A book?

I got a query about writing an adolescent novel on the Mountain MEadows Massacre. The narrator is a Navaho wife of Jacob Hamblin. She is bathing the oldest Dunlop girl, talking to her about the AnImals and birds. She is a Navaho Coyote Woman and her father is an Indian Doctor.

I skimmed some of what I culled from the net, and came across a passage consistant with what I was seeing and writing in the novel--I have dreamed of this man and in those dreams he has sometimes given me gifts. This is the passage.

"...two girls ran up the slope towards the east about a quarter of a mile; John and I ran down and tried to save them; the girls hid in some bushes. A man, who is an Indian doctor, also told the Indians not to kill them. The girls then came out and hung around him for protection, he trying to keep the Indians away."

"By this time it was dark, and the other Indians came down the road and had got nearly through killing all the others. They were about half an hour killing the people from the time they first sprang out upon them from the bushes.” [sic?]

"Some time in the night Tullis and the Indians brought some of the children in a wagon up to the house. The children cried nearly all night. One little one, a baby, just commencing to walk around, was shot through the arm. One of the girls had been hit through the ear. Many of the children's clothes were bloody. The next morning we kept three children and the rest were taken to Cedar City; also the next morning the train of wagons went up to Cedar City with all the goods. The Indians got all the flour. Some of it I saw buried this side of Pinto Creek. There were two yoke of cattle to each wagon as they passed up. The rest of the stock had been killed to be eaten by the Indians while the fight was going on, except some which were driven over the mountains this way and that."

[The meadows had been fenced, but the immigrants took down the fence,apparently not knowing how or being accustomed to use dry scrub and dry manure for fuel.]

Much of this account varies from the Brooks account and the Gibbs compilation, as well as Indian treatment of women and girls in war too much for me to credit. The Brooks account has the Mormon men leading the emigrants and bushwackers, if still alive--I suspect these were killed by marksman on the first night--and accounted for most or all of the ten men who died that night.

In the main massacre, Mormon men were paired with the emigrant men. Women and children were clustered behind a wagon out of which apparent Indians issued and killed the women and many of the children, Gibbs (Wiki) says within 3 minutes. In fact I believe the Indians were the motive force behind the brevity of the massacre.

All knew that they were shedding innocent blood. I read most of the books listed in the biography in junior high school and high school, and read much of the materialavailble in the BYU library in the Arrigton thaw on availability of books and manuscripts.

My understanding of the massacre involves
primarily oral sources--my grandfather and I both has FMS or some other slow viral disease that summer and he would tell me stories, some but not all included in his book later. The Indians being scared off by the cradle rocking by itself is a story
I remember from one of these trips.

I can remember him talking and get flashes
of passing scenery. The Dunlop girls were seen naked and with slit throats too bloated to be recognizable.

In order for them to be in a book at all they have to survive, so Shivave, the Kyote Clan wife of Jacob Hamblin and his adopted Indian son put two other girls in their places and take them to the Hamblin cabins deep into the Narrows or Rimrock Country--there are pockets of greenery deep within the narrows and waterpocket folds where the Hamblin Women would have hidden. The girls who are shown as proof are not the sisters, but other girls put in their place.

Still, it is late in the season for them to start. I assume that Shivave has to really make their Mules hoof it if they are to make it to the Hamblin Cabins before heavy snowfall with her old father who is still seeing to the wounded--it seems that he may have visited their camp, possibly with Alvin Hamblin, no more than two slaves to the Emigrants.

You can get into that country by going up Cedar Canyon and then down into just above Zion's narrows. It is too bad I have been ill for so long--this was not to be my life.

By the twisted Euro-American modern ethics of war, as described by Madeline Albright in a issue of the Iconoclasts on the Sundance Channel, is that it is acceptable to kill the few to save the many. She was talking about Kosovo. The small size of the Catastrophy at the Meadows allows it to be studied in microcosm, and both we and the descendents of the emigrants are still hard at it.

I understand the motives and justification for the Mountain Meadows Massacre more than those of any war since some aspects of WWII--but there were Atrocities on a massive scale in a war which also saved some, even man.

Even then, if I had not been a women and had been compelled to fight, I'd probably have wound up interned, in a brig, or singing in a jazz club. I think I'm a died in the wool pacifist, Mormons are not, though comitted to the conventions of war.

Even CO’s are allowed some uncertainty in speculating what they’d do if someone came into their house and attacked their families. The serrlements in Southern Utah were small, many were created to shelter Mormon women and children during the Utah War, and great efforts were made to jeep that as bloodless as possible.
Mountain Meadows, what happened there was anomalous.

When the Army drives the Native peoples into the unsurvivable desert--this is when the real tradgedy begins. And it is many years before the Mormons are able to begin to save them from lives of hunger, drunkeness, servitude and prostitition,
lives they at first lived under the Spanish.

An Indian friend, when we have been taling about the massacre said, "You know it was wrong don't you?"

I look at him helplessly. I think the men closest to Brother Brigham probably had a much better plan that involved killing the Missouri Wildcats silently and melting back into the Desert, leaving behind little story to tell and civilians unharmed.

I don't think these men planned on hunting or fishing or providing for themselves except by purchasing goods as they went along, so they may have had a rough time of it, though the Baker Range was rich with every kind of game.

The only Indian role, according to the words passed down from the Cheif at that time was to watch for escaping men and track them. They killed them at Las Vegas Springs. They also preached strongly against the killing of women and children.
Their opinion of us was that we had been brought up badly. I live ithe part of California where there are many indians--both native and those who married into Oakies and Arkies they found at the end of the Trail of Tears--then came the dustbowl and Steinbeck.

Manana--I slept from seven last night to about two. Time for a bit of a nap beforeMojo stops on his way to take his daughter to work. Little Akhnautin
loves his Xmasskel-ta-ton puzzle. He puts it together,
makes it glow green, then takes it apart.

Kathleen