Mountain Meadows • For nearly 16 decades, a skull belonging to one of the youngest victims of the Mountain Meadows Massacre lay hidden in the collections of an East Coast military museum.
This summer, the skull made the journey back to Utah and will be laid to rest Saturday in a vault at the massacre site, where relatives of the doomed Arkansas immigrants led a memorial service honoring the children.
Saturday’s funeral mourns not only the unknown young boy or girl whose head was ruptured by bullet fired by a Mormon settler in one of most inexplicable acts of violence in U.S. history, but all 20 of the children who were murdered to ensure they would not bear witness to the crime.
For decades the siege and massacre sites were largely neglected and the story of the tragedy only partially told, with the blame falling on Paiute Indians who had been recruited by the militiamen to help attack the wagon train.
But since the late 1990s, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has taken a stronger role in developing the area into a National Historic Landmark and promoting a more complete account of what happened. Those efforts reached a new milestone Saturday with the unveiling of new signage at some of the key sites associated with the tragedy.
The verbiage on the 19 signs, crafted in collaboration with the three main descendant groups, emphasize the experience of the victims, many of them prosperous residents of Carrollton, Ark., on their way to the nation’s newest state on the West Coast.
One panel recounts future Arkansas Sen. James Berry’s experience of seeing 15 surviving children return to Carrollton as orphans and gathered in the village courthouse. One of the girls, Sarah Dunlap, had been shot through the arm, which dangled uselessly by her side.
The signs provide ample details about the immigrants, identifying many by name, but is silent on why they were killed. No words are provided on what would turn farmers and and family men into mass murderers.
Around 50 Mormon pioneers participated in the slaughter but none are named except John D. Lee, the sole perpetrator found guilty. He was executed 20 years later at the scene of the crime.
Church officials have long denied that orders for the attack came from Salt Lake City, but they did express “profound regret” at the 150th anniversary observances in 2007.
“What was done here long ago by members of our church represents a terrible and inexcusable departure from Christian teachings and conduct,” said Elder Henry B. Eyring. He also expressed regret for the blame that was “unjustly” cast on the Paiute people.
The child’s skull that was interred Saturday had been collected from the massacre site by U.S. Army soldiers under the command of Major James Carleton, who had been dispatched to investigate nearly two years after the massacre. The victims had not been adequately buried and their bones were scattered in three main sites. The soldiers gathered the bones and placed them in crypts they built on site.
The skull was kept as evidence and wound up in what became the National Museum of Health and Medicine (NMHM), established during the Civil War to promote understanding of military medicine.
While all three descendant groups’ endorsed the return of the skull to Mountain Meadows, some relatives argued it should first be subjected to DNA analysis in hopes of identifying who it belong to. Forensic analysis indicates it belonged to a child between the ages of six and 10, which narrows the possibilities to less than a dozen children.
Descendant Catherine Baker contends that every effort should be made to identify the remains of a murder victim. She believes the skull should be interred by the grave of a sibling who might have survived the attack.
But the museum rejected the request for testing in favor of returning the child’s remains to the site where his or her family is also buried. Museum officials said that DNA analysis, which would have to be compared with DNA with numerous descendants, could not conclude with much certainty who the skull belonged to since many of the children on the wagon train were related to each other.