Survivors of the Massacre

Two, according to my Great Grandfather's information, gathered from the leader of the local band, were men, and were tracked by the leader of the local band, who called themselves the Water People, were chased as far as Las Vegas Springs, and killed there.

Then there were two sisters, by the name of Dunlop, and a child--the seventeenth, who was thought to be too young to remember its parents deaths. You can get a photo with a resolution of 856x541 from Wiki, and I strongly suggest it be
left in the article, in the original Government account of the massacre. If this is a picture of the lynching, these girls, and possibly the child, may have been held by the Federal Troops for a year or so while John D. Lee wrote Mormonism Unveiled.
It is a longish book, and I don't think he was in any hurry to finish it. The girls, if in Army hands, may have brrn instructed to write out canned affidavits as well. But this was not the man in charge. He was someone the Army wanted yo hang.

The picture's caption, written on the bottom margin, says that the picture shows John D. Lee, the Church Indian Agent, sitting
in front of his casket. I see the wagon box he was said to have stood on to be hung from a tree. I don't see the tree.

I visited the site with my grandfather, who wanted us to know the place. (I had read Juanita's book the year before, the local library carried it) I don't see the hanging tree here, nor did I see it on our visit. I didn't see the trunk or roots of the tree or any past tree.

I see two girls wrestling, the most visible with her hair down, and in the foreground, a child who appears dead. The Seventeenth child is supposed to have told John D. Lee --You look just like you looked when you killed my Papa. It would have been too far for the child to know anything about John D. Lee's facial expression. If he killed the child's father at all. One of the settler's did.

A group of people, probably troops, seem too be standing a ways off--these may be Lee's family. Why are these three, fitting the General description of the survivors, so close to the supposed place of hanging a year after the Massacre?

A hypothesis I had not considered before I saw this picture, is that these are the Dunlop girls and the surviving child who were held by order of the Army to identify John D. Lee as the official in charge. He could only have been incharge of the 200 or so armed and mounted Indians. Except for a few prominent Cherokees, and the Piedes who tracked the fleeing men to Las Vegas Wells, no indians were involved in the Massacre at all.

They may have been cooerced into pat cOnfession. The child did not go along, neither did one of the girls.