Everett Bassett: Discovering human remains at Mountain Meadows (Season 2, Ep. 1 - Part 1)

**Brad Westwood** (0:09)
Welcome to the podcast, Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history, produced by the Utah Department of Heritage and Arts. I'm Brad Westwood, Senior Public Historian. My job is to make the very best, the most interesting, the most accurate history of Utah accessible to the widest audience. If there's one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fixed, I hope this is the place.
Our guest today is historical archaeologist, Everett Bassett. Welcome Everett.

**Everett Bassett** (0:38)
Hey Brad, good morning.

**Brad Westwood** (0:39)
Good morning to you. Our podcast today is about an anniversary. Coming up this September, actually between the 7th and 11th of September, is the 163rd anniversary of what is perhaps the second most well-known story in all of Utah history. It's behind only the epic story of the Mormon pioneers who first came to Utah on July 24th, 1847 The story I'm talking about is the 1857 story of the Mountain Meadow Massacre, or the killing of approximately 120 men, women, and children by Mormon settlers and militiamen. While these California-bound immigrants were camped in a location between Cedar City and St. George known as Mountain Meadows, those massacred were hastily buried in shallow graves by their killers. Then two years later, in 1859, many of these remains were reburied by the US. Army. It is the location of these burial sites, covered in rock known as cairns or tumuli, that we will be talking about with Everett.
This was and is a very complex, really a horrendous story, which I'll ask Everett to briefly describe in just a moment. In the last 20 years, however, this historical event has been once more methodically re-examined, deeply researched and written about. If the story is new to you, our show notes can direct you to a reliable narrative or narratives and primary sources that can be helpful to you, no matter how deeply you want to go into this subject.
Our guest today, Everett Bassett, lives in Forest Knolls, California, and he is a principal of Transcon Environmental, Inc. an environmental planning firm with expertise working with utilities, industries, corporations and government agencies in their pursuit of the development of infrastructure for energy communications and mining. Previously working for an environmental cultural resource firm, Everett was employed by the Utah Division of Oil, Gas and Mining Reclamation Program. Bassett has academic degrees in biology, history and anthropology. Besides this, as a young man, he served in the United States Merchant Marines and for a time, he worked as a logger and all of these personal biographical elements are going to come into our discussion today. Once more, Everett, thank you so much for being here.
Let's frame up this very basic outline. Just tell our listeners, what is the Mountain Meadow Massacre?

**Everett Bassett** (3:23)
Well, it was an ordinary event to begin with that occurred during extraordinary times. A group of immigrants from Northwest Arkansas, actually fairly well-off with huge cattle, birds, were moving their herds from Arkansas to California.
Once they got to Utah, they followed the Old Spanish Trail and they camped at the Mountain Meadows, which is a high elevation meadow with water, lush grass, and so forth. However, they walked into two events. One was the Mormon Reformation, which had a lot of reactionary actions and beliefs, many of which were pushed by George A. Smith. It just flooded to an atonement. George A. Smith traveled around southern Utah, basically getting people excited about the Reformation. Of course, at the same time, the Utah War was going on, which was a war between the United States government and the territorial government, the Mormons under James Funger, Brigham Young.
There's a lot of paranoia going on. There was a lot of fear.
A decision was made by the Malibu region militia, how to Cedar City, to attack and to kill the immigrants. There's not a huge amount. There was a lot of disagreement of exactly what happened, but basically it appears that Isaac Haight, the battalion commander of the militiamen, and John D. Lee, who was the Indian agent, conspired to get Native Americans to attack and kill the immigrant party, which had at least 120 members present.
However, everything fell apart. The Indians didn't want to do it. The immigrants were much better shot than anyone expected, so a couple of Indians. And eventually, the militia with John D. Lee went in under a flag of truth. They said that they would help the immigrant leave the attack site.

**Brad Westwood** (6:05)
The threat of the Indian attack, so to speak.

**Everett Bassett** (6:08)
The Indian attack.

**Brad Westwood** (6:11)
And by that time, didn't the Fancher and Baker Party know by then that this was more than just Indians doing this?