CARROLLTON — Seventeen children survived the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857.
Much has been written about the killing of about 120 people - mostly Arkansans - on the wagon train in the high desert of Utah Territory. But what became of the children of the massacre?
Many of them went on to live happy, adventurous lives, said Burr Fancher, a descendent and biographer of Capt. Alexander Fancher, who led the wagon train bound for California.
One became a sheriff 's deputy. Another was a mailcarrier who was robbed by Jesse James.
A baby whose arm was almost severed by a musket ball in the attack grew up to marry the man who rescued the children from Mormon homes two years after the massacre.
Three of the Arkansas orphans were kept at the home of John D. Lee, the Mormon militia leader who led the attack on the Fancher-Baker wagon train and was executed by firing squad in 1877. Several authorities say Lee was an adopted son of the Mormon leader Brigham Young. One of the orphans remembered playing withYoung's children while living with Lee.
On Saturday, the Mountain Meadows Massacre Foundation and Mountain Meadows Association held a re-enactment of the return of 15 of those children to Carrollton, the Boone County town from which the Fancher-Baker wagon train departed 152 years ago last April. This month marks the sesquicentennial of the return of the surviving children to Northwest Arkansas. Two of the older children were returned later, after they testified for the federal government.
"I just want everybody to think about what it must have been like to retrieve those little children, to bring them back, to see them coming over that hill," said Karen Fancher, 56, of Alpena, as she choked back tears. Karen Fancher was dressed in period clothing and playing the part of Mrs. Railey, a woman who cared for the orphans on the way back to Arkansas.
About 50 people gathered under a large tent at Carrollton Park as rain drizzled off and on. Most were locals. Many were Fanchers. Other people came from as far away as New York.
Barbara Brown, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, came from Utah for the ceremony. She served as content editor for the book Massacre at Mountain Meadows, by Ronald W. Walker and Richard E. Turley.
"When I studied it, I was absolutely heartbroken and totally devastated," she said after the two-hour ceremony Saturday. "I just wanted to meet the descendants of the victims. ... What used to anguish me is there was nothing I could do for those people 150 years ago, but I came out here and realized there was something I could do for their kin."
Brown said this was her fourth trip to Northwest Arkansas. She has been working with the Mormon church to have the site of the massacre declared a National Historic Landmark.
A few direct descendants of the orphan children were in the crowd Saturday, including Mary Tryphena Wilson Anderson, 91, of Green Forest. She's a granddaughter of Triphenia Fancher Wilson, who was 2 years old at the time of the massacre. Three younger generations of Wilsons were also in attendance, all direct descendants of Triphenia Fancher Wilson.
Fifteen of the children were returned either on Sept. 16 or 28 in 1859. Historical documents varied on the exact date. They spent one night at the Old Yell Lodge before being brought to the Carrollton Square the next morning and distributed among relatives.
THE ATTACK
In 1857, tensions were running high between the federal government and the Mormon church. Concerned about the Mormon practice of polygamy, which was disavowed by the church in 1890, PresidentJames Buchanan sent federal troops to Utah Territory in 1857 to quell what he thought might develop into a rebellion.
Mormon leaders were preparing for war. It was at the height of this tension that the Fancher-Baker wagon train attempted to pass through Utah Territory.
On Sept. 7, 1857, Mormon militiamen and a small group of Paiute Indians attacked the wagon train. The Arkansans circled their wagons, dug rifle pits and fought back. After four days, Lee offered a truce and made promises of safe passage back to Cedar City, Utah.
The Arkansas pioneers had little choice but to agree. Most of the young children and the settlers' weapons were loaded into a wagon that was sent ahead.
About a mile from the siege site, the militiamen and the Paiutes attacked the settlers, shooting them at short range with rifles and pistols.
Everyone on the wagon train was killed except for 17 children under the age of 8, which is below the age one can be held accountable for his sins in the Mormon faith. They were divided up and taken into Mormon homes.
SURVIVORS
U.S. officials didn't know surviving children were being kept in Mormon homes until June 22, 1858, according to an 1893 article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
"Up to that time, it was not known by the relatives and friends of the Fancher train that a single soul had escaped death," according to the newspaper.
In a July 27, 1857, affidavit, U.S. Capt. James Lynch described the Arkansas orphans when he and soldiers found them in Mormon homes as being in "a most wretched and deplorable condition, with little or no clothing, covered with filth and dirt." Some of the children were said to have gone blind from disease while in the care of the Mormons.
Three of the orphans lived at the home of Lee until rescued by Lynch and Dr. Jacob Forney, U.S. superintendent of Utah. The survivors who lived with Lee include Triphenia Fancher, her brother Christopher and Mary Elizabeth Baker Terry. Terry recalled playing with the children of Brigham Young.
The investigation dragged on for a year before the children were sent home.
In Arkansas, relatives were elated to hear the children were still alive and would be coming home.
"I never will forget the day we finally got back to Arkansas," Sallie Baker Mitchell, a survivor whose ear was nicked by the bullet that killed her father, wrote in a September 1940 article in the Boston Advertiser - American Weekly, as the only survivor still living at that time. "You would have thought we were heroes.They had a buggy parade for us through Harrison.
"I remember I called all of the women I saw 'mother.' I guess I was still hoping to find my own mother, andevery time I called a woman 'mother,' she would break out crying."
Some of the children were recognized immediately. Others were recognized by unusual traits such as a genetically deformed fingernail.
After they grew up, some of orphans had tales to tell, but they weren't always about the massacre. William Twitty Baker, a mail carrier, said he was robbed by Jesse James.
Emberson Milum Tackett was a deputy sheriff in Yavapai County, Ariz., who chased moonshiners in Northwest Arkansas and served on a posse to help quell the Graham-Tewksbury feud in Arizona.
After being shot in the arm, Sarah Dunlap Lynch, who was 1 year old at the time of the attack, lost her eyesight because of an infection she got in a Mormon home in Utah.
She had befriended James Lynch, who was ill and thought to be dying. Lynch, then 74, recovered and traveled from his home in Texasto marry her in Arkansas in 1893. She was 38. They lived in Hampton, in Calhoun County, until Sarah Lynch died in 1901 and James Lynch died in 1910.
Lynch had found the hidden children, escorted them 1,500 miles home, kept in touch with them throughout the Civil War and the rest of his life, then married the youngest of the survivors.
One of the greatest tragedies of the American West became "the consuming passion" of Lynch'e life, wrote Burr Fancher in his biography Captain Alexander Fancher.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 19, 23, 24 on 09/20/2009