Under the Banner of Heaven (30 page)

While they awaited the arrival of the federal army, Brigham and other church leaders did their utmost to inflame passions against the Gentiles. The Saints were reminded again and again of the murders of so many of their brethren in Missouri and Illinois, and how their beloved prophet, Joseph Smith, had been shot dead by a godless mob in Hancock County. Rumors were spread that the approaching troops had orders to hang Brigham and exterminate the Mormons altogether. As the sweltering summer of 1857 crept toward fall, observed Juanita Brooks in her courageous, groundbreaking book
The Mountain Meadows Massacre*
speeches became more and more inflammatory, such speeches as have been used by patriots and zealots in many causes to stir the heart to anger and strengthen the arm for battle. From one end of the territory to the other, the people of Utah retold and relived their past sufferings, the mobbings and burnings and final expulsion from Nauvoo. They would never be driven again; they would fight first.

*
The Mountain Meadows Massacre,
published in 1950, is an extraordinary work of history, the seminal portrait of Mormondom under Brigham Young. Will Bagley’s updated treatment of the same subject,
Blood of the Prophets,
published in 2002, must now be considered the definitive work, but as Bagley acknowledges, he owes an immeasurable debt to Juanita Brooks, whom he praises as “one of the West’s best and bravest historians.” In a very discernible sense, every book about the Mormon experience in nineteenth-century Utah published after 1950 is a response to Brooks’s book—just as every post-1946 treatment of the Mormons under Joseph Smith was written in the immense shadow cast by Fawn Brodie’s masterpiece,
No Man Knows My History.

By August, hatred for the Gentiles had been raised to a fever pitch. Militias had been organized and drilled in each of the hundred towns and villages across Utah Territory. Men from distant Mormon outposts in Nevada and California had been summoned back to Utah to help defend the commonwealth. Saints were instructed to supply no provisions whatsoever to the Gentile wagon trains that continued to roll through Utah on their way to California; in a letter distributed across the territory, Mormon bishops were admonished not to let so much as a kernel of grain “be sold to our enemies.” And if the wicked Gentile army somehow managed to march into Deseret, Brigham demanded to know of his Saints, were they prepared to torch their own towns, burn their own crops, “lay waste to and desolate everything before them?” The answer was a unanimous, unequivocal “Yes!”

This was the explosive atmosphere that greeted the Fancher company when their wagon train crested the Wasatch Range and rolled down Emigration Canyon into the Great Salt Lake Valley on August 3, 1857. Noting the intensity of the Mormon hostility, the Arkansans rested only two days in the territorial capital before continuing south and west on the Old Spanish Trail to California.

The Arkansas emigrants, it seems, were marked as victims from the moment they entered Utah. One of them later claimed that as soon as they arrived in Great Salt Lake City, it was obvious to him that the Saints were looking for “an excuse to slaughter the entire train.” One reason the Fancher party may have been singled out was the Arkansans’ conspicuous wealth: it was reputed to be “the richest and best equipped train that ever set out across the continent.” Among the group’s twelve hundred head of stock were prize Texas longhorns and a strikingly beautiful Thoroughbred racehorse that was alone worth $3,000 in the currency of the day—the equivalent of many hundreds of thousands of twenty-first-century dollars. Additionally, it was rumored that the Fancher party was carrying a strongbox filled with thousands of dollars in gold coins. In Utah, where plagues of crickets and an extended drought had left many Saints contemplating starvation, such riches could not have failed to arouse the interest of people who considered it righteous to steal from the godless.

But the wagon train from Arkansas was probably imperiled less by its affluence than by the Saints’ carefully nurtured sense of persecution— a mood that was stoked relentlessly from the pulpit that entire summer. More than ever, the Mormons wanted payback for the assassinations of Joseph and Hyrum Smith. And they had just learned of another, more recent crime to avenge, as well: the slaying of Mormon Apostle Parley Pratt, who had been hunted down like an animal and savagely killed in the same part of Arkansas where the Fancher train originated, just two weeks after the Fanchers embarked for Utah.*

* Parleys Canyon, the valley Interstate 80 now follows between Salt Lake and Park City (the site of a ski resort and celebrated film festival), was named in honor of the martyred apostle, one of the most popular figures in Mormondom after Joseph Smith, and an estimable man by any measure.

The seeds of Pratt’s demise had been planted by an act of charity, when he’d provided succor to a troubled woman from New Orleans named Eleanor McLean. A recent convert to the faith, Eleanor was married to a nasty drunk, a Gentile named Hector McLean, who disapproved of her conversion and regularly beat her. Touched by Pratt’s kindness, Eleanor fell in love with him, abandoned her husband, left her three children in the care of her mother, and then found passage to Salt Lake City working as a cook for a party of Mormon emigrants. Although Eleanor remained legally married to Hector McLean, in Deseret Brigham sealed her to Parley Pratt for time and eternity, making her the twelfth of the apostle’s plural wives. In 1856, while Pratt was in St. Louis doing missionary work, she returned to New Orleans and absconded with her three children, inducing murderous rage in her first husband, who blamed Pratt for wrecking his marriage.

McLean set out in hot pursuit of Pratt and managed to intercept a letter from Pratt to Eleanor in which the apostle described his plans to meet her on the Arkansas River. Armed with this information, and working in cahoots with a federal marshal who hated Mormons, McLean had Pratt arrested and jailed in Van Buren, Arkansas. The non-Mormon magistrate assigned to hear the case quickly saw that the charges against Pratt were without merit. Concerned that the Mormon apostle would be lynched by vigilantes if he remained locked up, the brave magistrate surreptitiously released Pratt, but McLean was notified immediately by jailhouse spies.

The obsessed McLean and two accomplices tracked Pratt down twelve miles outside of Van Buren, where they stabbed him, shot him for good measure, and then left him by the side of the road to slowly bleed to death. Afterward, McLean boasted that killing Parley Pratt was “the best act of my life,” and he was cheered as a hero across western Arkansas for the deed. He was never arrested or charged with any crime.

After her husband’s death, Eleanor Pratt gradually made her way back toward Utah, destitute and dispirited. On the trail near Fort Laramie, she crossed paths with Porter Rockwell, who gave her a ride to Great Salt Lake City as he hurried to inform Brigham, on Pioneer Day, of the invading army. About the time the Fancher wagon train was crossing the border into Utah Territory, Eleanor delivered a detailed account of her husband’s murder to the leaders of the church. Her report heaped blame on the entire state of Arkansas and implored the Saints to avenge Parley’s innocent blood.

On August 3, 1857, the same day the Fancher train arrived in the Great Salt Lake Valley, Apostle George A. Smith (first cousin to Joseph Smith), who held the rank of general in the Nauvoo Legion, rode out of Great Salt Lake City in a carriage bound for southern Utah. Six years earlier, General Smith had led the settlement of this distant corner of the territory.* The Saints who had colonized the region under his direction were known to be the most fanatical in all of Mormondom. The general paused to address the brethren in every town he passed through, inflaming their fanaticism to even greater levels, urging the southern settlements to prepare for holy war.

* St. George, the largest city in southern Utah, was named after George A. Smith.

By late August, Smith was completing the outermost arc of his swing through the south, where he visited Jacob Hamblin, the “Mormon Leatherstocking,” a gifted missionary to the Lamanites who had built a summer cabin just a few miles north of the Mountain Meadow. Renowned for his rapport with the Indians, Hamblin was especially respected by the region’s Paiutes, who treated him as a father figure. Smith delivered a letter to Hamblin from Brigham Young, dated August 4, in which the missionary was told that the Indians “must learn that they have either got to help us or the United States will kill us both.”

Around the same time General Smith met with Hamblin, he also had a long powwow with hundreds of Paiutes on the Santa Clara River, some twenty miles from the Mountain Meadow, employing John D. Lee as his interpreter. According to Lee, Smith told the Indians “that the Americans had a large army just east of the mountains, and intended to kill all of the Mormons and Indians in Utah Territory; that the Indians must get ready and keep ready for war against all of the Americans, and… obey what the Mormons told them to do—that this was the will of the Great Spirit.”

Afterward, as the Mormons were riding away from the powwow, Smith told Lee, “Those are savage looking fellows. I think they would make it lively for an emigrant train if one should come this way.” If such a wagon train did arrive in the area, Smith then asked Lee, did he think the Saints of the southern settlements would join the Indians in attacking it? “Would the brethren pitch into them and give them a good drubbing?”

Lee gave the question careful thought, then answered, “I really believe that any train of emigrants that may come though here will be attacked, and probably all be destroyed.” This reply, Lee said, “served to cheer up the General very much; he was greatly delighted, and said, ”I am glad to hear so good an account of our people. God will bless them for all that they do to build up His Kingdom in the last days.“ ”

“I have always believed, since that day,” Lee wrote of this conversation twenty years after the event, “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 he was sent for that purpose by the direct command of Brigham Young.”

Shortly after this, Smith hurried back to Great Salt Lake City with Hamblin and about a dozen Paiute leaders in order to meet with Brigham. On the night of August 25, as they were on their way north, Smith, Hamblin, and the Indians actually camped within shouting distance of the southbound Fancher wagon train, and three of the Arkansans walked over to visit with the Mormons. In reply to the emigrants’ query about where they might rest and graze their massive herd of livestock before striking out across the Mojave Desert, Hamblin recommended a lovely little valley near his cabin called the Mountain Meadow.

The notorious conference between Brigham Young and the Paiute chiefs took place in Great Salt Lake City on the evening of September 1. It lasted for about an hour, with Brigham’s son-in-law Dimick B. Huntington acting as interpreter. According to Huntington’s notes of the encounter, Brigham explicitly “gave” the Indians all the emigrant cattle on the Old Spanish Trail—that is, the Fancher’s prize herd, which the Paiutes had covetously gazed upon when they’d camped next to the emigrants exactly one week earlier. The prophet’s message to the Indian leaders was clear enough: he wanted them to attack the Fancher wagon train. The morning after the meeting, the Paiutes left the City of the Saints at first light and started riding hard for southern Utah.

The Arkansans passed through Cedar City, thirty-five miles north of the Mountain Meadow, on September 4, where they asked to buy food from the Saints but were pointedly refused. By this time Cedar City was “a craze of fanaticism,” one Mormon resident recalled, where numerous false rumors had been circulating about the Fancher train. It was said, for example, that some of the emigrants had directly participated in the murder of Mormons at Haun’s Mill, Missouri, in 1838, and that one of the Arkansans had bragged that he was among the mob that had killed Joseph Smith. As far as the Saints of southern Utah were concerned, the emigrants were the personification of evil.

According to John D. Lee, on or around the day the Arkansans arrived in Cedar City, he received orders to attack the emigrants from Lieutenant Colonel Isaac Haight, the mayor of Cedar City, president of the LDS stake, and commander of the local battalion of the Nauvoo Legion. Lee was told to gather the Indian chiefs who had met with Brigham three days earlier, arm their warriors, and lead them in an ambush on the Fancher train in the mountains south of Cedar City; Lee reported that Haight had emphasized that this directive was “the will of all in authority.”

On September 5, Lee headed for the Mountain Meadow with a large contingent of Saints and Paiutes. They arrived in the hills above the meadow on September 6, where they hid among the stunted trees and watched the Arkansans make camp near the spring below, and the Saints painted their faces so they would look like Indians. The next morning before dawn, while the emigrants were sleeping, these painted Mormons and the genuine Paiutes stole toward the Fancher camp and took cover behind rocks and brush. As the sun crept over the serrated, ten-thousand-foot crest of the Pine Valley Mountains, the unsuspecting Arkansans gathered to cook breakfast. Lee’s snipers carefully aimed their muskets to inflict maximum casualties, then fired.

Lee had assumed the Arkansans would quickly succumb to the surprise assault. The Saints had been so confident of a quick victory, in fact, that they had promised, in Lee’s words, that the Paiutes “could kill the emigrants without danger to themselves.” But the Fancher party was disciplined, very brave, and well armed, and their ranks included many expert riflemen. After the initial volley of gunfire, the Arkansans quickly circled their wagons, dug into bunkers, and then immediately initiated a counterassault, utterly confounding their attackers.

At least one Paiute brave was killed that morning, two Paiute chiefs were mortally wounded, and the Indian and Mormon forces were decisively repulsed, dealing a completely unanticipated blow to their resolve. As they regrouped at a safe distance, the Indians expressed their displeasure with the bungled operation in no uncertain terms: they threatened angrily to go home and leave the Mormons to their own devices. “Now we knew the Indians could not do the work,” Lee was forced to acknowledge after their surprise attack failed, “and we were in a sad fix.” After ordering his men to keep the emigrants pinned down, Lee rode off to summon Mormon reinforcements, and to seek the counsel of his superiors.