A Comment on a September Dawn Review

OK--what this has shown me is that the anti mormon propogandathat partly defined the Victorean Era can still evoke its fell archetype, a tiny number todays Mormons knew anything about the anti-Mormon Genre revivified in September Dawn. Those of us whose Ancestors were under military orders at that time and somewhere between the Plat River on the East and Arizona in the South,
Salt Lake on the West and Idaho in the North, want to know how to help you feel better. If it is something you want the Church to do we may have influence there.

Our bones and the bones of the Indians who fought with us in the more than two years
of war with Federal Troops who would have
opened the door to many years of Genocide
and torture are impossibly mingled with those of your Ancestors, as may some of
our Ancestors. Jacob Hamblin, who carefully disinterred and inventoried the
mass grave, said that there were far more
than anyone had come forth to claim.

At this time Mormon Graves, if not buried
in the town cemetary, were not marked for fear of desecration. Sometimes a cairn may have been built, or a lace beadspread or
tablecloth lain over their bodies, their clothes taken to better secure the survival of those who remained alive. We scorched the ground to keep the wolves off the bodies sometimes, if there was time, if it was safe. Scots Thistle might be planted to
make it not worth it to disturb the ground.

Why assume that we are so callous as you do. Great blocks of context are omitted both from September Dawn and from the discussion. The illussion of religious fanatisism and intolerance as motivation for the Massacre only feeds the fire of hatred.

There were 6 million Indians in the United States when white men came here. Centuries later there were aproximatly 1/100th this number. The vast majority of these were killed as the Fancher/Baker party were killed, women and children hundreds of thosands upon hundreds of thousands.

Brigham Young is demonized, after 10 years of California Massacres by Militia who like the Mormons retained their military structures of rank and purpose.

The self-expressed purpose of the Missouri hired Guns was renewed Genocide against Mormons and Indians alike. The kind of Massacre that occurred at Bear Creek in the North. They bragged about participating in anti-Mormon Atrocities, brandished guns which
they said fired fourty balls into the
much beloved predecessor of Brigham
Young, who in times of peace was more
of a practical man and buffoon, than the tyrannical deamonic image portrayed in September Dawn.

Revolutions, expulsions and mass killings were rife from the Ukraine to the seacoast slums of Europe. In Denmark most of the non-conformists who did not join the well provisioned Mormon parties moving West were expelled into cities where the average life span was only 25.

Mass killings of Jews were rife. The Prussian King said that only onr family, that of the eldest son could inherit property, the rest would be killed if they did not leave. My great greatgrandfather and his brother left to avoid the draft into this Genocidal Prussian Army, whose ways were much like Hitler's.

Though his brother never joined and continued to California so the story goes,
or did he fight and die pursuing criminals
who had broken away from the Meadows. This was not Prussian Draft, it was Defense of Home and Country, of the kindley light that had led him so far.

My Great, Great, Grandfather died in bed, a very old man. He refused to either participate in the massacre or mass buriel of the Emigrants--I think he beleived that resistance best expressed his dissaproval, and his employer was a known participant, there was no reprisal and he kept the job he was using to save money for his marriage to my much younger grandmother, whose father had said she could not marry him until she was Eighteen and knew her mind.

Propoganda is simplified to hammer home a single message, or a few messages. History is vastly complex. I am sad for the Emigrants who lost their lives, my sympathy is harder to find for the fetid Missouri Wildcats, estimated locally to have been 6-8 men. If there were 200 as some accounts have claimed, this hard drinking subset may have set the fate of the rest. Only two got away and these were tracked by the local indians near Vegas--this and arguing for the lives of the Emigrant Women and Children was the only involvement, according to three generations of Indian leaders, that these tribes had in the matter.

The Mormons were Northerners, they welcomed Free People of color into their cities. When papers were declaring their positions on this issue, they clearly said so.

Those who took the Oregon trail due to the impression created by the massacre went to a state whose State Literature portrays the
Genteel perversion of Gentlemen from Missouri. Free People of Color if men, were given 2 years to leave Oregon, if women 3 years. Afterwords they were flogged every two months if they remained. Slaves were sold by the court to any who would purchase them for the shortest term.

Black People, Slaves, were not allowed to live with their masters, though these were largely House Slaves and often relatives.As was Sally Deming, Jefferson's Consort--she was his wife's half sister. All slaves were made to live in WWI tents in camps outside town limits.

The Oregon Laws, like its Constitution
were written by a single Judge who ruled with tyranical force. The Cross on Skinners Butte, visable through Eugene, is hundreds
of feet high and drew people from throughout the state when it was burned in the late twenties.

At the time of the Massacre, the guard hired by the Fanchers, were our enemies. Like the Klan, the Know Nothings of California were sworn to kill Catholics
and Mormons among others.

September Dawn may have told a gripping story, ‘’based on’’, as the press release fairly admitted, true events. Not a portrayal of the people and events as they occured--its purpose was to incite hatred.

My family has been involved in documenting events surrounding the massacre since the time of the trials, my great grandfather was a toddler living in a slaving indian village, but there was no detail of the massacre that he did not know.and has been a strong supporter of the monument.
I need to get back to my own work.

[At this editing, my eyes are relatively
rested and I found some unfortunate errata.
I need to stop now for fear of making more]

The site is best read from the early entries last July. I had just lost a kiney, nearly dying.

My purpose was to tell the story of my Grandparents involviement in the documentation of Southern Utah History, including the events at Mountain Meadows,
a few, key to understand this story, which they may not have told to anyone else.
The blogs are best read from July upward pardon the errata, but I havn't got back to edit all of them.

Good Wonders

This is my Grandfather's term.

Synonyms: A likely thought, interesting, possibly, probably, I don't know but it's likely thought/good wonder, probable hypothesis, likely hypothesis, good hypothesis.

Antonyms: Not likely . . . explanation. I don't figure so.

I wish he were still alive. He developed FMS about the same time I did--when I was nine. This was a pandemic year for what was then called Royal Free Disease after an
Epidemic involving three hundred people associated with The Royal Free Clinic in New South Wales. Studies have shown it to be very similar to various post war diseases and syndromes, some of which are mediated by familial genetics, or the cluster of pathogens transmitted at birth from parents to children.

Severity may be a function of genetic factors, particularly when generations share a
factor which damages the immune system or causes severity through exposure to
major carcinogens or mutagens, or as in the case of the British Millers Disease,
known to run in the families of millers, who worked with grain or flour infested by rodents. My Grandfather and Greatgranfather worked in the ZIon's Cooperative Association Mill in Cedar Canyon.

The Church had a miller who also was a fiddler who was married to my Great Grandmother. She must have loved him. Maybe she could sing, I've never heard.
She traveled with him during her childbirthing years and moved 22 times in
one five year period. Then she wanted to settle down, so she built a small house
with the help of her boys and her oldest daughter, Hannah Gibbs, born in about
1854 in Europe, she was Danish, but Gibbs doesn't sound like a Danish name to me.

Hannah's father joined the Church, but did not continue on to join the Wiily's or Martin Handcart company. Micah Martina Margretta Martina Gibbs Peterson
Elder Smith was a strongly built and robust woman who ran the Post Office during
a Small Pox epidemic when she was Eighty so her youngest daughter could take
her daughters into quarenteen. This was when being Post Mistress involved handling
grain and after the railroad came through, heavy catalogue items.

My Greatgrandmother lost two boys, leaving her with four girls. My grandmother
was strongly built, so to preserve the femininity of the others, she helped her father
with haying and other very heavy work. He died of Typhus when she was thirteen.
He was not robust and suffered from allergies.

The church established Benificial Life and tried to get church members to join. There was a painfull controversy about whether women known to have the sight should qualify. When she saw the death of her husband she realized that she didn't know
where her insurance papers were. She passed her time in waiting, praying that for
once her lights had failed her, and finally found the Insurance papers between the
leaves of a book. This is evidence of the truth of one of my favorite axioms--if you
lose something, really lose it, it's always nearby and probably in the most obvious
place. I am privileged to be old enough to have been held in her arms. She died
in French Camp, California when I was an infant.

I guess that's why I get a strange sense sometimes. I wasn't thinking about the sequahennial anniversity of the Mountain Meadows Massacre when I began this
blog. I had a huge abscess beneath my psoas muscle--after it burst and had
drained through a little rubber catheter the casing was oblong--big enough to
show the darker outline of a number of vertebrae and a large section of large
intestine.

I had a 5MK kidney stone that encapsulated my kidney, concealing it from
the CTT Scan. This ruptured when the radiological surgeon began to work
on the stone. Actually, those in the vacinity all agreed that it exploded. The
noise was so loud that it drew a number of those in the vacinity to mull
over what you call it when that happens. M.E.--sometimes called Post M.E.
in the old British Commonwealth Countries--kills, when it does kill
because there is so much pain that the patient doesn't know when to
call pain, even when localized, an event. I barely made it to the hospital
because the HMO nurses would not put me in contact with the Doctor.
If you call an Ambulance too often, well, it's like crying "wolf."

I've had this for nigh onto 30 years, so far as the time that has passed
since the onset of severe Myalgic Encephalomyelitis.

I suspect that researchers, descendents and church and civil beaurocrats
will be talking about the Monument and the gravesites at the Meadows.
The one on the site matches many other registered monuments throughout
Utah that my Grandparents, Children, and Grandchildren built. You
can't see the beauty of the rocks used from the photos on the Fancher
family site. And I havn't gotten to see them. My Grandmother had died
during a Priesthood blessing before the Monumentment was built.
{My light just blinked off and on again.] I'm sure she is pleased to see
the recognition of our dismal humanity that the Monument represents.

I wish those involved had built it in time for her to help, but she
did throw her weight behind it. Whatever the contention that caused
in town, and she did detest bickering and contention. I think
the site could use some picknic tables and campfire pits, but
then there is the peoblem of Coyotes. There are probably hundred
of small graves containing remains not identifiable by denomination.

White Men Dressed up as Indians

For those familiar with both Juanita Brooks book, the forced confession included in the Wiki period Magazine article, and/or local accounts or folklore, the supposed account of the massacre of the Fancher Train women and children may not ring entirely true.

Soon after a Mormon mill crew at Sutter's mill near Sacramento, California discovered Gold there,
the White Gold Rush was on. So was the methodical Genocide of California began. It was brutal, unrelenting and obscene.

My Grandfather believed that the Water People, who inhabited our valley, had crossed the desert from California soon after the Spanish Dons arrived and were given as much land as one man could encircle on a fast horse in one day.

Our San Lorenzo Brownie Troop visited an old man who had given the land adjacent to what we called "the airplane park" to we children. The prime feature of this park was a WWII fighter which we crawled all over.

Hundreds of thousands of Indigenous
Californians were massacred or died
of white diseases over the next
110 years. This was the "Army" that the "Missouri Wildcats" had drunkenly sworn by their dubious God to bring back to wreak havoc and Genocide on White and indian alike. This is why the Indians were not permitted to participate in the Massacre. There is little doubt that all would have been killed.

The actual choosing of settlements,
the choosing of mill sites, and the provision of fiddling for the duration of the mill building were men like Clayborn Elder, my Great Grandmothers older siblings, including one who ran off with Butch Cassidy and another boy. His family traced him to a mine register. Our family has a tendancu toward psychic abilities and my Great and Great Grandmother had some knowledge of things to come.

I have a feeling. a hypothosis, about this. While Indians did not kill women and children, and under Spanish Law had reason not to rape them, while they did sometimes engage in torture, white children were almost never abused, worked to death, etc.

They were more often adopted by families who needed household or ranch help. The buyer might back out of the deal if the slaves to be were not virgins. They were intended as Wives or household servants.

The mountain men who got the saints across the plains and settled them.
the body guards who snuck Joseph Smith in and out of Missouri Settlements who were sworn to kill the Assasins of Joseph Smith, were probably the white men who dressed up like indians and painted their
faces always dressed that way, and very often wore their Nauvoo Legion Uniforms in parades. They were prized and much honored.

When I look at this picture--pull it onto your desktop and let it sit there--a magnifying glass might help, it occurs to me that there may have been one or more
Mormon families in the train who were not identified until it was too late.

During the time that John D. Lee was writing "Mormonism Unveiled" under Army Guard, and tutelege, the surviving child and the two girls, were not easy to find.

As part of the agreement,
Jacob Hamblin may have been ordered to produce them. But what happened to the youngest child?
There are folktales--but they don't belong here, and I don't beleive that's what happened.

The older girls were returned to the East--more than a few of the Army thugs would have been killed if they had tried to force him to bring the witnesses into the horseshoe shaped trap, after the young child had been knocked to the ground unconscious,
shot, or otherwise klled.

Jacob Hamblin may not have come alone.

My own hunch is that the Guymon Brothers, a large
family of Cherokees and half Cherokee, killed the women and children--14 of them, fearing that they would get to California and return with a contingent of Missouri Mobbers--much like the Army that was "coming up the Plat singing many a lusty ditty, saying we'll do this and we'll do that when we get to Salt Lake City."

I am a pacifist and deplore this massacre AS MUCH OR MORE than any other. It haunts me--maybe the Ghost Busters could go out there and fund the next season of globe trotting with Church payoffs.

As to our family, my great great grandfather came from Denmark with a brother who went onto California. He said men approached him with sgovels and told him to get his. He well knew
what this meant and pretended not to speak English.

The other side of the the paternal family were Sutherland Scotts who reached Utah in the mid 1960's.

One thing is sure--the Fancher party would have gotten through safely if they had not had their Bush-wackers with them--Porter Rockwell was speeding South with orders to stand down, probably procured by Jacob Hamblin from Governor Brigham Young, for the Saints to stay their hands. If you pass through Saint George, the house of two of Jacob Hamblin's wives--

I suspect these to have been the ones who scalded a pair of Federal Marshall's faces with boiling warsh water, is on display--including an enormous Navaho rug on the Second floor work and playroom.

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.