Mountain Meadows

[_the road to hana]

Remember they were killed. Dead people don't produce offspring.

This is positively chilling.

[_John Larsen]

Most appear quite reasonable, not out for LDS blood, and are still quite grieved over the fate of their descendents.

Pssst. "Ancestors." But that isn't even really a correct statement. There are few direct Fancher train descendants. (Remember they were killed. Dead people don't produce offspring. And only a few survived.) But there are many Fancher train relations.

I believe that most of the descendants are from the Children that the Church took from their mothers, right before their mothers were killed. The federal government retrieved these children a few years back. These people also had other family that wasn't on the wagon train.

So, yes indeed there were survivors of this horrible affair.

[_Pokatator]

Most appear quite reasonable, not out for LDS blood, and are still quite grieved over the fate of their descendents.

Pssst. "Ancestors." But that isn't even really a correct statement. There are few direct Fancher train descendants. (Remember they were killed. Dead people don't produce offspring. And only a few survived.) But there are many Fancher train relations.

And I wonder about those who grieve for people they were only marginally related to and never knew, after a period of at least 100 years has gone by. My great-greatgrandfather and one of his sons (a brother to my great grandfather) were ambused an killed by a neighbor. John Taney laid in wait and shot them in a dispute over the boundary of their land claims. These deaths happened in the 1860's. Do I expect the Taney family to erect a monument? NO. Do I grieve over these deaths? NO. And if I were to do so, it would be indicative of a dysfunctional personality.

Can I be sorry that this family tragedy occurred almost 150 years ago? Of course. But to "grieve?" Ask any grief counselor and he/she will tell you this is a sign of mental dysfunction.

Cold, just plain cold.

[_Moniker]

Most appear quite reasonable, not out for LDS blood, and are still quite grieved over the fate of their descendents.

Pssst. "Ancestors."

Oops! :)

But that isn't even really a correct statement. There are few direct Fancher train descendants. (Remember they were killed. Dead people don't produce offspring. And only a few survived.) But there are many Fancher train relations.

Did you follow the link? I've emailed with a direct descendant. There were children that were returned and they went on to have families, as well.

And I wonder about those who grieve for people they were only marginally related to and never knew, after a period of at least 100 years has gone by. My great-greatgrandfather and one of his sons (a brother to my great grandfather) were ambused an killed by a neighbor. John Taney laid in wait and shot them in a dispute over the boundary of their land claims. These deaths happened in the 1860's. Do I expect the Taney family to erect a monument? NO. Do I grieve over these deaths? NO. And if I were to do so, it would be indicative of a dysfunctional personality.

Can I be sorry that this family tragedy occurred almost 150 years ago? Of course. But to "grieve?" Ask any grief counselor and he/she will tell you this is a sign of mental dysfunction.

Do I have to post the definition of "grieved"? I'm not talking about "grief", Charity! You don't think it was upsetting when these children and women were dug up haphazardly? That certain parties went into hyperdrive trying to get the remains buried again? I visit a family graveyard from time to time. I tend to it. My great grandparents, my grandparents, my brother, and various other relatives are buried there. It is important to me that this cemetery is tended to (it's a tiny one behind a small chapel in the woods), and that those that visit understand that they are not forgotten to us. Isn't that the norm for those that love those that pass on? Anyway, why isn't it appropriate that these Fanchers get upset about what is happening to those that passed on 100 years ago? I still tend to gravestones for those that passed on longer than that. I don't see it as odd?

http://www.mtn-meadows-assoc.com/Family ... ancher.htm

[_the road to hana]

Here's the monument I'd erect on the site:

ON THIS SITE IN SEPTEMBER 1857
OVER 120 INNOCENT SOULS
JOURNEYING WESTWARD FROM ARKANSAS TO CALIFORNIA
IN SEARCH OF A BETTER LIFE
WERE MURDERED IN COLD BLOOD
BY THOSE WHO SHOULD HAVE GRANTED THEM SAFE PASSAGE

MAY THOSE MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN OF THE BAKER-FANCHER PARTY
WHO ON THIS PLAIN LOST THEIR LIVES
REST IN A PEACE THEY NEVER FOUND

AND MAY GOD HAVE MERCY ON THE SOULS OF THOSE
WHO WERE THEIR EXECUTIONERS

[_richardMdBorn]

Here's the monument I'd erect on the site:

ON THIS SITE IN SEPTEMBER 1857
OVER 120 INNOCENT SOULS
JOURNEYING WESTWARD FROM ARKANSAS TO CALIFORNIA
IN SEARCH OF A BETTER LIFE
WERE MURDERED IN COLD BLOOD
BY THOSE WHO SHOULD HAVE GRANTED THEM SAFE PASSAGE

MAY THOSE MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN OF THE BAKER-FANCHER PARTY
WHO ON THIS PLAIN LOST THEIR LIVES
REST IN A PEACE THEY NEVER FOUND

AND MAY GOD HAVE MERCY ON THE SOULS OF THOSE
WHO WERE THEIR EXECUTIONERS

And those who covered it up and claimed to be prophets of God.

[Anonymous]

Alter Idem asked about folk tales or ghost stories connected with the massacre site. I just pulled out a 1942 Austin Fife article I have called ”Popular Legends of the Mormons,” from the California Folklore Quarterly. It addresses the most familiar massacre stories (I’ve seen these retold in a couple of other books on Utah/Mormon history). While I have notes on a few other tales, I still need to track down versions and establish other details. But here’s Fife’s work; I think its interesting.

He re-tells a few tales in a short essay that also relates well known folk lore like the appearance of the American Founding Fathers in the temple, the three Nephites. The folk legends of the Mountain Meadows Massacre he relates are these:

“The Mountain Meadows Massacre has given rise to several legends which are of some interest. Birney [Hoffman Birney, Zealots of Zion] reports a few of them. ‘There are stories of unseen wagons that creak slowly along the arroyo where once was an emigrant road, of the roll of ghostly gunfire echoing from the rocky hills, of moonless nights made hideous by the scream of women and children.’ He reports the belief that footprints are sometimes seen in the freshly plowed ground of the massacre site. Following are two oral versions I have collected which relate to this unfortunate episode of Mormon history.

The Devil Appears at the Site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre (oral version by Clara W. Stevens, Woods Cross, Utah July 26, 1939). My mother’s sister Elizabeth lived in Southern Utah, and she and her husband were coming up here and they passed the place where the Mountain Meadows Massacre had been---in that vicinity. They camped just a short distance from where that tragedy had occurred, and they built a fire and cooked their supper, and were just sitting around the campfire after supper, and looked over where that tragedy had happened and saw a man’s head coming out of the ground, and it just slowly and gradually cam out of the ground and sat there and smoked a pipe. That was supposed to be the devil.

A Massacred Mother Returns to Her Child (oral version by Mrs. Leon Fonnesbeck, Logan Utah, July 25, 1939) At the time of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Peter B. Fife lived at Fort Cove. He took into his home one of the seventeen children who had been saved from the massacre. One day the child was sleeping, and a woman dressed in white from head to foot appeared to Mrs. Fife, who was just outside the house. The woman asked if she could see “my baby.” Mrs. Fife, told her that the child was sleeping and that she might go in to see it. The woman entered the house. Shortly after, Mrs. Fife also went in the house, but the woman was not there. The house where the Fifes lived is believed to be haunted."

I think the second one is especially affecting and speaks to way the event lingered in the popular mind in Southern Utah.

I've seen the ghostly footprint story which Fife relates via Birney related in several places with the footprints appearing around the spring near the seige site, on the massacre path, and maybe even elsewhere. While not ghost stories per se, there is a scary folk tale about John D. Lee: variations on a story that he killed a surviving orphan some time after the massacre (a few days, weeks, even years), some times a boy, some times a girl. A usual feature of this tale is that a tree is planted over the child’s grave that gives off misshapen fruit no one will eat. There is one well known tall tale teller from Cedar City who even claimed to have found the "red-haired skeleton" of this child.

There is also to my mind a bizarrely gruesome legend that the body of one particularly beautiful murdered woman resisted putrefaction and was visible naked and intact on the massacre field for weeks.

Anyway, those are the folk tales and ghost stories I've most often run across.

[_Runtu]

What? The only possible complaint could be that the monument should not say who built it. But it very clearly says it was built "out of respect to those who died. . . "

I live in a very historic place, the seat of government for the Oregon Territory, where the plat map for San Francisco is kept in the county courthouse, a state which attained statehood 30 years before Washington state. We are inundated by monuments. Every single one says something about who built the monument. That is the way of monuments. And nobody understands that the monument was built to honor what/whoever built the monument.

Give me a break, guys. You may have some legitimate criticisms against the Church. This isn't one of them. And it really makes you look silly to be advancing this pathetic argument.

And putting runtu down? Shame on you.

She's not putting me down. She does have more degrees in literature than I do and is much more widely read than I am (and that's saying quite a bit, if I might sound a little conceited).

As for John Larsen's original statement, I can see where he's coming from. The monument does seem a little self-congratulatory to me, so I guess I'm guilty of agreeing with this pathetic argument.

[_Pokatator]

It is what the monument doesn't say that is most deafening.

[_Jersey Girl]

It is what the monument doesn't say that is most deafening.

That's what I think too, Pok, though my questions aren't being responded to in that regard. I'm not saying that the inscription or any other parts of the monument need to say that Mormon's were the assasins. What I'm saying is that from the images that John Larsen shared, if I didn't know anything about MMM, I would think it was a monument erected by the LDS Church in honor of their own. That is the appearance given by what I see in the images.