Book Reviews

Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Tragedy.

By Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr., and Glen E. Leonard. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.xvi + 430 pp. Cloth, $29.95.)

PLANS FOR THIS BOOK began late in 2001, and reached printed form in the summer of 2008. While originally projected as a definitive study of both the crime and the punishment, the “embarrassment of materials” discovered by the authors led to their decision for a second book. This volume focuses on the crime. Their extensive research is reflected in the 126 pages of endnotes, most with multiple citations, and four useful appendices containing brief biographies of people involved.

The authors chose to use their own sources and not to interact with and respond to previous books on the massacre. In their attempt to place what happened in the context of American history, they refer to the event as an American Tragedy. Mormons were generally unhappy with the government officials appointed to the Territory of Utah. The authors summarize the first decade in Utah briefly: “Two rival kingdoms were struggling against each other. One was religious and local. The other was civil and national. The issue was not just law and order, but whose law and order. Resolving the issue would embroil Utah and the federal government in a conflict that would come to be called the Utah War—and create an atmosphere for a massacre” (32).

News that General “squaw killer” Harney was commanding the troops en route to Utah caused the Mormons real concern. Governor Young preached: “avoid all excitement.” Still he instructed General Daniel H. Wells to alert all regional militia commanders to make preparations for what seemed an impending conflict. President Young preached on August 16: “I will not hold the Indians still…but I will say to them, go and do as you please” (98). That message was sent to southern Utah also. Apostle George A. Smith had gone South early in August to advise Church leaders of the dangers facing the Saints with the coming of the army. These authors do not believe Smith “hyped” the Saints’ fears. Indian Superintendent Young appointed Jacob Hamblin as Southern Utah Indian Mission President. He and about a dozen of the Indian chiefs joined Smith’s party on its return to Salt Lake City. They encountered the wagon train heading south at Corn Creek. Smith and the Indian chiefs met with Young on September 1, 1857. The authors suggest that none of those Indians were involved in the massacre.

With a general “context” established, the authors shift their focus from the federal government and church leadership in the north to the wagon train and the leadership and Saints in the south. They explain the dynamics of wagon trains, with people moving in and out. Most emigrants expected to buy supplies in Utah, but the Fancher-Baker people found that Mormons had been told to hoard supplies, and trade only if they could obtain more and better weapons. Conflict arose over the feed on public lands—considered free graze by the emigrants, but preempted pasture by the Mormons. The authors believe the livestock poisoning was caused by “Texas Fever—Anthrax” left in the soil from herds of cattle previously trailed through the area to the California gold field markets. Other conflicts occurred because of personalities and disagreements with both settlers and Indians, reaching fever pitch by the time the Fancher-Baker party arrived in the southern Utah settlements.

The authors state explicitly that nothing in the conduct of the emigrants could in any way justify what happened at Mountain Meadows. They also add that the Mormons involved the Paiute Indians in the tragedy. They believe the decision to “attack” was a local one, and cite experts on violence to explain the “group dynamics” at work there. “Violence is not only what we do to the Other…. Violence is the very construction of the Other” (127). Such violent group action depends on participants who “allow the dictates of ‘authorities’ to trump their own moral instincts,” or who “submit to conformity, and fear to go against the crowd,” or who agree to the “dehumanization of the victims” (128-29).

The “dynamics” playing out among those southern Utah Mormon Saints included rumors of misbehavior by some members of the wagon train even before Parowan and Cedar City. The authors see Colonel William Dame as a weak leader who felt that “words are like the wind.” But for Major Isaac Haight, also Stake President in Cedar City, those confrontations with some members of the wagon train triggered a need for serious action against them. The plan proposed was to have the local Indians ambush the train in the narrow Mogatsu Canyon south of Mountain Meadows itself. Haight initiated his plan by sending runners out to contact militia leaders and the local Indians. However, he faced strong disagreement at the Sunday morning meeting. That opposition resulted in their sending James Haslam as an express rider to obtain the “will” of Brigham Young in the matter. He would return too late!

Couriers were charged with keeping the leaders informed of what was happening. Major John D. Lee was assigned the job of “managing the Indians.” The initial attack Monday morning, September 7, resulted in the deaths of some Indians as well as members of the Fancher-Baker party. The ambush plans aborted because of the location and the valiant defense of the besieged party. With these delays two other problems showed up. The wagon train had sent William Aden with John Gresley to try to get help, either from the Mormons, or from one of the three wagon trains traveling behind the Fancher-Baker party. Militiaman William Stewart killed Aden, but Gresley escaped. For the Mormons this was a new crisis. The emigrants would know Mormons were involved if Gresley made it back to the train, although they likely suspected that Mormons were involved in the Indian attacks as well. If that information got to California, Mormons believed it would trigger a second front against them.

Major Haight felt destruction of the wagon train was imperative. However, he was not willing to make the decision alone, so contacted Colonel Dame and “bullied” him into giving the order for the massacre. Their plan involved sending the militia to Mountain Meadows, a white flag of truce, Lee’s disarming of the wagon train members, and separating them into groups of young children and the wounded, women and older children, and the men, each accompanied by an armed Mormon militiaman, and the Indians hidden in ambush. The slaughter was over in about one hour.

While the “what happened, and how” is clearly shown in this book, the authors’ answers of the “why” are incomplete at best. A “group dynamics” to explain that violence seems weak since the men involved on the “killing field” had to travel some forty miles or more to get to the Meadows, where the killing itself was precise, almost ritual-like. Those local leaders were also hearing other “voices.” Young’s Indian policy had been sent to them. In Blood of the Prophets, Will Bagley explains what Young’s “not holding the Indians by the hand” meant for western travel, as well as the impact of the oath taken in the temple to “avenge the blood of the prophets.” R. Kent Fielding in The Unsolicited Chronicler, and his article “The Lamanite Redemption” explains the challenges Mormon leaders had in understanding just what role the Indians were to play in “setting up the Kingdom of God.” He recounts how the quartering of troops among the Mormons after the Gunnison Massacre (1853) made Governor Young determined not to permit that again. Patriarch Elisha Groves gave Colonel Dame a “blessing” stating Dame would “lead the Lamanites in defense of Zion.” David Bigler’s Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon Theocracy in the American West, 1847-1896 offers unusually keen insights into the mentality of the Mormon people during those years, including their “Millennial expectations” and their deference to “priesthood authority.” D. Michael Quinn in Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power calls attention to the “military component” built into Mormon Theology.

Juanita Brooks asks the question: “what happened to the missing pages in Jacob Hamblin’s Journal which reported his exchange with the Fancher-Baker party at Corn Creek.” She also raises the issue of the “Proclamation” of August 5, 1857. Were the southern Utah leaders under “official martial law at the time”? In her two excellent volumes The Massacre at Mountain Meadows and John Doyle Lee, Juanita sees George A. Smith as something of a firebrand stirring up the people in preparation for the impending war.

While this book’s authors are skeptical of John D. Lee’s Confessions…, he was a firsthand source. Lee believed the Saints in southern Utah “all” believed in Blood Atonement. He also stated that Joseph Smith (in Missouri, 1838) talked of the “rules of war,” with one rule being entitlement to the “spoils of war” (like the Fancher-Baker wagon train’s properties?).

The authors have done an excellent job of relating details about the wagon train, the people involved, the pre-massacre activities, and the September 11, 1857, massacre at Mountain Meadows. But their “historical context” paradigm lacks completeness as they overlook the dynamics and the theology of the Mormon Kingdom, of the preaching and teaching of church leaders during that period, and the full “mental makeup” of those who ordered the massacre and who did the deed. This book is not the final word.

MELVIN T. SMITH St. George

House of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

By Shannon A. Novak. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008. xvii + 226 pp.Cloth, $29.95.)

UNTIL RECENTLY, most books on the Mountain Meadows Massacre have treated the victims of the crime as faceless beings. In the words of forensic anthropologist Shannon A. Novak, “they tell us a great deal about the killers and rather little about those who were killed.” Her book House of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre “aims to redress the balance” (6).

Approximately 120 people perished during the September 1857 massacre, most of them women and children. In August 1999 Novak was asked to analyze the recently unearthed bones of twenty-eight victims, most of whom were men. She combined the results of her research with findings from historical records in an effort to provide a more complete portrayal of the victims and of the massacre itself.

After a preface and introduction that explain her approach and provide background for what follows, Novak uses chapter 1, titled “Streams,” to describe the major emigrant families, their histories, and the regions from which they hailed. In chapter 2, “Confluence,” she correctly refutes the popular belief that the emigrant company was a unified group when it left Arkansas. She explains that kinship groups, as well as “satellite families and solitary men,” instead merged over time as they headed west (38).

In chapter 3, “Nourishment,” Novak assesses “skeletal indicators of dietary deficiency and excess” (59). Drawing on her study of Ozark society, census and property data, and skeletal evidence, she describes the likely diets and behaviors of the victims.

In chapter 4, “Constitution,” Novak examines what the bones say about the physical condition of the victims. Particularly welcome is her analysis of the charge made by some of the massacre’s perpetrators that many of the victims were afflicted with sexually transmitted diseases. She writes, “Though the skeletal evidence from the mass grave at Mountain Meadows cannot decisively refute the claims . . . , it casts doubt on the image of an emigrant party that was ‘rotten with pox’” (108). Such stories were meant to vilify the victims, salve the consciences of the perpetrators, and “deny the innocence even of the surviving children” (109).

Chapter 5, “Domains,” explores gender roles among the victims. The bones Novak studied provide “some insight into sex differences in both activity and injury patterns” (132). Here Novak urges caution toward her conclusions about the women, given the comparatively small number of women’s bones found in the grave. As she notes earlier, “what we have to draw on is not a perfect sample” (59). Chapter 6, “Epitaph,” examines the massacre itself and what the bones reveal about it. Novak includes photographs of the victims’ bones, and the pictures of skulls with bullet holes and other skeletal fragments tell a grisly story, reminding the reader of the horrific nature of the crime. Yet, as Novak writes in the book’s preface, “the bones cannot settle the matter of what really happened at Mountain Meadows, or who is to blame” (xiv–xv).

Modern historians have exploded the myth that the massacre was carried out entirely by Indians. The scholarly consensus today is that white men masterminded the massacre and were the principal aggressors in carrying out the crime. At times, however, Novak seems to imply that Indians had no role in the killings, a conclusion that goes against the testimony of Paiute headman Jimmie Pete and other sources. For example, she writes that “the skeletal findings do not support historical accounts of ‘scalping’ or other claims of specifically ‘Indian’ atrocities” such as the use of knives or arrows to kill victims (159). That same skeletal evidence, however, does not support the use of knives by white perpetrators either, even though good historical evidence suggests such use. In short, the absence of such weapon marks on the bones is not dispositive.

In an endnote, Novak herself cautions, “There may be a number of reasons for the absence of blade or arrow wounds. First, these weapons may not have been used in the massacre, or they were simply not used to attack any of the individuals in the mass grave. Second, knives and arrows may have been used, but they did not penetrate to the bone. . . . Finally, carnivore activity and other postmortem factors may have resulted in the loss of skeletal elements that manifest such wounds” (184 n. 11).

Novak also writes that “the most common injury observed in the skeletal sample was a single gunshot wound to the head” (161) and that “Southern Paiutes are especially unlikely to have wielded firearms on such a large scale” (173). Yet, as she also points out, “all the gunshot wounds were identified in males,” with one possible exception (162). Traditional histories of the massacre recount that the adult male victims were killed by white men; therefore, as Novak says, “in many respects the pattern of skeletal trauma corroborates the basic historical accounts. . . . Most of the victims in the mass grave were young adult males who had been shot. Most of the women and children had been bludgeoned to death” (159).

As so often happens with overreliance on secondary sources, Novak sometimes perpetuates errors made by other writers. For example, on pages 30 and 128 she misidentifies massacre victim Pleasant Tackitt as a preacher. Several writers have confused the young Tackitt with the more famous Methodist minister of the same name who did not die until 1886, well after the massacre.

But elsewhere she corrects errors made by previous writers. For example, she notes, “[Will] Bagley . . . mistakenly has Nancy Mitchell married to Lorenzo Dunlap” (181 n. 1). In fact, Nancy Dunlap Mitchell was Lorenzo’s sister; he actually married Nancy Wharton. In another corrective Novak writes, “There seems to be no support for [Sally] Denton’s . . . suggestion that the ‘Camerons of Carroll County’ were ‘perhaps the wealthiest family’ on the wagon train” (182 n. 6).

Overall, House of Mourning is a useful contribution to the literature on the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Novak is at her best when her conclusions follow directly from her scientific analysis of the bones, especially when she exercises caution, recognizing the limitations of her sample.

RICHARD E. TURLEY JR. Salt Lake City

The Chouteaus: First Family of the Fur Trade.

By Stan Hoig. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. xi + 337 pp. Cloth, $29.95.)

AWARD-WINNING JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR, Stan Hoig, has added an excellent new study on the Chouteau family’s impact, not only on St. Louis and the fur trade, but on the West.

The Chouteaus introduced goods and paraphernalia of the outside world amongst the powerful Osage Tribe as well as Kansa, Otos, and other regional tribes, and in so doing became “valuable intermediaries between the Indians and the government, forerunning the national advance, and assisting America’s western migration” (235). The two generations of Chouteaus played a significant role not only in fur trade but in the mercurial shifting political scene starting with the founding of St. Louis and that region’s moving from French to Spanish to French to American ownership. Utilizing a delicate balance of keen business acumen, political connections, common sense, and pragmatic application of strength, judgment, and accommodation they led the fur trade of the region and influenced western expansion from Oklahoma to Montana for over half a century. They were friends with and advisors to French, Spanish and American governmental and military leaders, as well as most of the significant tribal heads within hundreds of miles of St. Louis.

The saga of the Chouteau family revolves around two generations. The elders, Auguste and Pierre, were instrumental “in founding the city of St. Louis; in the development of the important fur trade along the Mississippi and lower Missouri rivers; and in providing critical aid to the young, still tentative United States in establishing its claim to the lands of the Louisiana Purchase and winning the friendship of Indian tribes of the region.” The next generation, “Pierre’s eight sons … left their mark on the American West through adventures in the fur trade and their close relationship with Indian tribes beyond the Mississippi”(ix).

Their business and political expertise impacted the next generation of fur traders who had their beginnings in St. Louis: William Ashley, Ceran St. Vrain, both the Bent and Robidoux brothers, Ramsey Crooks, Sylvester Pratte. It was impossible to separate fur trade from politics in the years between 1763 and the French and Indian War and the Mexican American War of 1848. Throughout the era the Chouteaus played a critical role, and with uncanny ability always landed on the right side of power struggles in America’s holding and utilizing its Louisiana Purchase, and expanding towards Oregon, California, and New Mexico.

As the beaver trade faded in the late 1830s, “Cabet and his cadre of Chouteau fur-trader siblings did much to help open and explore an untamed half continent for the new nation that was so ambitiously bursting westward” (233). The Chouteaus led the next chapter of fur trade on the plains — the buffalo robe trade. As they plied their business they directly impacted Santa Fe traders, the Mormons, the Forty-niners, the army, the Pony Express, railroaders, ranchers, homesteaders, city builders, and all the rest.

“Despite their flaws, the value of the Chouteaus to the West must be recognized…. With little formal schooling, they read, studied, and educated themselves in the arts of social behavior and trade. They maintained detailed books …and instituted strict business procedures…they established valuable social relations with Native people and helped advance the trappings of American society beyond the Mississippi” (224).

Hoig has written more than twenty books on the American West from his 1961 Sand Creek Massacre, to this new study on the Chouteaus. The Chouteaus is heartily recommended to all enthusiasts of Western History.

JOHN D. BARTONUtah State University Uintah Regional Campus

William Clark Indian Diplomat.

By Jay H. Buckley. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. xx + 306 pp. Cloth, $29.95.)

WILLIAM CLARK IS BEST KNOWN for his role in the famous Lewis and Clark Expedition. Meriwether Lewis died two years after that trek—in 1808, but William Clark settled in Missouri and lived on for more than three decades, serving as Indian agent, territorial governor, and later, Superintendent of Indian Affairs at St. Louis. Post-expedition America (1806-1840) was a time when the country looked inside itself for definition, a time when starry-eyed Argonauts peered out through the misty landscape of dreams that many times cloaked fear, reality, and propriety. They looked to settlement in the West, where opportunities based in land ownership were facilitated by dispersal of cheap federal lands. It was an era filled with vision and enthusiasm on the part of white Americans and fraught with nightmares for Native Americans, whose land fell to white settlement. While Anglo-Americans poured over the Appalachians and into the then West, previous denizens of French and Spanish stock also struggled to hold onto land claims held by their families for almost a hundred years. The West was a mishmash of socio-political workings that at times ran silent and deep and other times hot and red on the very land itself. This was a time when Aaron Burr fomented treason in an attempt to make of the West a new, independent nation; an era in which America reasserted its will before the world by fighting Great Britain in the War of 1812; a time of growth, of the advent of steamships on her inner rivers and commerce reaching beyond the Rocky Mountains. This was a time when the antebellum South pressed to have slavery in northern territories and Black Hawk and his people, among other native tribes, fought to hold onto ancestral lands. To study the life of William Clark is to revisit all this and more.

Jay H. Buckley’s William Clark Indian Diplomat is just such a study, an illuminating, sweeping, well paced history that is both straightforward and emotive, causing the reader to feel empowered and righteous one moment and carried away in pathos and introspection the next. It is well documented, laced with seventeen salient pictures, eight maps, and twenty-eight pages of notes. Buckley creates in the reader a vision as complex and compelling as his protagonist was real.

In his long career, Clark signed more treaties between Indian tribes and the United States than any other American. He was involved in nearly 20 percent of all Indian treaties ever negotiated by the United States. Clark personally negotiated thirty-seven treaties that were ratified by Congress, a full one-tenth of the total 370 ratified treaties signed between Indian nations and the United States of America, an astounding statistic. While Clark exhibited deep feelings toward Indians and strove to defend tribal rights and lands and to ease Indian suffering, in the end, demands of office rolled over the top of his good intentions. His public career inadvertently reduced Indian land base and devastated much of Native American culture. From the Treaty of Greenville in 1795 to Clark’s death in 1838, the United States acquired 420 million acres from native tribes, and Clark was accountable for about 100 million of those acres, and responsible for dispossessing more Indians than any other American. Ultimately, he adhered to the notion that if losing land and sovereignty was what it cost native peoples to assimilate, it was a cheap price to pay for survival. It was a conflicted logic built into a complex individual.

Jay Buckley, professor of history at Brigham Young University, has presented a comprehensive history of William Clark, revealing his influence and abilities in Indian-white relations in the trans-Mississippi West, and as a sentimental but yet pragmatic agent of expansion. Buckley intuitively uses words as a shuttle on a great loom of time and ties together a tapestry linking not only Clark, but many salient, even visceral underpinnings to this most fascinating era of United States history. Whether one has studied this regional history before or is experiencing it more or less for the first time, this work will not only bring to life William Clark, but will bring perspective to the comprehensive nature of post-expedition America and the trans-Mississippian West. Buckley’s William Clark Indian Diplomat is destined to become a forerunner in this genre.

H. BERT JENSON Utah State University