Is it alright to write it all down?

Yes. I am sure my grandparents would think so. My Great Grandfather was Bishop of Cedar City for most of his life and Operated the Second Church Coop Mill built in Cedar Canyon. His mother was living with him, a blond toddler, and pregnant among the Panguitch Indians at the time of the massacre.

I'm sad about Hinkley's Death. His WWII Media experience made him a man for our times. Monson is going to be stumping for
the far right, I fear, and then it's hard to know where the ill of the Church, a disproportionate number from the downwind area of Utah and Arizona fit in. Various Bishops have lectured my mother on how she's supposed to be taking care of me. It's getting harder to do, since she's getting older.
But my grandmother lost two children during pine nut season--
one a late miscarriage and the other at the start of pine nut season and Atomic Testing.

I haven't seen the two children I pretty much raised since their children, now young adults with junior high kids as the babies of their families. I think it has to do with blessings
they gave me early in my illness--I didn't get better. Maybe they feel guilty, like they aren't good enough to pray effectivly.

I have a sweetheart who has Prostate Cancer, which is in remission--we've gone through much of it together. His stepfather was a Finn and today I learned olayhookela which
is something like Golly Gee Whilikers in Finnish. He is very
entertaining. He moved to Long Beach--near a Naval Base, thinking to make his living with his Sax, but then there was a mind of revolution in Jazz. He took a few years off to learn Guitar and put a band together while babysitting, then opened
for Ike and Tina Turner while his oldest daughter watched on the TV.

The Cancer cut off his career--sad because he is so good. His youngest grandchild had a series of heart attacks, so things were pretty rough for two or three years. The Hospital was a pretty nice place--surely no one was ever allowed to be unkind. School isn't like that at all. He's on the verge of getting suspended for fighting [back].

I was in the Hospital, in and out from Valentines day to just after Mother's day. I had huge absesses--one didn't show on the CT scan because it was encapsulated in a stone bubble around an infected abcess--inside there was a large staghorn
stone.

My families' response? My mother said in her Christmas letter
that I'd been in the hospital for a few days and lost a kidney. Oleyhookala. I just found it yesterday and was glad it lost itself in the area around my bed.

I have 5 Mormon Novels--serials, and so I try hard to stay alive. Then there is a longpoem and alot of poetry, most of it on line. My mothers family was in charge of the Church
property that was used to grow food and raise range animals for the poor. This included Mountain Meadows, so I'm somewhat ahead of non-ethnic-Mormons whose ancestors were around. An interesting Blog I found is called Wanderer in a Stange Land--
a Blogger or Blogspot Blog by a woman who just opened that old box of papers and is wondering whether she should tell all.

I think its time--and remember, this is the most important thing to remember, that the Massacre happened during war time
and these men were swearing to bring back a army to repeat
very specific war crimes which they bragged about comitting in Missouri and Illinois--it wasn't just the assasination of Joseph Smith.

If Brigham did anything it was to call a meeting that in particular required the attendance of Jacob Hamblin--a sin of omission. When Jacob caught up with the next wagon train
headed South he escorted them out of the territory and then rounded up all the cattle that hadn't been turned into Jerky and drove it South, then went back and found another train to escort out of the State.

He was equally respected by various tribes who had little
time for one another and was used by the Federal Government
both during the trial and after, as a translator and negotiator.

Kathleen Matheson Weber

Mormon Missionary Dance

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.

Mountain Meadows Massacre, the lynching

Mountain Meadows Massacre, 1857-Ch1

Yea, even as we speak, the young men of the United States are waging war against two fierce Islamic Nations and we mat be moving into a third, unsurvivable war against a nation that does not forget or forgive. An Iranian Friend whose parents have worked for the American Military and was on the last plane out of Iran, making way for Khomeni to take the reigns of power. The context was personal, and I learned not to offend him. He would bend over backwards not to offend me.
At a certain point there might be no way back from the precipice, we worked hard to stay far back.

Many in all nations have been trapped in a war they had no part in initiating. Our Present did not pay much
attention to his classes in his DOD school, his Ivy League University, catch up classes at Washington University, where one of his TA's told me that he did not see, hear or absorb anything she tried to teach him. He was estranged from his age group, cranked up much of the time. He was not particularly intelligent.

We believed we could survive such a President. Millions of
casualties later, we go on as if war were now normal. There has been no normalcy since 911. DOD planning was in place to fight 1 and a half wars using the 182nd Airborne, the Ready
reserves. In the days of debate in the Senate, when argument escalated into violence, our women Senators rise against the rest I heard Hillary's voice rise above the rest--"Could we just get it down to three wars, PLEASE. She had read the DOD
game plan--the part that said we could not win a war if overextended. We would lose in any war where we were overextended.

Clinton was well ahead in the polls and I was not yet worried.
My friend early predicted a Bush win. Many, many of us had a
particular distaste for him, he had been disliked most of his
life. He was unconcerned about this because, as my friend mentioned DADDY WOULD BUY HIM ANYTHING HE WANTED. IF He WANTED TO BE PRESIDENT, DADDY WOULD BUY HIM THE PRESIDENCY.

I have just noticed an oddity in Wikipedia, I thought I'd blog a bit about a war in my past, a massacre near our town, a place to share my cogitations with people working in Mormon, Genocide, and Holocaust studies.

The account of the Massacre at Mountain Meadows in
Wiki now (first posted in July of 2007, is the official Army version, written 1910, when my Grandfather was a very bright seven, in a periodical of the era. It contains truth and rumor and is egregious for what it omits. Instead of analyzing the invasion of Utah by a third of the Federal Army, mostly rabidly anti-Mormon, the majority bushwackers.

I have been planning to add what my Grandfather and Great Grandfather passed to me that may not be generally
known.

Juanita Brooks is the unrivaled master of the subject.
Her place in the community gained her the confidence of old Sons of the Pioneers who did not want to take their morbid secrets to their graves nearing, as they were, their point of departure.

I know this: when very ill life flashes before you slowly, you regret things unsaid and undone. I remembered a class I audited at BYU called the Mormon Novel, team taught there by Gene England and my Grandmother's Aunt Marie's Grandson
Clifton Jolly--the youngest of my Great, Great Grandparents', Danish orphans who lived with her brothers and worked the land.

I had some pictures of Aunt Marie my Grandmother sent me which my Mother made no attempt to preserve. They were abandoned in her sale of the house, with the lace curtains I used to wind my fingers around when a toddler, with the 2,800 dollars worth
of Cedar Wood furniture he built me, a cabinet topped with florid madrone, Cedar paneling. It pointed magnetic North, and on the Quarter and cross quarter days of the year the sun and moon shone directly into the windows. I could see the broad night sky heavy with stars, I sat outside on summer nights and
watched and thought of my old people. A Hilindscotts voice
spoke in my spiritual ear--lego, lass, lego. I heard the same voice a number of times, as I watched the sunrise at breed,
or sat beneath the sky's dome.

Soma and his Uncle Yuseph sat beneath a summer sky and talked.
Soma yawned and said "I go to bed now," and went into the house, into his bedroom, onto his toddler bed and went to sleep.

Last February I nearly died from massive abdominal abseseses throughout my abdominal cavity. Something has been bothering me since then, and with my other writing, I have decided that I need to write an addendum to the Army's version of the massacre, information taken from my Grandparents' oral accounts.

Mine is a view of the individual's responsibility toward human events, the remembrance of human history, a history of genocide and war--past, present and future. A responsibility the past whose gift has been the will to work on my serial novel or autobiography everyday and into the night.

The Third book deal with my father's participation in WWII Japan attempt to colonize "The East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere," through a systemic genocide that rivals Hitler's Third Reich.

I do not mean to minimize the Shoah or its sacred place in Jewish Religious Life. I do believe that WWII China more resembles the Shoah than those Jews who hold it Sacred have dared admit. Do all men and women have a dark side that waits for its spark to nestle into the tinder? The combination of events and emotion, to converse--throwing them into Chaos, confusion, madness.

The Massacre at Mountain Meadows was an attempt to thwart a repeated Genocide--one that did not occur because of the resolve of its intended victims. Not entirely wrong or entirely right, it used Indigenous tactics that had transformed warfare in the American Revolution--the burning
of supply trains, the driving off of horses and stock, 'till snowfall, and a Winter on short rations at Fort Bridger with the maniacal Squaw Killer Harney.