Utah Macabre: Santa Clara Cañon

On a fateful September 11th in 1857, about 140 people comprised of men, women and children were escorted a little over a mile through a tranquil, grassy canyon along the Old Spanish Trail.  They had spent the previous four days besieged within their circled wagons, during which time several of them were killed and more were wounded.  Before joining the escort, they had buried their dead inside the wagon circle.  They had run out of water and the ammunition for their defense.  Although they had largely been dismissed when not treated without outright hostility by the Mormon homesteaders within the month they'd spent traversing the Utah Territory, the Mormon militia escort from Cedar City (35 miles away) had promised safe passage under a white flag.  They were desperate, and they were in trouble.
Two years later, U.S. Army Brevet Major James H. Carleton, who had visited the site soon after to investigate reported to the United States Congress of what he had found.  "The scene of the massacre, even at this late day, was 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 in the direction of the road, by 2 miles east and west, there gleamed, bleached white by the weather, the skulls and other bones of those who had suffered."  Carleton and men under his command collected what bones they could find; many of them being skulls with bullet holes and fractures, some of them broken to pieces, and one of a young man was noted to bear the deep wounds of a large knife; and buried them in a mass grave, building a stone cairn 12 feet high over it, with a 12-foot cedar cross on top with the words "Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord."
The victims had come from Arkansas and were on their way to California, having taken the Mormon trail into Salt Lake City and continued south onto the Old Spanish Trail that would have taken them further west through southern Nevada to Los Angeles.  They'd stepped into the Utah Territory at an unfortunate time, however, while many of the residents were caught up in the midst of renewed religious fervor and were fiercely embittered toward outsiders and the United States, with the U.S. Army on its way to depose their prophet's governorship.  Even in this increasingly radicalized environment, it was a special series of circumstances that led to the siege of the Baker-Fancher wagon train in the Santa Clara Cañon, better known today as "Mountain Meadows," on September 7, 1857 and the moment that the signal was given by leaders of the Iron County Militia to turn their guns, knives and bludgeons on the men, women and children on the 11th.  About 17 children deemed young enough to not testify to the day's events, but who had not already been killed in the chaotic melee like others, were adopted into Mormon households, and their murdered families' substantial property delivered to the tithing house in Cedar City while their bodies were devoured by wolves and other beasts out on the plain.  All but the few killed inside the wagon circle never received a Christian burial after their violent, traumatic deaths, and as recently as 2017, the skull of an unknown child with a gunshot wound in the back of the head was finally interred with the other scattered bones of the massacred dead.  Some who visit the site of the killings today report strange, unsettling sounds; voices and cries carried on the air testifying to the crimes committed against them over a century and a half ago.  The following is a account given to me personally and recorded in the words of Blaine Herriman, a history teacher at Lincoln County High School in Caliente, Nevada, about his experience once while visiting the Mountain Meadows massacre site in between Veyo and Enterprise, Utah:

I've been working on a book about massacres in the settling of the American West for a few years now.  It's slow goin', sort of a leisurely thing, ya might say.  I hain't been to every location I've been writin' about, but I have been to a lot of them, and I hain't ever seen anything like I saw there.  This was five years ago in the summer, and I'd gone a bit later in the day when it wasn't so hot, but since it was the summer, there was still pretty good light.  It had been a very hot, dry day.  I was actually by the women's and children's memorial, just a bit north of the main memorial, when I was suddenly hit by a gust of wind and a blood-curdling scream.  It was like the scream was riding on the wind, and both ended as suddenly as they began, but it made my heart jump.  My first thought was to think someone else was around and might have been hurt, but I hadn't seen anyone else around except a family drivin' away in a minivan just as I had pulled up nearly 40 minutes earlier.  Otherwise, it had been dead quiet.  I wasn't sure what to do, so I started to run back to the road to see if I could see anyone or evidence that anyone else was near, but after just a few steps, my foot sunk into the ground like it was a mud puddle.  It had been a dry day though, so it didn't make sense, but when I looked down, it was mud, sure 'nough, 'cept it was red.  I tried to pull my foot out quick, but the suction tugged on my boot, and I realized it must be blood!  I reached down to hold onto my boot while I pulled my foot out.  I after my foot was out, I crouched down to get a closer look, and it had a strange, metallic smell, but I was sure it was blood.  Then, I felt another gust of wind an' started getting real nervous.  I walked fast back to my car, looking carefully where I stepped, an' I could swear I could hear someone sobbing, but I was in a hurry to get out of there.  As soon as I was back in my care, I high-tailed it out of there, know what I mean [laughing]?