[The following is in relation to early murders and infighting within the Mormon faith, primarily during the late 1850s. This all takes place during a period that one author calls the Mormon version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which saw a resurgence in the violence which had at times characterized the church and congregation; a resurgence that was largely the work of one man, Jedediah “Jeddy” Morgan Grant, a close friend of Prophet Young and his second-in-command.]
Those who dared to flee Zion were hunted down and killed. William R. Parrish, an elderly Mormon of high standing, had “grown cold in the faith” and decided to emigrate with his family to California. But he was caught near Springville, Utah, home, his throat slit during an ambush. Killed with him was Gardner “Duff” Potter, one of the guides who had been with Gunnison at the Sevier River massacre. “Ever since that event,” his widow would be quoted in the New York Times, “the Mormons have been very suspicious and have been watching him continually, supposing that he knew more about the [Gunnison] affair than was consistent with the safety of certain men, particularly if he should escape the Territory.”
In Manti, a party led by Bishop Warren Snow seized a young man who was engaged to a woman Snow wanted to take for a plural wife. Accusing his rival of sexual misconduct, Snow and the others castrated him “in a brutal manner, tearing the chords right out,” one witness later recalled, “and then took the portion severed from his victim and hung it up in the schoolhouse on a nail, so it could be seen by all who visited the house afterwards.” Rumors of slayings pervaded the realm yet none of the crimes were ever reported in the Desert News, nor was anyone brought to justice, “although what they had done was common knowledge in their settlements,” according to David Bigler. Then, as quickly as the bloody regime began, it ended with Grant’s sudden death, on December I, 1856.
Source:
Denton, Sally. “Deseret, August 3, 1857.” American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857. Vintage Books, 2004. 106-7. Print.
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