Killings and aftermath of the Mountain Meadows Massacre

Killings and aftermath of the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

In 1857, a Mormon Militia slaughtered 120 innocent people and try to frame it on a Native American Tribe

"My father was killed by Indians. When they washed their faces they were white men."⁠

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On September 7, 1857, a group of Paiutes and Mormons disguised as Paiutes first attacked the Baker–Fancher wagon train in Utah. After days of battle, by September 11, the Mormons feared that the settlers had realized their identities. Two militiamen, their faces washed clean of paint and wearing plain clothes, approached the wagons with a white flag.⁠

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They told them they were a rescue party to save them from the vicious Paiutes they claimed were behind the attack. They said that they had negotiated a truce and persuaded the natives to let them escort them to safety in Cedar City.⁠

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The Baker-Fancher Party fell for it and the settlers were then separated into three groups of men, women, and children. The men were almost immediately shot at point-blank range. The women and children were also met with bullets. 

The Mormons "decoyed out and destroyed with the exception of the small children" who were "too young to tell tales," and subsequently left no settlers over the age of seven. These 17 surviving children were doled out amongst locals along with their possessions.⁠.... Read story 

Go inside the gruesome story of the Mountain Meadows Massacre by clicking the link in our profile.⁠

During the early morning hours of Monday, September the Baker–Fancher party was attacked by as many or more than 200 Paiutes and Mormon militiamen disguised as Native Americans.

The attackers were positioned in a small ravine south-east of the emigrant camp.

As the attackers shot into the camp, the Baker–Fancher party defended itself by encircling and lowering their wagons, along with digging shallow trenches and throwing dirt both below and into the wagons. Seven emigrants were killed during the opening attack and were buried somewhere within the wagon encirclement; sixteen more were wounded. The attack continued for five days, during which the besieged families had little or no access to fresh water and their ammunition was depleted.

⁠The Mountain Meadows massacre was a series of attacks on the Baker–Fancher emigrant wagon train, at Mountain Meadows in southern Utah. The attacks culminated on September 11, 1857 in the mass slaughter of the emigrant party by the Iron County district of the Utah Territorial Militia and some local Indians.

Initially intended to be an Indian massacre, two men with leadership roles in local military, church and government organizations, Isaac C. Haight and John D. Lee, conspired for Lee to lead militiamen disguised as Native Americans along with a contingent of Paiute tribesmen[3] in an attack.

The emigrants fought back and a siege ensued. Intending to leave no witnesses of Mormon complicity in the siege and avoid reprisals complicating the Utah War, militiamen induced the emigrants to surrender and give up their weapons. After escorting the emigrants out of their fortification, the militiamen and their tribesmen auxiliaries executed approximately 120 women, children, and men. Seventeen younger children were spared.

Investigations, temporarily interrupted by the American Civil War, resulted in nine indictments during 1874. Of the men indicted, only John D. Lee was tried in a court of law. After two trials Lee was convicted and executed near the massacre site.

Approximately seventeen children were deliberately spared because of their young ages. Multiple sources claim that Lee protested and prohibited the death of all children that were assumed to be too young to talk, and directed that they be placed in the care of one who was not involved in the massacre.

Not all of the young children were spared, however; at least one infant was killed in his father's arms by the same bullet that killed the adult man. In the hours following the massacre Lee directed Philip Klingensmith and possibly two others to take the children (a few of whom were wounded) to the nearby farm of Jacob Hamblin, a local Indian agent.

 Later, under the direction of Jacob Forney, the non-Mormon Superintendent of Indian Affairs for Utah, the children were placed in the care of local Mormon families pending an investigation of the matter and notification of kin. However, some accounts relate that Lee sold or bartered the children to whatever Mormon families would take them. Sarah Francis Baker, who was three years old at the time of the massacre, later said: "They sold us from one family to another."

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