[The following takes place during the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Context of the event, courtesy of Wikipedia: “The Mountain Meadows Massacre was a series of attacks on the Baker–Fancher emigrant wagon train, at Mountain Meadows in southern Utah. The attacks began on September 7, 1857, and culminated on September 11, 1857, resulting in the mass slaughter of the emigrant party by members of the Utah Territorial Militia from the Iron County district and purportedly aided by Native American allies. The extent to which Native Americans participated in the massacre is disputed and up until recent decades much of the blame for the massacre was unjustly attributed to the Native Americans. The militia, officially called the Nauvoo Legion, was composed of southern Utah's Mormon settlers (members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or the LDS Church). Intending to leave no witnesses and thus prevent reprisals, the perpetrators killed all the adults and older children—about 120 men, women, and children in total. Seventeen children, all younger than seven, were spared.”]
John Calvin Miller, six, was among the children, and with him were his sister Mary, four, and one-year-old brother, James. John was the only one of them who would talk, but he could not remember their last name, only that he was there when their mother and father and two other brothers were murdered, and that he saw the men who shot them. Georgia Ann Dunlap was eighteen months old. Her parents and seven sisters and brothers had just been executed in front of her eyes, and she was now alone with her five-year-old sister, Prudence Angelina, who could not stop sobbing. Emberson Tackitt, four, had watched his mother hacked to death, while his father, two older brothers, an aunt, and three cousins were being shot and their throats cut a few yards away. Like John Miller, Emberson had also seen many of the murderers clearly enough to identify them, but he knew to keep silent just then. His younger brother, nineteen-month-old William Henry, who was in his mother’s arms when the attack began, lay dazed and whimpering in one of the wagons.
Gushing blood from the gunshot wound that had mangled her ear, Sarah Frances Baker, three, her five-year-old sister, May Elizabeth, and the youngest of the surviving infants, nine-month-old William, had just watched the slaughter of their parents and a seven-year-old sister. Felix Marion Jones was eighteen months old. Within a few minutes his family had been wiped out, and he would not be able to remember anything about his murdered mother, father, and sister. Christopher “Kit Carson” Fancher, five, along with his twenty-two-month-old sister, Triphenia, had seen their wounded father shot in his litter and their mother murdered with an ax, while six brothers and sisters under the age of nineteen were being killed nearby. Nancy Sophrona Huff, at four, was the sole survivor of a family of six annihilated in the same ways.
One child died as they arrived at Hamblin’s ranch. Another, one-year-old Sarah Dunlap, had had her left arm nearly severed by a musket ball. Clinging frantically to her, their dresses soaked in blood, were her sisters Rebecca, six, and Louisa, four. They had all seen the slaughter of their seven brothers and sisters, as well as both parents, and Rebecca had pried her baby sister from the arms of their dead mother.
Rebecca and Louisa had also watched as the Mormon killers, disguised as Indians, washed off their war paint in one of the meadow streams. They would eventually be among the first witnesses to report this occurrence, thereby attributing the murders to white men rather than Paiutes [local Native Americans]. But for now, the sisters knew better than to utter a word about that.
”My father was killed by Indians,” little Kit Carson Fancher would tell a journalist two years later. “When they washed their faces, they were white men.”
Source:
Denton, Sally. “Mountain Meadows, September 7-11, 1857.” American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857. Vintage Books, 2004. 139-41. Print.
Further Reading:
If you enjoy this type of content, please consider donating to my Patreon!
No comments, yet...