Under the Banner of Heaven (31 page)

Down in Cedar City, Isaac Haight had heard by Monday afternoon that things were not going as planned on the Mountain Meadow. Haight was itching to send a deputation of Mormon militiamen up to the high country to finish off the emigrants, but vocal members of the community argued that such a grave action shouldn’t be undertaken until they’d received the explicit endorsement of Brigham Young. That evening Haight dispatched a rider on a fast horse to Salt Lake City, bearing a letter to the prophet explaining that Lee had the Fancher party surrounded at the Mountain Meadow and asking what should be done with them.

In the meantime, the Mormons and their Paiute mercenaries kept pressure on the Arkansans by harassing them with sniper fire, preventing them from collecting water from the nearby spring. By now, having glimpsed numerous fair-skinned men among those shooting at them, the emigrants had probably deduced that their attackers included Mormons as well as Paiutes. Hungry and tormented by thirst, the Gentiles knew that their situation was growing increasingly grim. Their ammunition was running out. They could neither bury their dead nor provide much comfort to the many who were seriously wounded. Most of their horses and cattle had been driven off by the attackers, but some sixty animals had been killed in the crossfire; the carcasses of these beasts were now putrefying around the Arkansans in the late-summer sun, creating a sickening stench.

On the night of September 10, two bold emigrants made a desperate attempt to sneak through the siege lines and summon help. One of them, a nineteen-year-old artist from Tennessee named William Aden, who had joined the Fancher train in Provo just a few weeks earlier, somehow made it out of the meadows and had ridden to within several miles of Cedar City when he came upon a group of men camped beside a spring. Believing them to be another party of Gentile emigrants en route to California, Aden rushed into their midst and blurted out a plea for help. The men, however, were Mormons, not emigrants, and upon hearing young Aden’s appeal they drew their weapons and shot him dead.

Isaac Haight’s messenger had arrived in Salt Lake City early that same morning, and promptly turned around to carry Brigham’s reply back to southern Utah. The prophet’s instructions were that the Saints “must not meddle” with the Fancher party. “The Indians,” Brigham wrote, “we expect will do as they please but you should try and preserve good feelings with them.” This letter has been intensely pondered by scholars, yet historians remain sharply divided about what Brigham really intended by it.* Whatever its meaning, the missive didn’t arrive in Haight’s hands until September 13, two days after the Mountain Meadows massacre had been carried out.

* The actual text of Brigham’s letter remains in some doubt, because the original has disappeared (along with almost every other official document pertaining to the Mountain Meadows massacre). The excerpt quoted above is from a purported draft of the letter that didn’t surface until 1884, when an LDS functionary came upon it in the pages of a “Church Letter Book.”

In the absence of word from Brigham Young, Isaac Haight sought guidance from his immediate superior, Colonel William Dame, the thirty-eight-year-old military commander of all the southern Utah militias. Haight rode twenty miles north to the settlement of Parowan, where he woke Dame in the middle of the night to ask him what to do about the besieged Fancher train. Colonel Dame impatiently insisted that Haight needed no further word from Great Salt Lake to take decisive action. “My orders,” Dame declared, “are that the emigrants
must
be done away with.” This directive was conveyed to John D. Lee at the Mountain Meadow by Major John Higbee of the Nauvoo Legion, a thirty-year-old zealot who arrived on the scene with more than fifty elite militiamen from Cedar City.

By the night of September 10, most of the Paiutes had ridden away from the Mountain Meadow in disgust, leaving the Saints with perhaps as few as forty Indian mercenaries. Fearing that they no longer had sufficient manpower to overwhelm the emigrants’ position by force, the Saints decided to end the standoff by means of subterfuge.

The next morning, September 11, Lee sent an English convert named William Bateman toward the encircled emigrants under a white flag; Bateman was instructed to tell them that the Mormons were there to intercede with the Indians on the Arkansans’ behalf, and would escort them to safety past the hostile Paiutes if the emigrants would hand over their weapons. After Bateman indicated that the emigrants were willing to parley, Lee approached the emigrant stronghold to “arrange the terms of the surrender.”

“As I entered the fortifications,” Lee reported, “men, women, and children gathered around me in wild consternation. Some felt that the time of their happy deliverance had come, while others, though in deep distress, and all in tears, looked upon me with doubt, distrust and terror.” It took Lee at least two hours to win the emigrants’ confidence, but eventually, seeing no alternative, they agreed to his terms and gave up their weapons.

The youngest children and several of the wounded were placed in a wagon and driven away. They were followed on foot by the emigrant women and the older children. A few hundred yards behind this group, the men of the Fancher party were led away in single file, with each emigrant escorted closely by a Mormon guard. After approximately thirty minutes, Major Higbee, bringing up the rear on horseback, discharged a firearm to get the Saints’ attention. “Halt!” he ordered according to a prearranged plan. “Do your duty!”

At this infamous command, each of the Mormons immediately fired a bullet point-blank into the head of the captive under his purview. Most of the emigrant men died instantly, but one of the Saints recalled seeing an apostate Mormon—one of the “backouts” who had joined the Fancher train in Utah and was a close acquaintance of the Mormon executioners— lying wounded on the ground, pleading to Higbee for his life. According to a Mormon witness, Higbee told the apostate, “You would have done the same to me, or just as bad,” and then slit the apostate’s throat.

Another Saint who participated in the massacre later reported that while the men from the Fancher party were being executed by their Mormon escorts, the women and children were attacked “by the Indians, among whom were Mormons in disguise.” Painted Saints and Paiutes rushed upon these victims with guns and knives and began shooting and bludgeoning them to death and slashing their throats. An Arkansan named Nancy Huff, who was four years old at the time, later reported, “I saw my mother shot in the forehead and fall dead. The women and children screamed and clung together. Some of the young women begged the assassins after they had run out on us not to kill them, but they had no mercy on them, clubbing their guns and beating out their brains.” According to Nephi Johnson, a Mormon who later confessed his own culpability to historian Juanita Brooks, “White men did most of the killing.”

The slaughter was over in a matter of minutes, leaving an estimated 120 emigrants dead. Approximately fifty of the victims were men, twenty were women, and fifty were children or adolescents. Out of the entire Fancher wagon train, only seventeen lives were spared—all of them children no more than five years old, deemed too young to remember enough to bear witness against the Saints.*

* Those children not killed were taken to Mormon homes to be raised as Latter-day Saints; some were placed in the households of the very men who had murdered their parents and siblings. In 1859 an agent of the federal government managed to find all seventeen survivors and return them to their Arkansas kin, but before handing the kids over, their Mormon keepers had the audacity to demand thousands of dollars in payment for feeding and schooling the youngsters while they were in the Saints’ care.

When quiet settled over the killing field, the Mormons looted the corpses for valuables; after the Saints had gathered what they wanted, they allowed the Indians to take the rest. The dead emigrants were soon stripped of everything, including every shred of clothing they’d been wearing. Very little of the plunder went to the Indians, however. According to historian Will Bagley, “The Paiutes only got about twenty horses and mules while the Mormon officers claimed the best animals for themselves, a measure of contempt for their allies… In the desperately poor country of southern Utah, the spoils of the slaughtered immigrants became a source of envy and conflict. Some of his neighbors felt that Lee had swindled them out of their share.”

Colonel William Dame and Lieutenant Colonel Isaac Haight— whose orders had prompted the slaughter—arrived at the Mountain Meadow from Cedar City on the morning after the killing had ended. It was the forty-fifth birthday of John D. Lee, who escorted his commanding officers to the site of the butchery, where they were confronted with the naked, horribly brutalized bodies of men, women, and children scattered across the landscape in twisted poses of rigor mortis. “Colonel Dame was silent for some time,” recalled Lee. “He looked all over the field, and was quite pale, and looked uneasy and frightened. I thought then that he was just finding out the difference between giving and executing orders for wholesale killing.”

Dame expressed shock at the carnage and tried to absolve himself of any responsibility for it. This infuriated Haight. “You ordered it done,” he spat back at his superior officer. “Nothing has been done except by your orders, and it is too late in the day for you to order things done and then go back on it.”

Confronted with this irrefutable statement of fact, Dame lost his composure and appeared as though he might burst into tears. According to Lee, Dame vehemently protested, “I did not think there were so many of them, or I would not have had anything to do with it.”

Losing his patience with Dame’s lack of spine, Haight turned to Lee and said, “Colonel Dame counseled and ordered me to do this thing, and now he wants to back out, and go back on me, and by God he shall not do it… I will blow him to hell before he shall lay it all on me. He has got to stand up to what he did, like a man. He knows he ordered it done, and I dare him to deny it.”

Having no adequate answer for this charge, Dame fell silent and turned his attention to supervising the disposal of the corpses. The Mormon militiamen, Lee reported, “piled the dead bodies up in heaps, in little gullies, and threw dirt over them. The bodies were only lightly covered, for the ground was hard, and the brethren did not have sufficient tools to dig with.” Within days, wolves and other scavengers had unearthed the dead emigrants from the shallow graves and scattered their remains across the meadow.

Upon completion of this halfhearted, hastily undertaken burial, according to Lee, the Saints gathered in a circle at the site of the mass murder to offer “thanks to God for delivering our enemies into our hands.” Then the overseers of the massacre reiterated “the necessity of always saying the Indians did it alone, and that the Mormons had nothing to do with it… It was voted unanimously that any man who should divulge the secret, or tell who was present, or do anything that would lead to a discovery of the truth, should suffer death.”

NINETEEN

SCAPEGOATS

Brigham Young saved his Church when Joseph was lynched, brought it to the Missouri, took it to Great Salt Lake, gave it safety, wealth and power. The state of Utah is his monument… He was a great man, great in whatever was needful for Israel. Great in understanding, in will and fortitude and resolution, in finding the means which others could not find. Great in remembering also, in the command and management of men, the opposition and hostility and hate. A great leader, a great diplomat, a great administrator, and at need a great liar and a great scoundrel.

Bernard DeVoto, The Year of Decision

“Look! Over here!” shouts six-year-old Randy Bateman. A pint-size tornado with a pertinacious blond cowlick, he kneels in the dirt to prop up a rock with one tiny hand while gesticulating furiously with the other. “Come see!” he yells again, with even greater urgency. “A scorpion hole!” A minute later he’s deftly plucked the sinister-looking arachnid from its lair and placed it in an empty Gatorade bottle. Then he scurries up the trail in a burst of dust to show off the prize to his father, DeLoy Bateman, the Colorado City teacher who has apostatized from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. As the crow flies, Colorado City is less than fifty miles from the site of the Mountain Meadows massacre. William Bateman—the Mormon who approached the Fancher party under a white flag at the Mountain Meadow in order to arrange the false truce that persuaded the emigrants to surrender their weapons and walk into John D. Lee’s homicidal trap—was DeLoy Bate-man’s great-great-great-uncle.*

* Several Saints who took an active part in the 1857 slaughter were the forebears of modern Americans of some renown. Current Utah governor Mike Leavitt, for example, is a direct descendent of massacre participant Dudley Leavitt, as was Juanita Leavitt Brooks, the author
of The Mountain Meadows Massacre.
And among the descendants of John D. Lee are members of the Udall political dynasty: Stewart Udall was a three-term congressman from Arizona and served as U.S. secretary of the interior under President Kennedy; his younger brother, the late Morris Udall, succeeded Stewart to serve fifteen terms in the U.S. House of Representatives; and Morris’s son Mark Udall currently represents Colorado’s Second District in the U.S. House.

Although DeLoy isn’t proud of his ancestor’s notorious role in the massacre, he believes it shouldn’t be swept under the rug. To the contrary, he’d like to know all there is to know about it. “I’ve always been a curious person,” he says. “Even when I was still in the religion. Uncle Rulon has always restricted what the people in Colorado City can learn, and what books they can read, but that actually kind of runs against the grain of what Joseph Smith originally taught. In
D&C
90,I think it is, there’s a revelation from Joseph which says something like, ”Study and learn, and become acquainted with all good books.“ In any case, I’ve always been interested in learning as much as I can about everything I can, and I’ve tried to instill that same love of learning in my kids.”