Toquerville, Utah, is central to a contested account of the deaths of Dunn and the Howland brothers. In 1980, a letter discovered in an old trunk in the hamlet led Wesley P. Larsen to propose that the men had been killed inside the local Latter-day Saint ward house, rather than by Shivwits as the prevailing account held. The town thus enters the narrative not simply as a location, but as the alleged site of a concealed killing and as the place where documentary evidence reopened a disputed history.

The Letter Found in Toquerville

The letter had been hidden for ninety-seven years. Dated February 17, 1883, it was written by William Leany to John Steele, a respected judge and church leader who also served as Toquerville’s doctor and bootmaker. Leany and Steele had been friends for thirty-seven years. The document’s long concealment and its intimate address gave Larsen grounds to treat it as a significant challenge to the established account, though it did not by itself settle what had happened.

Leany’s standing in the community complicated the letter’s significance. He had once been a trusted bodyguard to Brigham Young, but during the summer of 1857 he provided food to William Aden, a young Gentile traveling with the Fancher wagon train. The book presents this act as a breach with the intense hostility surrounding the approaching Mountain Meadows massacre. Leany’s later accusations against fellow Saints therefore came from a writer with close ties to the community as well as a history of conflict with its prevailing loyalties.

The Ward-House Allegation

In the letter, Leany accused fellow Saints of grave wrongdoing and referred to three people being killed in a room in their own ward. He also alluded to a murderer being killed to prevent further bloodshed. These references led Larsen to read the letter as evidence that Dunn and the Howland brothers had been killed in Toquerville, inside the ward house. The location’s ordinary civic and religious function is what gives the allegation its force: the suspected violence is placed not in a remote landscape but within a local community building.

Larsen proposed a possible sequence, not a proven reconstruction. He speculated that on the Shivwits Plateau, one or more fugitives from the Mountain Meadows massacre encountered the Powell expedition and mistook its members for federal agents or bounty hunters. In his scenario, the explorers’ claim to have completed the first descent of the Grand Canyon could have deepened that suspicion. The men were then supposedly taken to Toquerville, tried by an improvised court, and executed. The book presents this chain of events as Larsen’s hypothesis rather than an established account.

Competing Accounts

The prevailing version held the Shivwits responsible. It rested largely on accounts by Jacob Hamblin and John Wesley Powell, who described the Shivwits as freely confessing to the killings. Earlier challenges by Jack Sumner, a friend of William Dunn, and Colorado River guide Otis “Dock” Marston had been dismissed by many historians, including Wallace Stegner. Larsen’s letter renewed the challenge, but his interpretation was itself disparaged by most historians, along with other claims that the Shivwits were not responsible.

The disagreement turns partly on how testimony and documentary evidence are weighed. The accounts attributed to Hamblin and Powell had detailed descriptions of confession; the letter, written decades after the deaths, suggested another location and another set of perpetrators without conclusively establishing either. Toquerville therefore marks the point where a newly recovered document unsettles a dominant narrative while leaving the competing explanations unresolved.

Toquerville’s Narrative Significance

The town’s role in the book is defined by this collision between place, memory, and evidence. The 1883 letter ties the alleged killings to a specific room in a ward house; its discovery in 1980 gives an old local accusation new public significance. Yet the recovered document does not erase the existing account or produce a definitive verdict. Toquerville remains the setting of a plausible but contested alternative, where the history of the deaths depends on which witnesses and records are considered credible.