Under the Banner of Heaven (33 page)

* The nine-man expedition also included a melancholic Civil War veteran named George Bradley and twenty-year-old Andy Hall; both these men maintained good relations with the two disputatious factions. The expedition had embarked from Green River with a tenth member, as well, Englishman Frank Goodman, but after Goodman’s boat capsized and he nearly drowned in Disaster Falls, he told Powell on July 5 that he “had seen danger enough” and left the expedition—well before the group entered the Grand Canyon.

On August 28, after Dunn and the Howland brothers watched their companions crash through Separation Rapids and then disappear around a bend in the river, the three deserters began the arduous climb out of the Grand Canyon, carrying two rifles and a shotgun, a duplicate set of expedition papers, and a silver watch Jack Sumner had asked them to deliver to his sister in case he drowned. Dunn and the Howlands ascended a steep gulch (later named Separation Canyon) to reach the north rim, then set out across the Shivwits Plateau. Thirty arduous miles from the river’s edge, they climbed the gentle slopes of an extinct volcano, now called Mount Dellenbaugh, in order to
get
their bearings and plot a course across the harsh country that stretched ahead of them. On Dellenbaugh’s 6,990-foot summit, Dunn scratched his name on the face of a boulder, and then the trio presumably headed north for the Mormon settlements. Nobody knows for sure, though, because Dunn and the Howlands never reappeared, **

** Evidence corroborating the authenticity of Dunn’s inscription atop Mount Dellenbaugh was discovered in 1995: a young man from Cedar City named Wynn Isom was looking for arrowheads on the eastern slope of Mount Dellenbaugh, well off the trail, when he caught sight of “a little glint” on the ground, perhaps thirty feet away. It turned out to be a thin piece of badly tarnished brass, two inches long and just over an inch wide, with the name William Dunn engraved on its face in cursive script. From indentations at the plate’s corners, it appears to have been riveted to a gun stock, perhaps, or some leather article that belonged to Dunn.

After Powell and the rest of his team had made it through Separation Rapids without flipping their boats, they pulled ashore, “waited about two hours, fired guns, and motioned for… the Howlands and Dunn to come on,” Jack Sumner recalled, “as they could have done by climbing along the cliffs. The last thing we saw of them they were standing on the reef, motioning us to go on, which we finally did.”

Two days after floating away from the three deserters, Powell’s group arrived safely at the confluence of the Virgin River, where they encountered a group of Mormons netting fish. The Saints generously fed the emaciated explorers, then escorted Powell over the Beaver Dam Mountains to St. George, the principal city of southern Utah. On September 8, as Powell was traveling via carriage from St. George to Great Salt Lake City, a story appeared in the
Deseret News,
the Mormon newspaper, under the headline “Three of the Powell Expedition Killed by Indians”:

We have received a dispatch through the Deseret Telegraph Line from St. George of the murder of three of the men belonging to the Powell Exploration Expedition. It appears according to the report of a friendly Indian that about five days ago the men were found by peaceable Indians of the Shebett [Shivwit} tribe very hungry. The Shebetts fed them, and put them on the trail leading to Washington in Southern Utah. On their journey they saw a squaw gathering seed, and shot her; whereupon they were followed by three Shebetts and killed. A friendly Indian has been sent out to secure their papers. The telegraph does not give us the names of the men.

When Powell heard the news, he refused to believe that Dunn and the Howlands had been killed by the Shivwits—a retiring, relatively small band of Indians belonging to the Southern Paiute nation. His skepticism was based largely on reports that the woman, who had allegedly been raped before she was murdered, was alone and unarmed. “I have known O. G. Howland personally for many years,” Powell explained, “and I have no hesitation in pronouncing this part of the story as a libel. It was not in the man’s faithful, genial nature to do such a thing.”

The first report of any kind that Dunn and the Howland brothers had been killed by Indians was the mysterious telegram alluded to in the
Deseret News
story. The telegram had been sent anonymously to Mormon Apostle Erastus Snow in St. George on the evening of September 7, 1869, shortly after Powell had passed through town and asked the local Saints to keep a sharp eye out for the missing members of his team. The telegram read:

Powell’s three men killed by three She-bits, five days ago, one Indian’s day journey from Washington. Indians report that they were found in an exhausted state, fed by the She-bits, and put on the trail leading to Washington; after which they saw a squaw gathering seed and shot her, whereupon, the She-bits followed up and killed all three. Two of the She-bits who killed the men are in the Washington Indian camp with two of the guns. Indian George has gone to secure what papers and property there is left.

Jack Sumner—one of the expedition members who’d emerged safely from the Grand Canyon with Major Powell, and a close pal of William Dunn and the Howland brothers—didn’t see eye to eye with Powell on most matters, but he shared the major’s skepticism that Indians had killed their companions. The night after separating, the men who had stayed on the river with Powell had speculated around their campfire about “the fate of the three men left above.” According to Sumner, everyone else in Powell’s group “seemed to think the red bellies would surely get them. But I could not believe that the reds would get them, as I had trained Dunn for two years in how to avoid a surprise, and I did not think the red devils would make open attack on three armed men. But I did have some misgiving that they would not escape the double-dyed white devils that infested that part of the country. Grapevine reports convinced me later that that was their fate.”

Sumner was of course talking about the Mormons of southern Utah. He knew all about the Mountain Meadows massacre and the Mormons’ continuing insistence that Indians alone had been responsible for the murder of the Arkansans, despite ample evidence to the contrary. When Sumner heard the Mormons claiming that Indians had killed his friends, he was skeptical. Later he reported, “I saw some years afterwards the silver watch I had given Howland” during a drunken brawl with some white men, one of whom “had a watch and boasted how he came by it… Such evidence is not conclusive, but all of it was enough to convince me that the Indians were not at the head of the murder, if they had anything to do with it.”

A year after emerging from the Grand Canyon and departing Utah for his home in Chicago, Major Powell—now an international celebrity— returned to the region to conduct further explorations of the Colorado River and its tributaries. In the interim, he had been contacted by the Howland brothers’ family, who implored him to find out what had really happened to Oramel and Seneca. Toward these ends Powell sought the assistance of Brigham Young, who volunteered his main man in southern Utah, Jacob Hamblin, Indian missionary extraordinaire, to serve as Powell’s guide.

On September 5, Powell rendezvoused in Parowan with Brigham, Hamblin, and approximately forty local Saints—including two of the leading perpetrators of the slaughter at Mountain Meadows: William Dame and John D. Lee. The entire group accompanied Powell as far as the Mormon outpost of Pipe Spring, where Powell and Hamblin bid farewell to Brigham and the other Saints and headed south across the Arizona Strip with an escort of Kaibab Indians. On the evening of September 19, just northeast of Mount Dellenbaugh, Hamblin arranged a parley between Powell and members of the Shivwit tribe who had supposedly killed his men.

According to Powell’s account of the meeting, the Shivwit chief— relying on Hamblin to translate for him—freely confessed that “we killed three white men.” Another member of the tribe then explained (outside of Powell’s hearing) that Dunn and the Howland brothers had stumbled into the Shivwits’ village almost starved and exhausted with fatigue. They were supplied with food and put on their way to the settlements. Shortly after they had left, an Indian from the east side of the Colorado arrived at their village and told them about a number of miners having killed a squaw in a drunken brawl, and no doubt these were the men… In this way he worked them into a great rage. They followed, surrounded the men in ambush, and filled them full of arrows.

The murders had resulted from a terrible misapprehension, in other words. Powell forgave the Shivwits and made no effort to punish them or take revenge.

Over the years, a handful of voices persisted in challenging this version of the tragedy, most prominently those of Dunn’s friend Jack Sumner and a grizzled Colorado River guide named Otis “Dock” Marston, who claimed he had heard from a Mormon privy to confidential information that “it was the Mormons that shot these men.” But Sumner, Marston, and the other skeptics were roundly dismissed by the majority of historians and scholars, Mormon and Gentile alike, including such eminences as Wallace Stegner. Then, in 1980, a former dean of the college of science at Southern Utah University, a Latter-day Saint named Wesley P. Larsen, came across a letter that had been squirreled away for ninety-seven years in an old trunk in the hamlet of Toquerville. Dated February 17, 1883, the letter suggested that Dunn and the Howlands had been killed in Toquerville—inside the LDS ward house, no less—by one of the local Saints.

The letter was written to John Steele—a highly respected judge and ecclesiastical leader, as well as Toquerville’s preeminent doctor and bootmaker—by William Leany, Steele’s friend of thirty-seven years. Leany had been a faultless Saint (he had once even been a trusted bodyguard to Brigham Young) until the volatile, hate-soaked summer of 1857, immediately prior to the Mountain Meadows massacre, when he’d committed the unforgivable sin of providing food to a Gentile member of the Fancher wagon train as it passed through Parowan. The Gentile in question was William Aden, the nineteen-year-old artist from Tennessee who would be shot a week later trying to summon help for the besieged Arkansans.

Aden was the son of a doctor who years earlier had saved Leany from the clutches of an anti-Mormon mob that threatened to do him mortal harm in the town of Paris, Tennessee, where Leany was serving as a missionary. Following his rescue, Leany was taken to the Aden residence, where he met young William. Recognizing the Aden boy when the Fancher party stopped for the night in Parowan, Leany invited him into his home, gave him dinner, and then sent Aden away with some onions from his garden. Upon learning of this treasonous act, William Dame dispatched a thug to Leany’s house, who pried a post from Leany’s fence and clubbed him in the side of the head with it, fracturing his skull and nearly killing him.

In 1883, when he wrote the long, rambling letter discovered by Professor Larsen, Leany was sixty-eight years old. The correspondence to Judge Steele was apparently prompted by a suggestion from the judge that before he passed into the hereafter, Leany might want to repent for certain sins some of the Toquerville brethren had accused him of committing. Leany replied angrily that “God shall bear me witness that I am clean of all of which they accuse me & they guilty of all that I accuse them & much more.”

What Leany accused his fellow Saints of, the letter revealed, was “thieving whoredom murder and Suicide & like abominations.” He reminded Steele, moreover, that “you are far from ignorant of these deeds of blood from the day the picket fence was broke on my head to the day those three were murdered in our ward & the murderer killed to stop the shedding of more blood.” Five paragraphs later, Leany made another allusion to “the killing the three in one room of our own ward.”

Baffled and intrigued by these provocative references to murder, Wesley Larsen deduced from historical records that the killings alluded to by Leany had occurred in 1869- Then he determined that only three men had been murdered that year in southern Utah: William Dunn and the Howland brothers. But why would the good Saints of Toquerville want to take the lives of three wayward explorers?

Toquerville was founded in 1858, a year after the Mountain Meadows massacre, and most of the first families to settle there were headed by men who had participated in the slaughter. Many of these same men were living in Toquerville in 1869 when Powell floated down the Grand Canyon. The year prior to Powell’s expedition, Ulysses S. Grant had been elected president, and his administration had made it a priority to capture the perpetrators of the massacre and bring them to justice. Even before this new dragnet, moreover, a $5,000 bounty had been placed on the heads of Isaac Haight, John Higbee, and John D. Lee. By the time Dunn and the Howlands decided to abandon Powell’s expedition and walk to the Mormon settlements, many of Toquerville’s leading citizens were living in constant fear of arrest.

The climate of paranoia that pervaded the region was at a particularly high pitch in the summer of 1869 thanks to Brigham Young, who had made a trip through southern Utah that season stoking hatred for the Gentiles. Cautioning that federal troops were about to launch a new invasion of Deseret, Brigham ordered sentries to stand watch at strategic points along the territory’s southern border. This was the volatile atmosphere that awaited Dunn and the Howlands as they walked north from Mount Dellenbaugh toward the Mormon settlements.

Larsen speculates that somewhere on the Shivwits Plateau they encountered one or more Mountain Meadows fugitives, who assumed that Powell’s men must be federal agents or bounty hunters; their preposterous claim to be harmless explorers who had just completed the first descent of the Grand Canyon—which was known by everyone in Utah to be completely impassable—would only have confirmed their treacherous intentions in the eyes of the Saints. So (according to this scenario) the Mormons hauled Dunn and the Howlands into Toquerville, where they were tried by a kangaroo court and summarily executed.

Within a few days of this presumed lynching, Major Powell happened to turn up in St. George, asking the good people of the southern settlements to keep an eye out for his missing men, and the Saints of Toquerville realized they’d committed a serious mistake. Magnifying their blunder, Powell was a friend and vocal admirer of the Mormons, in sharp contrast to almost all other agents of the Gentile government in Washington. In a rising panic over what they’d done, the Toquerville residents sent a bogus telegram to Apostle Erastus Snow, blaming the murders on their usual whipping boys, the Indians. Five months later, these same Saints killed the unfortunate fellow who had volunteered to carry out the executions, electing to sacrifice the executioner in order “to stop the shedding of more blood,” as Leany’s letter described it. Then, just as they had done in the wake of Mountain Meadows, the conspirators swore an oath to say nothing about the abominable deed to anyone.