William Dame—Isaac Haight

William Dame and Isaac Haight were linked as superior and subordinate in the southern Utah militia, but their relationship became more than a military one when the Fancher emigrant party was besieged at Mountain Meadows. Haight sought Dame’s direction before acting; Dame authorized decisive action. After the Mountain Meadows Massacre, that authority became the center of an angry dispute: Haight insisted that Dame had ordered the killing and must share responsibility for it.

Command and the decision to seek orders

By Monday afternoon, Haight knew that the attack on the Fancher party was not going as planned. He wanted to send Mormon militiamen into the high country to finish the operation, but members of the Cedar City community argued that an action of such gravity required explicit approval from Brigham Young. Haight responded by sending a rider to Salt Lake City with a letter describing John D. Lee’s encirclement of the emigrants and asking what should be done. The exchange placed Haight between local urgency and a higher authority whose answer had not yet arrived.

With no reply from Young in hand, Haight turned to Dame, his immediate superior. Dame commanded the southern Utah militias, and Haight rode twenty miles north to Parowan, waking him in the middle of the night to ask what to do about the besieged train. The distance and the hour make the chain of command tangible: Haight did not simply proceed on his own, but carried the decision to the officer above him. Dame, according to the account, told him that no further word from Great Salt Lake was necessary and issued an order to do away with the emigrants. The decision was conveyed to Lee at Mountain Meadows by Major John Higbee, who arrived with more than fifty militiamen from Cedar City.

An order amid changing circumstances

Dame’s directive came as the earlier plan had faltered. The Fancher party had resisted the surprise assault, and most of the Paiute fighters had left the meadow by the night of September 10. The Saints feared that the remaining force was too small to overwhelm the emigrants directly, and turned to deception to end the standoff. On September 11, Lee sent William Bateman under a white flag with a false offer of escort and protection in exchange for the emigrants’ weapons. The connection between Dame’s order and the massacre is therefore not simply that he held superior rank: Haight had sought his judgment, Dame had authorized decisive action, and the militia’s subsequent course shifted from a failed assault to a surrender arranged by deception.

The evidence also shows that Haight had sought Young’s direction before consulting Dame, and that Young’s written instruction not to meddle arrived only after the massacre. That timing is important to the relationship. Dame’s order was given in the absence of the answer Haight had requested from the church leader; it did not resolve the broader question of authority, but it supplied an immediate command that Haight and the men at the meadow could act upon. The later arrival of Young’s letter could not undo what had already happened.

The confrontation after the massacre

Dame and Haight arrived at Mountain Meadows from Cedar City the morning after the killing. Lee, whose birthday it was, escorted his commanding officers to the site. There, Dame was confronted with the results of the operation. Lee later recalled that Dame remained silent for a time, appeared pale and uneasy, and seemed frightened. This reported reaction marks a sharp contrast with the confidence of the order attributed to him: at the meadow, the consequences were no longer abstract or distant.

Dame expressed shock and tried to disavow responsibility. Haight answered that Dame had ordered the killing and that nothing had been done except under his orders. The exchange exposes the central fracture between the two men. Haight’s accusation was not that Dame had merely failed to stop him; he presented Dame as the officer whose command had authorized the act. Dame, by contrast, said that he had not understood how many emigrants there were and that, had he known, he would have had nothing to do with it. His stated objection concerned the scale he said he had not anticipated, while Haight insisted that this did not release him from the order he had given.

Haight then told Lee that Dame had counseled and ordered the action but was now trying to retreat from it. He insisted that Dame must stand by what he had done and threatened to expose him rather than allow the blame to fall on Haight alone. The outburst turns the military hierarchy inside out: the subordinate who had gone to his superior for a decision now publicly demanded that the superior accept responsibility for it. Dame had no adequate answer to the charge, fell silent, and turned to supervising the burial of the dead.

Responsibility and the aftermath

Dame’s role after the confrontation complicates, but does not erase, the dispute over responsibility. He did not leave the site after expressing shock. Instead, he attended to the disposal of the bodies, which were placed in shallow graves because the hard ground and lack of tools made burial difficult. Scavengers unearthed the remains within days. The episode links the two men beyond the moment of authorization: both were present in the immediate aftermath, while Haight’s insistence that Dame could not disown the order became part of the account of how responsibility was contested.

The relation also sits within a wider effort to conceal the massacre. After the hurried burial, those present gathered in a circle to give thanks, and the overseers reiterated that the Indians alone should be blamed and that the Mormons had taken no part. The evidence describes a collective vote to punish anyone who disclosed the truth; it does not identify each participant in that decision. What it does establish about Dame and Haight is a stark personal conflict over an order followed by a shared presence at the scene and its aftermath. Their relationship is thus neither a simple story of a commander and obedient subordinate nor a settled allocation of guilt: it is a record of delegated authority, a deadly outcome, and an attempt by the officers to define who would bear the blame.