Horses

Horses are more than background to the book’s accounts of conflict: they make rapid travel possible, mark the wealth of a wagon train, and become part of the spoils claimed after violence. Their appearances trace a shift from practical transportation to prized property, showing how animals could carry news, signify vulnerability, and sharpen disputes over who controlled the resources left behind.

Working Animals in Moments of Crisis

On September 16, Porter Rockwell was riding to help a Mormon family recover possessions from a burned home when he encountered Lieutenant Frank Worrell on horseback. Worrell was pursuing a sheriff who had shown sympathy for the Mormons. Rockwell shot Worrell during the encounter. The horse’s presence places the episode in motion: Worrell was actively riding after the sheriff, while Rockwell’s journey had begun as an effort to assist a family displaced by arson. In this account, a horse is neither a symbol nor a prize but part of the immediate circumstances in which local violence escalated.

A different kind of crisis gives horses a decisive role as transportation. Porter Rockwell was carrying mail from Utah toward Missouri when Abraham Smoot told him that federal troops were preparing to march against the Saints and that their mail contract had been canceled. Rockwell immediately turned back toward Utah, traveling with Smoot and two other companions. At Fort Laramie, he hitched a buckboard to the two fastest horses in the Mormon corral and drove them hard toward Salt Lake City. They covered 513 miles in just over five days. The speed of the horses turned alarming news into a report delivered in time for Brigham Young to announce the impending invasion at the Pioneer Day gathering. Here the animals’ value lies in their capacity for sustained, urgent travel: they connect a distant warning to a public response.

The Fancher Train’s Valuable Stock

Horses also figure in the account of the Fancher train as part of a large and conspicuously valuable stock of animals. The Arkansas emigrants brought approximately twelve hundred head of stock, including prize Texas longhorns and a Thoroughbred racehorse described as especially beautiful. The racehorse alone was reportedly worth $3,000, an extraordinary sum in the currency of the time. A rumor also held that the train carried a strongbox containing thousands of dollars in gold coins. In a territory facing drought and the prospect of hunger, the stock’s scale and value made the train’s wealth difficult to overlook.

The book does not treat the animals’ value as a sufficient explanation for the attack. It presents that wealth alongside a political climate shaped by hostility, persecution, and calls for vengeance. The Fancher party arrived in Utah amid preparations for war and was regarded with suspicion as it continued south and west toward California. Its prize animals made its resources conspicuous, but the narrative places the train’s peril more broadly in the Saints’ cultivated sense of grievance and the rumors circulating about the emigrants. Horses thus belong to the material circumstances of the tragedy without reducing its causes to a desire for property.

Cattle, Horses, and the Mountain Meadow

In the account of the September 1 meeting between Brigham Young and Paiute leaders, the animals at issue are described chiefly as cattle: Brigham gave the leaders the emigrant cattle along the Old Spanish Trail, meaning the Fancher train’s prize herd. The book notes that the Paiutes had seen the train’s livestock when they camped nearby a week earlier. This detail connects the animals to the plan against the emigrants, while distinguishing the wider herd from the horses singled out in the account of what happened afterward.

After the massacre, the dead emigrants’ property was taken. Historian Will Bagley’s account, as presented in the book, says the Paiutes received about twenty horses and mules, while Mormon officers claimed the best animals. The division was unequal, and the animals became a source of envy and conflict in the poor country of southern Utah. Some neighbors believed John D. Lee had cheated them of their share. Horses and mules were therefore not merely remnants of the wagon train: their distribution exposed tensions among the people who had participated in or benefited from the violence.

Changing Meaning and Narrative Role

Across these episodes, horses change meaning according to who rides, owns, or claims them. Under Rockwell, a fast pair makes it possible to carry a warning across hundreds of miles; beneath Worrell, a horse carries a pursuer through a local confrontation. In the Fancher account, horses belong to a wealthy emigrant train whose stock becomes part of the stakes surrounding its journey. After the massacre, the surviving animals are divided unevenly, and that division creates further resentment.

The recurrence of horses links separate conflicts without making the animals responsible for human decisions. Their speed serves communication and movement; their market value makes wealth visible; their seizure and allocation reveal the competing claims left in the wake of violence. In the book’s wider account, this changing function gives the animals a quiet narrative significance: they register how urgently people move, what they possess, and who is permitted to take what remains.