Mountain Meadows--Church and Army Indian Agents

The best way to view this photo is to put it on your desktop and open it there. The girl and woman/older girl are not struggling as it seemed when I viewed it from my picture file. The land around the creek is muddy and overgrazed. The older woman/girl is squatting and trying to comfort the younger, who looks 12 or 13 she may have wanted go to the child, who is either falling or trying to get up or neither. It seems likely that he/she has been knocked to the ground. The fabric of the shift the child is wearing appears to be patterned.


There is no way to tell more without knowing the identity of the woman and children in the picture. I think the very large man
with the commanding stance is Jacob Hamblin. He assumed that his permission for the Fanchers to stay, virtually in his dooryard, would be enough to reassure all involved that he would see to the matter when he returned.


The indians have been exonerated, but I think they were restrained, but only with great effort.

I am lucky to have heard my grandfathers stories when I was nine or so, long before he wrote his book when I was a teenager.
This is a story I heard as a teen.

My grandfather said than one day he was with his father when a very old man was seen to be struggling up the hill to the mill.

He said he figured he was fixing to die and there was a story he didn't want to take to the grave with him. He said that one day he was sitting with John D Lee when one of the Missouri Wildcats came there bragging that he had raped John D Lee's 16 year daughter in Missouri and would again when he brought the Army from California--forcing the Mormons to fight a two front war.

John D Lee was shaken by this threat and said he could no longer hold the Indians by the hand. The Missouri Wildcat's, the self proclaimed assasins of Joseph Smith had been poisoning Indian wells and shooting indian women outright all the way from Salt Lake.

These tribes and bands were following the Fancher train and bush-wacker protectors all the way South on their small Spanish Horses.

By the time they reached Cedar City they outnumbered the white settlers.