Why Grandma started with the old mill

When Grandma started digging at John D. Lee's mill, it wasn't
to put in flowers. I there was nothing to mark where the mill
that preceeded the mill where grandpa had grown up, playing
with the Piede children and trying to stay out of trouble despite his pals Parley Pracker Pratt and Merlin Tut who was found under a bush and burned down the Tithing Barn. She dug much deeper and she and grandpa reconstructed it on paper from what they'd found. We had a Matheson for Governor then, and she had him down for a proper dedication.

The day they set the millstone in the monument, she uncovered
50 feet of drainage pipe with a grandchild.

If the old mill had never existed, there was no reason to
tell the events that happened there, things that were threatened there, conclusions drawn about what would happen if
word of the massacre reached the California and later the Eastern Papers. Matters, it might be hoped, would be settled,
the Soldiers posted well away from Mormon settlements, the new, unelected, territorial governor seated.

There was a bit of a leak, something a woman blogging on an ephemeral site got almost to saying but stopped--her Great
grandfather's family had been living in California when news
of the massacre became general and were driven out to settle in Parowan. He dressed like a reporter and took a notebook
and stood with the reporters during the hanging. She didn't
think she should say on the web what her great grandfather
heard.

A few days later I read that John D Lee had been given one last chance to say Brigham Young had ordered him to massacre
the immigtants, he refused and they hung him. John D. Lee was sealed to Brigham Young as his son--that came from Gene England in a 1976 class on the Mormon Novel.

Notes on 1856-8 Utah, Harney, etc.

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 Viet Nam. Itargues 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.

There was a movie and book some years ago rhat 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.

My 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.

The life expectancy in the urban slums to which many Scotch had been
driven was only twenty fields. Learning that my thrice Great Grandfather had three years of college which were intended to prepare him for the
Scotch 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 group
of shoeless orphans who wandered, as 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 let them raid the rootseller or icehouse, the chickencoop--finding what they could scrim to eat.

Jefferson Davis was among the Sutter Mill War Vetran Crew who discovered Gold and he brought his sister a pair of Gold earings. These were useless to her--she had starved over that winter and had lost the baby who had been born in Nauvoo. The identity o the father was not spoken of. It may have been another child who did not go to Nauvoo with the others, she may have been victimized or eploited in return for food and a stay in a Bachelor Farmers barn.

After leading a scouting epedition looking for good townsites he founded Whittier, Caliofornia as a station on the separate Mormon Pony Express Line.

This used teenage boys and supported ranches where Mormons reared horses for use along the mail line
to the port in San Diego.
Rhoda Leach Neese, his Sister, Second wife to James Guymon married to him iin Nauvoo, later chose to share her house withMarie Boudin, a teenaged French aristocrat who ran off to America with a man who mistreated her
and abandoned her in Salt Lake.

Marie is a major Character in my novel. I put James at the Point of the mountain formost of the novel in ordernot to have to deal with him until I've gotten the serial books finished. I would love to hear from any of her descendants since I am too ill to come to Salt Lake and Environs to look for any papers she may have left behind--I have an inkling that she may have left something of interest behind.

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.

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 divorced men. She distroyed the Guymon material I had with a cavalier and almost sneering attitude.
I talk to hima few times a year. She told me she’d destroyed his phone number to watch my reaction. It did not occur to her that I remembered them, all she did was do more damage to the difficult relationship between us.

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 even in Gene England, who did much research on the massacre. I was at the Y 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 Book Children's writing professor who had many hundreds of hours of oral history on tape.

She would 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. Even more she understood that Utah History, as elsewhere, is writen in blood. We are human and Human History is written in blood.

My professor told me of being a small girl and overhearing the teachers saying that her father had shot her mother and then himself. She ran home and was in her parents bedroom before anyone noticed her. This, my teacher said, is Utah History.


There is an evil, bred of Chaos and delusions of superiority, which begans in Europe and shows up in the early American Colonies. One can see it in the government rhetoric of Truman, the Haberdasher who lived on Missouri 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 Viet Nam. Something in such leaders believes that the common people are miserable wretches--without a Strongman or Strong woman to lead them by the hand they can plan or do nothing, not even act upon their own feelings, develop new religions or have cherished and legitimate culture of their own.

There was a movie and book some years ago that my family read with some interest called the Immigrants. It was about Denmark at a time of peak mass expulsion Genocide. These are the years just preceding the massacre.

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, when help could not be gotten to them. Squaw Killer Harney was on the trail ahead with his first contingent of troops.

They believed promises made to the Summer Companies and were easily fulfilled. Theirs was a mythical Prophet with larger than life qualities in whomthey could entrust their lives. They beleived sacred promises would bring them through in good stead, contrary to their or anyones common sense--certainly Brigham. E.E. Erickson’s writing on Brigham Young are very interesting here.

My 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.

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 strongmen as Harney 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 faced those who remained in Europe. Brigham’s plan and promise was intended for sunny days and grassy flowery fields. The life expectancy in the urban slums to which many Scotch had been driven was only twenty five.

My thrice Great Grandfather had lost four children to a herpetic epidemic the year before he came to America. He had had three years of college which were intended to prepare him for the Scotch Ministry, Brigham sent him South to work leaning the plethoraof Native American language.

His son was sent, with 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 to me from previous generations who
were close to the Village Elders and Indian Doctors of past generations.

According to information gleaned from 3 generations of men who felt a call to work with the Indians, the local indians helped in tracking and killing 2 men who escaped as far as Las Vegas Springs, or wells. That was their only involvement. They probably undressed the men for buriel for what they might be carrying in their pockets--this would have included verifying whether they were dead or not.

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 and to deny it is a such indication of impiety.

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

"Where nothing is long ago."

I can't say I've been enjoying the Mountain Meadows Blogging that's been going on on the web. The Sunday School lessonbook, which I never read, or used when I taught the 9 year olds was boring. I had ten girls who were headed for the Ivy League, they could all read at three, and two hyperactive boys. So I ignored the boys and divided some condensed histories into the number of weeks in the year.

1857 was a long time ago. I can't figure out why the number of casualtiesis so low. I remember reading at BYU, in the stacks and at home in a sunny corner. I remember the number of casualties to have been 155. I think the descendents have counted the number of their
party, including the Missouri Wildcats, and maybe think the rest
didn't matter so much.

When the flesh had been cleaned from the bones, and at the request of the court, Jacob Hamblin exhumed and counted the bodies, then reinterred the bones in the Danish way. The bones are cleaned by time
and set off to the side, then the newly dead are buried in caskets.

I've never been a fan of prosteliting, and the current mess shows why--
we are living in a time when people honestly beleive that paradigms are
perfectly suitable substitutes for History.

How Americans viewed treated the Indigenous People was set in cement by the late 1850's. I seem to remember Cotton Mather going out with
the men of his congregation and killing 600 people in a single afternoon.

My hypothesis about how it all happened is this: Joseph Smith used
very light skinned bodyguards, Cherokees and warriors who were Celts
going back far enough that they were often light skinned and Hazel or Blue eyed. The British didn't want to take their Highland Scotts back to
Britain, so they left them behind. They went up into the Appalacians and married wives from the East Coast tribes.

I put two and two together, don't know whether I have come up with four. Our house reading material was World Book, Websters, the Documentary History of the Church, B.H. Roberts Comprehensive History
of the Church, (Both about 6-8 hefty volumes), and a 21 volume first edition of the Journal of Discourses. We had the Discourses of Orson
Pratt, and a few other queer as in odd books.

One of these was written by a man who went back to Illinois, Missouri, and out to California looking for his assasins. In particular, he was looking for information about how they died. They died of a very gruesome disease, which I picked up from being a Nuclear Downwinder
born a day after the Paperclippers' flash blindness test.

See "The Plutonium Files." if it's declassified this week. My Cherokee friend, the Grandson of a Shaman, described to me a means of introducing a mosquito or no see um's eggs into the bloodstream, killing the perpetrator within a few days, probably from dehydration,
but if they got M.E. as well, I've had that for 45 years, and the onset
is very painfull.

Why did the author of this book know to ask the question? M.E. is caused by a slow virus or retrovirus, much like Kuru. The suffering
from this form of execution could be made worse or lessened depending on the severity of the crime, and whether the victim was
in the same family or Village as the perpetrator. Women often practiced this grisly art, because the crimes were often against their sisters, neices, or daughters. My friend's Grandmother explained to him exactly
how, when and why it was done when he was about Fifteen.

I came across a Bible verse on a Chinese blog where Christians and practitioners of a Christian like Buddist religion are being mercilously
tortured. This form of Meditation is often used by the old, ill, or weak
and involves unimaginably hideous barbarism in Concentration Camps.
It is an old and academic form of practice so practitioners are often
academics or professionals.

Sorry that I don't have my sticks on me, but the verse said that by endurance and silence a Christian could attain a better resurrection.
I don't beleive this or think it is a good thing to beleive, but the Maritime Indians, Celts, and early Christians did beleive it.

This may come out more as those whose anscestors participated in or were victims of the Massacre begin to talk more about it. My former husband did not get sunburned, even when a small child and is totally
disinterested in both Geneology and History, but his Great-great grandfathers were Cherokee bodyguards of Joseph Smith and were
sworn to seek out and execute his assassins. I'm sure they took no pleasure in it, that was their way.

So my question, if anyone still knows, is how the Missouri and Arkensaw
Pioneers were related. There were the gang, probably traveling without
their families who were drunk, who may have known the exact nature of
crimes perpetrated on Mormon women and children, who threatened to
bring the whole nightmare back again.

I think these men traveled through Utah more safely than they might have elsewhere. Whether the Misourri Wild Cats or Wildcatters were guilty or not they said they were, they brandished and bragged, threatened and made sadistic threats--with the support of the US
Army, they had no fear.

Mountain Meadows Massacre

I am a seventh generation Mormon, and I worry about first and second generation Mormons, who may not even be particularly familiar with the details of Mormon History.

So I started a site in July on a hunch, on the Mountain Meadows Massacre. I doubt that Brigham Young had anything to do with the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Among his tactical advantages, the Massacre would have been the last he would have chosen. What a letter from Brother Brigham Young needed to give was permission to give food for the journey. To set out onto the low desert
for months. Realistically, they would have been worn out and in no position
to refuse the Church's help.

This was in time of war. Utah had become a Territory after the questionable Doctrine
of President Monroe. Brother Brigham was very bright. Joseph Smith was the Prophet Joseph--the Brother of all.

I don't believe Brigham Young had a mystical bone in his body. Each of the Presidents of the Church had his own
style of Revelation and leadership.
Brigham was a masterful manager of
his very complex Church which was in forced migration. He could not only
see the way up ahead, but how to
get there.

He was sometimes wrong. He told Ellis Shipp not to marry Milton Shipp, a man formerly married and divorce. She was
being educated by Karl Maeser, the first President of BYU, who was hired to educate Brigham Young's children. Ellis'
mother was dead and she was studying
for her exams on her own and he paid for some of her University expenses for Medical School.

She did marry Milton, and go to Medical
School, her sister wife Maggie joined her
and they practiced Pediatrics, particularly
Ear, Nose and Throat, delivered babies
and trained Midwifes for the Inter Mountain West.

The Premise of September Dawn is that
Brigham Young was a Bloodthirsty Dictator
who ordered the massacre of more than a
Hundred people. Since Utah was a territory
and he its Governor he was the head of the
State Militia. He had an Militia which was
overextended by a unconventional war.
He wanted a compltely bloodless war,
with a few exceptions.

There were men who were well known
in Nauvoo to have commited Capital
Crimes. Here we hang the tale, not on
Brigham, not on any precedent. They
murdered Indian women and had
a hundred or so Indians trailing the
Missouri Mobcats. By the time they
got to the Meadows, with a letter by
their manager sent to allow them
good pasturage to fatten their
dray animals

Did he foresee or order the Massacre?

I doubt it.


I was at an open house for Sonia Johnson in the Stake where Sonia Johnson lived before she was excommunicated. A member of the Stake High council came, he cited procedural errors inthe trial.

Her Home teachers came. Her best friend was now the head of Mormons against the ERA and fell into a long bear hug--Mormons have faced many changes and challenges with loving-kindness and understanding. But Mormons tend to all go
together when they go. It happened when David O. McKay died, and when Benson became prophet.

I never liked Ezra Taft Benson's mingling of politics and religion, long before he was prophet. If they do kick us out,
can I still be on your website? I like Hinkley--possibly because
I understand Hinkley.

Facing History After Genocide and Mass Murder

The full title is: Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Murder, By Martha Minow,
I thought this a good book to mention here.

Selected pages are in my Google Library, which allows Student, Scholar, and Academic access to people working in similar fields. I'll talk about it the next time I post.

"With "Between Vengeance and Forgiveness," Martha Minow, Harvard law professor and one of our most brilliant and humane legal minds, offers a landmark book on justice and healing after horrific violence. Remembering and forgetting, judging and forgiving, reconciling and avenging, grieving and educating -- Minow shows us why each may be necessary, yet painfully inadequate, to individuals and societies living in the wake of past horrors. She explores the rich and often troubling range of responses to massive, societal-level oppression. She writes of the legacy of war-crime prosecutions, beginning with the Nuremberg trials. She explores whether reparation -- such as the monetary awards given to Japanese-Americans for internment during World War II, or art, such as Holocaust memorials -- can be a basis for reconciliation after immeasurable personal and cultural loss. Minow also writes with informed, searching prose of the extraordinary drama of truth commissions in Argentina, East Germany, and most notably South Africa, and in the process delves into the risks and requirements involved in hearing from victims, the dynamics of gender, and the value of even imperfect gestures in the midst of these riveting experiments in justice and healing.

Excerpt:

As already noted, the precise precedent established includes the application of laws to conduct committed before the clear statement of th laws, in sharp contrast to the rule of law.
Indeed one former Nuremberg prosecutor argues that the most important contribution of Nuremberg is the development of a kind of International Law that grows and is always in the process of becoming. "

Page 33-34.

On the land where, once, nothing was long ago

I have been musing on my ancestral family. Most were in Cedar or Parowan in 1857. There was little mention of my Great, Great, Grandfather when his wife was deeply embedded in an Indian Tribe with her young children. Daniel Matheson would have probably picked up the Indigenous languages quickly, he had had three years of college at St. Andrews in Edinborough.

He, I then presume, would have had a familiarity with Scots Gaelic, English, Latin and Greek, perhaps some French. So, Brigham very likely sent him to live among the Indians to pick up their languages. Jacob Hamblin spoke Hopi, Navaho and what anthropologists call Uto-Aztecan. What the Feds called Injun. They called themselves Pa or pi--meant the people of the ede, which was a suffix meaning water.

A clover when stressed, bore large seeds, kept water where, in the valleys, its nitrogen rich roots mixed with the edible roots of a large seeded tall grass called faleris. The valley was the meeting ground of Shoshone, Piedes, and other peoples, excluding the Utes. The border between land claimed by the Spanish and the land claimed by the Utes, was a swath a few hundreds of miles North of Parowan. Many birds sang there, mushrooms lined the creeks, and what we ploughed dried up and between our rows of wheat, blew away on the wind.

Grandpa said they laughed at our foolishness, but there came, in 1857, a deep drought and we took to running sheep which dried the land farther. Among the accusations made by Buchanon was that, in fewer words, we were going Indian.
We needed someone to teach us how to treat our Indians--Squaw killer Harney being his first choice. He'd made such a reputation for himself with the Eastern tribes going on to the Sioux.

After the Meadows, when all the houses in Salt Lake were set to light by young boys, Pa Snow's generation in Dad's war, Harney was sent back East. In any Democracy, it's an embarrassment when the Governed make a great deal of noise about the replacement of their elected Governor with someone so odious to them that they'd leave them nothing but scorched Earth.
Gibbs cites this as proof of fanaticism.

So, for their fanaticism, they got a Governor named Cummings.
I think it may have been the Mormon writer Vardis Fisher (so this is Apocrypha) who had Brother Brigham take his replacement around to catch the stragglers, leaving the city to Pa Snow's generation and their torches.

I'm not sure that Cummings shed tears. He ordered his Army to skirt the settlement--make their camp on the dry Western sides of the valleys--in Salt Lake City, Beaver City where the Federal Court was to be, and Cedar City to ride heard on us and our Nauvoo legion, who had used the Federal Army to ferret out the men who used Brother Joseph, the Prophet, for target
practice, plugging him with 40 pistol balls.

When the Mountain Meadows Generation passed on, leaving
their treasures to my Great Grandfather, later to my Grandpa's second hand store, they left many of their hunting rifles, seldom turned to war.

Since I havn't been back home--I've been too ill, but dearly missed it, I can see each weapon, back to Spanish Casle key guns, women's tiny garter guns's, a priest's rock amulet. Blessed, those who have passed on--how much we love then despite their errors and many defeats.

There is a time when John D. Lee--or someone, I'm writing from memory, asks a young translator to bring the Santa Clara Indians around. My Great-Great Grandfather might have been so described at that time, he was young, he followed orders.

I suspect Dear President Hinkley produced an apology, thorough two younger intermediaries, while genuous, was intended for airing overseas. We take as few lives as possible, as many prisoners as possible. In those days, not so long ago we hated the Eastern Press, and blamed it for our sufferings. I
suspect that there were 8-12 Missouri Wildcats taking turns brandishing the porcelain gun who they said killed our prophet.

Most were probably killed on the first night and were buried in the pit in the center of their laager. It may have been no Piute who killed them, but the sharpshooting personal guard of Joseph Smith who went to guarding Brother Brigham.

My friend who ate Oatmeal said of Cherokee traditions of torture that they hated to do it, but their lands were coveted by
surrounding tribes, whose land was not so rich. They felt it neccesary to make them fear them, and they had strong magick.
He said that they tied the warrior between two trees and cut a shallow line between his collar bones and groin. There was a
special fly--I suspect a mosquito-- that was drawn to the mosture, it lay it's eggs in the trench, directly into the circulatory system. The flap of skin sealed and the man's kin believed him to be killed by magic. His grandfather believed that the fly lay its eggs, which hatched young so small that they passed into the brain causing great suffering.

As in the British Mills, the bran and germ of the decimating wheat, went to the dogs and poor, with suet mixed in for the dogs. The rule back home with dogs was working dogs only. That was because the bran and germ went to compensate the Indians for the ruin of their lush vallies .

Compensate, hell, we just didn't know our place. So they put the Indians on land that was not arable. There was more water than is there today, but it wasn't land where anything could be grown.

My Great Great grandmother scared off quite a large band of Indians who had come to borrow some wheat flower. She crawled under a bed and rocked the baby's cradle from there.
The Indians looked in the window and saw only the cradle,
rocking, and they yelped and ran away. This was a story
Grandpa told me in the car going to the doctor in Salt Lake.

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.”

The Mountan Meadows Monument

In the mid 1980's, my grandmother, who had done much of
the back labor in excavating John D. Lee's Mill, wrote me to
say that a descendent of one of the victims came to the Lee
family reunion to ask for a formal apology to the families.
My grandmother was involved in the decision to erect a memorial to the victims of their times.

A memorial listing all who are known to have died there was erected on the site with her strong moral and physical support.
Brigham Young hitched a rope to the original gravestone and pulled it down. Mormons of my and previous generations do and did not put crosses on their Gravestones, and the army did
put one on John D. Lee's. He was Brigham Young's adopted son [Gene England, BYU, 1976] and according to Juanita Brookes he quoted the bible when it fell over saying ''Vengence
is mine sayeth the Lord.'' I don't know whether this was on the
Army Cross or not, but the idea that one man could be held accountable for a massacre committed by many the Lord may know, but I certainly do not, neither did Brigham Young.

The massacre was caused by many, complex and hopelessly
intertwined forces, rooted in the genocides of New York, Ohio.
Missouri, Illinois, Winter Quarters, the trail West and the starvation and disease suffered during the trail building in 1847
and the first Winter in the Valley. The drought of that year,crop
failure, and the inability to plant a proper crop due to the strenuous need to evacuate many thousands of people Southward and build housing for them. Every available hand
was involved in the move, the harrassing of Federal troops on the Westward trail in which my Great,Great grandmother's husband Clayborn Elder participated.Young boys piled hay and prepared houses in the City of Salt Lake for quick burning.

The threat of Genocide by an Army from California was real. At the time of the Civil war 1/3 of the Federal Army was stationed on the East banks of the Great Salt Lake and near Cedar City.
They were recalled after the Civil War began at Fort Sumpter.

Mountain Meadows--Gene England-Clifton Jolley-Edward Geary

While Mr. Gibbs sometimes jumps to conclusions, there were,
in the article, some new puzzle pieces. The article was written while my Grandfather was in Scotland, preaching the gospel,
but also looking for members of our clan or others who might want or need to gather to Zion. He came home shortly afterward and was called as Bishop and also as the Miller. This meant that he had a great deal to do with the local Indiian band,
since the poor were given bran and wheat germ from the mill, and this included most of the Indians.

He may well have spoken Piute. His mother lived with him in
Panguitch, which was an Indian Village at that time. My Great-Great Grandfather was away looking for work. This would have been a little bit after the massacre and my Book of Remembrance was lost when the house in Oregon was sold,
so I can't look it up.

Utah lived under two types of law in the early days. These both involved slavery. Southern Utah Indians lived under Spanish law, which regulated slavery--the selling of children under 14, for instance, was illegal. The Mormons were Yankees and very much against slavery, but were outnumbered in many sparsely populated areas, and people like my Great Grandmother, who had a two year old and was pregnant, had to pretty much do as the Romans did. There was a large black market that traded in fair skinned children and Native children traded for food.

My Great Grandmother was home with her two year old when an Indian neighbor came into the cabin, going through cupboards and making a very thorough inspection, she scolded my Great Grandmother some, was gone for awhile, then returned with a large bowl of steaming mush made of local
grass seed, probably faleris or a legume which could grow
quite large seeds.

Some time later, an Indian man came to the door carrying my Great Grandfather. He tried to reason with my Great Grandmother and was unsuccessful and frustrated, but nothing to suggest that she was in danger. He explained that she needed more food for the baby she was carrying. Her older baby was very blonde and pretty and they could get a good price for him if they took him South. White children were always treated well, he said, but the Indian children were treated very cruelly. She was unconvinced and did not push the matter.

I knew from a book we had, called "Church History Stories for Children, that the Spanish would even torture dark children for no reason at all. There was a story in the book about some slave traders who were cutting an Indian Girl and cauterizing the wounds. What they wanted to do that for is very hard to imagine. They came to a Mormon house and the wife or wives
there bought the girl for a sack of flour and some bacon and then adopted her.

So it was the Southern Indians who said that the escaped Dunlop girls were far too pretty to kill was not unusual.
They would also have been considered too pretty to rape, since girls who were not virgins were less valuable in trade. I think Jacob Hamblin sent a note South to his family who tended the Church stock--two wives and their children and Albert, Hamblin's adopted Indian son.

They likely would have been told to try to make the party comfortable until he could get to Salt Lake and confer with Brother Brigham. His assessment of the party was positive, but, again, I don't think he set eyes on the Bushwacking braggarts--the Missouri Wildcats. Albert was following orders
if the rumor was true that he was caring for them. There may have been Northern Indians at the Meadows, and a Professor at the Y confirmed the story about the "Wildcats"shooting an Indian woman combing her hair, sitting on a rock near a stream. His family lived nearby and near where the Indian
border between North or South.

The Northern Indians were likely to both keep those who they had some very serious gripe against as slaves at the least, worse
if the crime had been worse. But this grievance would have been against the Bushwhackers, not the girls. I believe they were safely held and produced at the time of the hanging,
as the picture seems to suggest, but not conclusively.

While without them the Fanchers would have been safe, there was no chance of them getting out of the territory alive, though Governor Brigham Young would have stayed out of it. No need to do otherwise. We use the term now "human shields" they were using the Fancher Party as human shields.

The Indians and Mormons were still arguing this during my Grandfathers time. Mormons were abolitionists, Slaveholding Mormons lived about forty miles to the South of Mountain Meadows and were very strongly urged to free their slaves.
They might keep them in their families and since Dixie was also known as the cotton mission, southerners of any color were useful.

Kathleen Matheson Weber

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.