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By Root 1422 0

to rejoin Charlie Fancher. They rode north to the town of Harrison, and from there west to the town of Berryville, where the wagon train was assembled, and the people that Fancher had “recruited” from all over the Ozarks, over 140 of them, got into the wagons. Charlie Fancher started the wagon train moving west, Benjamin driving one of the lead wagons with eight people in it, westward out of Arkansas and across the national boundary line into Indian territory, where occasionally they saw parties or even camps of Indians, but had no conflicts with any of them, until, weeks later, in a valley called Mountain Meadows, in a place called Utah, they were suddenly surrounded by a large band of mounted Indians in war paint who began shooting at them, not with bows and arrows but with rifles.

Charlie Fancher ordered the wagons to form into a circle and everybody got behind the wagons and Benjamin and all the other men who could handle a rifle returned the fire of the Indians, killing many of them, and keeping them at bay for hours into the night, then all of the following day, and the one after that, three days in all, until a white flag appeared among the enemy, a flag of truce under which approached a group of men. These were not Indians but white men, whose leader introduced himself as John D. Lee and told Charlie Fancher that his wagon train must turn back and that he and his fellow white men would protect their retreat from the Indians as far back as Cedar City. But the man insisted that Fancher and all his party must go on foot and unarmed in order to allay the suspicions of the Indians, a condition which Fancher was reluctant to accept, yet a condition which had no alternative except to stay and fight, which few of the Fancher party wanted to do, among those few Benjamin, who smelled something suspicious in the whole business, but had no liberty to disobey his leader, Fancher. At length Fancher ordered his party to yield to the retreat order, to leave their wagons and weapons and begin the march toward Cedar City. They never reached it, because as soon as they were out of sight of their wagons the Indians came again, along with those treacherous white men, and slaughtered every last single one of them, sparing only the youngest children.

Benjamin, as he felt the searing bullet tearing life out of his breast, was sorry that he had ever left home.

There was no survivor to return the news to Arkansas, but sometime later Eli Willard from Connecticut, hawking musical instruments this time, happened to bring with him a copy of a New York newspaper, to leave with Lizzie Swain and her family, who had such a hankering for occasional news from the outside world, although they could not read, and nobody could read except Jacob, who didn’t mind reading to Lizzie and her brood the newspaper Eli Willard had dropped off (and his business was pretty good this time around; to the populace of Stay More he sold three banjos, a piano, a parlor organ, and other instruments, including a fiddle that Jacob bought for his son Isaac, and a Jew’s harp that Noah bought for himself). Lizzie and her children assembled in Jacob’s dogtrot and he began reading them the newspaper. He hadn’t read very far, however, before he came to a big headline, “MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE” with a sub-headline “140 Arkansans Slain in Utah Valley” and a sub-headline “Suspect Mormon Plot.” Jacob’s voice quavered as he read the text of the item, and his voice broke when he came to the name of Charles Fancher, because that was the name of the man Benjamin had told him he was going with. Jacob stopped altogether when he came to the words, “…not one single survivor, except a few children under the age of seven who have been discovered to be in the custody of the Mormons in Salt Lake City.” He read the rest of the item silently to himself, as Lizzie and her children stared at him. It had been charged that Mormons had incited and directed the attack, to keep the Fancher party out of Utah, although the wagon train was merely passing through Utah on its way to California. The