The Old Spanish Trail was the southern route to California across Utah and onward toward the Mojave Desert. In 1857, it carried the Fancher party from the Great Salt Lake Valley into the uplands of southern Utah, making a long-distance emigrant road the setting for a journey increasingly shaped by hostility, scarcity, and danger.

Route and Setting

The Fancher party entered the Great Salt Lake Valley on August 3, after crossing the Wasatch Range and descending Emigration Canyon. The travelers spent two days in the territorial capital, then continued south and west along the Old Spanish Trail toward California. By the time the train reached the uplands of southern Utah, it was about 280 miles beyond Salt Lake City.

The country ahead gave the route a practical urgency. The emigrants had hundreds of miles of difficult, hot terrain before them, and their large herd needed places to rest and graze. On the evening of September 6, the party arrived at Mountain Meadows, a shallow valley about 5,800 feet above sea level, with an artesian spring and green sedges and bunchgrass. Beyond this high oasis, the trail descended sharply toward the scorching Mojave Desert.

The Fancher Party's Passage

The train grew as it crossed Utah. By the time it reached southern Utah, it included about 130 emigrants, mostly from Arkansas, as well as roughly 1,000 cattle and 200 horses. Apostate Mormons who had left the church joined the company along the way, bringing its total to approximately 140. The party's size and livestock made its need for food, water, and grazing especially pressing.

The travelers' route also brought them through an increasingly hostile territory. On August 3, the Fancher party encountered a climate of escalating anti-Gentile rhetoric and militia preparation. The emigrants rested only two days in Salt Lake City before continuing on the Old Spanish Trail. On September 4, they passed through Cedar City and asked to buy food; the Saints refused them. False rumors circulated there, including claims that members of the party had taken part in earlier violence against Mormons. In the account of the journey, the trail was therefore not simply a line toward California: the travelers depended on communities along it even as those communities increasingly cast them as enemies.

The Trail and the Mountain Meadows Attack

The trail's herds acquired particular significance amid this conflict. The Fancher party was reputed to be exceptionally wealthy and well equipped; its stock reportedly included prize Texas longhorns and a Thoroughbred racehorse. During a September 1 meeting in Salt Lake City, Brigham Young told Paiute leaders that the emigrant cattle on the Old Spanish Trail were theirs. The leaders rode south the following morning. A week earlier, some of them had camped near the Fancher train, and the emigrants had asked where they could rest and graze their animals before crossing the desert. Jacob Hamblin recommended the valley near his cabin at Mountain Meadows.

That recommendation brought the emigrants to the place where their passage turned into an assault. On the morning after their September 6 arrival, the party was preparing breakfast when a shot came from a nearby gully. The surprise attack fatally wounded seven Arkansans that day. The Old Spanish Trail thus connects the party's westward journey—its search for a viable stopping place before the Mojave—with the violence that met it at Mountain Meadows.