The Ghosts of Mountain Meadows

In September 1857, the members of the Fancher Wagon Train, enroute from Arkansas to southern California via the Old Spanish Trail, encamped in an idyllic oasis high in the mountains of southwestern Utah Territory, on the very cusp of the Great Basin.

- BY PAUL ANDREW HUTTON

"The scene of the massacre, even at this late date, was horrible to look upon. Women's hair, in detached locks and in masses, hung to the sage bushes... Parts of little children's dresses and of female costume dangled from the shrubbery or lay scattered about and among these... there gleamed bleached white by the weather, the skulls and other bones of those who had suffered." -Major James Carleton

It was a well-off party of over 120 souls, rumored to be carrying a large sum of gold coins, and they needed to rest their horses before the terrible desert crossing to the Meadows (Las Vegas) that lay before them.

At dawn on Monday, September 7, as the emigrants awakened to boil coffee and cook breakfast, they were suddenly attacked by unknown assailants from the surrounding hills and ravines. The determined pioneers corralled their wagons and drove back the assailants. Without water and with many dead and wounded to contend with, the Fancher party boldly defended their position from attack after attack, inflicting heavy casualties on their supposed Indian foes. They sent messengers out under cover of darkness to the Mormon settlements to the north and to the trail toward California to the south. They were all killed.