The Lions of the Lord: A Tale of the Old West

by Harry Leon Wilson

He remembered the scene close about him where many of the women and older children had fallen under knife and tomahawk. At intervals had come a long-drawn scream, terrifying in its shrillness, from some woman struggling with Saint or savage.

Later he remembered becoming aware that the bodies were being stripped and plundered; of seeing Lee holding his big white hat for valuables, while half a dozen men searched pockets and stripped off clothing. The picture of the naked bodies of a dozen well-grown children tangled in one heap stayed with him.

Still later, when the last body had been stripped and the smaller treasures collected, he had known that these and the stock and wagons were being divided between the Mormons and the Indians; a conflict with these allies being barely averted, the Indians accusing the Saints of withholding more than their share of the plunder.

After the division was made he knew that the Saints had all been called together to take an oath that the thing should be kept secret. He knew, too, that he had gone over the spot that night, the moon lighting the naked forms strewn about. Many of them lay in attitudes strangely lifelike,—here one resting its head upon its arm, there a white face falling easily back as if it looked up at the stars. He could not recall why he had gone back, unless to be sure that he had made the grave under the cedar secure from the wolves.

Some of the men had camped on the spot. Others had gone to Hamblin’s ranch, near the Meadows, where the children were taken. He had sent the boy there with them, and he could recall distinctly the struggle he had with the little fellow; for the boy had wished not to be taken from the girl, and had fought valiantly with fists and feet and his sharp little teeth. The little girl with her mother’s bundle he had taken to another ranch farther south in the Pine Mountains. He told the woman the child was his own, and that she was to be kept until he came again.

Where he slept that night, or whether he slept at all, he never knew. But he had been back on the ground in the morning with the others who came to bury the naked bodies. He had seen heaps of them piled in little depressions and the dirt thrown loosely over them, and he remembered that the wolves were at them all a day later.

Then Dame and Haight and others of high standing in the Church had come to look over the spot and there another oath of secrecy was taken. Any informer was to be “sent over the rim of the basin”—except that one of their number was to make a full report to the President at Salt Lake City. Klingensmith was then chosen by vote to take charge of the goods for the benefit of the Church. Klingensmith, Haight, and Higbee, he recalled, had later driven two hundred head of the cattle to Salt Lake City and sold them. Klingensmith, too, had put the clothing taken from the bodies, blood-stained, shredded by bullets and knives, into the cellar of the tithing office at Cedar City. Here there had been, a few weeks later, a public auction of the property taken, the Bishop, who presided as auctioneer, facetiously styling it “plunder taken at the siege of Sebastopol.” The clothing, however, with the telltale marks upon it, was reserved from the auction and sold privately from the tithing office. Many stout wagons and valuable pieces of equipment had thus been cheaply secured by the Saints round about Cedar City.

He knew that the surviving children, seventeen in number, had been “sold out” to Saints in and about Cedar City, Harmony, and Painter’s Creek, who would later present bills for their keep.

He knew that Lee, whom the Bishops had promised a crown of glory for his work that day, had gone to Salt Lake City and made a confidential report to Brigham; that Brigham had at first professed to regard the occurrence as unfortunate for the Church, though admitting that no innocent blood had been shed; that he had sworn Lee never to tell the story again to any person, instructing him to make a written report of the affair to himself, as Indian agent, charging the deed to the Indians. He was said to have added on this point, after a period of reflection, “Only Indians, John, don’t save even the little children.” He was reported to have told Lee further, on the following day, that he had asked God to take the vision from his sight if the killing had been a righteous thing, and that God had done so, thus proving the deed in the sight of heaven to have been a just vengeance upon those who had once made war upon the Saints in Missouri.

With these and with many another disjointed memory of the day Joel Rae was cursed; of how Hamblin the following spring had gathered a hundred and twenty skulls on the ground where the wolves had left them, and buried them again; of how an officer from Camp Floyd had built a cairn on the spot and erected a huge cross to the memory of the slain; of how the thing became so dire in the minds of those who had done it, that more than one man lost his reason, and two were known to have killed themselves to be rid of the death-cries of women.