Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (70 page)

James Carleton’s personality could not have contrasted more starkly with that of Carson. Yet in one respect they were oddly similar: Like his friend in Taos, Carleton had a curious knack for intersecting with history, for popping up in improbable, far-flung places where important things were happening.

In 1859, for example, Carleton happened to play a pivotal investigative role in one of the darkest and most controversial chapters in the settlement of the West. If his life’s work as a dragoon had been devoted to fighting and studying the Indian tribes of the frontier, this episode brought him face-to-face with the
other
great tribe of the West—the burgeoning Mormons of Utah.

It was spring of that year, and Carleton was stationed in Southern California, at a place north of Los Angeles called Fort Tejon, when he received orders to proceed with a contingent of dragoons to southwestern Utah to investigate an incident that had happened a little over a year earlier. A large caravan of Arkansas emigrants en route to California had passed through Utah when they mysteriously disappeared at a remote and beautiful stopping point, well known to many travelers, called Mountain Meadows. The caravan—the Fancher Party, as it was known, after one of its Arkansas leaders—numbered more than 120 men, women, and children. It was widely assumed that they had been massacred—by Paiute Indians, Mormon pioneers, or both—but the true facts were not known. No official investigation had been conducted, and no one had been punished for what was surely the most heinous crime, at least in terms of numbers, ever perpetrated on an American immigrant train.

Mountain Meadows was such an isolated spot that it took Carleton and his dragoons weeks of hard riding to reach it, crossing the southern Sierra Nevada and the Mojave Desert, among other obstacles, as he followed the Old Spanish Trail eastward. When he arrived at the site in Utah late that May and began investigating, it was soon obvious to him that all the worst reports were true. Carleton had his men scour the terrain in quadrants, sifting the dirt, painstakingly working inch by inch. The picture that emerged was terrifying: Although most of the very young children had apparently been spared—seventeen juvenile survivors had been placed in foster homes among Mormons living in the area—all of the men, women, and teenage children had been shot, typically in the head, at point-blank range.

Carleton’s chilling report to his army superiors was the first reliable source on the tragedy that became known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre—and remains a seminal document in the lingering controversy. By that point in his career, James Carleton was certainly inured to carnage, but he could not hide his shock at the crime scene. It was, he wrote, “horrible to look upon: Women’s hair, in detached locks and in masses, hung to the sage bushes and was strewn over the ground in many places. Parts of little children’s dresses and of female costume dangled from the shrubbery or lay scattered about; and among these, here and there, on every hand, for at least a mile…there gleamed the skulls and other bones of those who had suffered.”

Major Carleton began to interview pioneers in the area. Detective work suited him, and he was good at it. The Mormons who lived not far from Mountain Meadows insisted that the massacre had been committed entirely by hostile Paiutes. But Carleton, like the rest of the newspaper-reading nation, was deeply suspicious. The Fancher Party had been extremely well armed and led by experienced Indian-fighters, and the Paiutes were not known to be particularly fearsome warriors. Not only that, but the children survivors of the massacre reported that among the attackers, they saw white men dressed up and painted like Indians.

By cross-examining witnesses and closely studying the site, Carleton was able to determine, at least to his own satisfaction, that the Paiute role was minimal, that in fact the local Mormons had conceived and carried out the whole affair, apparently with the blessing of high-ranking church officials in Salt Lake—possibly Brigham Young himself. Utah had been seething with tension during the months leading up to the massacre; Mormons had good reason to fear that the U.S. Army was on its way from Fort Laramie to occupy Salt Lake City. All-out war seemed imminent. The polygamous Latter-Day Saints, recalling their history of persecution in upstate New York, Illinois, and Missouri, were in a state of high dudgeon, armed and ready to resist any encroaching Gentiles.

And then, along came the Fancher caravan. To the Mormons, these immigrants were not just
any
Gentiles: They were from Arkansas, and as it happened, a popular prophet within the church, Parley Pratt, had been murdered in Arkansas only a year earlier. Within the Mormon faith there was a doctrine known as “blood atonement”—which sanctioned the killing of Gentiles in situations when the church was threatened. However, Mormon law forbade the murder of “innocents”—which they defined as children up to eight years of age.

Perhaps, Carleton reasoned, this helped explain why the only survivors of the massacre were little children. On the day of the slaughter, the sobbing youngsters, their clothes spattered with the still-wet blood of their murdered parents, were sent temporarily to live among local Mormons—the very people, Carleton believed, who had made them orphans in the first place. These “foster parents” then had the temerity to charge the U.S. government nearly two thousand dollars to recover the costs they claimed to have laid out in “ransoming” the poor children from the Paiute Indians.

Carleton’s realization of this latest twist in the crime finally set him off: “Murderers of the parents and despoilers of their property; these relentless, incarnate fiends, dared even to come forward and claim payment for having kept…these helpless children. Has there ever been an act which equaled this in devilish hardihood or effrontery?”

The longer he stayed at Mountain Meadows, the more sickened Carleton became. The murderers did not even have the decency to bury their victims. “The remains,” he said, “were dismembered by the wolves and the flesh stripped from the bones.”

Carleton’s men buried the remains of nearly forty members of the Fancher caravan—which was all he was able to find. To mark the site, they cut down several red cedar trees and fashioned a large cross. On the transverse beam, Carleton had his men carve: V
ENGEANCE IS MINE, SAITH THE
L
ORD:
I
WILL REPAY
.

Then Carleton erected a rock cairn and placed a solid slab of granite in the ground, on which he engraved a brusque inscription: H
ERE 120 MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN WERE MASSACRED IN COLD BLOOD EARLY IN
S
EPT.
1857. T
HEY WERE FROM
A
RKANSAS.

Carleton’s assignment to Mountain Meadows haunted him for the rest of his life. A new fury entered into his writings, his voice now often infused with an apocalyptic tone. The West was a more intractably violent place than he’d ever imagined, with more turmoil and strife, more intricate tribal clashing than his tidy sensibilities could stand.

His lengthy army report, reprinted for the Congress and published in papers all over the country, was an unsparing diatribe against the Mormon Church. “They are an ulcer upon the body-politic,” he wrote, “an ulcer which needs more than cautery to cure. It must have excision, complete and thorough.” When he returned to duty in California, Carleton had a conversation with a friend in which he went even further: “We might as well look this devil right in the face at once,” he said. “Give the Mormons one year, no more; and if after that they still pollute our soil by their presence, then literally make Children of the Mist of them.”

For two years Carleton’s memorial stood at the site, a raw and eloquent warning to wayfarers. But in 1861, Brigham Young brought an entourage to Mountain Meadows and ordered Carleton’s cross and cairn destroyed. As his subordinates took down the monument, rock by rock, the Mormon prophet said, “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord: I
have
repaid.”

Shocked by his experience at Mountain Meadows, Carleton returned to Fort Tejon and remained there another year, immersing himself in California’s peculiarly complicated—and bloody—Indian relations. Only a decade had passed since the Gold Rush began, and yet already many California tribes were vanishing, their numbers decimated by disease, displacement, and white militias bent on outright extermination. The massive influx of Anglo-American immigrants, gold-crazed and land-hungry, had accelerated everything in California, including the course of Indian affairs. And so, as would later prove a general truism, California found itself well ahead of the national curve; the rapid demise of the tribes there was only a harbinger of the demise Native Americans would soon suffer throughout the West. The Indians’ predicament in the Bear Flag State became so dire so quickly that a number of officials began to show the first signs of an unfamiliar attitude toward the beleaguered tribes—an attitude that might be described as Christian compassion.

A new notion took hold: The tribes of California must be physically separated from white society as an alternative to their own extinction. They must be relocated on some clearly delineated parcel of arable land sufficiently watered by a river. There, they must be taught the rudiments of farming and animal husbandry. The government must not skimp—it must provide the Indians with modern tools, sound stock, and good seeds so that they might finally stop roving and settle down to earn an honest living as self-sufficient farmers, dwelling collectively on what amounted to a kibbutz. This communal farm must be closely guarded by an army fort, not only to prevent the Indians from straying into the white communities but also to keep ill-meaning white folks from venturing onto Indian land, bringing the scourge of alcohol and other vices with them.

The new policy was tantamount to apartheid, to be sure. But if it was predicated on the prevailing racism of the time, it was also fueled by an emerging humanitarian concern that whole tribes were truly on the brink of expiration—becoming, in Carleton’s alarming phrase, Children of the Mist.

Fort Tejon, where Major Carleton served, was the site of the first laboratory test of this new agricultural ideal—an experiment that in time would evolve into the United States reservation system. The farm created there was the brainchild of Edward Fitzgerald Beale, the colorful naval officer who had made a name for himself with Carson at the battle of Pasqual and who later accompanied Carson on his first transcontinental trip to Washington (the same man who piloted an ultimately unsuccessful program to introduce U.S. Army camels to the deserts of the American West). In the 1850s, Beale was appointed California’s first superintendent for Indian affairs. Progressive for his time, he was appalled by the slow genocide taking place before his eyes. He lamented that California’s Indians had been “driven from their fishing and hunting grounds, hunted themselves like wild beasts, lassoed, and torn from homes made miserable by want.”

So Beale set aside fifty thousand acres of decent land along a river bottom near Fort Tejon and persuaded nearly three thousand Indians (from the Emigdiano tribe and various other displaced tribes of the southern San Joaquin Valley) to settle there. Beale said he loosely based his idea on the Spanish mission system, which had for centuries kept many thousands of California Indians employed (others would say enslaved) in agricultural pursuits. “Surely,” Beale urged, “that which was accomplished by a few poor priests is not too great a task for the mighty republic of the United States.”

California newspapers lauded Beale’s visionary concept and advocated creating a network of similar reservation-communes up and down the Sierra Nevadas. “Either the whole Indian race in California must be exterminated,” argued an editorial in the
California Alta,
“or they must be brought together, organized into a community, made to support themselves by their own labor; and be elevated above the degraded position they now occupy.”

By the spring of 1854, Beale had forty plows working the ground every day at Tejon Farm—plows driven by young Indian boys who, after a little training, “showed so much dexterity and skill” that it seemed to Beale as though “they had done nothing else their whole lives.” The Indians planted 500 acres in barley and nearly 200 acres in corn. They dug irrigation ditches, raised barns, built houses. Beale’s dream took off, and for several years Tejon Farm showed great promise.

The experiment wasn’t cheap, however. Beale initially requested a federal appropriation of $500,000 and kept asking for more—sums that officials back in Washington considered outlandish. But the California papers, while recoiling at the staggering costs, continued to support Beale’s pilot project. The
Alta
argued that through Tejon Farm, and others like it, the Indians “could be transformed from a state of semi-barbarism, indolence, mental imbecility and moral debasement, to a condition of civilization, Christianity, industry, virtue, frugality, social and domestic happiness, and public usefulness.”