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

 

Mormon Agency in Last Year’s Massacre at Mountain Meadows. 

A correspondent of the Southern Vineyard, writing from San Bernardino, gives and account of the part the Mormons played in the massacre last year of a large body of emigrants bound for California. He says:

The Mormons have sworn vengeance against the people of San Bernardino, and they say they have never sold their land, but only took what the devil saw fit to give them, and they intend to make them pay tribute to the Lord by Daniting them, as they did the men, women and children at the Mountain Meadows last fall, who I am credibly informed, were massacred in the following manner:

The Mormons armed a party of Indians, and instructed them at what place to attack the doomed emigrants. The Indians obeyed council, but the men of the train, having their women and children by their sides, and all at stake, fought manfully; and my informant says they could have fought all the way to California had it not been for a fiendish Mormon Danite, who had been sent to instruct the Indians how to manage.

[Moderately accurate version of massacre follows]

But does the hellish deed stop here? No. What next? That which followed can be more easily imagined than written or told! Suffice to say, William H. Dame, Colonel of the Iron Military District, ordered the women to be stripped, which was done. He then, as William Matthew’s, formerly of San Bernardino, said, found them all diseased, and it was no harm to kill them.

I have also been informed that one David Carter was the means of saving the lives of the company of emigrants known as Captain Duke and Turner’s train, who were robbed of all their stock last fall, Nephi Johnson was the man who commanded the Indians and Mormons on that occasion, and was the man who borrowed the pistol, and ran off the stock.