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

 

Terrible Massacre of Emigrants by the Mormons and Indians. 

Elsewhere we publish late and exciting news from California, in regard the massacre of 120 American emigrants who were crossing the plains en route to California. The actual perpetrators of the massacre were no doubt Indians; but the suspicion is, that they were encouraged, instigated, and perhaps led on by Mormons.

The party in question is said to have consisted of about 135 men, women and children, including some forty or forty-five capable of bearing-arms. They were from Arkansas, were well provided, and had with them quite a stock of horses, mules, and oxen. They had traveled across the plains by the way of Great Salt Lake City, on their way to Southern California, and had reached the rim of the great basin, about three hundred miles south-west of the Great Salt Lake city, and fifty miles from Cedar City, the most southerly of the Mormon settlements in Utah, when they were attacked and all destroyed, with the exception of fifteen young children, who were afterward bought from the Indians by the Mormons. What we know of this affair, which seems to have taken place about the 10th or 11th of September, is derived from statements made by the Mormons as to what they had learned about it from the Indians, and from the statements of another party of emigrants who had subsequently passed over the same route, having left Salt Lake City ten days later.–—Suspicion would seem, however, to rest rather upon the extremely bad state of feeling which prevails between the Mormons and emigrants through their country—and which, in the case of this particular train, would seem to have been especially bitter—than upon any facts positively known.