Will Bagley

The Mountain Meadow

The Mountain Meadow

On the southern rim of the Great Basin in southeastern Utah, three mountain ranges rise from the Escalante Desert. To the northeast their heights command the broken red-rock country of Zion National Park, while the peaks to the south and southwest overlook the Mojave Desert of Nevada and the Sonoran ranges of northern Arizona. The Bull Valley Mountains shelter an alpine valley a mile wide and six miles long that is filled with snow in the winter and verdant with grass and flowers in the spring. The low ridge that divides the valley’s meadows marks the southern limit of the Great Basin. Perched over a mile above sea level, this remote spot offers a green refuge from the wide deserts that surround it. The valley narrows at its southern end, where a small creek breaks through the mountain wall to cut a torturous canyon. Here nestles a natural campsite beside a spring whose waters flow to the Sea of Cortez. By 1300 a.d. bands of Southern Paiutes roamed here, but the Paiutes’ own traditions say this country has always been their home. Depressions in this sheltered bowl still mark the sites of their wikiups and storage pits. For generations the Paiutes hunted rabbits and deer in the meadows, gathered its pine nuts and grasses, and escaped the intense summer heat of the surrounding lowlands. 

In the seventeenth century, long before any Paiute saw a European, bitter change disrupted their way of life. Unknown and terrible plagues and pestilence took a mysterious toll on the people. New trading ways persuaded the powerful bands who preyed on the Paiutes to steal their children and sell them as slaves in the Spanish colonies to the south. The meadow became a resting place for raiding parties on their way to plunder the ranchos of California, and by 1830 American fur trappers and Mexican mule traders from Taos and Santa Fé had followed Indian trails across the Mojave Desert to blaze a road of commerce to the Pacific. Soon the mountain cove was “where the annual caravan from California to New Mexico halted and recruited for some weeks.” To survive this onslaught of enemies, the Paiutes struck like ghosts at the traders and raiders who crossed their country, extracting some recompense for the toll on their lands.

The first white explorer to describe this oasis camped here in 1843. John C. Frémont delighted in its refuge, for “we found here an extensive mountain meadow, rich in bunch grass and fresh with numerous springs of clear water, all refreshing and delightful to look upon.” He named it las Vegas de Santa Clara—the meadows of the Santa Clara—and called it “the terminating point of the desert.” He wrote that the Paiutes had killed one of his herders, but “the Pathfinder” failed to count the Indians he slaughtered to avenge the killing. A later explorer found the meadows “more beautiful than any we had yet see—rich in waving grass, and watered by numerous rills.” The discovery of gold in California brought new significance to the meadow—strategically, it made the “southern route” through Utah to California practical, for the meadows gave wagon travelers an opportunity to rest (or, as the emigrants said, “recruit”) their animals and steel themselves for the arduous crossing of the Mojave Desert. Emigrants soon passed through the meadows every fall, praising the abundant springs and lush fields, full of “the best of grass & plenty of it.” There was “fine & tender grass enough growing on this Vegas to fatten a thousand head of horses or cattle.” This traveler also noted that “the Piutes at this place are said to be the worst on the route.”

After the American conquest of the southwest, Latter-day Saints came to settle in the Paiute lands. The “Mormons” gave simple, homely names to the mountain ranges, calling them the Pine Valley, the Red, and the Beaver Dam mountains, while the range that sheltered las Vegas de Santa Clara they named the Bull Valley Mountains. One of their scouts called this oasis “the most beautiful little valley that I have seen in the mountains south.” Unlike the traders and explorers who shot first and asked questions later, these whites befriended the Paiutes. The “Saints” believed they shared the blood of Israel with the people they called Piedes, and won the beleaguered Paiutes’ loyalty when they stopped the trade in Indian children. The Paiutes soon developed both respect and fear for their new neighbors, whose magic was amazingly powerful but whose demands for land, water, and grass were never-ending.

In the fall of 1857, the Paiutes watched their allies execute a ritual of blood and vengeance that left even the most hard-bitten tribesman shaken. After a five-day siege at the meadow, the Mormons accepted the surrender of an Arkansas overland company in exchange for a promise of safe conduct back to the settlements. The Mormons carefully segregated their prisoners into three groups—men, women and children, and infants and wounded—and marched them north from the camp. In early twilight at the rim of the Great Basin, the militia shot down some thirty unarmed men. Young white interpreters, disguised in paint and feathers and assisted by a small band of native freebooters, rushed from ambush and “cut the throats” of the terrified women and children. More than two dozen adult women and some forty children, ranging in age from infancy to eighteen years, died in this assault. The wounded adults were shot or clubbed to death, while seventeen children, none over six years of age and some painfully wounded, were spared. The Paiutes recalled that the leader of the whites “was like a wild beast who had tasted of fresh blood. He was turned into a demon.” 

In the first light of the next morning, the Paiutes later said they watched white women from a nearby settlement take the clothes from the dead females. The Mormon soldiers returned, stripped the men, and tossed the corpses into ravines, covering the bodies with a thin layer of dirt that did little to hide them from the wolves and coyotes that prowled the meadow. The white men met in a great circle to make magic and swear a blood oath, vowing that their grim ritual would remain forever a profound secret.

The campsite in the lower meadow became known as Monument Point and Murderers’ Spring, but the stream kept its Paiute name, Magotsu Creek. The Mormons called the haunted valley they had bathed in blood the Mountain Meadow.[1]

[1] Information on Paiute use of Mountain Meadows is from conversation notes with Marion Jacklin, Dixie Forest Archaeologist, 10 June 1996. For John C. Frémont’s description, see his Report of the exploring expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the year 1842, and to Oregon and North California in the years 1843–44, 270–71. Gwinn Harris Heap’s account is in Central Route to the Pacific, 231. Emigrant Orville Pratt’s report is found in Hafen and Hafen, Old Spanish Trail: Santa Fé to Los Angeles, 353–54, while LDS scout George Washington Bean’s comment is from Brooks, “The Mountain Meadows: Historic Stopping Place on the Spanish Trail,” Utah Historical Quarterly (Spring 1967), 139. H. L. Halleck to W. E. D. Whiting, 6 November 1900, provided details of the massacre he heard from the Paiutes in 1858. Many (if not most) early sources referred to “the Mountain Meadow,” but standard usage is now plural.