massacre at mountain meadows

The massacre at Mountain Meadows on September 11, 1857, was the single most violent attack on a wagon train in the 30-year history of the Oregon and California trails. Lee told the Arkansans he and his men had come to rescue them from the Indians. The channel’s Standards and Practices Committee, which had never objected to any of Kurtis’ productions, took an intense interest in the Mountain Meadows episode. The surviving men cheered their rescuers when they fell in with their escort. When descendants began to lobby to build a monument to the victims of the massacre in the late 1980s, their efforts went nowhere until they enlisted President Hinckley’s support. Major Carleton ensured that those killed in the Meadow Mountains Massacre … The Mormon prophet himself viewed the murders that way. More than 120 men, women, and children perished in the slaughter. During the five years Patrick spent making the film, the story evolved as the LDS Church dedicated the second monument, and different factions and personalities came into conflict. Fifty years later, Lynch remembered that Hamblin claimed some of the children were being held captive by the Indians. He reported that he hoped to recover at least some of the stolen property. For the 17 orphans, the pain of their loss never went away. For a Mormon perspective on the September 1857 event, see www.mormonwiki.com/mormonism/Mountain_Meadows_massacre. A Case of Vengeance and Retribution, A single question lurks behind almost everything ever written about the Mountain Meadows Massacre: Did Brigham Young order it, and if so why? The institution had successfully kept the story off screens both big and little for decades. After a long forgetfulness, the last five years have seen a flurry of histories, biographies, novels, plays, films and articles about the massacre. At first glance, it seems incredible that the largest massacre of American citizens in the history of the Oregon and California trails is practically forgotten. Meanwhile, both the U.S. Army and Federal Judge Cradlebaugh had launched their own investigations of the murders. See: Nels Anderson, Desert Saints (1966); Juanita Brooks, Mountain Meadows Massacre (1950); Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict, 1850–59 (1960); John D. Lee, Mormonism Unveiled and Confessions of John D. Lee (1892). Brigham Young followed the federal investigation closely. At Nephi, Forney met up with two remarkable frontiersmen: Colonel William Rogers and Captain James Lynch. “But their relations wrote back that they did not want them—that they were the children of thieves, outlaws and murderers, and they would not take them, they did not wish anything to do with them, and would not have them around their houses.” However unreliable Lee’s quote might be, a generation of Mormon historians repeated the slander that most of the children wound up in a St. Louis orphanage. At a meeting in 1989, they asked how they could reward his good efforts. Yet it has been all but forgotten. www.mormonwiki.com/mormonism/Mountain_Meadows_massacre, VIDEO: Battery H Of The 3rd Pennsylvania Heavy Artillery At Gettysburg, Dan Bullock: The youngest American killed in the Vietnam War, How a New York Dentist Developed a Unique “Volley Gun”. The death total was 120 and comprised of men, women and children. Once he was on board, powerful southern Utah politicians co-opted the project and eventually claimed credit for the whole idea. For most of a decade, friends of the place have lobbied against long odds to secure federal protection and administration of this contested ground as a National Historic Park Site (or Monument). With the intent of pointing the finger at Native Americans they armed Southern Paiute Native Americans and coerced them to join their party in the attack. Ultimately, the film dealt not only with reconciliation but—as its title reveals—the difficulty of dealing with the darker side of Mormon history. Everyone was dead except for 17 orphans, all under the age of 7, whom the killers deemed too young to be credible witnesses and who qualified as “innocent blood” under Mormon doctrine. When historians confront a complex historical event, they try to develop an interpretation that provides the simplest explanation of the evidence—a task complicated when evidence is destroyed, manufactured and relies on testimony of young children or men with blood on their hands. None of the Mountain Meadows orphans had bleaker prospects than Sarah Dunlap, who was only 1 year old when a gunshot wound almost severed her arm during the massacre. Cain’s son Dean (best known as Superman in Lois and Clark) put in a brief appearance as Mormon prophet Joseph Smith. The murderers appropriated the Fancher train’s considerable property and cash. How could this have happened? Again and again, I’ve had people ask, “Why haven’t I ever heard about this?” Upon consideration, the atrocity’s obscurity is easier to understand: After all, such a tale of blood and sorrow had little to recommend it to those who created the legend of the West. Her ornate gravestone and vault were “proof of the tenderness that James felt for Sarah.” For decades the community recalled how Captain Lynch “never tired of telling how he rescued her from the Mormons.”. The Mountain Meadows Massacre has since been hailed by historians as “the most hideous example of the human cost exacted by religious fanaticism in American history until 9/11.” The execution of John D. Lee in 1886. The tale of how a hard-bitten crew of colorful frontiersmen rescued these sad orphans is one of the great, untold stories of the American West. Forney and Cumming were timid men, and as heavy drinkers both were easily intimidated. With Jon Voight, Trent Ford, Tamara Hope, Terence Stamp. The Mountain Meadows Massacre stands as one of the darkest events in Mormon history. With the orphans in tow, Forney proceeded to John D. Lee’s home in Harmony on April 22, 1859. The statements the paper gathered from emigrants with the wagon trains following the Fancher Party “distinctly charge, that this persecution and murder of the emigrants is promoted by the Mormon leaders, [and] that opposition to the Federal Government is the cause of it.” A mass meeting of concerned citizens in Los Angeles on October 12, 1857, denounced the “long, undisturbed, systemized [sic] course of thefts, robberies, and murders, promoted and sanctioned by their leader, and head prophet, Brigham Young, together with the Elders and followers of the Mormon Church, upon American citizens, who necessity has compelled to pass through their Territory.”. On September 11, 1857, some 50 to 60 local militiamen in southern Utah, aided by American Indian allies, massacred about 120 emigrants who were traveling by wagon to California. I’m also the author of Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows, which took five years to write; and editor (with David L. Bigler) of Innocent Blood: Essential Narratives of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which took another five years to assemble and should appear next year from the Arthur H. Clark Company. This newly imagined creation, Brigham as Mr. Magoo, might sell in Utah Valley, but elsewhere it will probably not fare well. Sebastian, chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs, expressing his hope that an infant grandson had survived. Johnston then ordered the “Santa Clara Expedition ” to provide protection for Judge Cradlebaugh, who was on his way to investigate the crime and, if possible, arrest the murderers. Cain, best known to Western buffs as the director of Young Guns, financed the project himself and shot it in British Columbia. The party, led by veteran plainsmen familiar with the California Trail and its variants, consisted of a dozen large, prosperous families and their hired hands. William C. Mitchell, who was an Arkansas state senator, had picked up the other 15 children, who included his granddaughters Prudence Angeline and Georgia Ann Dunlap (but not his infant grandson, who was among the dead), at Fort Leavenworth in late August 1859, and on September 15, friends and relatives gathered at Carrollton, Ark., to welcome the orphans home. On Friday, September 11, hope appeared in the form of a white flag. Those most guilty of the crime explained it with denials, lies and alibis that twisted and turned as the evidence inevitably came out. Like Brooks, I am amazed to find myself slandered, libeled, reviled, hated and even feared for simply following the evidence to its obvious conclusions. Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith was more successful. Forney’s craven behavior with John D. Lee disgusted James Lynch, who swore out an affidavit that called the agent a “veritable old granny.” Lynch accused Forney of assisting the coverup of the crime by undercutting the authority of federal officials like Judge Cradlebaugh by arousing “a feeling of resistance to his authority among the guilty murderers.”. “I guess I was still hoping to find my own mother, and every time I called a woman `Mother,’ she would break out crying.”. May 11, 2017–Two new volumes contribute to understanding the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Also recommended for further reading: The Mountain Meadows Massacre, by Juanita Brooks. Historians operate by strict and often restricting rules, but Freeman’s use of imagination to re-create the past offers perceptions that I often found jarring—and enlightening. The travelers were running low on food and water and the militia feared that they would be recognized for not being Native Americans and therefore complicate the war in Utah. 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