Interesting but doesn't contribute hardly a thing. As the blog post points out, this identical information was communicated between Arapeen and Brigham Young on Sept 20th. But it does reveal that ordinary members were possessed of this information at about the same time Arapeen rode into town. (On the other hand, the Huntington diary strongly suggests that "new had reached the city" before the September 20 diary entry.)
Almost all of this letter simply recounts what Young had been already saying over the pulpit in published sources we have today.
But, O'Donovan tortures Huntington's diary entry (just as Will Bagley) had done.
The September 20 entry, as O'Donovan has it tortured, is:
"[September] 20 Arapene came to see Brigham Brigham told him now was the time to helpt himself to what he wanted [from non-Mormon emigrant trains] but he sayed he was [wants?] a squaw he sayed the Americans [i.e. non-Mormons] had not hurt him & he Did not want to hurt them but if they would only hurt one of his men then he would wake up he told me that the Piedes [Paiutes] had Killed the whole of a Emigrant Company & took all of their stock & it was right that was before the news had reached the City."
However, the entry from the diary that sits in the Historians' office (I have a typescript and an autograph copy) without the interpolations is:
"20 Arapene came to see Brigham Brigham told him now was the time to help himself to what he wanted but he say-cd he was a squaw he sayed the Americans had not hurt him & he Did not want to hurt them but if they would only hurt one of his men then he would make up he told me that the Piedes had killd the whole of a Emigrant company & took all of their stock & it was right that was before the news had reached the City."
The important thing to know from O'Donovan's tortured analysis is that O'Donovan assumes that the "Americans" are "non-Mormon emigrant trains." But early Mormon diaries show that when Indians referred to the "Americans" or the "Mericats" they almost always referred to the U.S. Army. [Often, the Emigrants were Irish, or English, or Scandinavian.] Here, we have an example of Huntington recounting what Arapeen is telling him, and Arapeen is able to distinguish in his comments between the Americans and the Emigrants. But O'Donovan wrongly assumes that the "Americans" are the emigrant trains.
Thus, elsewhere, when Huntington recounts meetings with Brigham Young, and the Americans, and cattle, it is very obvious that the Indians and Young are referring to the Army, not emigrant trains. (See the entry on page 14 of the journal where Young is talking about the army and "fighting" the Americans; page 35 talks about the "US Cattle".) But this blog entry that O'Donovan mangles or recasts Huntington to say that the Indians were talking about fighting the emigrants and stealing their cattle.
Nowhere is the misuse of this particular September 20 entry so acute as in Bagley's book. He reads this entry (see both versions above) to say that Brigham Young counseled Arapeen to take whatever he wanted from the Fancher train. This is one of Bagley's worst abuses. Rather, Young tells Arapeen to take the Army's cattle (a scheme Stenhouse confirms) and only then does Arapeen reveal to young that a massacre had taken place.
I discuss this major flaw in my review piece, which Geisner has read. I don't know if O'Donovan has. Geisner is so much of a Bagley sychophant that he can't see the flaws. Or admit to a single one. My short piece highlighting some of Bagley's more interesting flaws is at
http://randomrunner.wordpress.com/2011/ ... -prophets/. You'll see that Bagley posts a reply to this piece on my website, and tackles only the charge that I make that he never set foot in the National Archives and instead relied upon a file provided by an anti-Mormon author, William Wiseman. Bagley says nothing about the other flaws I identify.
So, the executive summary is:
The Huntington quote O'Donovan uses is misused to make it appear that when Brigham Young was talking about fighting the army by giving their cattle to the Indians, Young was actually talking about killing an emigrant train.