On the day of September 11, 1857, an emigrant party camped at Mountain Meadows was brutally killed by the Mormon militia aided by Indians. This essay examines two viewpoints regarding the massacre found in Sally Denton’s “American Massacre” and in “Massacre at Mountain Meadows” by Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley, and Glen M. Turley. September 7, 1857, the emigrants of the Fancher-Baker train were just awakening and preparing for the day when gunshots were sounded. The emigrants were caught by surprise and immediately fortified themselves with their wagons. For days they were harassed, lacking food and water. Finally a Mormon leader by the name of John D. Lee came to them with a white flag. The Fancher-Baker party was desperate …show more content…
She states that “Young’s church elders swept through the outlying communities” and scrutinized “those who were found lacking” (Denton 105). Denton then focuses on the revival of blood atonement, and how it struck fear in the saints. She points out that Mormons tried to flee after the reformation was in progress, but were “hunted down and killed” (Denton, 106). In her book she talks about how the church had more problems, stating that the church was “on the brink of bankruptcy, and with apostates and internal dissenters at an all time high” (Denton 107). Denton uses all of these radical statements to illustrate and give readers an understanding of why there was tension among the Mormons. Walker, Turley, and Leonard explain the reasons for high tension in Utah a different way. Instead of focusing about problems with the church like Denton, they explain about things happening around the church. They focus on how news of a coming U.S. army puts fear in the people. They quote Heber C. Kimball as saying “that the army wanted to take Mormon women back to the States” (Walker, Turley, Leonard 44). Also, the authors describe how Brigham Young also makes it seem like the second coming, where Christ comes to destroy the wicked, is near and that the people need to prepare for it. They also mention Brigham Young’s strict war policy. Within this war policy, they were to be frugal with all their supplies, and not sell or trade any of it to those of
Why acknowledge history? The solution is because we essentially must to achieve access to the laboratory of human involvement. In the essay “Haunted America”, Patricia Nelson takes a truly various and remarkably gallant stance on United States history. Through the recounting of the White/Modoc war in “Haunted America,” she brings to light the complexity and confusion of the White/Indian conflicts that is often missing in much of the history we read. Her account of the war, with the faults of both Whites and Indians revealed, is an unusual alternative to the stereotypical “Whites were good; Indians were bad” or the reverse stand point that “Indians were good; Whites were bad” conclusions that many historians reach. Limerick argues that a very brutal and bloody era has been simplified and romanticized, reducing the lives and deaths of hundreds to the telling of an uncomplicated story of “Good Guys” and “Bad Guys”.
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 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, together with some paiute native americans. The militia, officially called the Nauvoo, was composed of southern Utah's mormon settlers (members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints). 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.
This chapter provided information from the trial of Captain Thomas Preston. The chapter asked the question, “What really happened in the Boston Massacre”. Chapter four focused on the overall event of the Massacre and trying to determine if Captain Preston had given the order to fire at Boston citizens. The chapter provides background information and evidence from Preston’s trial to leave the reader answering the question the chapter presents. Although, after looking through all the witnesses’ testimonies some might sway in Captain Preston’s favor, just the way the grand jury did.
The Boston Massacre is one of the most controversial events in American history that occurred in Boston before the American Revolution. Certainly, it has a fundamental role in the development of America as a nation, which led it to have a huge motivation for revolution. A heavy British military presence and having very high taxes in the country were some of the main reasons that made Boston citizens very irritated. Thus, there were already many disagreements and tensions between inhabitants and the British that could have led to the Massacre. In this essay, I will carefully analyze three primary sources, and compare these to the interpretation given by HBO’s John Adams. In my view, these sources can be
Julia Lovejoy, an antislavery advocate who had recently moved to Kansas, provides some narrative unity for the first theme. Her letters, written to relatives in New Hampshire, detail the horrors of "bleeding Kansas." The second theme is told effectively from the perspective of Black Kettle, the Cheyenne peace chief, whose people were the victims of both Colonel John Chivington's massacre at Sand Creek, Colorado, and George Armstrong Custer's 1868 attack on the banks of the Washita River. Individual segments, which could be shown separately or safely omitted, tell the stories of: Samuel Clemens sharpening his wit in his early years as a reporter in Nevada City; and John D. Lee, who led the Mormons in a massacre of a wagon train at Mountain Meadows. This tragic incident, controversial both then and now, is explained in the context of rising American hostility toward Mormons, and the latter group's fears of the U.S. Army marching against them toward Salt
Then, on the fifth of March in 1770, after the British imposed the Townshend Acts, the Boston Massacre occurred. The colonists were throwing snowballs at the British soldiers, so the soldiers, without any order, started to aimlessly fire into the crowd. When the Boston men and boys came up to the British soldiers, “order quickly broke down, and the frightened soldiers fired into the crowd” (Doc 3). During the massacre five colonist men and boys were killed and even more were
On Friday, September 11, 1857, 120 emigrants were killed or massacred in southern Utah by Mormons and Paiute Indians on their way from Arkansas to California. They were part of the Baker-Fancher wagon train. Many of the emigrants were from Marion, Crawford, Carroll, and Johnson counties. They started their journey around Boone County in April of 1857 with their leader, who had been to California twice before leading the Baker-Fancher wagon train. About forty families met at Beller’s Stand. After they left Arkansas, the emigrants of the Fancher party traveled through Kansas and Nebraska before entering Utah. They passed Fort Bridger and Salt Lake City before making it to Cedar City. Mountain Meadows is a valley about 35 miles away from Cedar City, where the emigrants were massacred.
In The Mountain Meadows of Utah, September 11th, 1857 a group of Mormons murdered emigrants from Missouri and Arkansas. The Mormons were traveling through Utah. They had been chased out state to state in the 1830s, from the Mormon war. Utah was the only state that would allow them the freedom of going on wagon trains to safely get to California. Lots of emigrants rode on the wagon train with the Mormons. In the blink of the eye, the Mormons sought out for revenge against the emigrants, but why.
In, A Severe and Proud Dame She Was, Mary Rowlandson recounts the treatment she received as prisoner of war from Natives in the Wampanoags and Nipmuck tribes written in her perspective. In 1675, Mary Rowlandson found herself and children held captive in the hands of Massachusetts Native Americans. Mary writes with a bias that seems to paint the Native Americans as a species different than her own, but her tone suggests she tried her best to understand their tribe. The purpose of this article appears to be written with the intent of persuading the masses on account of personal experience; that is the interaction among Natives and their customs to be seen in a light of hypocritical behavior. Through the lens of the captured author, she details the experience of her captivity with merciful gestures on the Native’s behalf, despite them keeping her for ransom. Rowlandson suggests traditional Native warfare surrounds a central recurring theme of manipulating mind-games; psychological warfare.
This research will address the self-proclaimed prophet of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, a sect of Mormonism based in Utah, Warren Jeffs and his cult of fear. Warren Jeffs had control over ten thousands of followers for nearly a decade. Warren Jeffs coerced young girls into polygamous marriages with older men. Jeffs is estimated to have over 70 wives. The media was shunned, and he created a hidden community where polygamy was prized above anything else. In 2007, after there was a two year FBI manhunt, Jeffs was convicted as an accomplice to rape. Warren Jeff's rise to power effort led to his fallout. Even after his conviction his followers believed that he was innocent and held onto his beliefs and practices.
When the Army arrived at Pyramid Lake, they spotted a small group of tribal members. As the group fled the troopers followed but, what the Americans didn't know is that they were heading to an ambush.The Americans arrived at a ravine with 300 Paiutes waiting for them. Seventy-six out hundred and five died in the ambush, and also William Ormsby died as well. The other surviving volunteers fled the scene being followed for twenty miles.
In September of 1857, roughly 120 members of the “Baker-Fancher” party - a California bound wagon-train from Arkansas – decided to set up camp in Mountain Meadows, Utah Territory. The newly-arrived settlers were denied water access and grazing land by the LDS throughout Utah, and thus welcomed the lush pastures and pristine streams of Mountain Meadows. However, unbeknownst to them, an increasingly malevolent Mormon presence planned on retributive bloodshed.
The Story.In September 11, 1857 was the date that Mormons and Paiutes killed 120 emigrants at Mountain Meadows, Utah.The Mormons killed all those emigrants because the emigrants started committing minor depredations against Mormons fields, abusing the local Paiutes indians, and taunting the Mormons with the reminders of how the Missourians had attacked and chased them out of Missouri during the 1830s.Then after that some Mormon guerillas decided to get revenge on the emigrants.The Mormons cooperated with the Paiutes indians who were already attacking the train.Then when the Mormons got there they pretended to be the protectors.The Mormon guerillas told the emigrants that they have convinced the Paiutes indians to let them go if they surrender
The response of the countryside to Indian war, then, was controlled almost wholly by fear, a fear that made colonists afraid to be alone at home, or out tending the fields, or anywhere apart from large groups of colonists who might defend them if Indians attacked. Once fully realized, the rhetoric of the anti-Indian sublime could fit new agendas. For example, the Seven Years’ War helped create the notion of Europeans to be collectively known as “white people.” The premise of being part of the “white people” said something about how one thought and acted about Indians war, and toward Indians. It created images of a single, suffering peoplehood that encompassed nearly all of Pennsylvania’s diverse European ethnic groups – except Quakers – flourished in the press. The “white people” became a building block for public discourse, and the first outlines were sketched as a coalition that would help to push all pacifists out of Pennsylvania’s government and most Indians from their territory. The reasons for violence lay deep in the nature of intercultural relations in the countryside, a countryside that had come alive with fear. The growth in anti-Indian sublime drove ethnically and religiously diverse colonists into each
In 1675, the Algonquian Indians rose up in fury against the Puritan Colonists, sparking a violent conflict that engulfed all of Southern New England. From this conflict ensued the most merciless and blood stricken war in American history, tearing flesh from the Puritan doctrine, revealing deep down the bright and incisive fact that anger and violence brings man to a Godless level when faced with the threat of pain and total destruction. In the summer of 1676, as the violence dispersed and a clearing between the hatred and torment was visible, thousands were dead.(Lepore xxi) Indian and English men, women, and children, along with many of the young villages of New England were no more; casualties of a conflict that