William Dame

William Dame was the senior southern Utah militia commander whose authorization, in the account presented here, helped turn the siege of the Fancher wagon train into a massacre. His role is defined by a sharp reversal: before the killing, he told Isaac Haight that decisive action was required; afterward, confronted with the dead, he tried to disavow responsibility. The book follows that reversal through the chain of command, the confrontation at Mountain Meadows, and the effort to conceal what had happened.

Identity and Command

Dame was thirty-eight and held the rank of colonel, commanding all the militias in southern Utah. That position made him Haight’s immediate superior. When Haight needed direction about the besieged emigrants, he did not go directly to the militia officers at the meadow: he rode twenty miles north to Parowan, woke Dame in the middle of the night, and asked what should be done. The exchange placed the decision within a formal local command structure, rather than presenting it as an isolated action by men at the scene.

The book reports that Dame impatiently told Haight he needed no further instruction from Great Salt Lake before acting. Dame’s stated order was that the emigrants must be killed. Major John Higbee, a Nauvoo Legion officer who arrived at the meadow with more than fifty militiamen from Cedar City, conveyed the directive to John D. Lee. The account therefore traces the order from Dame, through Haight and Higbee, to the men facing the emigrant encampment. It identifies Dame not as a participant first encountered in the aftermath, but as a commander whose decision preceded the killing.

The Order and Its Consequences

Dame’s instruction was given while the emigrants were still besieged. By the night of September 10, most of the Paiutes had left the meadow, and the Saints feared they lacked the force to overwhelm the emigrants. They turned instead to deception. The next morning, Lee sent William Bateman under a white flag with a false offer of protection: the emigrants were told that the Mormons would intercede for them and escort them past hostile Paiutes if they surrendered their weapons. Dame’s reported order forms the command-level background to this stratagem, which brought the emigrants out of their fortified position.

The massacre left an estimated 120 emigrants dead. The account gives the scale and composition of the loss: approximately fifty men, twenty women, and fifty children or adolescents. Seventeen children, all no older than five, survived. These figures make the consequence of the command decision concrete, while the subsequent account of Dame’s arrival shows the distance between issuing an order and confronting what it had produced.

Confrontation at Mountain Meadows

Dame arrived from Cedar City with Haight the morning after the killing ended. It was John D. Lee’s forty-fifth birthday, and Lee escorted the two commanders to the site. According to Lee’s recollection, Dame looked over the field, grew pale, and appeared uneasy and frightened. Lee understood the reaction as the moment Dame faced the difference between ordering mass killing and seeing its aftermath. The book presents this as Lee’s account, not as an independent record of Dame’s thoughts.

Dame expressed shock and attempted to deny responsibility. Haight answered that the killing had been done on Dame’s orders and accused him of trying to retreat from a decision he had imposed on others. Lee recalled that Dame then protested that he had not realized there were so many emigrants and would otherwise have wanted nothing to do with the plan. The qualification did not undo the earlier directive. In the scene’s central reversal, the commander who had demanded decisive action now pointed to the scale of the outcome, while his subordinate insisted that the order itself remained the decisive fact.

Haight turned to Lee and said he would not allow Dame to leave him carrying the blame alone. He threatened to make Dame answer for his part and demanded that he acknowledge having ordered the killing. Dame had no adequate answer to the accusation, the account says; he fell silent and turned to supervising the disposal of the bodies. The episode leaves the dispute unresolved as a formal matter, but it makes the conflict over responsibility explicit: Haight names the order, and Dame’s silence follows his attempt to deny it.

Burial, Secrecy, and an Earlier Warning

The burial was hurried and incomplete. Lee reported that the militiamen gathered the dead into heaps in small gullies and covered them lightly with dirt because the hard ground and lack of tools made digging difficult. Within days, wolves and other scavengers had exposed and scattered remains. Dame’s supervision of the disposal is the last direct action assigned to him in this immediate sequence; the account does not describe a later admission or a formal resolution of the confrontation.

After the burial, the Saints gathered in a circle and gave thanks to God for what they called their enemies’ defeat. The massacre’s overseers then insisted that the Indians alone had carried it out and that the Mormons had no part in it. They agreed that anyone who revealed the secret or identified those present should die. The book does not single out Dame as the speaker of these words or as the individual who proposed the agreement. His presence in the preceding command-and-aftermath sequence nevertheless places his actions within a larger effort to bury both the dead and the truth about the killing.

An earlier episode involving William Leany adds another instance in which Dame is associated with the punishment of aid to an emigrant. Leany had once been a trusted bodyguard to Brigham Young. In 1857, he recognized William Aden, a nineteen-year-old artist traveling with the Fancher train, as the son of a doctor who had rescued him years earlier in Paris, Tennessee. Leany invited Aden into his home in Parowan, gave him dinner, and sent him away with onions from his garden. After learning of this, Dame sent a man to Leany’s house, where Leany was assaulted and nearly killed.

That episode connects Dame’s conduct toward Leany with the later order concerning the Fancher emigrants: in both, assistance to people classed as Gentiles becomes a reason for punishment. The evidence does not supply a broader personal biography or describe Dame’s life after Mountain Meadows. Instead, it gives a concentrated account of authority exercised before the massacre, challenged after it, and followed by silence and concealment. His significance in these passages rests on that sequence, and on the gap between the command he gave and the responsibility he was willing to acknowledge.