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Murders At
Mountain Canon Confirmed,
Daily Alta, San Francisco,
October 27, 1857
By the arrival of the steamer Senator,
we have received through Wells Fargo & Co., the San Diego Herald of
October 17th, and files of the Los Angeles Star to the 24th.
The
report of the late terrible massacre of the emigrants in southern
Utah, is
fully confirmed.
We
invite particular attention to our
Los Angeles letter, which appears
below. It gives minute details of the dreadful massacre at the Mountain
Canon, and also subsequent outrages on emigrants, together with other
matters of general interest. Our San Diego exchanges contain nothing of
importance.
Our
Los Angeles Correspondence, October 24, 1857:
The
massacre of more than a hundred American citizens by Mormon traitors and
Indians, has created a great excitement among all classes in our
community, and we hope that the tocsin is now sounded that shall rouse the
nation and compel the government to protect our countrymen from the
additional danger which foreign territories. For long years outrage upon
outrage has been committed and representations made imploring aid in that
inhospitable region where nature herself is so repulsive as almost to
forbid travel, but their calls have been unheeded.
Our whole community has been deeply moved. Many of them are waiting and
wishing for a call, to go and abate the evils which arrest the weary
traveler and consign him to an unknown and nameless grave, midway to his
destination. Two large public meetings were held in this city last week,
under the circus pavilion, at which speeches were made by several who had
been at Salt Lake, and resolutions were passed, which, I believe, express
the sentiments of everybody here but Mormons. There is a sentiment of
extermination, living and intense, growing in the minds of all true
Americans, against the traitors who have planted themselves in our
territory, and who have instigated the savages of the desert to slaughter
and rapine. Will the government make any effort to redeem its character
for pusillanimity, in so long delaying to correct those monstrous evils?
does there need hecatombs more of victims, before anything is done?
What further outrage and insult is needed to
prove to our rulers that there is a band of armed traitors in our midst
who are making indiscriminate war upon men, women and children, simply
because they are Americans, who are more dangerous because they are
blinded by fanaticism, and who are instigating the savages to slay all who
are not saints? A terrible example seems necessary to prove to them the
power of those they are thus taught to slaughter-an example so fearful
that it shall be remembered in all their villages, and shall make them
tremble with awe when they hear the American name.
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