American Massacre by Sally Denton

Author:Sally Denton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307424723
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

THE LEGACY

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Deseret, September 12, 1857

BEFORE DAWN on Saturday, Lee awakened to hear William Dame and Isaac Haight arguing loudly. The two senior Nauvoo Legion officers, respective presidents of the Parowan and Cedar City churches, had arrived at the ranch sometime in the night and had fallen into a dispute about the details of the episode and how it would be reported to Brigham Young. Dame, the thirty-eight-year-old high-strung militia commander, was cowed by Haight, who held a lower military rank but was ecclesiastically superior; the religious hierarchy superseded the civil or military divisions of the church. Haight was arguing against reporting the full details of the massacre—especially the large number of women and children—to Young, and he seemed surprised that Dame intended to do so. Haight told Dame that if his intentions were to report the massacre, he “should never have ordered it done.” When they noticed Lee and the others staring at them, their discussion came to an abrupt stop, the two men apparently not wanting their private dispute to be heard by the other participants. Lee, Dame, Haight, Klingensmith, Higbee, and Judge James Lewis, who had arrived in the night from Parowan, set out for the meadows on horseback; William Stewart drove the McMurdy wagon. Samuel Knight stayed at the ranch with the children and his inconsolable wife, Caroline, who had recently given birth to their own child at the Hamblin ranch. Alternating between coherence and delirium, Caroline repeatedly called for her young husband and then rejected him at the smell of blood on his clothing.

The first bodies they came to in the early-morning haze were the disfigured women and children. All color drained from Dame’s face. “Horrible! Horrible!” Dame said sotto voce, stricken by the reality that confronted him. Lee sidled closer to him, eager, as he said, to hear Dame’s reaction as well as any further discussion between the two commanders, because he had been so surprised by the conflict between the men. “Horrible enough,” Haight said loudly, “but you should have thought of that before you issued the orders.”

“I didn’t think there were so many of them [women and children],” Dame is reported to have said, “or I would not have had anything to do with it.” He then collapsed in distress, which infuriated Haight, who thought Dame’s posturing and denial of responsibility theatrical and perilous to protecting the secrecy of the massacre and the shielding of the participants.

Lee later wrote of this second altercation:

“I must report this matter to the authorities,” Dame told Haight.

“How will you report it?” said Haight.

Dame said, “I will report it just as it is.”

“Yes, I suppose so, and implicate yourself with the rest?” said Haight.

“No,” said Dame. “I will not implicate myself, for I had nothing to do with it.”

Haight then said, “That will not do, for you know a d—— d sight better. You ordered it done. Nothing has been done except by your orders, and it is too late in the day for you to order things done and then go back on it, and go back on the men who have carried out your orders.

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