History of Utah, 1540-1886 - Brigham Young University

LEE'S CONFESSION. 569
fession, 56 in which he attempts to palliate his guilt, to
throw the burden of the crime on his accomplices, especially
on Dame, Haight, and Higbee, and to show
that the massacre was committed by order of Brigham
and the high-council. He also makes mention of other
murders, or attempts to murder, which, as he alleges,
were committed by order of some higher authority. 67
"I feel composed, and as calm as a summer morning,"
he writes on the 13th of March. "I hope to meet
my fate with manly courage. I declare my innocence.
I have done nothing designedly wrong in that unfortunate
and lamentable affair with which I have been
implicated. I used my utmost endeavors to save them
from their-sad fate. I freely would have given worlds,
were they at my command, to have averted that evil.
Death to me has no terror. It is but a struggle,
and all is over. I know that I have a reward in
heaven, and my conscience does not accuse me."
Ten clays later he was led to execution at the Mountain
Meadows. Over that spot the curse of the almighty
seemed to have fallen. The luxuriant herbage
that had clothed it twenty years before had disappeared;
the springs were dry and wasted, and now
there was neither grass nor any green thing, save here
and there a copse of sage-brush or of scrub-oak, that
56 It will be found entire in Lee's Mormonism Uvvailed, 213-92; and in part
in Beadle's Western Wilds, 519-23, Stenhouse's Tell It All, G33-48, the last of
these versions being somewhat garbled. For other accounts and comments,
see Deseret News, March 28, 1877; 8. F. Post, March 22, 23, 24, 1877; San
Buenaventura Signal, March 31, 1877; Sonoma Democrat, March 31, 1877;
Napa Count// Reporter, Apr. 7, 1877; Los Angeles Weekly Express, March 24,
1877; Los Angeles Herald, March 24, 1877; Anaheim Gazette, March 24, 1S77;
Western Oregonian, Apr. 7, 1877; Portland Weekly Oregonian, Apr. 7, 1877.
67 He mentions the case of an Irishman, whose throat was cut by John
Weston, near Cedar City, in the winter of 1857-8; of Robert Keyes, whose
assassination was attempted about the same time by Philip Klingensmith ; of
three California-bound emigrants, who were suspected of being spies and were
slain at Cedar in 1857. An attempt was made, he says, to assassinate Lieut
Tobin in the same year. A young man (name not given) was murdered near
Parowan in 1854. At the same place William Laney narrowly escaped murder,
his skull being fractured with a club by Barney Carter, son-indaw to William
H. Dame. Rosmos Anderson, a Dane, had his throat cut at midnight by
Klingensmith and others near Cedar City. Lee's Confession, in Mormonism
Uncalled, 272-83. Some of these cases are imputed to the Danites, but I find
no mention of them in Hickman's Destroying Angel, whose narrative covers
the period 1S50-65.