History of Utah, 1540-1886 - Brigham Young University

560 THE MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE.
they are authorized by higher authorities, and if
they have any such notions they will have to dispel
them." 30 The grand jury refused to find bills against
any of the accused, and, after remaining in session for
a fortnight, were discharged by Cradlebaugh as "a
useless appendage to a court of justice," the judge remarking:
"If this court cannot bring you to a proper
sense of your duty, it can at least turn the savages
held in custody loose upon you." 31
Judge Cradlebaugh's address was ill advised. The
higher authority of which he spoke could mean only
the authority of the church, or in other words, of the
first presidency; and to contemn and threaten to impeach
that authority before a Mormon grand jury
was a gross judicial blunder. Though there may have
been cause for suspicion, there was no fair color of
testimony, and there is none yet, that Brigham or
his colleagues were implicated in the massacre. Apart
from the hearsay evidence of Cradlebaugh and of an
officer in the army of Utah, 32 together with the statements
of John D. Lee, 33 there is no basis on which to
frame a charge of complicity against them. That the
massacre occurred the day after martial law was proclaimed,
and within two days of the threat uttered
by Brigham in the presence of Van Vliet; that Brigham,
as superintendent of Indian affairs, failed to
embody in his report any mention of the massacre;
10 A copy of the judge's charge will be found in Stenhouse's Rocky Mountain
Saints, 403-6.
81 Cradlebaugh's Mormonism, 11; The Lee Trial, 6.
82 Major Carleton, of the first dragoons. In a despatch to the assistant
adjutant-general at San Francisco, dated Mountain Meadows, May 25, 1S59,
he says: 'A Pah Ute chief of the Santa Clara band, named Jackson, who was
one of the attacking party, and had a brother slain by the emigrants from
their corral by the spring, says that orders came down in a letter from Brigham
Young that the emigrants were to be killed; and a chief of the Pah Utes,
named Touche, now living on the Virgin River, told me that a letter from
Brigham Young to the same effect was brought down to the Virgin River
band by a man named Huntingdon.' A copy of the major's despatch will be
found in the Hand-book of Mormonism, 67-9. Cradlebaugh says that after
the attack had been made, one of the Indians declared that a white man came
to their camp with written orders from Brigham to 'go and help to whip the
emigrants.' Mormonism, 11.
83
Lee's confession, in Mormonism Unrailed, passim.