At Beaver they were again repulsed, and at Parowan they were not permitted to enter the town—they were forced to leave the public highway and pass round the west side of the fort wall. They encamped by the stream, and tried as before to obtain food and fresh cattle, but again to no purpose. The reason why they were refused admission to the town was probably because the militia was there assembled under Colonel Wm. H. Dame—which militia afterwards assisted in their destruction, for which preparations were even now being made.
They made their way to Cedar City, the most populous of all the towns of Southern Utah. Here they were allowed to purchase fifty bushels of tithing wheat, and to have it ground at the mill of that infamous scoundrel John D. Lee, upon whose memory will rest the eternal curses of all who have ever heard his name. It was, however, no act of mercy, the supplying of this corn. The sellers of it knew well enough even then that it would return to them again in the course of a few days. After all, they had but forty days’ rations to carry them on to San Bernardino, in California—a journey of about seventy days. Scanty kindness—miserable generosity!—fifty bushels of corn for a seventy days’ journey, for men, women, and young children, and at least one little one to be born on the road.
They remained in Cedar City only one day, and so jaded were their teams that it took them three days to travel thence to Iron Creek, a distance of twenty miles; and two days were occupied in journeying fifteen miles—the distance between Iron Creek and the Meadows.
The morning after they left Iron Creek, the Mormon militia followed them in pursuit, intending, it is supposed, to assault them at Clara Crossing. That this was no private outburst, and that, on the contrary, it was done by authority, is evident from sworn testimony to the effect that the assembling of those troops was the result of “a regular military call from the superior officers to the subordinate officers and privates of the regiments.... Said regiment was duly ordered to muster, armed and equipped as the law directs, and prepared for field operations.” A regular military council was held at Parowan, at which were present President Isaac C. Haight, the Mormon High Priest of Southern Utah, Colonel Dame, Major John D. Lee, and the Apostle George A. Smith.
No military council, whether of the militia or the ordinary troops of the line, would dare to determine upon such an important matter as the cutting off of an emigrant train of one hundred and thirty persons without receiving permission from superior authority. Brigham Young was in this case the superior authority—he was the Commander-in-Chief of the Militia:—the inference is obvious. I do not, of course, say that he gave the order for this accursed deed, but that it was his business to bring the criminals to justice no one can doubt or deny.
The regiment, which started from Cedar City under the command of Major John D. Lee, the sub-agent for Indian affairs in Southern Utah, was accompanied by baggage-waggons and the other paraphernalia of war excepting only heavy artillery, which in this case would have been useless. But, at the same time, a large body of the Piede Indians had been invited to accompany them.
An order came from head-quarters to cut off the entire company except the little children. The emigrants were utterly unprepared, and the first onslaught found them defenceless. Accustomed, however, to border warfare, they immediately corralled their waggons and prepared for a siege—their great misfortune was that they had not any water—Major John D. Lee, finding the emigrants resolute, sent to Cedar City and Washington City for reinforcements, which duly arrived.
The next morning, Major John D. Lee assembled his troops, including the auxiliaries which he had summoned, about half a mile from the entrenchment of the fated emigrants, and then and there informed them, with all the coolness which such an infamous scoundrel alone could muster, that the whole company was to be killed, and only the little children who were too young to remember anything were to be spared.
The unfortunate emigrants did not know who their foes were. They saw Indians, or men who were so coloured that they looked like Indians, and they saw others who were more than strangers to them, but they had no clue to the cause of their detention. To them all was mystery. That Indians should attack them was quite within the bounds of probability, although there was at that time no cause for such an outrage; but that such an attack should be persistent, and should be carried on under the peculiar circumstances in question, was, to say the least, highly improbable.
Who could rightly tell a story so fearful as this? The emigrant train—men, women, and children fainting and famishing for want of bread and meat. In their pockets was money wherewith the necessaries of life might have been bought, and the generous hand of the Almighty had that year been open so wide, and had scattered those necessaries so liberally, that nothing but the wickedness of man towards his fellow could have created a dearth. But so it was that darkness and the fear of death—a fearful death even at the door—was all those poor emigrants had standing before their eyes. What right had the Mormon militia to be pursuing, to be hanging about the skirts of any body of emigrants? Their very presence was in itself unauthorized—criminal. The emigrants supposed that they were surrounded by Indians, and expected the cruellest treatment in case of resistance not only death, but the outrage and shocking atrocities of savages. They did not know that the red men who threatened their lives and the lives of their helpless wives and infants were brought together at that spot for that same purpose by the counsel of Mormon authorities. They did not know that so many of the appearing red-skins were only painted devils, mocks of humanity, wretches who under the mask of a red-skin’s colour were eager to perpetrate the foulest of offences—scoundrels a thousand times damned in the opinion of men, and by the decree of God.