As the party was traveling west there were rumors about the party's behavior towards Mormons and war hysteria towards outsiders was rampant, so while the emigrants were camped at the meadow, local militia leaders, including Isaac C. Haight and John D. Lee, made plans to attack the wagon train. The leaders of the militia, wanting to give the impression of tribal hostilities, persuaded Southern Paiutes to join with a larger party of militiamen disguised as Native Americans in an attack. During the militia's first assault on the wagon train, the emigrants fought back, and a five-day siege ensued. Eventually, fear spread among the militia's leaders that some emigrants had caught sight of the white men, likely discerning the actual identity of a majority of the attackers. As a result, militia commander William H. Dame ordered his forces to kill the emigrants.
Cum Town bit: death cult based on the widsom of a conman, doing blackface to hide their soulless wendigo nature
The women and children were then ambushed and killed by more militia that were hiding in nearby bushes and ravines. Members of the militia were sworn to secrecy. A plan was set to blame the massacre on the Native Americans. The militia did not kill small children who were deemed too young to relate what had happened. Nancy Huff, one of the seventeen survivors and just over four years old at the time of the massacre, recalled in an 1875 statement that an eighteenth survivor was killed directly in front of the other children. "At the close of the massacre there was eighteen children still alive, one girl, some ten or twelve years old, they said was too big and could tell, so they killed her, leaving seventeen." The survivors were taken in by local Mormon families. Seventeen of the children were later reclaimed by the U.S. Army and returned to relatives in Arkansas. The treatment of these children while they were held by the Mormons is uncertain, but Captain James Lynch's statement of May 1859 stated that the surviving children were "in a most wretched condition, half starved, half naked, filthy, infested with vermin, and their eyes diseased from the cruel neglect to which had been exposed." Lynch's July 1859 affidavit states "The children when we first saw them, were in a most wretched and deplorable condition; with little or no clothing, covered with filth and dirt."
very suprising that a satanic death cult would do this!
The livestock and personal property of the Baker–Fancher party, including women's jewelry, clothing and bedstuffs were distributed or auctioned off to Mormons. Some of the surviving children saw clothing and jewelry that had belonged to their dead mothers and sisters subsequently being worn by Mormon women and the journalist J.H. Beadle said that jewelry taken from Mountain Meadows was seen in Salt Lake City.
www.readsettlers.com
Unpopular opinion, but the outsized focus on the Mountain Meadows Massacre imo contributes to the whitewashing of American genocide against western tribes. Why point to this instance of settler vs settler violence when you could instead point to the Mormon genocide and displacement the Ute tribe? There’s also some great historiography about how this is whitewashed by framing the Utes as being from Mount Timpanogos (cause that makes sense) instead of the lakebed where most large Utah county cities are located (also one of the hottest real estate markets in the country. Great case for reparations and land back policies). Way more people died in this and other tribal genocides than in the MM Massacre.
Mormonism is neither a Satanic (Imma just point out for the babies in the audience that Satan isn’t real) or a death cult. The violence they engaged in was motivated by the same material interests as other settlers.
If people are interested in Tribal, Mormon, and Western history, I have some recommendations that aren’t Wikipedia.