[The following is in relation to the rescuing of the young survivors of the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857. Some context of the massacre, 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.” These seventeen children were later rescued, about two years later, by an American delegation under armed escort.]
Lynch and Forney proceeded to Hamblin’s nearby ranch home, where the surviving children had been assembled. Lynch’s emotions overcame him at the sight of the small survivors. “In a most wretched and deplorable condition,” he described them, “with little or no clothing, covered with filth and dirt, they presented a sight heart-rending and miserable in the extreme.” He was particularly affected by three-year-old Sarah Dunlap, who had gone blind and had lost the use of her left arm from the musket ball that had nearly detached it at the elbow. It was a sight that would stay with him the rest of his life.
Lynch took the ten orphans to Cedar City, where they waited for three days while clothing was made for them, “half-starved, half-naked, filthy, infested with vermin.” At Cedar City, they retrieved two more children, and another at nearby Painter Creek. Lynch conversed with the children, whom he described as traumatized but ecstatic to be back in the safety of “Americans.” He learned from them that they had never been among Indians [the Mormons had almost immediately blamed the local Native Americans for the massacre, deflecting blame from themselves], but rather had been living with the very men they had seen kill their mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. “The children pointed out to us the dresses and jewelry of their mothers and sisters that now grace the angelic forms of these murderers’ women and children,” Lynch later testified.
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Rebecca [one of the children rescued] later recalled that when the children were brought to the Hamblin ranch, one of the little boys had been shot in the leg and was crying. “The men stopped the wagon. One got out… took the little boy by his feet and knocked his brains out against the wagon wheel.” She also told of Mormons robbing the corpses. “If a ring wouldn’t come off easily, they cut off the finger.”
Source:
Denton, Sally. “Cedar City, April 7, 1859.” American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857. Vintage Books, 2004. 194-95. Print.
Further Reading:
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