The Fancher-Baker party were nearly the last large emigrant party of that year. They had the astounding ill-luck to be traveling south as tensions in the Utah settlements mounted in anticipation of an all out apocalyptic war between the Saints and the forces arrayed against them. Brigham Young had declared martial law, sealing the borders and outlawing travel through out the territory without a permit. Having already departed Salt Lake City by the time this requirement had been made public, the Fanchers and their party had no such permit, and were probably not even aware that such was required of them. They were probably aware, since they had not been able to purchase supplies from Mormon settlers, that such necessities were being stockpiled in anticipation of a war.
What they did not realize, possibly not until that last horrifying moment when the words “Do your duty!” was shouted and the men of the party were gunned down by the militiamen escorting them, was that all unknowning, they had become the enemy. Since departing from Salt Lake City, they had become identified with the advancing US Army, with the persecutors of the Saints in Missouri, and the murderers of the Prophet Joseph Smith, and with the murderer of Parley Pratt. Rumors – most of them concocted after the fact, as justifications for the massacre – had them leaving poisoned food for the Indians, boasting of rape and murder, allowing their cattle to trample crops and numerous other offensive incivilities. It is fairly certain that the local Piutes were encouraged to steal cattle from emigrant trains by no less than Brigham Young himself, who had built strong ties between his church and the local tribes. The Indians were also encouraged to attack Americans, which appears to have baffled the tribes somewhat, since they had been discouraged from doing so before. In the mean time, an emissary from Salt Lake City George Smith visited the southern hamlets of Parowan and Cedar City, steeling those militia units for battle, and encouraging residents to resist an American invasion, and telling them that they might not be able to wait for orders… but to use their own initiative.
At this late date, and because just about every witnesses who gave testimony afterwards were up to their necks in the matter, it is impossible to deduce whose idea it was to attack the Fancher-Baker train, only that once proposed it seemed to be a course of action simultaneously agreed upon. There were meetings held by various authorities in Cedar City and Parowan; at one of those meetings on September 6th it was reported that men in the Fancher train had boasted of being among the mob that had killed Joseph Smith, and that they would wait at Mountain Meadows for the approaching Army and join in on the resulting attacks against Mormons in Utah. A messenger was sent to Salt Lake City asking for Brigham Young’s advice, but it was a six-day round trip journey. Another messenger was sent to the south, where the LDS Indian Agent John D. Lee had already gone to assemble the Mormon’s Indian allies. But by the next day the Piute had already begin skirmishing with the Fancher train at Mountain Meadows. Brigham Young did not even receive the message from the dispatch rider until the night of the 10th. His instructions to allow the Fancher Party to pass unmolested – although he allowed that the Indians might do as they pleased as regards emigrant trains – was not received until too late. Of the local authorities who had taken some part in the massacre, only John D. Lee was convicted and sentenced. He was the one who had carried a white flag into the Fancher encampment and told them that their safety had been negotiated with the attacking Indians. He was executed by firing squad at Mountain Meadows in 1877, twenty years afterwards… to the end acknowledging that he was a scapegoat for others involved.
The seventeen surviving children were retrieved from the local families who had fostered them after the murders of their parents in 1859 and returned to their kin in Arkansas. Nothing of the property and possessions of their parents was ever recovered. Several children while they were living in the Utah settlements observed men driving their fathers’ ox-teams, and women wearing their mothers’ dresses and jewelry.
A dreadful story, of murder and sanctioned looting, committed by Americans against other Americans. But within three years of it happening, the armies of the Union and the Confederacy would be doing much the same on American soil, to American citizens who were their cousins, brothers and friends, on a degree that would put what happened in a meadow in Southern Utah far into the shade.
The Mormons had been treated abysmally in New York, Ohio, Missouri and Illinois. Their people had been murdered, raped, beaten and robbed in plain sight of both state and Federal governments, while Mormon pleas for equal protection under the law were ignored or contemptuously dismissed.
Their first Prophet, Joseph Smith, was shot down by a mob while under the sworn protection of the Governor of Illinois, Dan Ford; they had been driven out of Missouri with fire and sword, said actions legitimized by the “exterminating order” issued by Governor Lilburn Boggs. They had a LOT of reasons to have tremendous antipathy toward America and Americans already; Buchanan’s dispatch of the U.S. Army to “subdue” them on nothing more than the outright lies of a corrupt, womanizing spoils appointee certainly didn’t help matters.
With the U.S. Army on its way bringing the scum of the earth to, as their own soldiers openly admitted, rape and pillage the “upstart” Mormons, I see no reason whatsoever to be surprised that the Mormons did what they did at Mountain Meadows. Americans brutalized those people because of their religion and completely denied them the protection of the state and national laws they were entitled to as citizens. You think they wouldn’t have resented Americans because of it?
Mormons didn’t have to wonder what American citizens would do to them if they got the upper hand; they already knew from bitter experience. Brigham Young was ready to move every Mormon in Utah south to Mexico rather than again suffer the depredations they had endured back east.
When the U.S. Army finally was allowed to march through Salt Lake City to their agreed-on camp 40 miles west at Camp Floyd, they marched through a deserted city populated only by men at the corners of each block carrying lighted torches. Those men had orders from Brigham Young to burn the mostly wooden city to the ground rather than let the “mobbers” steal the fruits of Mormon enterprise again, as they had previously done in Missouri and Illinois. The rest of SLC’s Mormon populace was in Provo ready and waiting for the word from Brigham to go south. Mormons neither liked nor trusted most Americans and, as far as I can see, had extremely good and logical reasons for having such an attitude.
The Fancher party was a group of American Southerners stupid enough to be in the midst of a lot of people who had very good reason to hate them. If they made any of the comments and threats that have been attributed to them, they were playing with matches on top of a pile of dynamite soaked with gasoline. I suspect they did make those comments and threats because they had been raised and socialized to hold Mormons in contempt. They may not have placed the explosives themselves, but their actions set the explosion off. It wouldn’t have taken much.
The LDS Church is apologizing for the Mountain Meadows Massacre now, but I see no reason for them to do so. If the people back east had treated Mormons only half as well as they were legally entitled to be, the vast amount of rage, anger and bitterness that fueled Mountain Meadows would never have accumulated.
If there is a multiple American Beslan in the not too distant future, it doesn’t take a crystal ball to figure that anyone Muslim will be taking a tremendous chance by continuing to live in an American society so justifiably angry about the actions of other Muslims. Should such a horrific action occur, a massacre of American Muslims on a Mountain Meadows (or greater) scale wouldn’t surprise me in the least.
Comment by Mac — 20070912 @ 2240
To this day, Mormons get very defensive when asked about Mountain Meadows.
Comment by Terry Hazen — 20070913 @ 0017
Yep, no doubt about that, Terry…
Mac, the Fancher party was one of thousands and thousands of wagon-train parties and individuals traveling through Mormon territories pre-Civil War, when SLC was a pretty welcome rest stop and resupply point. By all accounts, once out in the wilderness pretty nearly everyone managed to mind their Ps and Qs, no matter what their feelings about Mormons, Indians or anyone else.
Emigrants with their families and everything they owned in a wagon weren’t generally too keen on provoking anything that put all of that at a risk.
Which was one of my points - the Fancher party appears to have not done or said anything out of line to any of the Mormon citizens they encountered while transisting Utah territory. No poisoning of food, no molesting of women, or being generally abusive, although at one point Captain Fancher did chide one of the other men for rudeness. They’d nothing to do with any murders back in Arkansas, had left there before anything had blown up politically and wanted to be in California as fast as possible. Out of the party about 70 were children, and thirty were women, and I doubt that any of the men were stupid enough to provoked a fight when they would have been that badly outnumbered. Emigrants may have hated and feared Indians, for example - but no one deliberatly picked a fight with the Sioux, and I suspect the same applied to Mormons.
The Fanchers weren’t stupid… just fantastically unlucky to be in the wrong place at a bad time. The Parowan and Cedar City militias had their mad minute, their opportunity to strike back for every injustice ever done to Mormons… but in the long run I suspect they regretted having done so almost at once.
Comment by Sgt. Mom — 20070913 @ 0732