Oh What a Slaughter by Larry McMurtry Page B

remained in hiding.
    These women, having lived under conditions of terror for four days, were likely not free of fears about what would happen if the Indians were allowed to have their way. Perhaps, like the men, they reposed their hopes in Mormon decency. The historian J. P. Dunn suggests that they had even begun to perk up—it’s not clear to me how he could know this. He thought, from what reports I don’t know, that the womenfolk had begun to regain their confidence; if so, they didn’t regain it for long.
    Suddenly Major High Higbee, the military man who devised the Mormon battle plan, appeared on a ridge ahead ofthem. Major Higbee waved his arms and shouted something like Do-Your-Duty, whereupon the Mormon escorts immediately shot down the men they had been escorting. The few who failed to die immediately had their throats cut, so that, Dunn suggests, the atoning blood could flow more freely. (For whatever reason, a great many throats were cut during the massacre.)
    According to Dunn, the Indians then fell on the women and children—they had been assigned the job of killing these tender ones, presumably to avoid the possibility of some Mormon shedding innocent blood. A baby had already been killed by the same bullet that cut down his father, who was carrying him at the time, a death that threw an instant taint over the whole gory enterprise.
    The long-held view that the Indians took care of the women and kids received a severe challenge with the discovery of the mass grave at the massacre site in 1999. When those bones were uncovered the Mormon authorities must have felt at least briefly that the place was cursed. Thanks to the abundance of Native American remains in Utah, there were laws on the books protecting just such a discovery. With the help of the then governor, Mike Leavitt, a descendant of a massacre participant, and, of course, the Mormon hierarchy, these laws were eventually evaded, but not before a dedicated team of forensic scientists had had some time to work—and
did
they work, eighteen hours at a stretch; they were well aware that the powers that be would soon succeed in having those telltale bones reburied.
    This, of course, is exactly what happened, but in fact the scientists still prevailed, assembling parts of twenty-eight individuals and piecing together eighteen skulls.
    It was the skulls that cast most doubt on the old belief that the Indians had done most of the killing. Most of the males whose skulls were reassembled died of gunshots fired at very close range—the females, in most cases, had been bludgeoned. The close-range executions by pistol shot suggested white behaviorrather than Paiute behavior. The Paiutes had long claimed the Mormons did the lion’s share of the killing. Thus what had begun as an attempt to landscape the monument site had blown up in the Mormons’ faces. The Paiutes were not entirely exonerated but the notion that they had more or less been slackers at this massacre gained currency again.
    Whichever group, Mormons or Indians, accounted for the largest share of the dead did nothing to lessen the horror of what had occurred that September day. Terrible violence occurred, a terror in the desert. Many of the women were quickly dispatched but some children fled. Two young girls hid in some bushes, only to be spotted, dragged out, raped, and killed. One of them pled for her life but John Doyle Lee, the man eventually executed for his role in the massacre, cut her throat anyway. (Lee maintained that he killed no one, but various witnesses said otherwise.)
    Seventeen children—innocents in Mormon terms, which meant that they were seven years old and under, were spared and, at first, divided among Mormon families. Most of them were eventually retrieved and sent back to Arkansas—twenty years later their testimony came back to haunt the perpetrators.
    John Doyle Lee, Philip Klingensmith (a Mormon bishop), and Jacob Hamlin all insist that