Endless Sillygisms

The more I read my Google Alerts triggered by Allusions to topical Mormon History, the more I
say to myself, the more exasperated I become.
Why now? Why topical now. Why not topical or relavent over the 150 all the years before?

The formula goes like this-- attack plus religion
plus 911 equals a brutal bloodbath in a Utah cowpasture fueled by Fanatisism. It's the scariest
thing since that camcorder movie about the supposed serial killing witch in England.

For those of us, yes, even many Mormons suspect that that we've been born and died before on this mudcaked fireball as it weaves its mysterious, monsterous, miserable way through eternity.

Face it--we;ve been there, as victims, as perpetrators, as the guy at the top. And the top guy never took the rap. Yea, the top dog walks away. Is there ever a war criminal who was not out on the loose while within a ten year period. A few, probably, possibly the majority. The majority go free, most likely so, I think. Brigham Young was the guy at the top.

Did he get off scott free? Yea, probably because he didn't do it? Nothing could be farther from the Truth. In an ordinary sense he did it not. His public speech of the last few years had grown particularly frustrated.

'Why, he shouted at the Danish men, women and children (in English) who straggled into SLC, that he never promised safe passage to the Valley if they started two months late with carts made of uncured wood. They needed to think for themselves--he could be wrong, he could be right--maybe right often enough to make it worth their time to listen to what he was trying to suggest.

The 1957 poor excuse for a Federal Army had him in a trap--one created by uncontrollable forces, a year when there were piles of corpses-and maniacal top dogs, neighbors with torches, torchlight ricosheying off their streaming tears whitch streamed down their icy cheeks and as much pathos and purple prose as you want to invest. My Great-great grandma made 'HEART
THROBS OF THE GOLDEN WEST'.

For her trip up the Platt with that uncured wagon, she was assigned an old man who was called by their Captain to help her and her three year old daughter gather to Zion. Oddly enough, her maiden name was Gibbs. Was our wiki Gibbs a brother?

His methods were allright, and the information he received from a correspondent named King, well
I can say that they King family of King family song, dramatists, journalists, a brothers King King and King law practice--they even had King a King family musical hour on prime time weekend TV.
At least one King daughter worked at my Grand-mother‘s barbeque grill (Bar and Grill) in a small
Germantown outside Oakland, California.

I wonder about Larry King sometimes. The hour long was weekly Home Evening, foisted on an unsuspecting audience by Mormons--it was probably that King who Gibbs corresponded with and found a cooperative informant.

So I have credited some, but not all, of the article.
If Brother Gibbs got the story filtered through this King, my ears prick up.

Will we learn anything from our onourous, grueling, cradle to grave effort this time around the go round?

Brigham is both responsible for the Massacre and not responsible. He was the top dog, he the barked orders, but often he left decisions to his top officers--Porter Rockwell, Brigham Youngs top most, onetime Joseph Smith's, bartender in the Mansion house.

He knew every face in Nauvoo, Mormon, non-Mormon. If it was the Missouri Wildcats who led the Fancher-Bakers to that lonely, darksome vale, where within the space of 3 minutes most met their doom.

Well, as in most dramas it was the beautifull and innocent who met their doom. I know the descendants need somewhere to tell their stories, they need some public response. Still this isn't a story about Mormons and Evangelicals, Baptists hating one another.

Why was Porter racing toward the Meadows?
Did he have the needed letter? Did he just want to keep his still greif-stricken and overought Southern Forts from doing anything truly stupid.

Did he simply want to get a good look see at the wildcat assassins before Joseph's aforementioned assasins got their last bear hug.

Dunno. But save me the cult-911 bugaboo ninsense. I went around in Shock for weeks if not months or years, but we should have found the real culprits and used our noggins about what to do next, first? I think so.

They didn't force us to fight an unwinnable three front war with experienced Buswhackers--which was what we had for an Army then. We would have died, as the ill-starred Fanchers did, as the 250 or so Utes did at Bear River died, killed by a California
Militia who shot Native Americans like screaming
rabbits.

The right to bear arms infers the right of self defence. Self defence can be better attained with Non-violence, Solidarity, and direct action. As with the Chinese support of the Darfur Gennocide, the persecution of Religion in China--we need to learn to see it coming. Weneed to admit that it is already here. How can we make Genocide stop?

We all have to try a lot harder.

Now for a musical interlude--

So-- we're--on our way to California.
In the Spring we'll take our journey.
Pass beyond the Rocky Mountains,
Far be-y-o-o-nd the Arkansaw's Fountains.

There was a Mormon Arkansaws Company who,
knowing the Mormon Trail for the death trap it then was, wintered in a grove in Colorado, but
not without the sheperding of the Utah Militia.
Finding and organizing settlementts was their
duty to the wild West. With little credit, Brigham Young was a genius.

Kathleen Matheson Weber

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.