Everett Bassett: Discovering human remains at Mountain Meadows (Season 2, Ep. 1 - Part 1)

The story of the siege and massacre of approximately 120 California bound immigrants by Mormon settlers and Paiute Indians at Mountain Meadows (Washington County, 38 miles northwest of St. George) on September 11, 1857 is perhaps the second most well-known story in all of Utah’s history behind only the epic story of the 1847 Mormon Pioneers. 

The massacred were hastily and incompletely buried after this horrendous event. Two years later in 1859 U.S. Army troops led by Major James H. Carleton, gathered the exposed remains and interred them in two mass graves. The finding of these graves in 2014 by Bassett, is the focus of this Speak Your Piece interview. 

Guest Bio: Everett Bassett is a principal archeologist for Transcon Environmental, Inc., an environmental planning firm, with expertise in the pursuit of developing infrastructure for energy, communications, and mining. Previously Bassett worked as contact archeologist for a firm doing extensive work for the Utah Division of Oil, Gas and Mining. He has degrees in biology, history and anthropology. As a young man Bassett worked as a logger and served in the United States Merchant Marines.

Transcript

THIS IS A TRANSCRIPT OF THE FIRST, TWO-PART EPISODE OF THE PODCAST SPEAK YOUR PIECE, A PRODUCTION OF THE UTAH DEPARTMENT OF HERITAGE AND ARTS. THE HOST IS BRAD WESTWOOD, AND THE GUEST IS EVERETT BASSETT.

BW: Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history produced by the Utah Department of Heritage and Arts. I'm Brad Westwood, Senior Public Historian. My job is to make the very best, the most interesting, the most accurate history of Utah accessible to the widest audience. If there's one place, one podcast, to get your Utah history fix, I hope This is The Place. Our guest today is historical archaeologist Everett Bassett. Welcome Everett.

EB: Hey, Brad. Good morning to you. 

BW: Our podcast today is about an anniversary. Coming up this September, actually between the seventh and 11th of September is the 163rd anniversary of what is perhaps the second most well-known story in all of Utah history. It's behind only the epic story of the Mormon pioneers who first came to Utah on July 24th, 1847. The story I'm talking about is the 1857 story of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, or the killing of approximately 120 men, women, and children by Mormon settlers and militiamen, while these California-bound immigrants were camped in a location between Cedar City and St. George, known as Mountain Meadows. Those massacred were hastily buried in shallow graves by their killers, and two years later, in 1859, many of these remains were reburied by the U.S. Army. It is the location of these burial sites, covered in rock known as cairns—tumuli—that we will be talking about with Everett. This was and is a very complex, really a horrendous story, which I'll ask Everett to briefly describe in just a moment. In the last 20 years however, this historical event has been once more methodically reexamined, deeply researched and written about. If the story is new to you, our show notes can direct you to a reliable narrative or narratives and primary sources that can be helpful to you, no matter how deeply you want to go into this subject. Now, our guest today, Everett Bassett, lives in Forest Knolls, California, and he is a principal of Transcon Environmental, Inc., an environmental planning firm with expertise working with utilities, industries, corporations, and government agencies in their pursuit of the development of infrastructure for energy, communications, and mining. 

Previously working for an environmental cultural resource firm, Everett was employed by the Utah Division of Oil, Gas, and Mining Reclamation Program. Bassett has academic degrees in biology, history, and anthropology. Besides this, as a young man, he served in the United States Merchant Marine, and for a time he worked as a logger. All of these personal biographical elements are going to come into our discussion today. Once more, Everett, thank you so much for being here. 

EB: Thank you Brad. 

BW: Let's frame up this very basic outline. Just tell our listeners, what is the Mountain Meadows Massacre?

EB: Well, it was an ordinary event, to begin with, that occurred during extraordinary times. A group of immigrants from Northwest Arkansas, actually fairly off, with huge cattle herds, were moving their herds from Arkansas to California. Once they got to Utah, they followed the Old Spanish Trail, and they camped at the Mountain Meadows, which is a high elevation meadow with water, lush grass, and so forth. However, they walked into two events. One was the Mormon Reformation, which had a lot of reactionary actions and beliefs, many of which were pushed by George A. Smith, such as Blood Atonement. George A. Smith traveled around southern Utah, basically getting people excited about the Reformation. And of course, at the same time the Utah War was going on, which was a war between the United States government and the territorial Mormon government under Brigham Young. 

There was a lot of paranoia going on, there was a lot of fear. And a decision was made by the Nauvoo Legion militia out of Cedar City to attack and to kill the immigrants. And there's not a huge amount—there's a lot of disagreement over exactly what happened. But basically it appears that Isaac Haight, the battalion commander of the militiamen, and John D. Lee, who was the Indian agent, conspired to get Native Americans to attack and kill the immigrant party, which had at least 120 members present. However, everything fell apart. The Indians didn't want to do it, the immigrants were much better shots than anyone expected, and killed a couple of Indians. And eventually the militia with John D. Lee went in under a flag of truce, they said that they would help the immigrants leave the attack site—

BW: The threat of the attack, so to speak. Although by that time they didn't know, didn't the Fancher and Baker party know by then that this was more than just Indians doing this?

EB: Yes. Yes. Well, they I think they suspected. Now, everyone there was killed, right, except for some very small children. So this is one of these questions we don't know. We have to assume they were suspicious. But the story played up by the local Mormons, was one of Indians versus white men. And it's very possible that the immigrants bought into that. Or they may have been suspicious. At any rate, they were divided into two groups, the men and the older boys and the women and the children, and they were led away, reportedly to go to Cedar City. A few thousand yards up the valley, the men and the boys' groups were massacred and completely killed by the militiamen. And another few hundred yards further up, the women and the children were similarly attacked. Now whether these were attacked by the militiamen, by the Native Americans, or by a combination of both, is still a matter of contention and great controversy.

BW: And that's the sort of one of the great bits of misinformation is the idea that it was only the Indians that did this killing, which has all kinds of interesting historical implications, that the Mormon settlers would urge or try to convince them to do this killing. But I think the story is much more complex. And we'll perhaps talk a little bit more about that. 

EB: Yeah, it's very complex. So these bodies are basically lying out there. Some folks, we're not sure, Jacob Hamblin among others, apparently came. And they dragged the bodies over into some ravines. And they lay there, apparently, until 18 months later, when the Army came and reburied them. And they essentially these graves remained hidden and unknown for 160 years. Now these locations are different than the initial attack site. Now many of the listeners have been down to the Mountain Meadows site, and they know that interpretive park that the LDS church has set up. That's where this group of emigrants was originally attacked. These were not the two massacre sites.

BW: And in fact, the siting of these cairns wasn't not on church owned property, but a private rancher's property.

EB: That's correct. And I don't like to use the term "cairn." Using that term has actually led to some problems because you think of a cairn and it's an upright monument, something designed to signal that there's something important there. These were more like low mounds used to protect the body from the wolves. In many ways, they actually hid the graves rather than celebrate them.

BW: They obscured it rather than let them stand out on the landscape. We’ll talk...

EB: Exactly. And because of that, they actually remained. If they had been up in the flat and easily marked, more than likely they would have been destroyed long ago.

BW: Interesting. So benign and obscure neglect offered us an opportunity to see and understand the story much differently. Let me ask you about your early work experience, your training, that plays into the story, how these matters played into your discoveries. Let's talk a little bit about you, Everett, and just how you've approached this work because of your life experiences.

EB: Well, it's interesting. The best historians and the best archaeologists do it for love, love of history, love of the past. And everybody has different stories on how they came by that love. For me, part of the story, like many, was being dragged to Gettysburg [BW laughs] as a child, and playing around Devil's Den and imagining finding a Confederate skeleton with a rifle in a cave or something. But then as I became older, I had other experiences. I was in the Merchant Marine, and there was an old guy on the ship with me who had sailed a five masted barque from Chile in the 1920s, hauling guano. And he kept a sand-filled hose in his locker, because during the Thirties, he used to go on labor marches and use this weapon to fight the police. I mean, these are aspects of history that I was never taught about. And just sitting and listening, late into the evening to these old sailors tell these stories, just really intrigued my imagination.

BW: The fact that he would take it out of this out of his personal affects, full of sand, place it in his trousers and make his way to a labor event. [laughs]

EB: That's right. And what's interesting is these guys, these crusty old sailors off the boat, they would go and they would march for the lady garment workers in New York, who of course, were women, and who it was not genteel for women to march in labor marches. So they would get these old soldiers, these sailors to do it. But just little things like that got me very interested in history. And of course, working on ships. But I logged for many years, I worked in mines, I've worked on farms. You sort of understand the relationship between people and the land. I always say that the best archaeologists would probably be farmers or miners, because they understand that relationship, more so than an egghead.

BW: They form a relationship with the land.

EB: Exactly.

BW: Let's talk about the different perspectives, the different approaches. In both cases, hundreds of years of methodology between historians and archaeologists, how does that play into this story?

EB: Well, what I mostly do is called historic archaeology. And it's a form of archaeology where the written records, oral histories, photos, maps, inform and contextualize the cultural materials. And when these are all used together, they can provide a surprisingly three-dimensional view of the past. Now, historical archaeology in Europe, they probably call it post-medieval archaeology. There's also a subset called industrial archaeology, where people are studying the rise of the Industrial Revolution. But it's very different from prehistoric archaeology, which is such a great discipline, particularly in Utah.

BW: It's a big part. Because thousands of years of stories unfolded in the archaeological record here in Utah, so this…

EB: That's right. And what they see in the ground is pretty much what they have to work with. And their techniques for finding that material is very similar to the ones that historic archaeologists use. But they don't have all that written context to complement what they do. Now, there's a curious relationship between the historical evidence and the historic archaeology. Of course, it's always been said, history is written by the victors. And so historic archaeology is used often to complement the historic record, and it works best when the historic record is nonexistent or incomplete or biased, or out and out lies. And so the best historic archaeology I have found deals with the working class, with slaves, with Native Americans. with women, and children!

BW: Things not expressed otherwise in the historic record.

EB: The archaeology of children is a big deal!

BW: For me, as I have worked for the Division of State History, and I worked for a time with the LDS Church, so frequently the archaeological approach offers some stunning information that in many ways, counters, often, the historical narratives. Why is that the case, Everett?

EB: Well, because history is used to inform, but it can also be used to disinform. And one of the very best examples of that, of course, is the Mountain Meadows Massacre, where we have enormous amounts of history, historic documents, but most of it is lies. And so as we'll talk about later, I basically was successful in my work in the Mountain Meadows by throwing out all the history, or almost all the history, because I couldn't trust it. And there's a tendency among historians to really cling to these nuggets that they find. The more work you put into tracking down some obscure diary that was tucked behind Grandma Jane's dresser, it becomes so important, the work you did, that it needs to be part of the narrative. 

BW: You've got to sew it in because of so much of the value or time it's taken you to track it down, or...

EB: Exactly, exactly. And it's very hard to admit that [laughs] it's not true. And the archaeological record sometimes allows us to check on these things and say, oh, yeah, this is good history. Or no, this is bad history. 

BW: Well, you let the physical, archaeological evidence—so there's a sort of a rigorous scientific process. And historians, we all try to say we work so hard at being rigorous and careful in our methodology. But in the case of historical archaeology, it's really following the physical evidence as much as possible, right? Period. Just what's it say?

EB: Yeah, it is. And of course, historic archaeology has its own problems, its own biases. We can find something and that thing we find is a fact. But how we interpret its meaning, our own biases can be brought into that. You know, in any sciences, we have to be careful. 

BW: Yea, absolutely. For me, what fascinated me walking through Mountain Meadows, and understanding what went on—and of course, anyone, if you're a professional historian, or you're just someone who loves history, or you're tormented by the story of the massacre, when you get out there, you try to kind of understand the landscape, and see how it plays into the story. For me, I'm interested...what's the big deal? Why is knowing where something happened, the location of a historical site or an event, why is that important?

EB: Well, “place” is very interesting. Native Americans have the best view on this. They name everything around them, and everything around them has a story. Places are touchstones to memory. And memories, of course, lead to history. They become touchstones to history. And when we see these places, and when we're standing on them, it lets us participate in that history. And sometimes the history is of national importance, think of Ellis Island, or I mentioned earlier, Gettysburg, or the World Trade Center. But the best places I think are the ones that are more intimate. The place where Grandpa took you fishing or something like that. But then we have places like Mountain Meadows. And it's important that we know where these places are because the landscape informs and the landscape informs, the landscape provides a sort of almost spiritual relationship to the place. And in public history, as you're aware, Brad, there's sometimes a tendency to identify vicinities rather than places because it's more convenient. And there's also a tendency to Disnify places, to get rid of embarrassing actions. Southern plantations that had no slaves, things like that. And places are important because they tie us more closely to history, more so than books ever can.

BW: And there's not a historical site in Utah that offers that kind of experience more, at least in my mind. Well, maybe I'm playing it up too much. But to me, getting out there in those beautiful mountainous meadows, and trying to understand that landscape and then saying, “okay, where did these things happen?” I have to say, I have a tinge of regret, because some four years ago, State History was involved in putting a monument out for the Circleville Massacre. And we were able to work with an incredible mayor and city and we put this monument up with the help of the Utah Westerners and hundreds of different contributors. But we knew we had a deadline coming up, and we got that monument put in, and I'm extremely proud of it. But yet, we don't know where those bodies are in that vicinity. And I'm hoping somehow, some way, that we can be able to discover where those are. And it took 160 years for us to figure out where these bodies were, even though there were dozens and dozens of people and historians working on this. It's a fascinating story. And I think it's one of the most interesting things of late is what you're finding, those tumuli, those locations. Will you paint a picture, Everett, for our listeners regarding the Mountain Meadows landscape; explain, such as the Old Spanish Trail or California bound wagon trains or the flooding. I mean, just explain, as much as possible, how that landscape affected the story.

EB: Mountain Meadows is a lovely place. For those listeners who haven't been there, they should visit it I think, now, as many of the properties there are increasingly being preserved. And it's returning to the lush landscape that it once was. It's fairly high up, at 5800 feet. It's got water, it's got grasses. It's a unique location. It's surrounded by very severe mountains and deserts. And when the first Mexican traders came through in 1829—they developed the Old Spanish Trail that went from Santa Fe to Southern California—they discovered these meadows. And it was a wonderful place for them to rest and recuperate their livestock. Because just beyond it, as you move to the southwest, you have to cross the Mojave Desert. It was important to fix your saddles and get your cattle and your horses all set up and everything. And it's interesting, because it's one of the few places where we can discuss the history, before 1851, when the first Mormons came to Southern Utah. One of the ways that I've been studying it is, I've been looking at the records of the Spanish missions on the California coast, and the Presidio at Monterey. And many of these military and religious leaders kept records of the weather. So we know what happens when a storm comes from the west, across California. It eventually hits Utah. So I've been actually able to identify major storms that would have hit the Mountain Meadows in the 1830s and in the 1840s from these records. 

BW: And ravines and waterways play into the story, so...

EB: Exactly. Because when you start making a path or a road through soft mountain meadows, you start to cut away the vegetation. And then when it rains, these get downcut, and they turn into ravines. And now you had earlier mentioned that you thought the Mountain Meadows is one of the most important locations in Southern Utah. What's interesting is we have a “twofer” here, because the Mountain Meadows historic locations are directly on top of the Old Spanish Trail. So what we have is we have what I consider the two most important cultural sites in Southern Utah: the Old Spanish Trail and the Mountain Meadows, and they're in one location, they're directly on top of one another. 

BW: So why did you feel it was necessary? Now I'm going to frame up that many qualified, capable archaeologists and historians had come up with some conclusions as to where these tumuli were, or at least where they thought, on the landscape, these people were buried. Why did you think it was necessary, Everett, to take what they had presumed and do the work you did?

EB: Well, a few years ago, the LDS Church put up two monuments in the Mountain Meadows, in addition to the major monument at the attack site. And these locations purported to identify where the men and boys' massacre took place and when the women and children's massacre took place. And as well, they identified where they thought the road was, that the wagon trains had followed, which in 1857 was generally called the California Road, or the Salt Lake to California Road. And when I looked at these locations, it was like getting hit in the stomach. It was like, No, no, no, no, this cannot be! It was not because I knew where the massacres were, but I kind of knew where they couldn't be. And for example...

BW: In a funny way, as a historical archaeologist, in some ways you started this discussion figuring out what it couldn't be.

EB: Exactly, exactly, and I kind of do a lot of my work that way. When I'm looking for an old road, I don't say, let's look at historical records and try to figure where the road was. What I do is I take maps and identify where it couldn't be. And if you identify where something can't be, the options for where it can be are much reduced. It makes your job a lot easier. And what the church had done, and what they really were doing was they were really building on the church’s 2002 work, which I think is very, very good. But I think they got some of it wrong. And they identify the road as running up along where current State Highway 18 is, which is the main paved highway through the Meadows. And when you look at that, you realize that, first of all, it runs in a straight line. It's up in the sagebrush, rolling hills. It required heavy equipment and cut and fill to build. Well, there's no way that in the 1850s there would have been a road there when there was this perfect location down at the bottom of the meadows. Soft ground, lots of forage for your animals, no rocks or sagebrush. 

BW: It wouldn't be up on a bench or something like that.

EB: No, it wouldn't be up on a bajada. So I immediately said, hey, they got this wrong. And so what I did was I went to one of the descendants of the folks, the families that had come through, Scott Fancher from Arkansas. And I went to Scott and I said, "Hey Scott, I think they got this wrong. Would you like me to look and try to find the right spot? Because I think if everyone believes this is where the massacres were, and they do get it wrong, it puts the real locations at risk." I mean, these monuments say, "This is where the massacres took place." And it was literally written in granite. I mean, literally. And you say something like that, and there's no reason to disbelieve it. And so my worry was, well, the actual locations are elsewhere. But now they won't be protected because we think we know where they actually are, and we don't.

BW: Well, and we know that development, various lines, both underground and above, have gone through corridors, power corridors, and there's just all kinds of development out there. If we had just taken this assumption and went with it, there's a good chance that historical evidence over the course of time could have been destroyed.

EB: Yeah, and that's always a risk with the evidence of the prehistoric and the historic past. 

BW: Well, why wasn't it found before, Everett?

EB: That's an interesting story [laughter]. I think the problem was the history. There was too much of it, which I know is a weird thing to say on a historical podcast. There was too much history, but almost all of it was bad. For the most part, it fell into two camps: one were the people who were there at the time. So who could write about it later that had been there? The people that were actually doing the massacring. So we get people like John D. Lee, and Haight, and Klingensmith, and all these people. And they're basically writing, "Oh, yeah, the Indians out there, they killed all these people. We tried to stop them." 

BW: Yeah, "We tried to stop them and it's not our doing."

EB: Yeah. And even long after that, these stories kept coming. There's a horrifying letter written by Wilford Woodruff, who later became president of the church, as the church in the 1860s tried to spin the story. And he refers to the bodies of these slain women as being "pox-ridden." Well, that's language for saying that they had syphilis and therefore loose morals. Elsewhere in this letter, he talks about how the U.S. government used, quote, "giant Negros," unquote, to escort the children back to Arkansas. And again, this is him trying to get people riled up about how the government was evil, and the people who had been taking care of these children whose parents they had killed were actually good. So this history is all trying to do that. Now, there's other history, and this is a lot of yellow journalism about how evil Mormons were, and how they had this bloodthirsty culture that, well, this is what you expect from Mormons. So all this was either obviously wrong, or probably wrong, or possibly wrong. I wasn't sure. So I basically threw it all out. So, to do history by first of all throwing out all the history [laughs] is the securest way to do it. But I did keep one thing, I kept the records of the U.S. Army, who came by in 1859. The Army did not have a dog in this fight. Secondly, they had professional photographers with them, so the records they kept were likely accurate. 

BW: There were some from Fort Douglas. And, there were some who had come and been a part of Utah and may have developed some animus or ill feelings. But there was a certain rigorous and almost—well, the words not fiduciary, but this kind of legal thing where they had to pursue the evidence in a certain way. 

EB: Exactly right. If you're an Army officer, and you do something that's wrong or inaccurate, you can be court martialed. And so I took that information, and I used just it. And as I learned more things and discovered more things. I was able to go back to the history and say, well, this history has been proven wrong. This history has been proven right. Other histories we don't know about yet. So I was able to slowly pull the historical documents back into the story once I found what was on the ground.

BW: So, when I think of those that worked before on this topic, and there are many whom I will not mention, many who did some really interesting things, but Frank Beckwith, Morris A. Shirts, Will Bagley, Richard E. Turley, T. Michael Smith, Glen Leonard, and most recently, Ben Pykles, had all previously proposed locations for those tumuli. In your efforts to go through those Army records, and really carefully select those things where the motives were not—you know, the story got better with the telling one way or another—just cutting through that, tell me about how it all came about in discovering on the landscape these sites.

EB: Well, yeah, it's kind of an interesting story. And I think when the story is all done and told, the question is, why weren't these mass graves found earlier? It is a fit question. What I did was, like I said, first of all, I distrusted the historic record. So I wasn't tied to that. A lot of historians deal with historic records much like a jigsaw puzzle, where they want to take every bit of history they find and fit it together, to help provide the narration. And so I didn't do that. The other thing was that I, ah, realized that the story about what these graves were had been told so many times incorrectly that it became well known that these were cairns. But they were never called cairns. There's only one description ever made of the graves. And it was by a surgeon with the Army, who ah, his name was Charles Brewer, and he was under the command of Captain Reuben Campbell out of Camp Floyd. He said they were marked with "mounds of stone." That's all we have, mounds of stone. And that quickly became monuments or cairns. So people were looking for cairns. 

BW: Yeah. Big things on the landscape. 

EB: Yeah. And in fact, I was actually looking for cairns. I made the same mistake. I assumed somewhere up on the flats, there would have been this tower of rock. So I made that same mistake. But what I realized, when I started going into this, I realized that there were three aspects to the physical remains of the massacre. One would be the massacre sites themselves. And I knew I would never be able to find them. They occurred over an hour. They didn't affect the landscape. There might be a couple bullets in the ground, or buttons or something. The second would be the graves. And again, I figured I would never find those. They were probably rock piles that had been collected from fields or plowed away. But the third was the road that was taken. And I figured I had a shot at identifying the road. If I could find the road, then I'd have a very, very narrow frame of where the graves could be. I might be able to find the graves then. And if I could find the graves, then I would also know where the massacres were. So I started off looking for the road, and ah...

BW: Everett, I'm going to stop you right now. [laughs] We're midway in our interview with historical archaeologist Everett Bassett. You've been listening to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is where writers, historians, and contributors to Utah's history share their insights and discoveries. Today's guest is coming back for our second half. We're going to talk more about the remains, the story of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and the reading of the landscape. We're going to talk about how the Army approached burials. There's some really interesting history that we're going to talk about, and we hope you'll return. If you want to read more about the show and today's guest, please go to our show notes, available at community.utah.gov and then “Speak Your Piece.” Now you can also, just online, research Speak Your Piece, that's P-I-E-C-E, Utah, and even my name, Brad Westwood, and the podcast will come up. Thank you so much for joining us. In our next segment, we'll ask Everett Bassett to explain more about so many interesting aspects of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Everett, thank you so much for being here. We hope you'll tune in again to Speak Your Piece.

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