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The Mountain Meadows: historic stopping place on the Spanish Trail
Utah Historical Quarterly
Vol. 35, 1967, No. 3
THE MOUNTAIN MEADOWS: historic stopping place on the Spanish Trail
BY JUANITA BROOKS
The use of the Mountain Meadows on the Spanish Trail stretches back into prehistoric times. Although Father Silvestre Velez de Escalante in 1776, and Jedediah Strong Smith a half-century later, missed the Mountain Meadows by following Ash Creek to the Virgin River, traders on the Spanish Trail as early as 1805 had come to use this area as a place to recruit their animals. By the following decade, an annual caravan left Santa Fe each fall for California — autumn was the only time of year traders could safely brave the desert.
The first description in English of the Spanish Trail and the Mountain Meadows area was written by John C. Fremont on his second exploring trip. He was headed north out of southern California with the Cajon Pass behind him, when on April 20, 1844, he recorded:
If Fremont found the trail clear and well marked, his caravan left it even more a road, for he had over a hundred horses and mules besides some horned cattle. "Our march was a sort of procession," he wrote, "Scouts ahead, and on the flanks; a front and rear division; the pack animals, baggage, and horned cattle in the centre; the whole stretching a quarter of a mile along our path . . . ."
They followed this well-marked trail past the Mojave, on to the springs at Las Vegas, over the desert to the Muddy River, up the Virgin to the Beaver Dams, over the summit to the Santa Clara Creek, and along its winding course to the Mountain Meadows, where they camped. On May 12 in describing this oasis-like spot Fremont said:
After two days at the Meadows, Fremont continued his journey, leaving the Spanish Trail where it turned toward the mountain pass, and followed instead the course to the Salt Lake area earlier charted by Jedediah Smith. This route would soon become the Mormon Trail to California and much later U.S. Highway 91.
An early diary of the complete journey from Santa Fe to California was kept by Orville C. Pratt, a young lawyer, who with an escort of 16 men left Santa Fe on August 28, 1848. When he reached the Mountain Meadows, he was so impressed that he wrote:
With the arrival of the Mormons in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake, this southern route to California took on great importance. The first wagon to be taken over it was brought by Mormon Battalion men traveling from Los Angeles to Great Salt Lake City in May of 1848. That same fall a company was sent from Salt Lake to California for seeds, grape cuttings, and cattle. This party returned in the spring of 1849, leaving the trail quite well marked. Later that same year the California-bound company whose tragic end gave Death Valley its name followed the trail at least as far as the Meadows.
Brigham Young, ambitious to establish his inland "Kingdom," sent colonists south to the present site of Parowan in 1850, and in the years immediately following established villages along the road wherever there was sufficient water. Thus as far south as Cedar City the road was improved, bridges built over the most difficult places, and some guide posts set. While these improvements were primarily for the local travel, they impressed the overland emigrant also. But nothing delighted his heart so much as the grassy meadow where he could loiter as he pleased. And many writers echoed the words of Mormon George W. Bean who said it was "the most beautiful little valley that I have seen in the mountains south."
Wagon travel steadily increased. During 1853 so many cattle and sheep were driven to California that the grass well might have begun to be depleted. On August 4, of this same year Edward F. Beale, superintendent of Indian Affairs for California, traveled to his destination with a pack company. His historian, Gwinn Harris Heap, wrote of the Mountain Meadows:
The Meadows continued to be a haven for the traveler until September of 1857. On the eleventh of that month a tragedy occurred here which erased forever all connotations of delight and beauty and changed the place to one of horror and fear. On that date two companies of emigrants, temporarily traveling together and totaling about 120 persons, were massacred. Only 18 small children, placed in a wagon and sent on the road ahead were spared.
The motives behind this tragic event and the driving forces which exploded in it are too complex to be detailed here. But in order to understand even partially the dark happenings of this day, we must consider briefly the Mormon background.
As they attempted to build up their "Kingdom of God," the early Mormons were constantly involved in conflicts with their frontier neighbors. Three times they had been driven from their homes, from Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. There had been whippings, tar-and-feather parties, pillaging and burning of their homes, and even murder. The Prophet Joseph Smith had been assassinated. Finally, the Saints had been forced out of their city of Nauvoo on the banks of the Mississippi in the dead of winter. On their westward trek they had buried their dead — dead from exhaustion, disease, and hunger — in uncounted numbers. And when Brigham Young led his people into the Valley of the Great Salt Lake in July of 1847, there to build up their kingdom at last free and unmolested, he is reported to have said: "Give us ten years, and I ask no odds of my enemies."
Brigham had his ten years, but just barely. Word of an approaching U.S. Army reached Utah on July 24, 1857 — ten years to the day. To the Mormons the coming of the army meant just one thing: they were threatened once again with annihilation, this time by the power and might of the federal government.
Immediately the people were counseled to store their grain and supplies, to gird themselves for a terrible seige. Another vital factor was the Indians. For three years Mormon missionaries had been trying to cement their friendship, to teach them, to civilize them. Now in the face of an approaching army the natives supported the Mormons, who in turn would be protected by their Great God. But a few Indian leaders had been killed or wounded in an early Indian-white skirmish, and the Indians demanded revenge — if not on the white emigrants passing through the territory then on the Mormons themselves.
Emotions and motives were fanned into a flame which culminated in this wholesale murder at the Mountain Meadows, this complete tragedy for all: for those who were killed, for the children who were orphaned, for the men who participated.
Many of these men moved their families to distant parts of the territory. Within a year Cedar City had lost about half its population. Local people shunned the Meadows, believing the place to be haunted; they rerouted the road in order to miss all reminders of that dark day.
The so-called Mormon War, which had ignited the flames of passion culminating in the massacre, was really not a war at all. One of the soldiers reported: "Wounded, none; killed, none; fooled, everybody." Except for the massacre at Mountain Meadows no blood was shed, and in the spring the army marched peaceably through Salt Lake City and took up quarters at Camp Floyd 40 miles to the west.
Some effort was made to investigate the tragedy at the Meadows, but while the Mormons ostracized those few who remained in the area, they would not turn them over to the law. In 1859 U.S. soldiers examined the site carefully, gathered up the bones that had been dragged from shallow graves by animals or washed out by rain, and buried them in two separate graves. Over one grave they erected a stone pyramid on the top of which they placed a large wooden cross bearing the inscription VENGEANCE IS MINE & I WILL REPAY SAITH THE LORD.
By 1864 the monument had been torn down, but was again replaced with the same cross or a similar one. By this time a total change had come over the face of the Meadows. Local folk believe that God had cursed the land. Scientists say that the grass was eaten down by too many herds, that the iron tires of hundreds of wagons had cut through the grass turf so that erosion set in. The winter of 1861-62, known as the flood year, played havoc, gutting out a great wash, draining off the top soil, and leaving only sterile gravel. The appearance of the place eloquently supports the belief that God has washed away the stains of blood and decreed that this land should never again be productive.
The pile of stones, with the cross gone, stood amid the shadscale and scrub brush that struggled for existence in the sterile soil. In 1907 a letter was written by relatives of the victims to government officials asking what procedure to follow in order that this spot be properly marked, dignified with a suitable monument, and beautified with shrubbery. Except for the exchange of letters nothing was done until 1932, when the Utah Trails and Landmarks Association in cooperation with local citizens erected a square stone wall around the crumbling pile of stones and placed on the west face a plaque that reads:
NO. 17 ERECTED 1932 MOUNTAIN MEADOWS
A FAVORITE RECRUITING PLACE ON THE OLD SPANISH TRAIL IN THIS VICINITY, SEPTEMBER 7-11, 1857 OCCURRED ONE OF THE MOST LAMENTABLE TRAGEDIES IN THE ANNALS OF THE WEST. A COMPANY OF ABOUT 140 ARKANSAS AND MISSOURI EMIGRANTS LED BY CAPTAIN CHARLES FAN- CHER ENROUTE TO CALIFORNIA, WAS ATTACKED BY WHITE MEN AND INDIANS. ALL BUT 17, BEING SMALL CHILDREN, WERE KILLED. JOHN D. LEE, WHO CONFESSED PARTICIPATION AS LEADER, WAS LEGALLY EXECUTED HERE MARCH 23, 1877. MOST OF THE EMIGRANTS WERE BURIED IN THEIR OWN DEFENSE PITS. THIS MONUMENT WAS REVERENTLY DEDICATED SEPTEMBER 10, 1932 BY THE PIONEER TRAILS AND LANDMARKS ASSOCIATION AND THE PEOPLE OF SOUTHERN UTAH
That was 35 years ago. Now the wall is crumbling and cracking, the land surrounding it is more bleak and barren than ever, and the road to it is almost impassable. Yet here lie the remains of 120 American citizens. Such other spots are suitably preserved, as witness the site of the Donner tragedy. Does not this one deserve better treatment — some trees and greenery about it, an access road and path so that the hundreds of citizens who visit here annually would not find this dismal sight? Would not it be in the best American tradition that this site on the Spanish Trail be given the dignity and continuity of some suitable recognition?
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