Cattle

Cattle are more than background stock in the book’s account of nineteenth-century migration and conflict in Utah. They are food, transport wealth, and a conspicuous measure of what a wagon company carries; they also become spoils promised to potential allies, stolen property concealed from its owners, and a reason for the displacement of the Shivwits. Across these episodes, control of cattle links the vulnerability of emigrants to the power of Mormon leaders and settlers over people and land.

Traveling Wealth and Exposure

The Fancher party reached southern Utah with an immense quantity of livestock. The company included about 130 emigrants, mostly from Arkansas, and a thousand head of cattle, as well as two hundred horses. The book later describes the party’s stock as numbering twelve hundred head, including prize Texas longhorns. The herd was not incidental baggage: it represented substantial wealth and would have to be fed and watered along the route.

On September 6, 1857, the emigrants brought their wagons to Mountain Meadows, where they stopped beside a spring in a green valley along the Old Spanish Trail. The meadow offered pasture before the trail descended toward the Mojave Desert. The party’s cattle could graze there, but the open campsite also left a large and valuable herd in view. At daybreak, the travelers gathered around fires; they had not circled their wagons the previous night, as was customary on the trail. The contrast between the oasis’s practical promise and the company’s exposure gives the herd a double significance: it sustained the journey while making the travelers’ resources visible.

The Fancher party’s wealth was widely remarked upon. Its train was reputed to be the richest and best equipped to cross the continent; its livestock included a Thoroughbred racehorse said to be worth $3,000, and rumors circulated that the company carried a strongbox of gold coins. The book suggests that such riches could attract interest in a territory where drought and cricket infestations had left some Saints facing hunger. It also places that material temptation beside a broader danger: hostility toward Gentiles had been inflamed through recollections of persecution and calls for resistance. The herd mattered, but the narrative does not reduce the threat to greed alone.

A Herd Promised as Spoils

The cattle became an explicit part of the negotiations preceding the attack on the Fancher party. On August 25, George A. Smith, Jacob Hamblin, and Paiute leaders camped near the southbound emigrants. Three members of the company visited the group, and Hamblin recommended Mountain Meadows as a resting place where they could graze their livestock before crossing the desert.

A week later, Brigham Young met with Paiute chiefs in Great Salt Lake City. According to the notes of interpreter Dimick B. Huntington, Young gave the Indians all the emigrant cattle on the Old Spanish Trail. The book identifies this promise with the Fancher herd, which the Paiutes had seen when they camped beside the company. Young’s offer treated the animals not simply as property but as prospective plunder, an inducement connected to the proposed attack. The Paiutes left the city the following morning and rode toward southern Utah.

The promise also sits within a larger pattern of attempted alliances and cattle raiding. Young expected a Mormon and Lamanite alliance to serve a millennial purpose, but the book emphasizes that the Paiutes did not regard the Saints as natural allies. They sometimes attacked emigrants in return for a share of the plunder. Reports from Gentile travelers described horses and cattle taken by Indian raiders appearing later in Mormon corrals. When the Saints could persuade the Paiutes to act, livestock offered a concrete reward and a practical weapon against passing emigrants.

Raids, Disguise, and Hidden Stock

In September 1857, after the Mountain Meadows massacre, Jacob Hamblin orchestrated a shakedown of the William Dukes wagon train. The emigrants had paid Mormon guides $1,815 for safe passage through southern Utah, yet a band of Paiutes attacked them. The party escaped toward California, but the raiders took everything of value, including more than three hundred head of cattle.

The emigrants noticed that some of the supposed Indians had blue eyes, curly hair, and patches of white skin near their eyes and behind their ears. The book reports that the thieves were Mormons disguised with painted faces, acting on Hamblin’s instructions. The Paiutes received a few of the stolen cattle for their participation, while Hamblin retained most of the plunder. He claimed to be safeguarding the herd until the Dukes party could return to Utah and reclaim it.

When William Dukes sent a representative to recover the animals, Hamblin hid most of them in the mountains for three weeks. The representative eventually departed frustrated and nearly empty-handed. The episode turns the supposed protection of livestock into a means of keeping it: cattle taken in a staged raid were presented as temporarily held for their owners, while concealment wore down the attempt to retrieve them. The animals’ value is shown through the effort expended to steal, hide, and recover them.

Grazing Land and Dispossession

The conflict over cattle extends beyond wagon-train theft to control of land. Two decades after the Shivwits parley with John Wesley Powell and Hamblin, the Saints forced the Shivwits from their vast ancestral homeland on the Arizona Strip because Mormon cattle needed the range. The Indians were relocated to a reservation on the outskirts of St. George measuring barely six miles by six miles.

In this account, cattle are not only movable wealth but also a claim on territory. The grazing needs of Mormon livestock help explain the transfer of land away from its Indigenous inhabitants and the reduction of their homeland to a small reservation. That consequence broadens the significance of the earlier raids: cattle repeatedly pass through a system in which the powerful can take property, keep it, or secure the land needed to support it, while emigrants and the Shivwits bear the losses.

The book’s cattle episodes therefore connect several kinds of vulnerability without making them identical. The Fancher and Dukes parties encountered herds that could be targeted on the road; the Paiutes were offered a share of stolen animals; Hamblin concealed most of the Dukes herd; and the Shivwits were displaced so Mormon cattle could graze. The recurring presence of livestock makes economic power tangible, while showing how the language of alliance, protection, and settlement could accompany appropriation.