mormon attorneys that investigated and talk about it later. It says, “Because they were too young to give evidence in court.”
GT: Oh really? Oh, I always thought it was because children under eight are not capable of sin.
Barbara: That theory came much later.
GT: Oh, okay.
Barbara: It’s a modern theory. It doesn’t hold up because babies were killed. Some babies were killed in the massacre and seven year-olds were killed. Again, the oldest survivor was six. So, what all of the perpetrators said was they were too young to tell tales. Again, there’s a federal district judge named John Cradlebaugh, and he says they were spared because they were too young to give evidence in court.
GT: Okay. So it was a legal issue. It wasn’t a theological issue.
Barbara: That’s what the historical sources say. Yeah. I can’t find a single historical source that says, “Oh, we’re not going to kill them because they’re not eight yet.” There’s not a single historical source that says that.
What precipitated the Mountain Meadows Massacre? It turns out that Mormons were stealing cattle from California-bound immigrants! Was this part of Brigham Young’s strategy to send a message to Washington that immigration was unsafe? It seems that Brigham Young was encouraging Mormons (and Indians) to steal immigrant cattle! Barbara tells about another raid on immigrant cattle at the same time the Mountain Meadows Massacre happened.
Barbara: We can’t say for sure who did it. We don’t know. That’s all we have is this account from those immigrants on the northern route. But it takes place on September 8, 1857. They said, “It was clear they did not intend to kill anyone. It was clear they just intended to run off our cattle.” That’s exactly what happens with this other train. They have their cattle run off. They’re strung out on the road and it’s in the dark at night-time and they’re in a ravine, a large wash. The Moapa Indians, led by five or six Mormon interpreters run off their cattle, and then the train goes on and makes it to California, to San Bernardino. That happens right after this other one. No one is killed.
GT: Mormons have a history of cattle rustling it sounds like.
Barbara: Well again, this was Brigham Young’s strategy. His war strategy was to try and convince the federal government that if the government removed him as Indian Superintendent and Governor of Utah and ran the Mormons out, this is what would happen, that immigration would be no longer safe.
GT: This is kind of his strategy, and so he’s making it not safe, essentially.
Barbara: Yeah. He’s encouraging this cattle raiding. In all of the sources in which the cattle raiding is encouraged, you don’t see any evidence of any killing to be encouraged at all, just to have the cattle raided.
GT: So why do you think the killing happened in Mountain Meadows?
Is this simply the actions of a small group of men that went bad? Were you aware the Brigham Young encouraged Mormons to steal cattle from immigrants? What are your thoughts?
Wheat & Tares 
In my travels a year ago I came across the site of the MMM. A beautiful location for such a sordid history.
Encouraging cattle rustling is a surprise. If anything caused major problems in those times they included water, fences, mine claims, and animal issues whether cattle or otherwise. Oh, don’t forget “religion” here and there.
If BY did encourage rustling, then whether he was directly involved in the MMM or not, he is culpable to a point. Kind of like the Church member that led the Donner party astray.
What are my thoughts? Let’s raise the dead and ask them again, not that they were willing to say much when they were alive.
My virtue signal is at half-mast. I might not be as virtuous as I imagine myself to be.
I hadn’t heard about the cattle rustling before. That’s interesting, but not out of character for BY who was clearly trying to establish full dominance of the west, a theocracy / dictatorship. It turns him into a real Tony Soprano, though. “You want protection? I can give you protection if you put me in charge, but if you don’t want my protection, I can’t be held responsible should an accident occur that might harm your business.”
The body count is impossible to determine with any more reliability than we have now. If we went out there and dug up the entire area (which would cost a bundle) we might find more victims. We might not find anything else this late in the game.
I seem to recall that in one of the books, some of the perpetrators reportedly knew some of the victims. A few accidental encounters back in the 1830’s might be possible when members of both groups lived not far apart.. Otherwise, this raises the prospect that some Utah apostates joined the fated wagon train, which was large and well-armed, as a safe way to escape from the area. If so, the number of victims could go several dozen higher and “blood atoning” traitorous apostates raises another twisted motive for the massacre.
*****
As for BY culpability, does failing to investigate the massacre as the governor of the state count? If the Indians were involved he was also the territorial Indian agent and John Lee also was on a federal salary as an Indian agent. Does 20 years of obstructing justice and lying about it count? For me the case is clear that BY was an accessory, after the fact.
BY came closer to “swinging from a rope” over this incident than most of us realize. The strongest evidence that BY did NOT plan the massacre is the “Pony” Haslam letter he sent back down to Stake President Haight in answer to a letter Haight sent to him. After some windy preaching the crux of the BY letter is as follows:
“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.
Case closed?
Not quite. This letter is a response to another letter sent to BY by Haight by way of the same messenger. This Haight letter was preserved into the 20th century and destroyed because “it made the church look bad.” What could it possibly have said to flip the message of the letter above? Finding a copy of its contents could blow the lid off the innocence of BY. The other thing to remember is that the Mormons have blamed the massacre on the Indians (BY does it in the letter above); at first entirely on them and gradually less and less so as more evidence incriminates us over the decades. Now there is no convincing evidence the Indians did anything except watch and steal cattle. The child survivors reported seeing Mormons dressed as Indians doing the killing.
So who were these “Indians” referred to BY? One way to put the pieces together is to presume there were two separate groups of Mormons involved. 1. Haight and the local brethern in southern Utah. 2. Lee and the Mormon “Indians,” his goon squad of rowdy young men. We do know that Lee’s group attacked the Arkansas emigrants early on a Monday morning and botched it up pretty bad. For the rest of the week they attempted to besiege them. On Friday Haight and the local brethern went up there, tricked the emigrants into surrender, and killed every last one of them except some of the children.
What if the Pony Haslam letter was a coded message telling Haight to hold back his group and let Lee’s Mormon “Indians” do the dirty work? I realize this line of thinking assumes the conclusion and works backwards from it. Haight’s lost letter might have made this supposition clear and convincing.
***
For me the most mysterious of the myths of MMM is the escape of John D Lee from the firing squad. Does our guest historian have any logs or water to put on this fire?
I first encountered this myth from a girl I knew who was raised in a polygamous family in the 1950-60’s.She claimed there are recorded eye-witness accounts of many people meeting Lee in hiding following the execution and it is commonly accepted among her people. A picture of Lee in his coffin immediately after the execution by 12 Mormon boys with .50 caliber buffalo guns does not show any blood or holes in his clothing or on the coffin. BY promised Lee not a hair of his head would be harmed if he surrendered and he delivered on his promise- in the first trial.
That is only the beginning….
“Were you aware the Brigham Young encouraged Mormons to steal cattle from immigrants? What are your thoughts?”
No and apparently John Turner wasn’t either because he didn’t include it in Pioneer Prophet.
What’s the primary source on that?
Perhaps running off cattle as a form of harassment is different from stealing cattle?
Let’s be careful with our choice of words.
Let’s be careful with the facts. The cattle were discovered in the hands of Mormons and Bishop Klingensmith was found to have embezzled tithing. These are facts ji, and are in Richard Turley’s book on mmm.
Know history before making unsubstantiated statements.
And where’s the source that BY encouraged it?
To be honest, I didn’t know that about Brigham directing people to steal cattle when I interviewed Barbara, but she told me it was in Richard Turley’s first book “Massacre at Mountain Meadows.” So, I just looked it up, and Turley mentioned Will Bagley too referenced it too. Next week I will be posting my Turley interview and he mentioned it like it was common knowledge. From Page 146 of Turley’s book:
Here are the endnotes.
105. Huntington, [Aug. 31], 1857
106. Ibid., Sept 1, 1857
107. Bagley, 112-14
108. Ibid, 379, See also Brooks2, 41-42. Bagley also places into his narrative the report that James Gemmell, a frontier adventurer and Mormon convert, was in Young’s office on Sept. 1 and overheard Hamblin tell Young of the misconduct of members of the Arkansas party, when he had met at Corn Creek while travelling with George A. Smith. “If he (Brigham) were in command of the Legion he would wipe them out,” Young supposedly said. See Bagley, 285. To give credibility to the incident, Bagley suggests Gemmell may have tried to blackmail Young and was forced to flee from Utah in order to save his life. The details in the sources he gives, however, are contradictory, and some appear to be anachronistic. See Richard E. Turley Jr., “Parley P. Pratt and the Mountain Meadows Massacre,” symposium paper, Religion & Reaction: The Life, Times, and Legacy of Parley P. Pratt, Fort Smith, AR, Apr. 21, 2007.
Rick B, Does Turley’s endnote actually use the names “Gunnell” and “Gemmell” or is one or more of those an error here? It seems the family uses the name “Gammell”. Google, e.g., “James Gammell Chronicles.”
Sorry that was a typo. It should read James Gemmell. I will see if I can fix the comment.