Ulysses S. Grant

Ulysses S. Grant’s role in the account is brief but consequential: as president, he oversaw renewed federal efforts to capture those responsible for the Mountain Meadows Massacre. That pursuit intensified the danger facing John D. Lee, and Brigham Young’s response shows how federal pressure reached into the church’s leadership and its effort to protect a prominent fugitive.

Presidency and the pursuit of the massacre’s perpetrators

The account places Grant’s election in 1868, the year before John Wesley Powell’s expedition down the Grand Canyon. His administration made capturing and prosecuting the perpetrators of the Mountain Meadows Massacre a priority. This effort added force to an existing manhunt: even before the new federal dragnet, a $5,000 bounty had been placed on Isaac Haight, John Higbee, and John D. Lee.

The pursuit formed part of a tense federal-local conflict in southern Utah. Many of the men who had participated in the massacre had settled in Toquerville, founded in 1858, and some still lived there in 1869. By then, the prospect of arrest had become a source of constant fear among leading residents. Grant is not shown directing a particular arrest or appearing in Utah; his significance here lies in the administration’s renewed priority of bringing the fugitives to justice.

Pressure on Brigham Young and John D. Lee

After the massacre, many culpable Saints had fled to remote desert settlements to evade Gentile pursuers. Lee did not readily follow them. By 1869 he was the wealthiest man in southern Utah, with several homes and eighteen wives, and he was reluctant to leave his established life. When federal efforts intensified, Brigham Young grew concerned that Lee would be arrested and advised him to sell his property and make himself scarce.

Lee rejected that advice and stayed in the area, retreating to the local hills when federal agents or bounty hunters approached. During a 1870 excursion onto the Arizona Strip, Brigham again urged him to move far from Washington and Iron Counties and settle in the wilderness. Brigham feared that if Lee were caught, he might disclose secrets capable of bringing down the church. Grant’s administration did not itself resolve Lee’s case in this account, but the pressure it represented helped prompt Brigham’s effort to send his adopted son into hiding.

Narrative significance

Grant functions as a figure of federal enforcement rather than as a fully developed character. His administration’s priority supplies the political pressure behind Brigham’s alarm and Lee’s continuing evasion. The account sets that pressure against a local landscape in which massacre participants remained influential and federal pursuit was feared: Grant’s presidency marks a renewed attempt to bring them to account, while Brigham’s counsel reveals the church’s concern about what Lee might say if captured.