Yet their youth did not prevent the orphans from leaving behind some of the most compelling accounts of what actually happened on that black Friday. “The scenes and incidents of the massacre were so terrible that they were indelibly stamped on my mind, notwithstanding I was so young at the time,” Nancy Huff Cates recalled in 1875. The tale of how a hard-bitten crew of colorful frontiersmen rescued these sad orphans is one of the great, untold stories of the American West.

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The first news of the worst massacre in the history of the Oregon and California trails appeared in the Los Angeles Star on October 3, 1857. Several children, it reported, “were picked up on the ground, and were being conveyed to San Bernardino.” A week later, that newspaper said the Indians saved 15 “infant children” and sold them to the Mormons at Cedar City. By the end of the year, word of the murders had reached the families of the victims in northwest Arkansas, where an angry citizen asked if the government would send enough men to Utah “to hang all the scoundrels and thieves at once, and give them the same play they give our women and children?”

William C. Mitchell’s married daughter, Nancy Dunlap, had been with the so-called Fancher party, as had a married son, Charles, and an unmarried son, Joel. Mitchell wrote to Senator W.K. Sebastian, chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs, expressing his hope that an infant grandson had survived. He asked Sebastian to investigate: “I must have satisfaction for the inhuman manner in which they have slain my children,” he wrote,“together with two brothers-in-law and seventeenof their children.” Many of the murdered emigrantscame from powerful Arkansas families. InFebruary 1858, the “deeply aggrieved” people ofCarroll County in northwest Arkansas petitioned Congress to appropriate funds to reclaim andreturn the children saved from the massacre.

Utah was still in a virtual state of rebellion, however, and not long after the massacre Mormon guerrillas had burned Army supply trains on the way to the territory. The government could do nothing much until June 1858, after Brigham Young’s hoped-for alliance with the Indians collapsed and the “Mormon Revolt” fizzled. Young grudgingly accepted a blanket pardon for treason and allowed the new governor and federal judges into the territory. That same month the U.S. Army established the nation’s largest military station at Camp Floyd, 40 miles from Salt Lake City. Alfred Cumming replaced Young as governor, and Jacob Forney took over as Indian superintendent. One of their first priorities was to locate the Mountain Meadows orphans and “use every effort to get possession” of them, as Washington had first orderedForney to do back in March.

Jacob Hamblin, the president of the Mormon Southern Indian Mission, met with Brigham Young in June and told Young “everything” about the murders, including that whites were involved. Young told him, “Don’t say anything about it,” and Hamblin loyally continued to blame the massacre on the Indians. Hamblin told Forney that 15 of the survivors were living near his ranch with white families. With considerable effort, Hamblin claimed, the children had been “recovered, bought and otherwise, from the Indians.” Forney hoped to go south in a month to recover the children, but he put off the job for almost a year, although he didtell Hamblin to collect the children.

In early August, Young sent orders to Isaac Haight and William Dame, religious leaders in southern Utah (and the same men who had given the direct orders to massacre the Arkansans). He told them to have Hamblin“gather up those children that were saved from theIndian Masacre [sic].” Forney also sent orders toHamblin, “All the children must be secured, at anycost or sacrifice, whether among whites or Indians.” He instructed Hamblin to take the childreninto his family. “You will be well compensated forall the trouble you and Mrs. Hamblin will have,”Forney promised.

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