Investigations and Prosecutions Relating To The Mountain Meadows Massacre - Federal Investigations in 1859

Federal Investigations in 1859

The Utah War interrupted further federal investigation and the LDS Church conducted no investigation of its own. Then in 1859, two years after the massacre, investigations were made by Hurt's superior, Jacob Forney, and also by U.S. Army Brevet Major James Henry Carleton. In Carleton's investigation, at Mountain Meadows he found women's hair tangled in sage brush and the bones of children still in their mothers' arms. Carleton later said it was "a sight which can never be forgotten." After gathering up the skulls and bones of those who had died, Carleton's troops buried them and erected a rock cairn.

Carleton's report of May 1859 included verbatim statements from Jacob Hamblin and a young Snake man, aged 17 or 18, who lived with the Hamblins and went by the name of Albert Hamblin. Both attempted to blame the local Paiute Indians, but Carleton analyzed the contradictions between the evidence he encountered and their statements to suggest that their accounts were false in several respects. Carleton tricked Albert Hamblin into revealing the identities of some of the Mormons present, by telling him that Jacob Hamblin had already informed Carleton that John D. Lee and other Mormons had been present. Albert then admitted that, apart from Lee, also present were the Mormons Prime Coleman, Amos Thornton, Richard Robinson, and "Brother" Dickinson from Pinto Creek. Speaking to Paiute Indian chiefs, Carleton was told by Chief "Jackson", head of the Santa Clara band, that a letter from Brigham Young had ordered the emigrants to be killed, and that 60 Mormons, painted and disguised as Indians, led by Bishop John D. Lee and Isaac C. Haight, had fulfilled this order. Another Paiute chief, Touche, then living on the Virgin River, told Carleton that a letter from Brigham Young to the same effect was brought down to his band by a young man named Huntington, an Indian interpreter living in Salt Lake City at the time of Carleton's report.

By August 1859, Jacob Forney, Superintendent of Indian Affairs for Utah had retrieved the children from the Mormon families housing them and gathered them in preparation of transporting them to their relatives in Arkansas. He placed the children in the care of families in Santa Clara prior to transportation. Forney and Capt. Reuben Campbell (US Army) related that Lee sold the children to Mormon families in Cedar City, Harmony, and Painter Creek. Sarah Francis Baker, who was three years old at the time of the massacre, later said, "They sold us from one family to another." As early as May 1859, Forney reported that none of the children had ever lived with the Native Americans, but had been transported by white men from the scene of the massacre to the house of Jacob Hamblin. In July 1859 he wrote of his refusal to pay claims by families who alleged they purchased the children from the Native Americans, stating he knew it was not true. Forney had seen to the gathering up the surviving children from local families after which they were united with extended family members in Arkansas and other states. Families received compensation for the children's care, including Jacob Hamblin; some protested that the amounts were insufficient—although Carleton's report criticized the conditions under which some of the children lived.

Forney concluded that the Paiutes did not act alone and the massacre would not have occurred without the white settlers, while Carleton's report to the U.S. Congress called the mass killings a "heinous crime", blaming both local and senior church leaders for the massacre.

A federal judge brought into the territory after the Utah War, Judge John Cradlebaugh, in March 1859 convened a grand jury in Provo, Utah concerning the massacre, but the jury declined any indictments.