This is the story, most imperfectly told, for I dare not sketch its foulest details, of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Brigham Young, who was at the time Governor of the Territory and also Indian Agent, made no report of the matter. Let that fact of itself speak for his innocence or guilt. Would any other governor or agent in another territory have been thus silent? John D. Lee, and Dame, and Haight, and the other wretches have never been brought to trial or cut off from the Church, although their monstrous crime has never been a secret, nor have any endeavours been made to conceal it.
This fearful deed was one of the unavoidable results of the teachings of the Mormon leaders during the Reformation. There were crimes then perpetrated in secret which will never be known until the day of doom; and there were horrors which have been known and recorded, but for which no one has been brought to trial or has suffered inconvenience. There are men in Salt Lake City, who walk about unblushingly in broad daylight, but who are known to be murderers, and whose hands have been again and again dyed with blood under circumstances of the most atrocious cruelty.
There was one cruel murder, but by no means the worst—which came under my own personal observation, and which I have alluded to elsewhere—the murder of Dr. John King Robinson in Salt Lake City, which attracted more than ordinary attention. This gentleman was a physician of good standing, who came out as assistant-surgeon with the United States army, and afterwards began to practise in Salt Lake City. He was known as a man of unimpeachable moral character, and there are to this day hundreds of responsible people who would testify to his fair fame and rectitude; although he had by some means incurred the dislike of many of the Mormon leaders. He formed the idea of taking possession of some warm springs on the north of the city, and proposed to erect there baths, an hospital, &c. A small wooden shanty was erected for the purpose of holding possession, but the city authorities claimed the spring, and, after some very unpleasant proceedings, the matter was referred to the law courts, and Judge Titus decided against the doctor.
After this verdict had been rendered, Dr. Robinson seems to have acted very prudently, and to have remained in-doors as much as possible during the succeeding days. Between eleven and twelve o’clock on the night of the third day, however, after the family had retired to rest, a man called at the house, and stating that his brother had broken his leg by a fall from a mule and was suffering very much, he, after some earnest persuasion, induced the doctor to accompany him. Anxious as he might be to remain in-doors at such a time, no professional man would refuse to perform an act of mercy. He accordingly went. At a distance of about a couple of hundred steps from the house he was struck over the head with some sharp instrument, and immediately after shot through the brain. His wife, a young girl, to whom he had only been married a very short time, heard the report of the pistol, and witnesses saw men fleeing from the spot. The police were sent for, and the body was carried to Independence Hall, and afterwards to the victim’s house. The Mayor of the city was not informed of the murder until ten o’clock the next day, and the chief of police, who was sitting round the fire with his men when news of the murder arrived, went to bed immediately, and did not visit the scene of the outrage for three days.
The following Sunday, Brigham Young, in the Tabernacle, publicly suggested that the doctor had probably been murdered by some of the soldiers from Camp Douglas, who were dissatisfied with his treatment when they were under his hands, or else that he had fallen in some gambling transaction—both of which statements, however, were known by every one present to be utterly false. No one was ever prosecuted for this cruel murder. It did not occur during the Reformation, but was the natural result of the teachings of those times.
I simply mention these facts without any comment of my own. Let the reader form his own conclusion. More of these frightful stories I do not care to relate; and I should not even have presented these to the notice of the reader had it not been impossible otherwise to give any adequate idea of that terrible “Reformation.” The Gentile army came in. The Union Pacific Railroad was opened. Changes and chances altered all that had been, and brought into being that which might be, and that which finally really was. Instead of looking to the events of three or four thousand years ago, men began to act up to things which were—to think and act in the present, not to dream of the past. The day has gone by, but not far, when the perpetration openly of such deeds was possible; but it is still boasted that, when “Deseret” becomes a State, the “Saints” will “show still greater zeal for the Lord!”
In concluding this too brief sketch of the most tragic episodes in Mormon domestic history, I must warn my readers against the inference that the ghastly facts and details there presented came to my knowledge either immediately or soon after my arrival in Utah. No, it was only after many years’ residence there, and by very slow degrees, that they became known to me, and the effect which they produced on my mind was necessarily broken and impaired by the gradual and disconnected way in which they oozed out, the horrible and bewildering travesty of biblical argument urged in their defence, and by my utter isolation from the outer and higher world, and communication with the heart and brain ennobling influences of a wholesome and invigorating public opinion.