As the party was traveling west there were rumors about the party's behavior towards Mormons and war hysteria towards outsiders was rampant, so while the emigrants were camped at the meadow, local militia leaders, including Isaac C. Haight and John D. Lee, made plans to attack the wagon train. The leaders of the militia, wanting to give the impression of tribal hostilities, persuaded Southern Paiutes to join with a larger party of militiamen disguised as Native Americans in an attack. During the militia's first assault on the wagon train, the emigrants fought back, and a five-day siege ensued. Eventually, fear spread among the militia's leaders that some emigrants had caught sight of the white men, likely discerning the actual identity of a majority of the attackers. As a result, militia commander William H. Dame ordered his forces to kill the emigrants.
Cum Town bit: death cult based on the widsom of a conman, doing blackface to hide their soulless wendigo nature
The women and children were then ambushed and killed by more militia that were hiding in nearby bushes and ravines. Members of the militia were sworn to secrecy. A plan was set to blame the massacre on the Native Americans. The militia did not kill small children who were deemed too young to relate what had happened. Nancy Huff, one of the seventeen survivors and just over four years old at the time of the massacre, recalled in an 1875 statement that an eighteenth survivor was killed directly in front of the other children. "At the close of the massacre there was eighteen children still alive, one girl, some ten or twelve years old, they said was too big and could tell, so they killed her, leaving seventeen." The survivors were taken in by local Mormon families. Seventeen of the children were later reclaimed by the U.S. Army and returned to relatives in Arkansas. The treatment of these children while they were held by the Mormons is uncertain, but Captain James Lynch's statement of May 1859 stated that the surviving children were "in a most wretched condition, half starved, half naked, filthy, infested with vermin, and their eyes diseased from the cruel neglect to which had been exposed." Lynch's July 1859 affidavit states "The children when we first saw them, were in a most wretched and deplorable condition; with little or no clothing, covered with filth and dirt."
very suprising that a satanic death cult would do this!
The livestock and personal property of the Baker–Fancher party, including women's jewelry, clothing and bedstuffs were distributed or auctioned off to Mormons. Some of the surviving children saw clothing and jewelry that had belonged to their dead mothers and sisters subsequently being worn by Mormon women and the journalist J.H. Beadle said that jewelry taken from Mountain Meadows was seen in Salt Lake City.
www.readsettlers.com
Mountain Meadows was horrible, but another massacre took place in what is now Provo Utah that literally no one has heard of, or attempted to hold the LDS church accountable for, so I like to post it where I see these discussions crop up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_at_Fort_Utah
Whereas Mormon's always like to say that the top brass had no knowledge of mountain meadows, the Extermination Order against the Timpanogos tribe near Fort Utah came directly from Brigham Young (who at this point was, according to Mormons, in direct communication with god). This order came as a result of the Timpanogos taking livestock from settlers at fort Utah, which was itself a reaction to the Mormons killing a native man and using up too many resources during a hard winter.
Once they had permission, Mormons exterminated over 100 Timpanogos, including groups that had never had any conflict with the Mormons. The survivors, mainly women and children, were left outside the fort during the winter. Many starved or died from exposure (Mormons destroyed the homes of the natives during the extermination. The survivors (around 40) were then sent to live as slaves serving Mormon families. The bodies of the Timpanogos warriors who died in battle were decapitated, with the heads to be sent east "for study." When Chief Peteetneet came to the area and found the bodies, and learned of the fate of their heads, he killed Mormon livestock in retaliation. He was captured and executed. It's not super clear if the heads ever left, since they were taken and put on spikes outside the Fort for the survivors to see.
This act is especially depraved, given two points Mormons like to emphasize when they discuss their own history:
The Mormon Extermination Order. To this day, Governor Boggs issue of executive order 44, permitting militias to drive out or exterminate mormons in Missouri, is taught in any and every church history class administered by the LDS church. It is probably the center of their "persecution narrative," that Mormons have been and always will be persecuted by "gentile" nations and people. It is therefore especially disturbing that, the leaders and people who survived this extermination order, who believed that Boggs and his posterity would be cursed by god for his issuing of the order, would turn around and issue their own, which they ruthlessly carried out in a more depraved manner than their persecutors ever did.
The LDS church has always taught that the native inhabitants of the americas were a "lost tribe of Israel," and that it was their duty to preach the gospel to them. Modern mormons imagine that their ancestors were friends with the native peoples. You cant have it both ways though, you either exterminated natives or you didn't.
Overall both are horrific, but Mountain Meadows has at least cropped up occasionally in narratives about Mormon history, but the fate of the Timpanogos never has, to my knowledge. I guess its easy to guess why.