Pre-bellum Militias

This morning a Cherokee friend made me breakfast. He lived first with an Uncle, then when he was 10 he went to live with his 110 year old Grandfather. His Grandfather
was captured during a raid and sent to live as a slave of the tribal shaman. Spanish
and Indigenous slavery were different and both very different from Southern American Slavery. One difference was that Indian Children [male] could not be sentenced to Slavery until they were old enough to join raiding parties.

When his term was up, he might choose to remain with his adoptive tribe, or return to his Native Tribe. Since this was at the time of the Trail of Tears, eerily like the numerous winter expulsions of Mormons from place to place, he decided to stay and train as a shaman. My friend isn't sure how long he stayed with his grandfather, but between he and his Uncle he learned quite a bit.

I played the Eyring apology for him and I think he began to better understand what and why I was so persistent in badgering him with questions. It is in my blood, going back four or more generations. When the Handcart companies skirted the starving Federal Army in Fort Bridger, starving and frozen themselves and having lost a quarter
of their number, they were among 1300 wagons and carts still on the trail in that late and snowy fall.

Also on the trail was the Utah Territorial Militia. Until the civil war, each state had its own militia. During the Civil War America had two armies--one belonging to the Union and another to the Confederacy. At the beginning of the Civil War 1/3 of the Federal Army was in Utah. Their Mormon Counterpart was still called the Nauvoo Legion, a proud and innovative force whose pride it was to acheive it's objectives without shedding blood. An unwelcome visitor to Nauvoo might be surrounded by
a hundred whistling and whittling youths, otherwise silent who made them eager to
continue on their way. During the Echo Canyon war, their task was to make the troops think there were far more of them than there were. They created this illussion was attained by, say, three stripling warriors tending three warriors wearing three coats and having three horses. They changed off frequently, coats hats and horses, and fed the fires with all the wood they could.

I no longer have the papers on my family and on my ex-husband's grandfather's family that I once had. My mother thought it was rediculous for me to have my ex's family because I could not stay married to him. She through away a big framed collage of my personal pictures because they had my ex-husbands pictures in them and when I became ill, neither stayed with me indefinatly.

I have a great love for loyalty. The Cherokee bodyguard of Joseph Smith were loyal.
They were upriver building a cabin for Joseph, Emma his wife, and their children when
their Brother Joseph came out of hiding at the urging of his brother and wife because of the threats being made against the city if they did not produce him. Joseph
beleived that this internment would not go as had his many others--he went, as he said, as a Lamb to the Slaughter, devoid of offense to any man.

He left his religion unfinished, and each Mormon, each region and country has had to
fill in the gaps differently. Brigham was an Empire Builder, a counselor, archetect, elected Territorial Governor, head of the Nauvoo Legion. With so much of the legion
harrying the Federal Troops, he may or may not have stationed two of his highest
officers in Parowan, but my best guest is that that was where they were or thereabouts, noting every word that came from their drunken mouths, every brandishing of the white revolver that they claimed had put many of the forty bullets into the Prophet Joaephs' body when it had fallen from the window and been propped up against the wall of the debtors prison where he was supposed to have spent the night.

They cried when they heard of his death. A grim smile must have played on their lips
when the Bushwhackers went on and on digging their own graves. As I think of it,
I can't figure out why the Fancher/Baker trail was travelling on that trail that summer in any case. Why didn't someone tell them that there was a war going on and they were not going to be able to get resupplied. Someone has coined a term for what the
Mobocrats did--in Mountain Meadows, while their stock nibbled at Mormon Grass, they used the Fancher Train as human sheilds, man woman and child of them. They harboured self confessed felons without noticing that they had hot blodded men on their trail, Cherokees in buckskin. Cherokee justice was measure for measure. If it was these who trailed the two escaped men to Las Vegas Springs, I envy them not.

Why were they left exposed to Kyotes and the elements? Well, my Great, Great Grandfather wanted nothing to do with the burial detail. They had come to America to escape such work in his home country. At the turn from the Sixteenth to the Seventeenth Century Fredrich the II of Prussia passed a law that allowed one offspring to each Jewish family, a son to inherit the land. All others, the old, the sick, the too
sure it would all blow over as before needed boys with shovels to finish their work
for them. He hadn't come all that way to see men with shovels needing help to
tidy things up.

I suspect that everyone else, not trailing escapees, were settling their families in the crevices of the mountains, among the Indians, out of sight of the Army should it continue South.