Archaeologist says he’s found true burial site of Mountain Meadows Massacre victims

[Joel]

Archaeologist says he’s found true burial site of Mountain Meadows Massacre victims — and it’s not on LDS-owned land



| Courtesy Everett Bassett. An independent archaeologist discovered what he believes are the two grave sites holding the remains of up to 100 Arkansas migrants murdered at Mountain Meadows in 1857. This photo depicts the grave holding the men and boys, which is located about 2,100 feet west of the LDS Church's monument that purports to commemorate the grave.

For more than a century and a half after the Mountain Meadows Massacre, no one knew exactly where the bodies were buried.

A California-based archaeologist now says he has solved the mystery, and that it was surprisingly easy.

Last summer, Everett Bassett found what he believes are the two rock graves constructed by the U.S. Army about 20 months after Mormon militiamen and their Paiute allies slaughtered 120 westbound Arkansas migrants in southwestern Utah.

The sites are 1,000 or more feet to the west of monuments The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints built on properties it acquired under the belief that they harbored the grave sites, Bassett said. He used Army records to locate the actual graves, which were described simply as mounds of rocks. They are in a ravine formed by the Old Spanish Trail — exactly where the records said they would be — on land the church does not own.

"The trick to finding these was figuring out where the road was," Bassett said. "I was sitting on it when I realized that this enormous mound of rocks is what we were looking for all these years."

He unveiled his findings Saturday at a gathering of victims' descendants in Harrison, Ark., and plans to publish them in a peer-reviewed journal.

"I wanted to go through the descendant groups and have them have the first shot at preservation," Bassett said. "They need stabilization, and we can't do that without public involvement and public or private funding."

Richard Turley, assistant LDS Church historian and co-author of the critically acclaimed 2008 book "Massacre at Mountain Meadows," said he's eager to see Bassett's report.

"If, in fact, they have found the graves, it would be a very important development, one that would be of great interest to many people," he said. "People have looked for it for many, many years."

Victims' descendants were pleased by Bassett's discovery.

"It just adds to getting closure. These people have been dead 150 years. There's not a lot you can do for them, but you can remember them in the highest way possible," said Phil Bolinger, president of Mountain Meadows Monument Foundation Inc. "We believe the site is worthy for a national monument. That would be the highest order of federal protection."

The LDS Church-owned site was designated as a national historic landmark in 2011, but Bolinger contends the graves mark the locations where the massacre actually occurred. They are about a mile north of the siege site, which is accurately marked with the monument built in 1990.

Bolinger's group is working with the property owner, whom he declined to name, to craft a conservation agreement.

Though the events leading up to the Sept. 11, 1857, massacre have been the subject of controversy, it's generally believed that Mormon militiamen disguised as American Indians besieged the Fancher-Baker wagon train for several days before John D. Lee brokered a truce.

The militiamen, who included prominent pioneers and church officers, guaranteed the migrants safe passage if they laid down their arms and followed them north.

The migrants agreed, only to be lured to their deaths. On a predetermined signal, the militiamen shot the men and boys in the head at one location and bludgeoned the women and children at another.

Only 17 children, those under age 6, were spared. The dead were left where they fell or received cursory burials.

For months, the corpses lay beside an important pioneer migration route, prompting the Army to dispatch 207 soldiers to construct a more worthy resting place for the Mountain Meadows victims.

The church did not fully acknowledge its members' role in the crime until 2007. Lee, who died before a firing squad 20 years after the killings, was the only one held accountable.

Bassett describes the Army-built structures as "sepulchers," both 8 by 12 feet, formed by boulders of basalt and granitic material — even though the surrounding rock is almost all sandstone.

Soldiers probably hauled the rock a short distance to the massacre site because it was seen as a more suitable building material, Bassett said. These different rocks provide further proof that the bones of up to 100 victims rest under them.

He believes the soldiers would have constructed the sepulchers in a single day. They gathered what bones they could, interred them in the structures and covered them with 4 feet of rocks.

"They were really more functional and designed to keep wolves from digging them up," Bassett said. "They were not built where people would see them."

The grave for the men and boys has a stone apron around it, along with a sandstone tablet, which Bassett believes was inscribed with axle grease that faded long ago.

For years, people had assumed the Army-built graves to be conspicuous monuments that had been dismantled and scattered through the years.

The piles did not fit with what Bassett expected to find. Dirt is now piled along the structures' sides, and sagebrush grows on top of them.

"There's no way this could be the grave," Bassett said, "but, on other hand, there was absolutely nothing else it could be."

He has made no effort to disturb the rock structures, which are characteristic of the mass graves the Army built for Civil War dead. Bassett has never seen one like these before in the West.

"We want to preserve and protect the sites," Bolinger said. "The Army did a wonderful job of building the sepulchers, but the creek is different than it was 150 years ago."

He also believes the LDS Church has some explaining to do.

"It makes us want to say to the church, you either intentionally didn't tell us or you weren't as thorough as we thought you were capable of," he said. "You guys have bought all this property and built monuments that missed the mark. You made two mistakes."

[Desert Roses]

Heard this story this morning; I think it's interesting because my guess is that the victims of the massacre wouldn't want to be buried on LDS property. I know I've thought a time or two about where I'd like to be buried and wake up on resurrection morn. If I was murdered by Mormons, I sure would not want to be buried on Mormon land! Maybe that doesn't matter, but I think its a little bit of ironic justice in this whole messy Mountain Meadows massacre.

[Joel]

Skull of unknown Mountain Meadows Massacre child victim buried as descendants, Mormon church mourn 1857 tragedy


Mountain Meadows • After 160 years buried in a museum collection, the skull of one the Mountain Meadows Massacre’s youngest victims was laid to rest Saturday in a song-filled ceremony that honored all the immigrant children whose lives were cut short here in what was among the nation’s worst peacetime atrocities.

The child’s remains made the journey from an East Coast museum back to Utah this summer. Saturday, they were interred at the meadow where relatives of the doomed Arkansas immigrants gathered to reflect on a tragedy and close a controversy that had ensnared the skull for nearly a decade.

“It represents all the children who died. It’s not just one. It’s all of them we grieve for today. God knows who this child is. It is an honor to give this child a Christian burial,” said Patty Norris, a descendant of the immigrant train leader Alexander Fancher, to open the service.

Seven of the nine Fancher children were murdered, along with every adult.

Saturday’s service marked the anniversary of the five-day siege that culminated in the massacre of some 120 California-bound immigrants on Sept. 11, 1857, at the hands of Mormon militiamen from Parowan. Unfolding in a scenic valley 50 miles southwest of Cedar City, the massacre still defies explanation.

For decades the siege and massacre sites were largely neglected and the story of the tragedy only partially told, with the blame falling on Paiute Indians who had been recruited by the militiamen to help attack the wagon train. But since the 1990s, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has taken a stronger role in developing the area into a National Historic Landmark. The church has worked with the victims’ descendants to properly remember and honor the victims, who for decades were regarded in Utah as faceless passersby who brought their misfortune upon themselves.
The church facilitated Saturday’s memorial.

“We see this is a great day for the groups to come together and put some closure on an issue that that been outstanding for some time,” said Benjamin Pykles, an archaeologist who heads the LDS Church’s Historic Sites Division.

The church’s efforts reached a new milestone Saturday with the unveiling of new signage at the siege site and Dan Sill Hill, overlooking the gravesite memorial and the massacre sites, separated by about a mile.

The verbiage on the 19 signs, crafted in collaboration with the three main descendant groups, emphasize the experience of the victims, many of them prosperous residents of Carrollton, Ark., who were on their way to California, the nation’s newest state.

“We want to humanize the immigrants. It’s easy to vilify people that you don’t know anything about, that you just relegate to the category of immigrants,” said Roger Logan, a retired Arkansas circuit judge who led a tour of the new signage.

While the signs provide details about the immigrants, identifying several by name and station in life, they are silent on why they were killed. Around 50 Mormon pioneers participated in the slaughter but none is named except John D. Lee, the sole perpetrator found guilty. He was executed 20 years later at the scene of the crime.

After the service, two descendants of Lee offered tearful apologies to a group of immigrant descendants at the site where Lee met his end before a firing squad. They both spoke of the heavy weight the massacre has brought to their communities.

“I ask for you forgiveness on behalf of my ancestors, my church and my family,” said Jared Smith. “The best sermon I’ve heard on forgiveness is from this group.”

He went on to ask immigrant descendants to “humanize” the perpetrators, many of who probably had no wish to kill in cold blood and lived out their days with regret.

“I view Lee as an additional victim, in this case a just victim, of the decisions made that day and the orders given,” Smith said.

The child’s skull that was interred Saturday had been collected from the massacre site by U.S. Army soldiers under the command of Major James Carleton, who had been dispatched there to investigate nearly two years after the massacre. The victims had not been adequately buried and their bones were scattered in three main sites. The soldiers gathered the bones and placed them in two stone crypts they built there.

The skull wound up in what became the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Maryland, established during the Civil War to promote understanding of military medicine.

While all three descendant groups’ endorsed the return of the skull to Mountain Meadows, some relatives wanted DNA testing. Forensic analysis indicates it belonged to a child between the ages of 6 and 10, which narrows the possibilities to about a dozen children known to have been killed.

Descendant Catherine Baker contends that every effort should be made to identify the remains of a murder victim. She believes the skull should be interred next to the grave of a sibling who might have survived the attack.

But the museum rejected her request in favor of returning the child’s remains to the site where his or her parents are buried. Museum officials said that DNA analysis, which would have to be compared to DNA from numerous descendants, could not conclude with much certainty who the skull belonged to, since many of the children on the wagon train were related to each other.

The service was much like any other funeral, just without pallbearers and the precise identity of the person being buried. The funeral home director bore the child’s remains to the ceremony in a flag-draped oaken box, hewn from a tree cut in the Ozarks, while a four-piece string band performed classic Americana songs 19th century immigrants would have played on their way West, including “I Wish I Were in Dixie” and “It Is Well With My Soul.”

Descendants cast Arkansas soil into the vault at the base of the stone pyramid erected by U.S. soldiers 18 months after the massacre, which now anchors the historic landmark.

Over the strains of the Old Time Fiddlers and the blowing wind rushing up the valley, the names and ages of 21 children who perished here 160 years ago were read and recited back by the audience. Then, with “Amazing Graze” emitting from bagpipes, the tiny casket was carried to the vault, past the descendants lining the walkway.

Earlier in the day, at a St. George funeral home, a viewing was held for the remains, wrapped in a quilt bearing the names of the children. A hole left by the bullet that killed the child was plainly visible.

“To see that small child’s skull, reality comes home. It is so fitting that this child has been brought from Washington, D.C., to rest with the rest of their family and the rest of the bones it was take from,” said Kenny Hightower, a descendant of massacre victim Milum Rush. “It was taken as evidence and it has served its purpose. Now it’s time for it to be interred with the rest of its family. I’m happy to be a part of that today.”

[Joel]

The Mountain Meadows Massacre

At the peak of this tension, in early September 1857, a branch of the territorial militia in southern Utah (composed entirely of Mormons), along with some Indians they recruited, laid siege to a wagon train of emigrants traveling from Arkansas to California. As the wagon train traveled south from Salt Lake City, the emigrants had clashed verbally with local Mormons over where they could graze their cattle. Some of the members of the wagon train became frustrated because they had difficulty purchasing much-needed grain and other supplies from local settlers, who had been instructed to save their grain as a wartime policy. Aggrieved, some of the emigrants threatened to join incoming troops in fighting against the Saints.39

Although some Saints ignored these threats, other local Church leaders and members in Cedar City, Utah, advocated violence. Isaac C. Haight, a stake president and militia leader, sent John D. Lee, a militia major, to lead an attack on the emigrant company. When the president reported the plan to his council, other leaders objected and requested that he call off the attack and instead send an express rider to Brigham Young in Salt Lake City for guidance. But the men Haight had sent to attack the emigrants carried out their plans before they received the order not to attack. The emigrants fought back, and a siege ensued.

Over the next few days, events escalated, and Mormon militiamen planned and carried out a deliberate massacre. They lured the emigrants from their circled wagons with a false flag of truce and, aided by Paiute Indians they had recruited, slaughtered them. Between the first attack and the final slaughter, the massacre destroyed the lives of 120 men, women, and children in a valley known as Mountain Meadows. Only small children—those believed to be too young to be able to tell what had happened—were spared. The express rider returned two days after the massacre. He carried a letter from Brigham Young telling local leaders to “not meddle” with the emigrants and to allow them to pass through southern Utah.40 The militiamen sought to cover up the crime by placing the entire blame on local Paiutes, some of whom were also members of the Church.

Two Latter-day Saints were eventually excommunicated from the Church for their participation, and a grand jury that included Latter-day Saints indicted nine men. Only one participant, John D. Lee, was convicted and executed for the crime, which fueled false allegations that the massacre had been ordered by Brigham Young.

In recent years, the Church has made diligent efforts to learn everything possible about the massacre. In the early 2000s, historians in the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints scoured archives throughout the United States for historical records; every Church record on the massacre was also opened to scrutiny. In the resulting book, published by Oxford University Press in 2008, authors Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr., and Glen M. Leonard concluded that while intemperate preaching about outsiders by Brigham Young, George A. Smith, and other leaders contributed to a climate of hostility, President Young did not order the massacre. Rather, verbal confrontations between individuals in the wagon train and southern Utah settlers created great alarm, particularly within the context of the Utah War and other adversarial events. A series of tragic decisions by local Church leaders—who also held key civic and militia leadership roles in southern Utah—led to the massacre.41

Aside from the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a few Latter-day Saints committed other violent acts against a small number of dissenters and outsiders. Some Latter-day Saints perpetrated acts of extralegal violence, especially in the 1850s, when fear and tensions were prevalent in Utah Territory. The heated rhetoric of Church leaders directed toward dissenters may have led these Mormons to believe that such actions were justified.42 The perpetrators of these crimes were generally not punished. Even so, many allegations of such violence are unfounded, and anti-Mormon writers have blamed Church leaders for many unsolved crimes or suspicious deaths in early Utah.43

[Col. Flagg]

Another 'difficult truth' for most members of the church to swallow - and if you mention it to anyone, you're an apostate.

[solonan]

Your comment is a bit over the top Col Flagg.

[Col. Flagg]

Your comment is a bit over the top Col Flagg.

It may have been TIC, but there's more truth to that than you might think.

[solonan]

Apparently you've experienced it in some ward somewhere and I believe Isaiah makes reference to the knowledge or lack there of, of the latter day members. You just sound bitter.

[XEmilyX]

Oh wow. Never heard of this. There's probably more to the story than what's known on why there hasn't been justice on the men who committed the crime. *shrugs*
Just because someone has the title of Mormon doesn't make them good people, you'd assume so though, but this act was evil and doesn't represent what we believe.

[Joel]