Assassins in the Mountain Meadows Massacre

Mountain Meadows Massacre Assassins

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Daniel Hanmer Wells Daniel Hanmer Wells (1814-1891) - Commander-in-Chief of the territorial militia, the Nauvoo Legion, it is not known as to whether Wells had prior knowledge of the attack that took place at Mountain Meadows. However, as third in command in the military hierarchy, he, as well as his superiors, George A. Smith, and Brigham Young, are culpable under the military rules of accountability. Further, there is little question that he and superiors were involved in the cover-up that followed the tragedy.

Wells was born on October 27, 1814 in Trenton, New York to Daniel Wells and his wife Catherine Chapin. When he grew up he married Eliza Rebecca Robison on March 12, 1837 in Commerce (later Nauvoo), Illinois. The couple made their home in Nauvoo and Wells was a "Jack Mormon", a term applied to non-church members, who defended the church and its members. He was personal friends with Joseph Smith which helped him get elected to the Nauvoo City Council and later as a judge. After his friend, Joseph Smith, was killed in June, 1844 and the Mormons were expelled from the area, Wells decided to join the church. Made an official church member in 1846, Wells remained in Illinois until 1848, when he went to Utah and began working toward the organization of the State of Deseret. However, his wife, Eliza, who never participated in plural marriages, did not accompany him. In Utah, Daniel, on the other hand, would take six wives.

In the year of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Wells was ordained as an Apostle, was the second counselor to Brigham Young, and the commanding officer of the Nauvoo Legion, the territorial militia. Later he would preside over the church's European missions while living in Great Britain and when he returned to Utah Territory was elected mayor of Salt Lake City in 1866, a position he held until 1874.

In 1872 Wells was arrested for being an accessory in the murder of Robert Yates, a murder that occurred in 1857 at the mouth of Echo Canyon. Though a man named Bill Hickman would eventually confess to killing Yates, Wells was the official commanding officer of the military operation which resulted in the death of Yates, thereby making him an accessory. However, a year later the charges were dismissed.

In 1879 he was jailed for failing to disclose information regarding the various polygamist marriages he had performed. Jailed for a couple of months and accessed a $100 fine, he was released.

In 1884, he was back in Europe, returning in 1888. At the age of 76, he died in Salt Lake City on March 27, 1891.

Elliot Willdon Elliot Willden (or Wildon) (1833-1920) - Born in England in 1833 to Charles and Eleanore Willden, Elliot's family came to the United State in 1849 and were in Utah in 1851, as members of the Mormon congregation. In 1853, they had moved to the Iron Mission in southern Utah. In 1856, Willden married an English immigrant named Emma Jane Clews who would bear him nine children over the years.

When the Fancher party began to move through Utah in 1857, Elliot was a private in the Fourth Platoon, Company F, of the Iron County Militia in Cedar City. While he was known to have been at the massacre site, his role in the tragedy remains unclear.

Though an investigation began the year after the massacre, nothing became of it due to tensions preceding the Civil War. In the meantime, the Mormons went back to their lives and in 1861, Willden and his family established Fort Willden on Cove Creek midway between Beaver and Fillmore, Utah. However, when the Black Hawk War broke out in 1865, they were forced to abandon the fort, and they moved to Beaver, Utah, where he lived the rest of his life.

In 1867, Ira Hinkley and his family returned to Fort Willden and built a larger fort, called Cove Fort, which still stands today.

In 1874, while Willden was working as a farmer in Beaver, the indictments were handed down by the Grand Jury of the Second Judicial District Court against nine men involved in the massacre, including Elliot Willden. Though it is known that he was present at Mountain Meadows, it is unknown what he might have done that caused the private to be singled out and indicted when so many others were not. However, the charges were never followed-through.

In 1890, Willden's wife, Emma Jane died and two years later, he married another English immigrant, one Christiana Brown, who would bear him three more children. Willden lived to the ripe old age of 87, when he died in 1920 and was buried in Beaver, Utah.

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