Oh What a Slaughter

by Larry McMurtry

  Saw two piles of bodies, one composed of women and children, the other of men. The bodies were entirely nude, and seemed to have been thrown promiscuously together. They appeared to have been massacred. Should judge there were sixty or seventy bodies of women and children: saw one man on that pile; the children were from one and two months up to twelve years; the small children were almost destroyed by wolves and crows; the throats of some were cut, others stabbed with knives; had bullets through them. All the bodies were more or less torn to pieces, except one, the body of a woman, which lay apart, a little southwest of the pile. This showed no sign of decay and had not been touched by the wild animals. The countenance was placid and seemed to be asleep. The work was not freshly done—suppose the bodies had been there fifteen or sixteen days.

  The travelers who discovered the bodies gave testimony and were believed. Soon, as J. P. Dunn reports, the news “flew on wings of the wind” to every part of the country. The people of California asked the president for support—the people of Arkansas were forced to wonder if any of their loved ones were alive. Outrage ran high, as it should have, prompting the Mormons to issue various lame statements—they are still issuing them to this day, as witness President Hinckley’s evasions at the dedications of the new monument.

  The general thrust of these statements, for the first eighteen years at least, was to put the blame squarely on the Indians.

  The first lame line of defense was that the immigrants had angered the Indians by giving them a poisoned cow; there was the suggestion that the Mormons might also have poisoned the spring. But when Dr. Forney, the superintendent of Utah, went south to launch an investigation, the Paiutes themselves immediately gave the lie to these accusations. There was no poisoned cow, and the spring ran as pure as ever. (Of course, with so many animals, a cow might easily have eaten a poisonous weed: the cow might have bloated and died; but the Paiutes, no fools, would have been quick to note any such distemper. A bloated cow is hard to miss.)

  Dr. Forney had come south predisposed to believe the Mormons, but only a few days on the ground convinced him that the Mormon story was seriously flawed. Kanosh, the leader of the local Paiutes, flatly disputed all the stories of poisoning.

  Meanwhile, in the court of public opinion, the fact that the Mormons had let it be known that they intended to defy the U.S. Army did not sit well. The Mormons were rapidly losing the public relations effort, as, in a sense, they still are.

  Dr. Forney didn’t press his investigation until the summer of 1859, but, though fooled at first, he soon realized that there was something wrong with the Mormon version of the killings. For one thing, the Mormon account and the Paiute account flatly contradicted each other.

  The local Mormons, evidently thinking that Dr. Forney would believe any white man over any Indian, foolishly gathered together sixteen of the surviving children and tried to persuade Dr. Forney that they had been with the Indians all along. Both Kanosh and the children themselves denied it, which didn’t stop the Mormons from presenting the superintendent with a bill for $1,700, which is what they claimed it cost them to buy the children back from the Paiutes. Somehow it didn’t occur to the local Mormons that they wouldn’t be believed.

  Kanosh

  Well, they weren’t. Some of the children were now nine years old and quite able to confirm that they had been with Mormons, not Indians, for the past two years. Seven years of age was, for Mormons, the cutoff point between innocence and knowledge. In this case it was the knowledge the children had that made them a threat to the Mormon story line. It was soon apparent that, in producing the children, the Mormons had merely produced so many witnesses against themselves. Several children pointed out that some of the killers were just painted white men. “White hell hounds,” Dr. Forney called them; he went on to say that these men had “disgraced humanity.”

  In the spring of 1859, not long before Dr. Forney arrived, a company of dragoons and two companies of infantry were dispatched to Mountain Meadows to bury the bodies, which, by this time, were dispersed over a rather large area.

  It was Major (later General) Carleton who ordered the rude cross erected at the site of the massacre. He felt he ought to do something to commemorate the victims.

  It was this modest marker that disappeared during Brigham Young’s visit to the south.

  Fifteen of the seventeen children who survived were eventually sent east, first to Fort Leavenworth and then back to Arkansas; two boys who had been retained as witnesses were first taken to Washington and then returned to Arkansas as well. Eventually the U.S. government allotted each survivor 320 acres of land, but, so far as I know, the descendants of the victims have not gotten back any of the monies that the Mormons took from the dead. The descendants, of course, still might try to recover those losses, which is one reason the Mormons are so careful not to admit anything.

  While Dr. Forney was pursuing his investigations, an attempt was made to hold a legal court of inquiry in southern Utah, but the attempt had to be abandoned when the U.S. Army refused to provide protection for the witnesses, who considered that they would be committing suicide to testify without such protection. When Brigham Young finally came south with would-be judge John Cradlebaugh, Young is reported to have this to say about Mormons who don’t support the official story:

  I am told that there are Brethren who are willing to swear against the Brethren who were engaged in this affair. I hope there is no truth to that report. … But if there is I will tell you my opinion of you and the fact so far as your fate is concerned. Unless you repent at once of that unholy intention, and will keep the secret of all you know, you will die a dog’s death and be damned, and go to hell. I do not want to hear anymore treachery among my people.

  Warrants had apparently been issued for some participants, but when the army declined to provide protection the warrants were set aside.

  Some of the Mormons who had gotten away with being painted white men in the slaughter of the Fancher party soon tried it again on smaller groups of immigrants. There were at least four copy-cat attacks, involving rape, gougings, deaths of babies, in which painted white men were involved.

  Soon, though, the dead of Mountain Meadows began to exercise their potency. Some of the participants wasted away; and the site itself, where grass had once grown belly-high to a cow, became sere and desolate, as it is today.

  More than a decade passed after the first truncated attempt at an inquiry with little change. At this time, in Utah, the selection of jurors was still a prerogative of the Mormon church. Once Congress undid this, there was at least some hope of effective prosecution. John Doyle Lee was first brought to trial in 1875, in a proceeding that smacked of farce. Lee was sure that the church would protect him, and, for a time, it did, despite the fact that former bishop Philip Klingensmith, who had long since removed himself to California, came back, testified, and told the whole story. His testimony was corroborated by several witnesses, despite which a mostly Mormon jury promptly acquitted Lee.

  Nevertheless, with this farce of a trial, the always shaky edifice of the Mormon cover-up began to crumble. Details of what happened at Mountain Meadows were soon known to the whole country—the media era had arrived. The testimony of Klingensmith and others fatally undermined the attempt to hold the Paiutes responsible for it all.

  Somewhat to the surprise of the Mormon church, the national response to this coached verdict was immediate and severe. Suddenly nobody believed the Mormon story. The response, indeed, was so negative that the church did an abrupt about-turn and decided to sacrifice John Doyle Lee.

  In their sudden panic the Mormons retreated to one self-defeating legal strategy after another; individual witnesses soon ensnared themselves ever and ever more tightly in the loops of their own previous falseshoods. Talk was one thing, but legal process something else: its coils began to tighten around many confused participants.

  By this time Brigham Young himself had been deposed and had admitted that he was an accessory a
fter the fact. Various witnesses who had remembered nothing at the first trial began to realize that they might unwittingly have implicated themselves. In desperate attempts to undo this damage, to free themselves from the coils of the court, they often contradicted themselves wildly; many soon lost track of what they knew and what they believed.

  This time John Doyle Lee was speedily convicted and sentenced to death. He was allowed to choose the method of his own execution and he chose to be shot—in 1877, at the massacre site, he was killed by a firing squad.

  John Doyle Lee spent his last days either cursing the Mormon church, or confessing, which he did four times, in wild spewings that contained many contradictions. Dunn dryly observes of the second trial that the jury that finally convicted Lee had no more right to sit in judgment of him than had the sultan of Turkey. He was killed by his own people, all of them hoping to save themselves.

  Brigham Young, a man who kept many secrets, died peacefully a few weeks later.

  J. P. Dunn ends his long account of the Mountain Meadows Massacre with this vivid splash of color:

  The Mormons were right in their superstition that a Nemesis stands, ever threatening them, on the mountains of southern Utah. She does stand there, and in her outstretched hands, for the ash branch and the scourge, she holds a curse over the doomed theocracy, while from her ghastly lips comes the murmur of those words which no prophet can still: “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” saith the Lord.

  The theocracy was not doomed—it prospers today, but I would have to agree that Nemesis still broods over that massacre site, particularly in the area of the monument they can never get right. In attempting to pretty up the monument site a backhoe operator uncovered a mass grave, the very last thing the Mormons would have wanted to happen. But when it did happen they proceeded to remake laws in order to get the bones back into the ground before the forensic team could do its work, which only makes them seem the more guilty.

  Nemesis may not depart, either, unless the Mormon church can somehow bring itself to be honest about Mountain Meadows, and that day has clearly not arrived.

  Probably some of the Mormons who put on war paint and slaughtered immigrants did suffer agonies of remorse. Killing people is no light task. But if some few wasted away, quite a number seemed to live with the crime well enough, their discomfort level only increasing during the second trial of John Lee, when many of them had to abruptly change positions that they had been defending for twenty years.

  John Doyle Lee had every right to be outraged at the church and the colleagues who sacrificed him. Yet he himself had wiped blood off his hands that day, helped himself to some of the cattle and some of the loot, and lived serenely as a prosperous farmer, for twenty years a well-respected man.

  He took the massacre in stride, and so did many of his co-participants. Many of them felt genuinely indignant when they were finally linked to this crime they had committed so long ago. Some may have convinced themselves that they were off hoeing corn that day. A lie sustained for twenty years can come to seem like the truth.

  Utah is a state with many fabulous beauty spots: Mountain Meadows is not one of them. It is a long way from anywhere. The monument—perhaps I should say the most recent monument, for who knows what Nemesis will yet wring out of the Mormons?—at least has the names of the victims on it. And yet this monument put up to honor the victims merely insults them yet again in its half-honesty. There are the names of the victims—where are the names of the killers? Unlike the fine memorial plaque at Wounded Knee, the Mountain Meadows monument leaves a bad taste in the mouth. In southern Utah dishonesty still rules; Nemesis is not yet satisfied. The simple cross that Major Carleton put up to begin with would have served mourners better than the present showy fraud.

  The Mormons’ final argument, once it had been proven by the testimony of Lee, Klingensmith, and others that they had participated in the massacre, was that the Indians made them do it. The authorities tried to argue that the Indians would have killed the Mormons had they not helped in the attack. This lacks even the semblance of probability: the Indians lacked the weaponry to do anything of the sort.

  The authors of the most recent studies of this dread event offer different theories as to why the wagon train was attacked. Sally Denton thinks the principal motive was greed—no wagon train that rich had ever passed that way; the money to be made, the loot to be collected, drew the locals into action. Will Bagley argues that it was not greed but creed: the blood atonement creed.

  The participants themselves may have remained defiant for twenty years, but many Mormons were so repelled by what they heard that they left the church. Neither Brigham Young nor anyone else could hold them, a fact that tells us much about the common horror at massive bloodletting.

  If one contrasts the amount of commentary on the Sacramento River Massacre with the flood of commentary about Mountain Meadows, one might suspect a racial element in the accounting: whites killing whites attracted more attention than whites killing Indians. There are a dozen books and many historical commentaries on Mountain Meadows and yet I’m not sure that the racial point is valid. Probably the most written about massacre of the nineteenth century was Sand Creek, where, once again, whites were killing Indians. Mountain Meadows involved a theocracy that, due to a resort to terror, had been put on the defensive, whereas Sand Creek involved trade routes, settlement issues, and racial hatred. Mountain Meadows and Sand Creek both produced more than one official trial or inquiry. Like great battles, big massacres seem to demand repeated reassessments. Why the killing? How many died? Who was to blame? There is always much to be decided, but the way to a sound decision is never very clear.

  Sand Creek, November 29, 1864

  The Sand Creek Massacre site is now on land owned by a Colorado rancher named Bill Dawson—or at least it is unless he’s recently sold his holdings. The site is just north of the hamlet of Chivington, Colorado: the town is named, of course, for John Milton Chivington, the man who planned and led the massacre.

  The Arkansas River is a little distance to the south, flowing through expensive irrigated agricultural country. Not far upriver is the reconstructed Bent’s Fort; it had been the first great trading post on the Santa Fe Trail, visited by everybody who traveled this famous trail. William Bent, who, with his brother Charles and the trader Ceran St. Vrain, built the original fort, which had initially been farther west, had a number of half-breed children by two Cheyenne sisters: first Owl Woman, who died, and then Yellow Woman.

  At least four of William Bent’s children were camped with their Cheyenne cousins on the day of the Sand Creek attack: Robert, George, Charles, and John. What happened that day turned one of these sons—Charles—into a half-crazed, white-hating Dog Soldier, a torturer and killer who at one point even went south meaning to kill his own father. Fortunately William Bent was away at the time.

  William Bent

  Bill Dawson, the rancher who owns the land where the massacre occurred, is, by all accounts, a reasonable and likable man who, while holding his own views on Sand Creek, has nonetheless been generous with Indian groups who want to hold prayer services there. In the 1990s he allowed Connie Buffalo, an Ojibwa woman who had come into possession of two scalps taken at Sand Creek to bury them at the site, with appropriate ceremonials. Connie Buffalo had been given the scalps by the owner of a small motel near the site. They had been in the man’s family for years but the owner seemed to feel that Connie Buffalo had a better right to them: he offered them to her with tears in his eyes.

  I mention this exchange because it suggests that the power of such an event as Sand Creek resonates through time as few other experiences do. Southeastern Colorado, like much of the Great Plains, is very thinly populated now. There are not many people there, but most of the farmers and ranchers who operate near the site had been in that place for a long time. Sand Creek, whether they like it or not, has always been in their lives. Some might still argue for Chivington’s position, but few doubt that the trag
edy marked their families and their region. Few, I imagine, see it as a simple case of white wrong. Though it was wrong, it had a context that few not of that region can appreciate now.

  I would agree with the locals that Sand Creek wasn’t simple. Perhaps the plainest thing about it was the character of John Chivington, who, though a longtime Free-Soiler, was also a racist Indian-hater. But Chivington was not the only man shooting Indians that day and Sand Creek was not an entirely spontaneous eruption of violence, in which some hotheads in Denver decided to attack a camp of one hundred percent peaceful Indians.

  When I visited Sand Creek, the best I could do without bothering Mr. Dawson was to drive around it in a kind of box route, on dirt roads. From several rises I could see where the massacre took place. On much of my box route I was trailed by an SUV from Michigan—its occupants no doubt hoped I would lead them to this historic place. I couldn’t, and they finally drove off down the road toward Kansas, which is not far away.

  The country around the site is rolling prairie—very, very empty. From several modest elevations I could see the line of trees where the fighting took place. The plain is immense here; on a chill gray day the word “bleak” comes naturally to mind. “Pitiless” is another word that would apply. On a fine sunny day the plains country of eastern Colorado looks beautiful, but Sand Creek and Wounded Knee were winter massacres; the cold no doubt increased the sense of pitilessness. If you were at Sand Creek, being massacred and desiring to run, only the creek itself offered any hope. Otherwise, north, south, east, or west was only open country: totally open.

  * * *

  The first factor that might be noted in a discussion of Sand Creek is the date: 1864. The Civil War was in progress, a fact of some importance, as we will see.