William Leany

William Leany was a Latter-day Saint whose aid to a young traveler and whose later accusations against fellow Saints linked two episodes of violence in southern Utah. A letter he wrote in 1883, discovered nearly a century later, became a significant clue in the unresolved deaths of William Dunn and the Howland brothers. Leany’s own account presents him as both a target of retaliation and a witness accusing others, though it does not establish that he participated in the killings he described.

Identity and Background

Leany had once been regarded as a faultless Saint and had served as a trusted bodyguard to Brigham Young. His earlier life also took him beyond Utah: while serving as a missionary in Paris, Tennessee, he faced mortal danger from an anti-Mormon mob. William Aden, a local doctor, helped rescue him and brought him to the Aden family home, where Leany met Aden’s young son, William. That encounter later gave Leany’s decision to aid the younger Aden a personal history reaching back years before their paths crossed again in Utah.

By 1883, Leany was sixty-eight and had been friends with John Steele for thirty-seven years. Steele was a respected judge and ecclesiastical leader, as well as Toquerville’s leading doctor and a bootmaker. Their long acquaintance made him the recipient of Leany’s extended, aggrieved letter, in which the older man answered a suggestion that he repent for alleged offenses. The exchange places Leany inside the community’s religious and civic life even as his account describes a bitter rupture with some of its members.

Aid to William Aden and Retaliation

In the summer of 1857, the Fancher wagon train passed through Parowan during a period of intense hostility toward outsiders. Leany recognized William Aden, the young man he had met at the Aden home in Tennessee, and invited him into his own home. He gave Aden dinner and sent him away with onions from his garden. The gesture was small and practical, but in the prevailing climate it was treated by local authorities as disloyalty because Aden belonged to a Gentile emigrant party.

When William Dame learned that Leany had helped Aden, he sent a man to Leany’s house. The man removed a post from Leany’s fence and used it to assault him; the attack nearly killed Leany. This retaliation marked a sharp reversal in the standing of a man previously trusted by Brigham Young. It also connected Leany’s personal history to the Fancher party’s passage through southern Utah: Aden would be shot a week later while trying to summon help for the besieged Arkansans.

The 1883 Letter

Leany’s letter to Steele was long and rambling, but its accusations were direct. He rejected the suggestion that he should repent for what other Toquerville brethren said he had done, insisting instead that his accusers bore guilt for acts he knew about. Rather than offering a general defense of his past, he set his grievance within a chain of violence that, in his telling, began with the assault on him and continued into later murders.

The letter’s most consequential references concerned three men killed in one room of the local Latter-day Saint ward house. Leany wrote of the deaths as known deeds of blood and stated that the person responsible for carrying out the killings had himself been killed to prevent further deaths. Five paragraphs later, he returned to the detail that the three men had been killed in one room of their own ward. The repetition made the location and number difficult to dismiss as incidental, while leaving the identities and circumstances unstated in the letter itself.

The Dunn and Howland Mystery

In 1980, Wesley P. Larsen, a former dean of the college of science at Southern Utah University, found Leany’s letter in an old trunk in Toquerville, where it had remained for ninety-seven years. Historical records led Larsen to date the murders Leany described to 1869. He found that the only three men murdered in southern Utah that year were William Dunn and the Howland brothers, explorers who had left John Wesley Powell’s expedition and were walking toward Mormon settlements. Leany’s references therefore offered a possible account of their disappearance, rather than a direct identification of the victims.

Larsen’s proposed explanation depended on the political fear then surrounding Toquerville. Many of its early settlers had participated in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and several men implicated in the massacre remained in the area. Under Ulysses S. Grant, federal authorities were pursuing the perpetrators; a $5,000 bounty had been placed on Isaac Haight, John Higbee, and John D. Lee. Brigham Young’s 1869 journey through southern Utah further heightened suspicion of an impending federal incursion and prompted sentries to watch the territory’s southern approaches.

Larsen speculated that on the Shivwits Plateau, Dunn and the Howlands encountered one or more fugitives from the Mountain Meadows Massacre. In his reconstruction, the fugitives mistook the explorers for federal agents or bounty hunters, and the travelers’ account of having crossed the Grand Canyon seemed implausible to people who considered it impassable. The men may then have been taken to Toquerville and killed after an improvised proceeding. This scenario remains Larsen’s theory; the letter supplies suggestive clues but does not independently prove the encounter, the motive, or the identities of the killers.

Aftermath and Significance

According to Larsen’s reconstruction, John Wesley Powell’s arrival in St. George within days of the presumed killings transformed the danger for the people responsible. Powell was a friend and admirer of the Latter-day Saints, unlike many federal agents, and the Toquerville residents may have recognized that the deaths could not safely be blamed on a routine conflict with outsiders. Larsen’s account holds that they sent a false telegram to Apostle Erastus Snow attributing the murders to Native Americans, then killed the man who had carried out the executions. Leany’s letter described this second killing as an effort to stop more bloodshed and said the conspirators swore an oath of silence.

Larsen further proposed that the presumed executioner was Eli N. Pace, a Latter-day Saint who died on January 29, 1870, under circumstances that prompted dispute. A local inquest judged his death a suicide, but Pace’s family contested that finding and requested another investigation. The second inquest, led by Erastus Snow and including Isaac Haight on its three-man jury, affirmed the initial conclusion. These details support the existence of unresolved suspicion around Pace’s death, but they do not confirm Larsen’s identification of him as the executioner.

Leany’s importance rests less on a complete account than on the way his letter preserves a contested memory. It records his earlier aid to William Aden, the punishment that followed, and his charge that respected members of his own community were implicated in further killings. The letter gives the Dunn and Howland mystery a possible local setting and links it to the fear surrounding the pursuit of Mountain Meadows perpetrators. At the same time, its fragmentary references and the later investigation’s reliance on inference leave crucial questions open. Leany appears in the record as a man who broke with communal silence in writing, not as a proven participant in the crimes he alleged.