The New Yorkermagazine did quite an expose on them in preparation for the winter olympics there, last year, a February issue('02, or was it '03?), I believe.
Wasn't very complimentary. The polygamy. Also, Recounts a recent excavation for a new highway in NV desert; remains of a noted wagon train, en route from Arkansas, massacred by Indians--or so the orignal story went.
Turns out forensics, at least according to the NYer article, demonstrate the men were separated from the train, killed, then the women and children likewise. The forensics left suspicions it wasn't Indians who did the killing.
That was the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
"O, Lord, my God, receive their spirits: it is for thy kingdom that I do this!" The gun exploded and the bullet killed both men. Samuel McMurdy had surely "kept alive the spirit of the reformation"; he had vindicated his right to hold the "holy" Mormon priesthood, and to be first counselor to Bishop Klingensmith.
According to Nephi Johnson less than three minutes were consumed in the work of death.
During the excitement and confusion attending the massacre, two girls, Rachel and Ruth Dunlap, made a desperate attempt to escape the carnage. From the evidence, and from a careful study of the ground, the girls must have been on the north side of the group of women and children when the attack was made. Running to the east on the north side of Knight and McMurdy's wagons, they turned to the south and sped toward the bench, where clumps of oak bushes seemed to invite them to a temporary refuge. Clambering down the steep side of the gully they crept into the oaks on the opposite brink. They were then about thirty rods from the scene of death, over which the smoke from exploding firearms hung in a hazy cloud from which there no longer issued protesting cries of women and the pitiful screams of children.
During a few brief minutes Rachel and Ruth Dunlap believed they were saved from the white and red butchers. Very likely no thought entered their minds of the fate that awaited them on the desert - the thirst and hunger that surely lurked for them amid the inextricable maze of hills and desert canyons. They dreamed not that if they escaped to some habitation the occupants, under pain of death, must surrender them to the blood atoning priests because, forsooth, they were old enough to tell the story of the massacre. Their only hope was to see the setting of the sun and to feel the sheltering mantle of night descend upon them.
One or more of the assassins must have seen the terrified girls as they raced toward the gully and reported the fact to the chief from Parowan, who found the girls and dragged them from their hiding place. The Indian sent for Lee, and on his arrival asked what should be done with them. When informed that they were beyond the age limit prescribed by Haight, the chief pleaded that they were "too pretty to be killed." Divining the sentence pronounced by Lee, the elder girl dropped to her knees and with clasped hands cried out: "Spare me, and I will love you all my life!" But she died, as her sister had died, and at Lee's hands. (Lee vehemently denied the awful charge.) For pitiful story of attempt by Hamblin's Indian boy to save the girls, see appendix.
Note.- Since the massacre, rumors have been persistent to the effect that prior to their death those girls were outraged by those who murdered them. The charge was so terrible, so diabolical and inhuman that, as a Mormon, and later on an "apostate," I could not believe the rumor - it appeared to be just another Mormon canard to further blacken the memory of John D. Lee. There was, however, something in the terms of the girl's appeal that is inexplicable when considered apart from the rumor. Last winter (1910) I met a devout Mormon woman in southern Utah, who was a girl at the date of the massacre, and she assured me that the rumor is entirely trustworthy; that she remembers hearing the women of St. George discuss the awful fate of the Dunlap girls. "And," the lady concluded "we Mormons have never been accused of charging crimes to our people when the accusations were not true."
.......
"Notwithstanding that the people of southern Utah are familiar with nearly all the incidents of the massacre they have thus far, as a general truth, failed to grasp the central force that was responsible for the devilish act. Their abiding faith in the "divine mission of Joseph Smith," and their certainty that the Mormon "prophets" can do no wrong, blinds them to the forces that unerringly led up to the massacre. But there are scores of young men and women who are now demanding that the truth be told. Their reason teaches them that the assigned causes, or reasons, for the massacre, are insufficient to account for all the facts. They are now asking: "Why did those fifty-five men, professed followers of the merciful Son of God, commit a crime at which the civilized world stood aghast? If it was murder for plunder, why is it that only one assassin was punished for the crime when the name of every one of the murderers was known to the leading religious and civil authorities of Utah at the time of Lee's trial, or could have been obtained had there been any inclination to punish them? 'There is something hidden,' they say, ''something mysterious and inexplicable as to the impelling motive to the crime. What is it?'
" While not complete, the youth of Utah, and the people of the world, may, in the foregoing pages, learn the basic causes that led up to the Mountain Meadows massacre."
http://www.utlm.org/onlinebooks/mea...HE%20EMIGRANTS.
There were two girls one sixteen and, one eighteen, they ran and hid in the oak brush. The Indian chief found the two girls and brought them to John D. Lee and said, that they are to pretty to kill. There names were Rachel, and Ruth Dunlap. It was reported that the girls pled for mercy and told Lee, that they would work for him, and love him all his life, and serve his needs as to whatever he wanted them to do, but the girls were both..... Sexually Abused ....and afterwards there throats cut from ear to ear .... There was personal testimony at the 2ND trial of John D Lee from Jacob Hamblins 15 year old Indian boy, whom Hamblin had adopted, testified that he sat on the hill above where the girls were hiding, and wittinessed the sexual abuse and murder of the Dunlap girls, by John D.Lee.
http://www.mindspring.com/~engineer_my_dna/mormon/mountai2.htmAnother account:
http://asms.k12.ar.us/armem/brondel/archive/rea.htm Young Sarah E. Dunlap was a nursing baby and lay cradled in her mother's arms with one tiny arm up to her mother's neck, when her mother was shot, and an arrow pierced Sarah's forearm, shattering a bone. Powder burns affected her eyes. Her sisters, Rebecca, age 7, and Louisa, age 4, were in the wagon with the young children. Her teenage sisters Rachael and Ruth escaped the massacre and hid in the bushes for a while, but they were hunted down and murdered. Being the youngest (age one), her knowledge of the events were, no doubt, only what was related to her by others. Captain James Lynch brought Sarah and the other children back to Arkansas to live. When he was released from the army he returned to visit the children and began a whirlwind romance that resulted in a marriage between Captain Lynch and Sarah.
http://www.scsc.k12.ar.us/2002Outwest/NaturalHistory/Projects/JeffersE/newpage1.htm
