[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.”]
Several families of the Shivwits Paiute band had witnessed the siege from the surrounding hills, where they had gone for their traditional fall harvest of piñon nuts. This fact was either not known or not given much consideration by the killers, who were busily taking their collective vow of silence. But for the tribe, the massacre would have far-reaching and devastating consequences. Peaceful farmers and root diggers, the Paiute of the Great Basin had survived for a thousand years crafting bones into tools and eating seeds, insects, squirrels, rabbits, and birds. Lean and agile, but armed with the crudest of weapons, they could bring down one of the ubiquitous mule deer of the Beaver Mountains only if they hunted as a group. Usually naked, they sometimes dressed in buckskin hides or wore rabbit skins as a cape. September was the most important season of the year to the Paiute, having religious as well as celebratory significance, and they clung unwaveringly to the associated rituals. The nut gatherers carried their processions on their backs from the lower elevations of the desert into the cool high mountain country.
After seeing the events on September 11, they instinctively sensed they were in danger. A Paiute descendant of an eyewitness, recalling what his grandfather had told him when he was as a child, said, “We knew we would be blamed. We had seen too much. We knew we’d either be killed by the Mormons or by the Americans, and either way we could no longer stay there.” Some members of the tribe left that night with he belongings they had with them, many migrating into what is now eastern Nevada and northern Arizona; some went as far north as Wyoming and Montana. Their dispersal irrevocably strained their native culture – one more victim of the terrors let loose in the valley that day. Like the Mormon killers, the Paiute Indians protected the secret from generation to generation, their few oral histories over the next century laced with the fear and reticence of telling all they knew about the massacre.
Source:
Denton, Sally. “Mountain Meadows, September 7-11, 1857.” American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857. Vintage Books, 2004. 142. Print.
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