Wesley P. Larsen

Wesley P. Larsen, a Latter-day Saint and former dean of the college of science at Southern Utah University, became a central challenger to the accepted account of how three members of John Wesley Powell’s expedition died in 1869. In 1980 he found an 1883 letter that appeared to place their killings inside a Toquerville ward house and implicate local Saints. Larsen used the document to construct an alternative explanation involving fear of federal arrest, mistaken identities, and a concealed execution. His account did not settle the mystery: it gave the surviving doubts a documentary basis while leaving the decisive claims disputed.

Identity and discovery

Larsen entered the story not as a witness to the deaths but as a researcher who uncovered a long-hidden document. In 1980, he came across a letter in an old trunk in Toquerville, where it had remained for ninety-seven years. Written on February 17, 1883, by William Leany to John Steele, the letter referred to three men being killed in one room of the local ward house and to the subsequent killing of the person responsible. Those references suggested that the deaths traditionally attributed to the Shivwits might instead have occurred within the settlement.

The letter’s author gave Larsen reason to take its accusations seriously without making them straightforward proof. Leany had once been a trusted bodyguard to Brigham Young and was described as a faultless Saint. His standing had changed after he provided food to William Aden, a nineteen-year-old Gentile travelling with the Fancher wagon train, shortly before Aden was killed while seeking help for the besieged emigrants. Decades later, Leany was writing to Steele after being urged to repent for alleged wrongdoing. He responded with anger, denying the accusations against himself and accusing fellow Saints of grave crimes. The letter was therefore both a potentially revealing account and a personal dispute shaped by Leany’s own claims of innocence.

From allusion to historical hypothesis

Larsen compared Leany’s references to murder with the historical record and inferred that the events described had taken place in 1869. He found that the only three men murdered in southern Utah that year were William Dunn and the brothers Oramel Howland and Seneca Howland, members of Powell’s expedition. Their deaths had long been explained as an attack by the Shivwits after the men separated from the expedition and headed toward Mormon settlements. Larsen’s interpretation instead asked why local Saints might have wanted the explorers dead.

He placed the deaths in the aftermath of the Mountain Meadows massacre. Toquerville had been founded in 1858, and many of its first families were headed by men who had participated in the massacre. By 1869, federal efforts to arrest those responsible had intensified under President Ulysses S. Grant. A $5,000 bounty had been placed on Isaac Haight, John Higbee, and John D. Lee, and residents who feared arrest were living amid heightened suspicion. Larsen also pointed to the atmosphere that summer: Brigham Young warned of a coming federal invasion and ordered sentries posted at strategic points along the territory’s southern border.

In Larsen’s reconstruction, Dunn and the Howlands encountered one or more fugitives on the Shivwits Plateau. The fugitives may have taken the explorers for federal agents or bounty hunters. The men’s claim to have just completed the first descent of the Grand Canyon could have seemed implausible to people who believed the canyon impassable, strengthening suspicion rather than dispelling it. Larsen proposed that the explorers were taken to Toquerville, subjected to an improvised local proceeding, and killed. This was a conjecture about how the letter’s allusions might fit the political circumstances, not an established account of the men’s final journey.

Concealment and the possible executioner

Larsen’s scenario continued beyond the initial deaths. Within days, Powell arrived in St. George looking for his missing men. Because Powell was known as a friend and admirer of the Mormons, Larsen reasoned that Toquerville residents could have understood that the killing had been a serious mistake. In this version, they tried to divert suspicion by sending Apostle Erastus Snow a false telegram blaming the deaths on Indians. The letter then referred to a further killing, supposedly carried out to prevent additional bloodshed, followed by an oath of silence among the conspirators.

Larsen identified Eli N. Pace as a possible victim of that second killing, while keeping the identification explicitly tentative. He noted that Pace had three wives, one of them a daughter of John D. Lee, and suggested that Pace might have mistaken Powell’s men for bounty hunters closing in on his father-in-law. Pace died on January 29, 1870, in circumstances that Larsen described as mysterious. A local inquest ruled his death a suicide, but his family disputed the finding and sought another investigation. The second inquest, presided over by Erastus Snow and including Isaac Haight on its three-man jury, reached the same conclusion. The matter was closed by local church and judicial authorities, which the account describes as effectively the same institution. These details furnished circumstantial support for Larsen’s theory, but they did not establish that Pace killed the explorers or that he was subsequently killed by the community.

Challenging the accepted account

Most historians had dismissed earlier claims that Mormons, rather than the Shivwits, were responsible. The prevailing account rested substantially on reports by Jacob Hamblin and Powell that the Shivwits had confessed. Larsen questioned how much weight those reports deserved. Hamblin had a reputation for integrity among southern Utah Saints, but the historical record also showed that he had lied to protect the Church and had taken part in schemes for personal gain. Larsen therefore argued that Hamblin’s reliability could not simply be assumed because of his local reputation.

Powell’s presence during the reported confession seemed to offer independent confirmation, but Larsen challenged that too. Donald Worster had argued that Powell knew enough of Southern Paiute languages to recognize whether Hamblin translated accurately, making a fabricated confession without Powell’s awareness implausible. Larsen answered that Powell was not fluent in Paiute and that the Shivwit dialect was difficult for even other tribes to understand. On that account, Powell would have depended on Hamblin’s translation. Larsen also noted that Powell’s published narrative combined material from different visits to Utah Territory and included embellishments and omissions, so its dramatic account could not be treated as an unproblematic record of events.

Larsen further pointed to the anonymous telegram reporting the deaths on September 7, 1869. It said that two alleged Shivwit perpetrators were at the Washington Indian Camp with two of the missing men’s guns. The camp was less than ten miles from St. George, yet, according to the account, no one made a serious effort to arrest the men or recover the explorers’ bodies and property. Larsen observed that the telegram did not identify its sender or place of origin and suggested it could have come from Toquerville, where the telegraph office was located in the ward house implicated by Leany’s letter.

Limits and significance

The physical and practical circumstances also informed Larsen’s doubts. The Shivwits were described as a poor, generally docile people without firearms, while Dunn and the Howlands were experienced, armed men: they had two rifles and a shotgun and were alert to ambush. Dunn had previously been wounded four times by Comanches. Larsen’s argument did not prove that an attack by Shivwits was impossible, but it challenged the ease with which the accepted version was repeated, particularly given documented instances in which Latter-day Saints had blamed Indians for crimes committed by Mormons.

The book presents Larsen’s theory as a serious counterargument, not a resolved verdict. The letter’s allusions, the political climate, the disputed inquests, the telegram’s omissions, and questions about Hamblin’s translation accumulate into a case for doubt; none independently confirms who killed Dunn and the Howlands. Larsen’s significance lies in making that uncertainty difficult to ignore. His archival discovery shifted attention from a single account of confession toward the interests, silences, and credibility of those who transmitted it, while the deaths themselves remained unresolved.