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.
