"Horrible Massacre of Emigrants!!" The Mountain Meadows Massacre in Public Discourse

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SECOND ISSUE, REVISED AND ENLARGED. 

Editors are respectfully invited to give place to the following brief defense or our people.

Philadelphia, May, 1877.

TO THE PRESS OF THE UNITED STATES. 

In view of the deluge of malevolent charges, slanders, accusations and "confessions," widely and freely, and for a term of years, sown broadcast over the land by the press generally, is it asking too much that the papers everywhere, including the New York Herald, give the foregoing as wide a circulation as they have given to the diatribes of our enemies? It is not often we ask the press to give us a hearing.

The red hot feeling now kindled against us is entirely unwarranted. I speak from the record, having been identified with the "Mormons" since 1846. I know that the excitement and consequent prejudice periodically fanned to blood-heat against our citizens is made to promote the personal interests of very bad men. We have had, and now have in Utah, such frauds as Eliza Pinkston, J. Madison Wells, and Returning Boards by the score. To prove this I need but state that out of the appointments made by Ex-President Grant, during the eight years of his incumbency, to places of trust in Utah, he was obliged to remove FORTY-FIVE of them because of their DISHONEST, UNLAWFUL AND RASCALLY ACTS. These re-calls were GOVERNORS, ACTING-GOVERNORS, SECRETARIES, JUDGES, LAND OFFICERS, DISTRICT ATTORNEYS, MARSHALLS, SPECIAL MAIL AGENTS, and the like.

What this unenviable picture illustrates your readers need not be told, and time will demonstrate that the mouthy mob-exciters, now in that territory, and elsewhere, are of the same ilk. It has always been so. Many of the past U. S. carpet-baggers in Utah, who have been the most blatant opposers of our bible marriages, were leprous men. One of them left his wife and children in the east and took a courtesan with him west; she sat by his side on the judicial bench, and he introduced her as his wife. It was he who incited President Buchanan to send an army against us; subsequently, by Gov. Cumming and others, his statements Were all proven to he UTTERLY FALSE. Another official, soon after his arrival, made improper advances to a respectable lady, whose sons, it was said, overtook him in his flight for the east, and for the gross insult to their mother, deprived him of virility. Another and his son became the joint father of a waif, whose sorrowing mother, on oath, could not say whether the go was the father or grandfather. And still another bitter enemy, in the person of a Governor, was not long in Salt Lake till he was discovered in a drunken debauch with an imported harlot, both of whom were in a condition of primitive nudity; and yet another—who was greatly exercised at the "Mormons," because of their daylight marriages, would never lose an opportunity to denounce them—was so incautious as to permit the embarrassing discovery of hair-pins in the bed he nightly occupied, while his wife was thousands of miles away. His Gentile hostess was so disgusted at his unadulterated hypocracy she quitted the place without notice.

But a few years ago, a "web-foot" with his carpet bag and previous bad character, overshadowed Utah with his stately presence at the instance of the powers that be on the Potomac. He was mouthy and pious. For a season he led a scripture reading class on sabbath days. His week days were employed in building pit-falls to catch leading "Mormons" and in villifying them. His stump-speeches in mining camps were gems of braggadocia, and dynamite tirades against the Patriarchs of the great Basin, and their system of union and marriage. Soon the government tired of him for his rascally acts, and like his hair-pin predecessor it closed his gubernatorial career sine die. On the way to the Pacific slope, it is said, this spotless anti-"Mormon" scripture reader, for a whole night. contested the right of possession to a sleeping berth, on a Pullman car, with a woman, not his wife, neither being willing to surrender it to the other, a joint occupancy was maintained the entire night.

Once a drunken carpet-bagger incited a riot upon on election day (the only exhibition of mob violence we ever had). The web-foot Governor took oath that the braggart was not drunk; while it is notorious on the streets of Salt Lake that the abnormal condition of the fellow would be a sober and ordinarily decent one. He too was set adrift by President Grant, it is understood, for Bell napping government funds.

We once had a judicial luminary that would not keep in his family's employ a servant-girl or washer-woman except on special personal considerations. Some years ago his wife and other ladies, of the same faith, sent east a piteous petition to the lady members of the same church for a christmas gift of five dollars each, for the erection of a church in Salt Lake, looking to the "amelioration of the Mormon women." Soon after the petition was made public one of the principal "lady" signers was fined for keeping a house of prostitution.

Many of our past officials have in every possible manner, by their judicial, official, and other acts, encouraged and screened prostitution and drunkenness. The pimp, harlot and rumseller would draw on them at sight, and they were ever ready to honor their drafts and aid in crippling the law officers of Salt Lake City, and other places, with writs, injunctions, etc. Once upon a time a "Mormon" was sent to the penitentiary for a term of years and fined $300 by a "mission" judge for openly maintaining two wives and their children. When the Supreme Court of the United States set aside his extra-judicial proceeding, and released the "Mormon," an officer and a harlot rode out in a carriage to open the prison door, and while enroute, it is said, they maintained the relations of married people.

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Among the most ardent, but pitiable, would-be regenerators was a man whose ambition centered in subjugating the "Mormons," freeing Ireland from British rule, drinking whisky, and making love to a subaltern's wife; while his own wife and children were off on furlough, he took as kindly to the proxy, as it is said, measles take to children. Like the web-foot ex Governor, the sleeping-cars were favorite haunts wherein to gratify his amours.

The god-fathers of the anti-polygamy bill, and a once highly respected government official; now an humbled citizen of Indiana; and a man of New York city, who free-loved a neighbor's wife and was shot by the outraged husband; and a would-be popular actress, all bitter enemies to our daylight, healthy, and beautiful children-increasing marriages, have gone and are going into ineffable disgrace.

In the list of illustrious (?) frauds barnacled on Utah was a pious, religion jobber. The cloud that lowered over his domestic infelicities in the northwest, followed him and remained in unpleasant proximity in his new home. It was he who assisted in writing up a lecture which has had a pendente-lite run in the States; and aided in putting "Pendente-lite" herself in possible shape before the immaculate, "monster," jurist—her principal judicial sponge-holder.

The story about one of Utah's carpet-bag anti-"Mormon" judges selling out his unexpired term of office, with its "goodwill," to a fellow of his own stamp, for 2700$ must be fresh in the minds of many. The buyer gave his note for the sum, which is not yet paid, notwithstanding his purported large special income, while on the judicial bench, from those interested in valuable mines. He too, was one of the illustrious FORTY-FIVE fire-eating,anti-"Mormons," General Grant was forced to cut out of Utah's official circuit.

Another carpet-bagger has been repeatedly accused of homicide before he went to Utah. Nor do I know that he ever denied it. He lets no opportunity escape to traduce the "Mormons," and in his rabid tirades he represents the essence of anti-"Mormon" strychnine.

A history of the causes which led to the removal of the HALF HUNDRED IMMACULATES, will be very interesting reading when made public.

This list is already offensively long—money could not have tempted me to give so much publicity to such doggerels of humnanity, but for their persistent, shameless and vile attempts to blacken the characters of the unoffending people of Utah, by using their official positions and patronage to cover us with wide-spread and bitter odium, so as to justify their mobbing us from our mountain homes, which we have so dearly earned at a cost of many millions of dollars and thousands of lives. This is my only apology for thus obtruding these facts—facts which are notoriously true in the Great West, and which are tacitly CONFIRMED BY THEIR REMOVAL FROM OFFICE, by the general government, for their villainous practices.

I might add a painful list of cases where gamblers, rumsellers, thieves, renegades, lechers, and harlots have been habeas cognised and the local civil authorities enjoined by emission-judges and others holding carpet-bag commissions, but for the present I will forbear.

In some unaccountable, but no doubt accidental manner there has been a few honorable, upright men sent to Utah to direct her gubernatorial, judicial and other affairs, but it is indeed a sad commentary when the executive of the nation finds it absolutely necessary to remove FORTY-FIVE of his own appointees within a period of ONLY EIGHT YEARS, all from the same territory!

Hundreds ask me about the Mountain Meadows Massacre. President Brigham Young had no more to do with that tragic affair than the citizens of Philadelphia. The Mountain Meadows are some 350 miles south and west of Salt Lake City, where the magnates of the church were at the time. Utah was a wilderness then, being but ten years old. We had no telegraph lines nor railroads for many years afterwards. The country was sparsely settled, with but very little travel or communication between places. LEE NEVER WAS A BISHOP. He was excommunicated from the church years ago, for his participation in that massacre; nor do I believe that he ever made a confession implicating the magnates of the church. It was understood in Utah that he had repeatedly been assured his freedom if he would do so. Philip Klingensmith was set free for turning state's evidence. No doubt he was as guilty as Lee. Does any sane man suppose that Lee, to obtain his freedom, would not have sworn to any and everything he knew? Is it not strange that not one of the four or five confessions Lee is said to have made, saw daylight TILL AFTER his execution? Isn't it strange that not one of the confessions is sworn to, or even signed in the presence of attesting witnesses? Isn't it also strange that no two of the confessions agree? And futhermore, isn't it strange beyond all belief that the great people of the U. S. should, on the purported contradictory confessions of a convicted man, condemn and execute in advance, without judge, jury or witness, such great and good men as President Brigham Young and his Cabinet? Such, without disguise, is the proposition of nearly all the radical anti-"Mormon" newspapers of this Republic.

In relation to the confession published, first in the New York Herald, which has created so much bitterness towards Utah's humble, prayerful people, the Sacramento Record-Union, of March 23, discourses as follows:

"The N. Y. Herald yesterday printed a thin and garbed and altogether inaccurate statement, purporting to be the confession of John D. Lee. It was not the confession of Lee, nor any thing like it. It was merely a disjointed and unfaithful echo of some part of that confession, as little resembling the original as any statement compiled from the published accounts of the Mountain Meadows Massacre would have been. The only genuine confession of John D. Lee, written by his own hand, and containing his own version of the tacts, is in the possession of the Record-Union, and will be given to the public to-morrow. It was just like the Herald to attempt to palm off a fraudulent and bogus narration as genuine, but when the real confession appears it will he seen how great a difference exists between the false and the true. What the condemned man did write is an intelligible array of facts, and not a bold and confused farrago of such stuff as the New York Herald attempted to foist upon its readers."

In the confession above alluded to, Lee states that from Nauvoo on, he held a number of civil and ecclesiastical offices, but at the time of the massacre he held neither civil, military or church office. For years before the massacre he was a great man, but at the time, and after the massacre he was only a private citizen! If true, is there no significance in this voluntary revelation?

But two days before Lee's execution, the editor of the Beaver Square-Dealer, NOT A "MORMON," wrote and published the following:

"Not only has Lee's confession been most unsatisfactory for paucity of narration, but he has been contradictory in his general statements from the first, disgusting his own lawyers and confusing the prosecution.

"One particular statement he has adherred to from the first. He has at all times declared that Brigham Young and the church leaders had nothing to do with the massacre. The value of Lee's statement accrues chiefly to the church leaders, whom it exonerates completely. Standing upon the eve of the execution after a searching investigation, which has been prolonged for two years, not a jot or tittle of evidence has been elicited connecting the slaughter with Brigham Young or any leading church official.

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"Lee has told nothing because he had nothing to tell. The country will be satisfied after the execution that he died with no secret in affecting Brigham Young.

"A few facts warrant our statements: John D. Lee was tried by a Mormon jury, who, on the testimony of Mormon witness', brought in their verdict of murder in the first degree. Years ago Young severed Lee from his church, thus challenging the exposition of any orders, "written" or otherwise, which he may have held from him as the head of the church.

"The conviction of Lee by a Mormon jury and his silent execution, will be a receipt for Brigham Young for all time, to come as against the massacre of the Arkansas emigrants."

Is not a NON-"MORMON" editor of a paper published in the place where Lee was tried, convicted and imprisoned, as likely to get at the bottom facts of the case as the NON-"MORMON" editors of New York and Philadelphia?

Some time ago one L. C. Hughes, of Arizona, sent east a copy of a military order purported to have been issued at the instance of President Young to destroy the Arkansas emigrants. This order was widely published, and I think, from the tone of the press, was generally believed. The conspirators made a sad mistake in dating their bogus order seven months after the massacre occurred. The massacre took place SEPTEMBER, 1857; their "authenticated" order, said to be fortified by "three affidavits of Salt Lake merchants" is dated APRIL 19, 1858!

Does any sane man suppose that if such an order ever had an "authentic" existence, it would not have been introduced at Lee's trial, in evidence against the persons implicated? Why was it and the three affidavits kept from the public till after Lee's execution?

Governor Cumming and General Kane entered Salt Lake City, from the army at Fort Bridger, APRIL 12, six days before the date of the bogus order; the difficulties had terminated, and Governor Cumming took immediate control of the territory. The fact is, that same order was up before an investigating committee in 1867 and was proven a base fabrication.

In connection with this order we have also been accused of murdering some eighty teamsters. The following is from the Southern Vineyard of June 5, 1858, published at Los Angeles, Southern California. It is an extract from a card nearly a column long, written by a number of teamsters formerly connected with the Utah Expedition. They say;

"On the 16th we arrived at a Mormon station at the mouth of Echo Canyon in a famished condition. On representing our distressed circumstances, our wants were promptly and gratuitously supplied. Here we were furnished with an escort to the city, where we met with Lieutenant-General Daniel H. Wells, of the Utah militia, who issued in instructions regarding our safety throughout the settlements, accompanied with a relieved escort at each station. We recruited ourselves at Beaver City, and it was deemed advisable to fit up for the journey to California. We would be exceedingly ungrateful in omitting an expression of our sincere thanks and deep indebtedness to our Mormon friends of Utah, and the Mail Carriers, for the disinterested kindness evinced towards us in ministering to our wants, and for the aid extended to us in our journey to California, without which we could never have reached our destination, but have perished on the desert, or been killed by merciless savages."

The foregoing is the kind of treatment the people of Utah have always shown the needy and helpless.

At Lee's trial JAMES HASLEM testified that he was ordered to take a message to President Young with all speed. He left Cedar City Monday, September 7, 1857, and reached Salt Lake City following Thursday. Started back same day and reached Cedar Sunday, 11th. Delivered the answer to Haight who said it was too late. Witness testified when leaving Salt Lake to return President Young said to him: "Go with all speed spare no horse-flesh. The emigrants must not be meddled with, if it takes all of Iron County to prevent it. They must go free and unmolested."

NEPHI JOHNSON testified that some days after the massacre, witness was sent to protect the next company of emigrants to Santa Clara; on their way witness stopped at Harmony, where he saw John D. Lee, who proposed to him to get the emigrants into an ambush to destroy them by the Indians and so get their property. Johnson replied: "There has been too much blood shed by you already. I have been instructed to see them through, and I will do so or die with them."

At the same trial, U. S. Prosecuting Attorney Sumner Howard said, "he had been engaged constantly during the past three months in sifting facts and everything related or connected with the massacre. As in his opening address, he repeated again, that he had come there for the purpose of trying John D. Lee, because the evidence pointed to him as the main instigator and leader, and he had given the jury unanswerable documentay evidence proving that the authorities of the Mormon church knew nothing of the butchery till after it was committed, and that Lee, in his letter to Brigham Young a few weeks after, had knowingly misrepresented the actual facts relative to the massacre, seeking to keep him still in the dark and in ignorance. He had all the assistance any United States official could ask on earth in any case. Nothing had been kept back, and he was determined to clear the calendar, but he did not intend to prosecute any one lured to the Meadows at the time, some of whom were only boys and knew nothing of the vile plan which Lee originated and carried out for the destruction of the emigrants."

We are not a blood-thirsty people. We are the very opposite of this. From the beginning till now we have always been on the defensive. Our practice has been, it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. There are always two sides to every question. A great and adolescent people should not be judged by the conflicting statements of avowed enemies, some of whom may be leprous apostates or syphilistic, profane, intemperate, carpet-baggers. Utah to-day is head and shoulders in advance of the aggregated people of these United States, in the following features; paupers, insane, and idiotic, convicts, school attendance, illiteracy, printing and publishing establishments, church edifices, etc. We have also a much smaller per cent. of public and personal indebtedness, litigation, domestic quarrels, divorces, jealousies, political intrigues and general lawlessness, and enjoy greater freedom, peace, prosperity and happiness than the people elsewhere. All these give indisputable evidence of superior moral and intellectual training.

In a late visit of Governor Safford, of Arizona, to the "Mormon" colonists on the Little Colorado, he speaks of our people as follows: "We were kindly received by Mr. George Lake. The colony consists of about 400 men, women and children, who made us welcome and gave us freely, of such comforts as they had, as this people do to all strangers who come among them. Every one works with a will. They have no drones among them, and the work they have accomplished in so short a time is truly wonderful. All concede that we need an energetic, industrious, economical, self-relying people to subdue and bring into use the vast unproductive lands of Arizona. This Mormon emigration fills every one of the above requirements. No luxury is indulged in among them; tea, coffee, tobacco and spirituous liquors they do not use, and claim that they enjoy much better health in consequence of non-use. They are spoken of by those living nearest to them as the kindest of neighbors, and all strangers receive a hearty welcome among them. The health of the young colony is excellent, which they mainly attribute to the absence of drugs among them, and only using such herbs and roots as they can find in case of sickness. There has been seventeen births since their arrival, and a matronly old lady told me that this was only a small beginning of what might be expected to follow. They have a splendid, robust looking lot of children, and the mothers are very fond of showing them to the newcomers. They are very desirous of having schools, and will at once build four school houses and organize school districts under the school law of the territory."

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The "Mormons" have no poor in Utah, going about unfed, unclothed, unschooled, or unhoused. Until the anti-"Mormons" came into our midst, we had no organ-grinders, monkey-showmen, houses of prostitution, dram-shops, bowling saloons, and indeed but very little of the general make-up of civilized (?) communities.

Our wives, about whose duress so much is said, enjoy greater freedom and more franchises than any other women of the United States. They vote on all political, social religious, domestic, and other general questions,—and they vote just as they please, without let or hindrance, the same as the men do. Further, they have the privilege of nominating their husbands, and if their husbands maltreat, neglect, or in any manner abuse them, on their own application, without feeing a lawyer, or other expense, they can obtain a separation from them, retaining the minor children, with ample dower for their mutual support, while their husbands cannot divorce their wives except for the violation of the seventh commandment. No woman in Utah is barred—except by nature—the honorable and enviable privilege of becoming a beloved wife and doting mother, which Gail Hamilton says "is the sole, complete elysium of woman, and there is not one woman in a million who would not be married if she had a chance."

The ladies of Utah also have a journal, "WOMAN'S EXPONANT," published at Salt Lake City in their own interests, conducted entirely by themselves, while there are but very few periodicals in the United States devoted exclusively to the behoof of the sex.

We maintain that women have just as much right to enjoy the blessings of marriage and maternity, as man has to become an honored husband and father, and so long as there is one redundant marriageable woman in all the land, it is ungenerous, ignoble and cruel in man, by the proscriptive laws he ordains and enforces, to deny her the inestimable privilege. With us marriages are consummated for eternity, as well as time. There is no marrying in the resurrection; it must be attended to here, the same as baptism, etc. Godly marriage, plural or single, means healthy, beautiful offspring, and never-ending companionship. Our system is scriptural, natural and logical. It effectually bars the social-evil, promotes longevity, gives EVERY woman a husband and home, and multiplies the "noblest work of God" by tilling the earth with joyous, robust children.

I am often asked about the Lecturers and writers in the anti "Mormon" field. All are "put up jobs" by Lecture brokers, for pelf. Their literary garbage is written by bad MEN, while they hawk it about as their own. It is notorious in Utah that one of these begged to become a plural wife, while her infidelity to her marriage obligations has subjected her to neighborhood comment in Salt Lake and Chicago; and another was so spotless, that when she heard of an accident occurring to a man—not her monagamic husband—whose linen she used to do up, fainted and would not be comforted. Another, who was in Utah but a few months, and who has lately written a letter from one of the central counties of this state, to a New York paper, is credited with saying that if her husband should ever become a practical polygamist, herself and daughters would open a bagnio.

Not over seven per cent. of the population of Utah are Gentiles, and yet they are in posseision of ninety-odd per cent. of all the offices and advantages of trust, influence and money. They have the Governor, with the veto power, Secretary, with the disbursement of over 20,000$ legislative funds, judges, Marshals, Prosecuting Attorneys, Register, Receiver, Surveyor-General, Clerks of Courts. Commissioners, many of the Notaries, principal Post Offices, Mail Contractors, Postal Agents, Revenue Assessors and Collectors, Indian Agencies, Indian Supplies, Armies and Army Cot tracts. Express Companies, Railroads, Telegraph Lines, Associated Press Agencies one-half the Jurors, some Probateships. Penitentiary. etc., etc., and still they are not content. They want to lie our bishops and presiding elders, and receivers of the tithes and offerings of the people. They desire to MAKE and EXECUTE our laws.

They would like the territory, counties and cities in their own hands, and to carry the keys to the several Treasuries. Now, our territory, etc., are free from debt; if the carpet-baggers were the custodians, they would soon be in hopeless insolvency. What a modest innocent animal the Utah carpet bagger is!

"But," says one, "the late Delegate election returns indicate a somewhat larger per cent. of Gentiles." True, but many of the "Mormons" are too young to vote, and sonic of the adults are not naturalized; while most of the Gentiles are adults, and tinder the stimulants of money and whisky, not only VOTE OFTEN, but vote car loads of emigrants passing through Utah, On election days, for the west, and hundreds of non resident and non-tax paying freightors and miners. This they boast of.

The hot-bed mobbers care no more about polygamy than they are concerned about intemperance and profanity. They are themselves polygamists, intemperate and profane; and like their predecessors of Missouri and Illinois, (who murdered hundreds of our people, including our beloved Leaders, confiscated millions of our property, and mobbed us into the wilderness, where, they boasted, the savages would make an end of us,) they covet our homes, daughters and wives, and hesitate at nothing to ostracise and exterminate the "Mormons." Outside of God's direct assurances, our only hope is in the Supreme Court of the United States, or in a dignified, honorable Investigating Committee.

"Mormons," it would seem, are not destined to enjoy "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," and are not "born free and equal" with the rest of mankind, nor are "liberty, fraternity and equality" their's to possess. Hath not a "Mormon" eyes? Hath not a "Mormon" hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject, to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as his implacable anti-"Mormon" persecutors? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die, the same as our unrelenting prosecutors? These paraphrased interrogatories, from Shakspeare, have just as much significance from the lips of a "Mormon" as from a Jew.

Respectfully, &c., A. MILTON MUSSER, "Mormon" Elder. Having been intimately identified with the "Mormons," and familiar with their history, since 1843, I cheerfully certify to the entire correctness of the foregoing statements and sentiments. HENRY GROW, "Mormon" Elder.