Under the Banner of Heaven (32 page)

The Bateman clan is on a weekend camping trip, planned around a climb of Mount Dellenbaugh, an extinct volcano that stands at the southern edge of the Arizona Strip. The objective of the ascent is to track down a 132-year-old signature said to be etched on the rim of the crater that forms Dellenbaugh’s rocky crest—a signature that may help explain a puzzling series of events that happened in the aftermath of the Mountain Meadows massacre, and might conceivably have involved some of DeLoy’s ancestors or their cohorts. In addition to DeLoy and Randy Bateman, the team presently en route to the summit includes one of DeLoy’s two wives and nine more of his seventeen children; four other kids, a grandchild, and a son-in-law have stayed behind at base camp in support.

Because today’s expedition includes DeLoy’s two six-year-old boys, Randy and Kevin, and his two eight-year-old daughters, Maria and Sarah, the pace up the mountain is less than brisk. The kids are strong hikers and completely at home in this unforgiving environment, but they stop constantly to peer under rocks in search of snakes and other interesting creatures or to marvel at desert plants and identify geologic specimens. “I encourage it,” DeLoy says with an unapologetic shrug. “The idea is to turn every trip outdoors into a biology lesson.” The only problem is, by the time the party finally arrives on the summit, the sun is within minutes of disappearing behind the majestic curve of the western horizon, leaving precious little daylight for locating the signature DeLoy hopes to find.

The top of Dellenbaugh is a spiky crown of basalt swept by a hot, dry wind. Hundreds of giant megaliths bristle from the summit crater, and any of them might conceivably be imprinted with the relevant graffito. Finding the right rock before the mountain is swallowed in darkness seems like a long shot, but should the expedition fall short of its goal, the view from the top is a fine consolation. To the south, the earth is covered in a rolling sea of pinon and scraggly juniper that washes right up to the very lip of the Grand Canyon, which appears as a huge, shadowy gash rimmed with cliffs of pale Kaibab limestone.

Just before daylight vanishes altogether, somebody yells, “Here it is!” And lo, scratched onto a brownish, flat-faced chunk of basalt the size of a washing machine is the name DeLoy has been looking for, faintly but unmistakably printed in crude, inch-and-a-half-high letters: “W Dunn.” Immediately below is the date 1869 and an arrow pointing north toward the Utah line. “I’ll be darned,” DeLoy exclaims. He brushes his fingertips across the inscription, then looks up to consider what the man who carved his name into this rock would have seen more than a century earlier from this mountaintop.

The inscription was made by one William Dunn, a shaggy-haired mountain man, not yet thirty years old, whose buckskin clothing was distinguished by its “dark oleaginous luster.” This latter description comes to us from Mr. Dunn’s employer at the time, Major John Wesley Powell, the eminent explorer of the American West celebrated for making the first descent of the Grand Canyon. Dunn, a member of that astounding expedition, vanished with two companions, the brothers Oramel Gass Howland and Seneca Howland, near the conclusion of the journey. Dunn’s signature atop Mount Dellenbaugh is the last trace of the missing explorers known to exist.

After taking a few photos of Dunn’s etching, DeLoy and his family admire the view from the summit for as long as the twilight lingers, then descend to their camp beneath a sky smeared with stars. The next morning on their way back to Colorado City, the Bateman caravan unexpectedly rolls past a memorial to the lost men from Powell’s expedition, and DeLoy pulls off the road to examine it. The handsome wooden sign declares:

WILLIAM DUNN, O. G. HOWLAND AND SENECA

HOWLAND, AFTER LEAVING MAJOR POWELL’S PARTY

CAME UP SEPARATION CANYON AND CROSSED OVER MT.

DELLENBAUGH. THEY WERE KILLED BY INDIANS EAST

OF THIS MARKER THE LAST OF AUGUST, 1869.

The memorial reflects the prevailing view of what happened to Dunn and the Howland brothers. DeLoy has recently arrived at a different opinion, however. He’s decided that the three explorers were murdered not by Native Americans but by the Mormons of southern Utah. And the bloodshed, he believes, stemmed from an unfortunate misunderstanding that grew out of the Mountain Meadows massacre.

In 1858, a year after the massacre, Brigham Young reluctantly agreed to admit federal troops into Utah and to step down as territorial governor, bringing an end to the threat of all-out war between the Saints and the United States. But persistent rumors that Mormons had committed unspeakable atrocities against the Fancher wagon train kept drifting up from the southern settlements, threatening the fragile peace.

President Buchanan’s secretary of war ordered army brevet major James H. Carleton to investigate the matter. Arriving at the Mountain Meadows in the spring of 1859, Carleton was sickened to discover that, nearly two years after the event, the valley was littered with skulls, bones, clumps of women’s hair, and scraps of children’s clothing bleaching in the sun. An army surgeon reported that many of the skulls “bore marks of violence, being pierced with bullet holes, or shattered with heavy blows, or cleft with some sharp-edged instrument.” The nature of the bullet wounds, he concluded, “showed that fire-arms had been discharged close to the head.”

“There has been a great and fearful crime perpetrated,” Carleton declared. His soldiers gathered up whatever bones they could find, interred them in a common grave, and then laboriously hauled stones from the surrounding hillsides to build a massive, if crude, monument above it. At the apex of this rock pile, which was twelve feet high and fifty feet in circumference, they placed a wooden cross inscribed with the epigraph “Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord.”

In May 1861, Brigham Young happened upon this memorial as he was passing through the meadow during a tour of his southern settlements. According to Apostle Wilford Woodruff, who was accompanying the prophet, when Brigham read the inscription on the cross he pondered it for a short while and then proposed an emendation: “Vengeance is
mine,”
the prophet smugly asserted, “and I have taken a little.” A moment later one of the Saints in his entourage threw a rope over the cross and pulled it down, while others began dismantling the stones and scattering them. By the time Brigham’s party departed the Mountain Meadows, the monument to the slaughtered emigrants had been obliterated.

Things had lately been looking up for the Kingdom of God, leaving the prophet in a cheerful frame of mind. The territorial governor installed by President Buchanan as Brigham’s replacement, a bureaucrat from Atlanta named Alfred Cummings, had turned out to be a patsy who was easily manipulated to do the Saints’ bidding. The despised Buchanan, moreover, had himself been replaced in the White House by Abraham Lincoln; after taking office, Honest Abe told a Mormon emissary, “You go back and tell Brigham Young that if he will let me alone, I will let him alone.” Brigham thus had good reason to be in an expansive mood.

The Saints’ capital city had even become a popular travel destination for intrepid luminaries from afar, including the French botanist Jules Remy, the famous newspaperman Horace Greeley, and the English explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton. Greeley—the most influential journalist of the era—had interviewed Brigham in 1859 and then published a largely favorable piece in the
New York Tribune,
noting that the prophet spoke “with no apparent desire to conceal anything” and had “no air of sanctimony or fanaticism.” After Sir Richard Burton rubbed shoulders with Brigham, Porter Rockwell, and other Mormon eminences in I860, the celebrated English adventurer had written,

The Prophet is no common man, and… he has none of the weakness and vanity which characterize the common uncommon man… There is a total absence of pretension in his manner, and he has been so long used to power that he cares nothing for its display. The arts by which he rules the heterogeneous mass of conflicting elements are indomitable will, profound secrecy, and uncommon astuteness.

Such flattery from prominent Gentiles no doubt buoyed Brigham’s disposition, but most of his ebullience was attributable to the advent of the Civil War. The momentous conflict erupted at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, just a month before his 1861 tour of the southern Utah, inspiring in the prophet an attitude of renewed insolence toward the United States. When federal troops were yanked out of Utah to buttress the Union forces fighting the Confederacy, he couldn’t have been happier.

All the news from the East, moreover, seemed to confirm that the Gentile nation was teetering precariously on the brink of self-destruction, exactly as Joseph Smith had prophesied back in 1832.

On December 25, 1832, Joseph received a revelation, later canonized in
The Doctrine and Covenants
as Section 87, in which God explained that civil war

will shortly come to pass, beginning at the rebellion of South Carolina, which will eventually terminate in the death of many souls… For behold, the Southern States shall be divided against the Northern States… And it shall come to pass, after many days, slaves shall rise up against their masters, who shall be marshaled and disciplined for war… And thus, with the sword and by bloodshed the inhabitants of the earth shall mourn; and with famine, and plague, and earthquake, and the thunder of heaven, and the fierce and vivid lightning also, shall the inhabitants of the earth be made to feel the wrath, and indignation, and chastening hand of an Almighty God, until the consumption decreed hath made a full end of all nations.

Although their bitterness toward the government in Washington, D.C., moved the Mormons to cheer each Confederate victory on the battlefield, Brigham was certain that Union and Confederate forces would eventually annihilate each other, leaving the Latter-day Saints triumphant and unmolested when the Civil War came to an end, eagerly awaiting the Great and Dreadful Day of the Lord.

Seeing no reason to doubt this outcome, Brigham felt assured that the United States would no longer be meddling in the affairs of Deseret. His confidence, however, proved to be distressingly short lived. Just sixteen months after Union forces pulled out to fight the Confederacy, President Abraham Lincoln replaced them with a regiment of California infantry to ensure federal control of Utah. For the remainder of the war, according to historian D. Michael Quinn, some of these troops “literally had their guns trained on Brigham Young’s home, so that if there was going to be a civil uprising, his home would be the first to receive cannon shots.”

Compounding the prophet’s woes, in 1862 Lincoln signed into law the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, which had been drafted specifically to “punish and prevent the practice of polygamy in the Territories of the United States and to disapprove and annul certain acts of the territorial legislature of Utah.” Just months after taking office, Lincoln demonstrated that he intended to be at least as tough on the Mormons as Presidents Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan had been before him, prompting Brigham to lash out against “such cursed scoundrels as Abe Lincoln and his Minions.” (Which is ironic, because the second Mormon prophet shared many of the attributes that distinguished the sixteenth American president; had Brigham’s life been diverted onto a different track—had his ambitions been less millennial and more secular—it is easy to imagine him in the White House. He certainly had what it takes to become president, and he would have made a memorable one, a national leader in the mold of Lyndon Johnson, say, or Franklin Roosevelt, or even Lincoln himself.)

In April 1865 Brigham’s comforting pipe dream of the North and South’s mutual destruction came to an end with the surrender of General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox. The Civil War concluded with the Union not only intact but in important ways stronger than ever. Brigham was forced to acknowledge that the United States would thereafter be increasingly involved in the business and governance of Deseret.

This eventuality was underscored in 1869 with the ceremonial driving of the golden spike at Promontory Summit, near the north end of the Great Salt Lake, marking completion of the transcontinental railroad. Now all that separated Utah from the ungodly reach of the whole Gentile nation was a relatively short, comfortable train ride. And 1869 also saw another major event that signified the end of Utah’s isolation: the first descent of the Green and Colorado Rivers by Major John Wesley Powell, a Civil War hero who had lost his right arm at the battle of Shiloh.

Powell’s expedition cast off in puny wooden boats from Green River Station, Wyoming, on May 24, 1869, planning to float the Green River to its confluence with the Colorado River,* then continue downstream through the treacherous, completely uncharted chasms of the Grand Canyon, thereby traversing the last vast expanse of unexplored wilderness in the contiguous United States—the final blank spot on the map. It was a trying voyage, marked by danger, hardship, and acrimony between Powell and some of his men.

* In those years it was called the Grand River, rather than the Colorado.

On August 27, near the lower end of the Grand Canyon, the boatmen beached their vessels on the riverbank immediately above what would turn out to be the last set of dangerous rapids on the entire journey. Seneca Howland, his brother Oramel Howland, and William Dunn announced that they were leaving the expedition. Ignoring Powell’s pleas that they remain with the main group, the three disgruntled adventurers told him they intended to climb four thousand vertical feet from the river to the canyon’s north rim, then walk across more then a hundred miles of barren desert to the Mormon settlements of southern Utah.

By this point the expedition had traveled nearly a thousand perilous river miles. All nine men were battered and hungry, and they had only five days of provisions left, mostly consisting of dried apples and coffee.

The party’s greatest problem, however, was the rift that had developed between Major Powell and his mentally unstable brother, Captain Walter Powell, on the one hand, and five free-spirited trappers on the other: Dunn, the Howland brothers, Jack Sumner, and Billie Hawkins.* As Wallace Stegner noted in his classic biography of Powell,
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,
the major and his brother “represented military discipline and the officer class,” while the five trappers “represented frontier independence and a violent distaste for discipline of any kind.”