Mountain Meadows: The Massacre Thirty-Five Miles Away
Near Cedar City, Utah
Thirty-five miles southwest of Cedar City, in a broad valley along the old Spanish Trail, lies one of the bloodiest crime scenes in the history of the American West. The place is called Mountain Meadows, and what happened there in September of eighteen fifty-seven left a stain on the Mormon settlement of southern Utah that has never fully faded.
The victims were members of the Baker-Fancher wagon train, roughly one hundred forty emigrants from Arkansas bound for California on the southern overland route. The perpetrators were primarily members of the Iron County Militia, a unit of the Mormon Nauvoo Legion whose officers and men were drawn largely from Cedar City and the surrounding settlements. They were joined by a small number of Southern Paiute fighters who had been recruited into the attack under circumstances that historians have examined and debated for more than a century.
The assault began on September seventh. After a siege lasting several days, militia officers approached the wagon train under a white flag and offered to escort the emigrants safely out of the valley. When the signal was given, the militiamen turned and shot the men beside them. A second group attacked the women and children. At least one hundred twenty people were killed. Only seventeen children, all six years old or younger, were spared on the theory that they were too young to testify about what they had seen.
For nearly twenty years, Mormon authorities attributed the massacre entirely to the Paiute. It was not until eighteen seventy-seven, two decades after the event, that John D. Lee, a militia officer who participated in the attack, was executed by firing squad at the massacre site. He was the only person ever tried and convicted for the killings. Mountain Meadows is now a National Historic Landmark. It remains one of the hardest chapters in this region's history to look at honestly.
