Massacre at Mountain Meadows by Walker Ronald W. & Turley Richard E. & Leonard Glen M

Author:Walker, Ronald W. & Turley, Richard E. & Leonard, Glen M. [Walker, Ronald W.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2008-07-21T16:00:00+00:00

EPILOGUE

Under Sentence of Death

Beaver to Mountain Meadows, March 20–23, 1877

THE ORDERS CAME down on Tuesday afternoon, March 20, 1877. They directed U.S. Army 2nd Lt. George T. T. Patterson and a detachment from his company to proceed with “utmost secrecy” to the “appointed place.” There the soldiers, each fortified by “forty … rounds of ammunition and six days rations,” were “to prevent any interference … with the proper execution … of John D. Lee, a convict under sentence of death.”1 A posse with Lee in its charge would follow Patterson’s company the next day.2 At 7:30 Tuesday evening, after the last glow of twilight had faded, Patterson and his twenty-three men slipped quietly from southern Utah’s Fort Cameron, two miles east of Beaver.3

Patterson and his party rode west, skirting Beaver before turning south and following the road to California that the ill-fated Arkansas company emigrants took nearly twenty years earlier just before they were massacred. During their trip, Patterson’s party passed Paragonah, Parowan, and finally Cedar City, where they took the road west for Leach’s Cutoff and then Mountain Meadows.4

Almost twenty-four hours after Patterson’s entourage left Fort Cameron, U.S. Marshal William Nelson drove to the fort to tell prisoner John D. Lee to prepare for a “journey.” Lee, knowing this to be his death march, was surprised only by the timing. The court had decreed that he die on Friday between 10:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., and it was just Wednesday evening. With little emotion, the prisoner asked for a bath and fresh clothes. He “wanted to die clean.”5

The nation had watched closely as Lee’s first trial, in 1875, ended in a hung jury, and his second, the following year, saw him convicted for his role in the massacre.6 Now in March 1877, reporters for newspapers from coast to coast were again in town to witness and report his execution. Tipped by Nelson that Lee was about to be moved a day earlier than planned, the journalists hurried to join the sizable caravan, which soon strung out on the road. Inside Nelson’s carriage, Lee sat facing a deputy holding a “double barrelled gun.”7

The suspense made good newspaper copy for a nation that seemed riveted on Lee and the massacre.

During the ride to the Meadows, Methodist minister George Stokes, father of the deputy who arrested Lee, accompanied him. According to a reporter, Lee ventured a confession of sorts, telling Reverend Stokes “that he killed five emigrants and possibly six.”8 That was the one thing Lee kept to the last.

For years, he maintained that he rushed to the Meadows as a peacemaker and had done all in his power to stop the killing. In a written “confession” drafted in the last months of his life, he had even mixed up dates to conceal his role in the first attack. That same “confession” also claimed he made a full disclosure to Young two weeks after the massacre.9 But he had omitted important details then, including those he now gave Stokes.10

Officials never explained their unusual decision—kept secret until the final hours—to end Lee’s life at the Meadows.

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