Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

by Jon Krakauer

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.*

  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, Dam
e 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.”