Nose to the Grindstone

MASSACRE AT MOUNTAIN MEADOWS--A Failed Exercise in Histriography


I am glad that Gordon Hinkley lived long enough to Dedicate
the Mountain Meadows Massacre Monument. My Grandparents had
recently died, but worked so many years in Utah Historical
Preservation of many artifacts. In 1973, my Grandfather
wheedled a museum and two Forest Rangers to see to the museum
construction and babysitting. It is still there, but without
his wooden Indian Nickel with the address and phone number
on the back. He'd press it into the departing visitor's hand
saying, ''Don't take a Wooden Nickel.''

A good caveat for any not rooted in Utah History, confronted
with the huge about of blather that has been written about
19th Century History--the mind must keep and store its deamons,
and a fresh Source is always tittilating.

A Cedar man had a collection of Carriages, and my Grandfather
had a corner where he could show his more important artifacts.
My Grandma kept a DUP Museum above a realtor's.

Mostly the Rangers went on trips with my Grandfather to
Document the settling of Southern Utah. He took them to
Salt Creek to show them how the pioneers had used burlap
to dry briney spring water that leached out of a small
spring for table use, in 1973 he took me to meet them and
we hiked up Fiddler's Canyon where there was a megalith
perhaps 3 or 4 by 10, with the sad history of the tribe,
it may have served as a warning to shamans that some
Southern Utah Shamans traded slaves to the Spanish.

First there was a bareheaded man with a serpents' tongue.
Next came men with hats and a woman and child in a corral.
Lastly came a figure of a handshake, probably indicating
the closing of a trade.

My grandfather had marked where, by looking through a small
deep window, and noting the position of certain rocks, the
quarter and cross quarter days of the year, and other
pertenate dates could be noted and remembered. Higher up
the canyon were broad flat rocks used for ceremonies for the
ill and one for the dying, or the old or sick who felt
their dying day had come.

Brigham-The Mastermind, Ringleader-Myth

There is an evil, bred of Chaos and delusions of superiority,
which began in Europe and which shows up in the early
American Colonies. One can see it in the government
rhetoric of the Haberdasher who lived on land which was
never purchased and to which its owners could not return
except on pain of legal extermination.

I am speaking of Truman and the Mc Carthy hearings, the
anti-protest counter-movement during VeIt Nam.
It believes that the common people are miserable wretches,
and without a Strongman or Strong woman to lead them by the
hand can plan or do nothing, not even act upon their own feelings,
develop new religions or even have cherished and legitimate
culture of their own. Brigham Young was not generally tyranical
or heavy handed. He knew what comes around goes around,
particularly with Indians not corrupted by the Spanish.
One wonders whether the marrying French, the Genocidal,
or lands who fell under Spanish law and whose fringe buyers
did not heed it's protections--which harmed the surviving
Indigenous Americans most greiviously.

In terms of lives it was the pathigenic microbes, but I
mean something
that cannot be described by maps and numbers here.

There was a movie and book some years ago That my family read with some interest called the Immigrants who came from Denmark at a time of peak mass expulsion and religious and political Genocide.

This is why Brigham Young planned for the largely Scandinavian
Immigrants at the time of the Mountain Meadows to come by Handcart.
The Summer Companies fared well and reached the Valley in good
physical and reasonable mental condition. They had lost much, but
had saved their lives and been assigned property, set to building
and Irrigation projects.

Those who were driven out later, who had only arrangements intended
for Pioneers of the next season, who Brigham would never have advised
to start so late, where help could not be gotten to them--and Squaw Killer
Harney was on the trail ahead with his first contingent of troops.

They believed promises made to the Summer Companies and fulfilled,
creating a mythology of a Prophet with larger than life qualities in whom
they could entrust their lives, who had made them sacred promises which
would bring them through in good stead.

M Mortensen ancestors, most of whom were children and young boys,
believed a promise of supernatural aid intended for summer Saints
who followed the plan and was never much more than a prediction of
probabilities. Brigham was faced with, if Lund was correct in the
Fire of the Covenent 1300 wagons on the snowy trail West and a starving
Federal Army holed up for the winter at Fort Bridger with their aptly
named commander, Squaw Killer Harney, a comrade in arms and purpose
with Custer. and very certain to have met a gruesome end if
allowed to reach the Valley.

People in the East knew this, they knew that this slender, almost girlish
Bucky Buchannon with his promises of ending the challenges of the
Western lands forever by the use of such Genocidal strongman was a
formula that they did not want used against white people. Many had
horrified family both in the East and California and these gave the name
Buchannons folly, or sometimes Buchanon's Blunder to Squaw Killer's
deployment to settle the Mormon question once and for all.

I don't know if the story of the Missouri Wildcats killing one or more
Indian women and poisoning wells was true--it is possible that it was a
legend born of Squaw Killer's name itself. It was said to be true by
a normally reliable BYU history professor who grew up near there.
Could I ever suggest to my sublings and cousins that Brigham had
promised, probably, that those with means might sacrifice their
wagons and go by handcart, thus providing their desperate urban
co-religionists a means of escaping the fate that was faced those
who remained in Europe. It was a promise intended for sunny
days and grassy flowery fields.

The life expectancy in the urban slums to which many Scotch
had beendriven was only twenty fields. Learning that my thrice
Great Grandfather had three years of college which were intended
to prepare him for theScotch Ministry, Brigham sent him South to work
leaning the plethora
of Native American language. He sent his young wife and baby to the
tribe then living among the beautiful wooded high country belonging to
the Panguitch Indians.

A few things have been passed down from previous generations who
were close to the Village Elders and Indian Doctors of past generations.
According to information gleaned from 3 generations of these men,
the local indians helped verify and tracking and killing 2 men who
escaped as far as Las Vegas Springs, or wells. Some were slavers under
Spanish rule, and dealt with men wearing hats, according to the idiographs
on the Calendar stone near the one time encampment
in Fiddlers Canyon which had an upright stone with a window cut in it
where a medicine person could stand and find the eqinoxes and solstices.
My grandfather took me and Larry Dean Olson up and showed
us the Sacred site, certainly pre-Escalante.

On top of the bluff there were two rocks, probably not used since the
movement of the first Yankee/European Mormon explorers to enter
Cedar Valley. Led by a member of the Mormon Battalian named
Jefferson Davis. He gained his skill as a Scout as one of the elder
boys in a groupof shoeless orphans who wandered, as the young WWII
partisans did, eating what they could find to eat and sleeping in barns
when farmers were kind enough to overlook them and find what they
could scrim to eat.

He later founded Whittier, Caliofornia, as a station on the separate
Mormon Pony Express Line, which used teenage boys and ranches
where Mormons lived and reared horses for use along the mail line
to the port in San Diego. He was the brother of Rhoda Leach Neese,
Second wife to James Guymon who later married Marie Boudin, a
teenage french aristocrat who ran off with a man who mistreated her
and abandoned her in Salt Lake. She is a major Character in my novel.
I put James at the Point of the mountain for most of the novel in order
not to have to deal with him until I've gotten the serial books finished.

Much Mormon History can be found in California--particularly at
Riverside, I picked up Rhoda's brother's trail at the museum of the
California Pioneers, where it was easy to stop off when I lived in
San Francisco the last year I was well enough to do proper research.
This blog is a result of oral history--some still on tape or in the hands
of my first husband's very large family.

My mother had very little time for men who are divorced by their wives
and distroyed the Guymon material I had. There were many people
doing research during the Arrington Historical period, looking for
leads to family organizations and elderly keepers of original documents--
as promised, and as one of the last things President Hinkley did, he made
sure that these materials would be at least seen by Historians again.

But whether they will have the feel for the land and people, I don't know.
I found this failing as I saw it in Gene England the years my Grandparents
were excavating John D. Lee's Cooperatively owned mill
and he was collecting alot of Mountain Meadows' material along with my
Children's writing professor who had many hundreds off hours of oral history
on tape. She would just stop in any town and ask for the oldest people in town,
then knock on the indicated door, a pretty writing professor from the Y with a
love for children's literature, but with an understanding that Utah History,
even if not so much as elsewhere, iswriten in blood. We are human.
Human history is written in blood.

i found this among my Google Alerts but haven't retraced my tracks yet,
this is what was on the public web. It took a few years for the newspapers
to learn of the massacre, and I think that was all that was
intended. The main war was to the North and involved the Utes who were
brave warriors, the Guymons and Jewkes and other East Coast,
light skinned Indians were trying to keep them in hand. Bucky Buchannon
was being conciliatory and had sent a more restrained, smaller army the
Utes wanted blood to pay them for tribal members killed during Squaw
Killer's failed attempt to get to Utah.

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.

The Three Ringed Circus

I wanted these pages to be my own--for my memories, feelings,
suppositions and hypotheses about the settlement of South Western Utah and the role of my ancestors in it. The role of the ancestors of the children I once hoped to have.

I knew I wanted to write a novel. My ancestors played a role, but they were not at the core of the story of the tribulations of the early days, they were never beaten or flogged or riddled with bullets, they never lay in a lonely grave with the wind whistling and the wolves howling above them, though they did dig such a grave, laid a lace coverlet over it, memorize the names of those they buried in the icy ground.

No, the story belonged, as I thought, to my childrens' ancestors--Cherokee Mountain men, bodyguards to the prophet, a starving orphan who wandered, much as the very young partisans in the European winters--sleeping in barns,
knawing on raw potatoes, their parents already buried.

Such a life does not make heroes or Saints of human beings. It may not make them good people, though they may grow in their capacity for goodness when they are settled. And what if, after nearly twenty years of hardship the wolf is again at the door threatening to raise a enormous mob, known for their atrocities, and they know this pack of wolves and they say what they will again do.

I wanted to get this blog started before I began surfing to see what is out there--my family stories and the Gibbs article is enough to occupy my time and energy.

But I had to do it, I had to open the lid of the box and draw back in horror, like Pandora. At the end of the tale, there is still
beauty and hope. I drew back in rage.

What right has anyone, after massacring via Air America, between tens of thousands to a million souls, largely children,
women and old, honored men, to seek some explanation, some allegory, for our needless, heedless barbarism. Do we seek it in the unmarked graves of uncounted ravaged women, little babies dead because their mothers were starving, men who froze on the trail because they would not spend another night among fiends who dared take the Lord's name in vain and call themselves “Christians.”

We pray in Jesus' name, we beg favors of his Father, we listen for the whispering of the Holy Ghost. We are people of the book, we believe our Trinity to be one in Spirit, in Purpose, in Love, and what is God but Love.

I believe, and I'm a Pacifist, that if anyone had the right to defend themselves from a two front war--caught in the Genocidal pinchers of fiends and goons--it was these men.
And if any Indian anywhere had the right to stand and prevent
Genocide, it was these, who had already suffered for 500 years
under the Spanish Iron yoke.

The Cherokee Scouts knew this and were white in color. They prepared themselves in the traditional way, with the paint prepared by their families, traditionally, and when the surviving children saw them wash it off they were white men in Indian
Buckskins.

One of my BYU professors anscestors were from the hamlet near which the Indian Woman was shot--before or after? And how did they poison the well--by throwing her body diown?

The reaction to Mountain Meadows was about racism. Why didn't we just kill the vermin and take the land, like the Army did everywhere else. We didn't even want them, though North of the Black Ridge we were as Yankee as anywhere else. We understand Post Traumatic Stress Disorder now. Can those who want to bring back the old prejudices--and they will come if this is mishandled.

What did Jesus say--examine the pus in your own eye before you scrutinize others. “Let he who is without sin cast the first
stone.”

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.