John Higbee

John Higbee was a thirty-year-old major in the Nauvoo Legion whose role at Mountain Meadows joined military authority to a planned deception. After arriving with reinforcements, he gave the signal that initiated the killing of the surrendered Fancher party, making him a central figure in the massacre’s execution sequence.

Identity and Arrival

Higbee served under Colonel William Dame, commander of the southern Utah militias. On the night the local leaders decided they lacked enough Paiute fighters to overwhelm the emigrants by force, Dame directed Isaac Haight to take decisive action. Haight conveyed Dame’s order to John D. Lee at Mountain Meadows through Higbee, who arrived from Cedar City with more than fifty militiamen. The book describes the arriving group as elite and Higbee himself as a zealot.

The Surrender and the Signal

The next morning, Lee approached the emigrants under the pretense that the Mormons would intercede with the Paiutes and escort the party to safety if it surrendered its weapons. After Lee gained their confidence, the emigrants gave up their arms. The youngest children and some wounded people were placed in a wagon; women and older children followed on foot, while the men were led behind them in single file, each accompanied by a Mormon guard.

After the groups had traveled for about thirty minutes, Higbee rode at the rear on horseback and fired his weapon to attract the Saints’ attention. He then gave the prearranged order to halt and do their duty. The guards immediately shot the emigrant men assigned to them. Higbee’s position at the rear and his signal made him the coordinator of the planned transition from a purported safe escort to the killings.

The Apostate and Higbee’s Role

One of the men among the captives was an apostate Mormon, described as a close acquaintance of the Mormon executioners who had joined the Fancher train in Utah. A Mormon witness recalled that the wounded man pleaded with Higbee to spare his life. Higbee answered that the man would have done the same to him, or something equally bad, and then killed him. This account presents Higbee not only as the officer who initiated the execution sequence but also as a participant who rejected a plea for mercy.

The account distinguishes the killings of the men from the attack on the women and children, which it attributes to Paiutes and Mormons in disguise. Higbee is specifically placed at the rear of the men’s procession and associated with the signal and the treatment of the apostate; the evidence does not assign him a separate action in the attack on the other captives. His documented part in the massacre is therefore concentrated in the moment when the promised escort was exposed as a trap and the surrendered party was killed.