Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (16 page)

No one, however, rallied around the eugenics flag more fanatically than the Nazis, and after beginning with forced sterilizations, they concluded that operating on those deemed physically, psychologically, or morally defective was time-consuming and expensive. It was easier just to kill them.

One of the doctors most responsible for implementing this doctrinal shift in Nazi medical policies was Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician and the head of the Third Reich’s euthanasia program. Buried among the thousands of documents from Brandt’s trial at Nuremberg is this damning quote: “A strict selection by exterminating the insane or incapable—in other words, the scum of society—would solve the whole problem in one century, and would enable us to get rid of the undesirable elements who people our prisons, hospitals, and lunatic asylums.” Although the passage articulated Brandt’s opinion to the letter, he didn’t write it. The excerpt, submitted by his lawyer as evidence that Brandt’s views could not be judged abhorrent, came from Madison Grant’s
The Passing of the Great Race
. Brandt was later hanged for war crimes.

“Do you want to see our petting zoo?” Karen asks me. My gut reaction is to say no. I have to catch a flight out of San Francisco at 7:00
P.M.
, and I want to avoid rush-hour traffic on Highway 101. I check my watch and decide a few minutes probably won’t matter after all. It doesn’t seem completely relevant to my visit, but I also don’t want to appear rude. “Sure,” I say.

As we drive up to the little farm, which has an indoor aquarium and an outdoor aviary, Karen familiarizes me with the animals. “We have llamas, ducks, rabbits, a guinea pig, sheeps, goats, and Pedro the bilingual parrot.”

“Pedro the bilingual parrot?”

“He’s an Amazonian parrot who knows words in both English and Spanish. Well, he speaks bird, too, so I guess he’s trilingual.”

We step into the barn, and Karen points out the buttons at wheelchair height along the stalls. “When you press one of these you get information about the animals. All of them have names. Deuce the pig is over there, and we also have two potbellied pigs, Breezy and Jethro. They’ve adopted a black rabbit named Louis, who prefers staying with them than the other rabbits.”

“That’s amazing.”

“They’re not the only ones like that. The llamas are very protective of the sheep, and Gretchen the turkey has been caring for some baby chickens that have taken to her as well. She’s very maternal and likes to give them rides on her back.”

We loop around to the parking lot, passing the outdoor pens along the way. I try to catch a glimpse of Louis snuggled under the watchful eye of his pig protectors, but he’s apparently hidden himself somewhere.

“Well, I hope that was worth it.”

“Oh, it was,” I say, cheerfully thinking of how appalled Madison Grant, who based his vile and idiotic beliefs on the supposedly immutable laws of nature, would have been to find such an affectionate display among various creatures. It’s a small example, no doubt, and I certainly knew before coming here that different species care for one another, especially the more vulnerable among them, and that nature—whether animal or human—isn’t wholly cruel at heart. But every so often, it’s nice to be reminded.

WHEN THE MASSACHUSETTS
Bay Colony hanged Mary Dyer and three other Quakers on Boston Common, the executions—albeit indefensible—were not part of a larger campaign to actively hunt down and kill Quakers wherever they lived. Only once in American history have members of a particular faith been targeted for annihilation, specifically because of their religion, by a government directive. “The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the state if necessary for the public peace—their outrages are beyond all description,” Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs proclaimed on October 27, 1838.

Two days before Governor Boggs issued his decree, formally known as Executive Order 44, Missouri troops had skirmished with Mormon forces in Ray County, leaving three Mormons and one Missouri soldier dead. This was one Missouri soldier too many for Governor Boggs, and he declared open season on all Mormons. Taking his words to heart, the Livingston County Militia, led by Sheriff Thomas Jennings in nearby Caldwell County, descended on the Mormon settlement in northwestern Missouri that Jacob Haun had established three years earlier. Anti-Mormon sentiment had been building throughout the United States since 1830, when a twenty-four-year-old self-educated New Yorker named Joseph Smith Jr. published the Book of Mormon and laid the groundwork for what would become, officially, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (With more than fourteen million members today, Mormonism is now the largest American-born religion in the world. Early Mormons were especially hated and persecuted for engaging in “plural marriages,” and the LDS Church banned polygamy among its followers in 1890.)

Since Haun’s Mill wasn’t in my trusty road atlas, I phoned the Caldwell County sheriff’s office for information on how to find the place, and an officer kindly gave me detailed directions and also cautioned me that the dirt roads leading out to the remote spot can be impassable following a heavy rain and dicey even after a light one. Storm showers drenched the region two days ago, but fortunately, as I drive up
71 North for about thirty miles from St. Joseph and turn onto a series of increasingly narrow and rough roads, I’m encountering only a few shallow, muddy ditches along the way.

Finally I spy a thin vertical post that says
HAUN’S MILL
located just outside a large field. After parking, I walk through the thick unmowed grass and head toward a wooded area where many of the villagers had lived and which, according to more recent visitors, is supposedly haunted. It’s hard to be spooked in broad daylight, but I do find myself flinching when I pass a small puddle and half a dozen tiny frogs jump up unexpectedly and plop back into the dark water.

Before coming here, I pored over numerous eyewitness testimonies, personal journals, affidavits, family histories, and other firsthand recollections describing what happened when Sheriff Jennings and his men invaded Haun’s Mill. Although there are discrepancies in these accounts (some villagers claim that more than two hundred Missouri militia rode into Haun’s Mill, while others put the number closer to three hundred), overall they are remarkably consistent.

What many survivors emphasized from the start was how pleasantly warm and serene October 30, 1838, had been—up until the crack of rifle shots and the rumble of galloping horses broke the tranquility. “While I was busily engaged getting supper, and two of the brethren, Mr. Rial Ames (my husband’s brother) and Hyram Abbot, were sitting just outside the door, one cutting the other’s hair,” wrote Olive Ames in her journal (the last name is spelled Eames in other records), “they rose from the chair and remarked, ‘I see some of the brethren coming from Far West,’ when suddenly the party began firing. Then said Mr. Ames, ‘It’s the mob right on us.’ ” She continued:

“I made my escape by flight being shot four times through the body and once across each arm,” Laney recalled. One bullet struck his right hip. “It hit the bone just above the joint[,] glanced out through the skin and rolled down my drawer leg in to my boot.” Bloody and almost unconscious, he could hear the militia picking off defenseless villagers. “I listened at them shooting the wounded which could not escape. I was informed that one of these murderers followed old Father McBride in his retreat and cut him down with an old scythe.”

Thomas McBride was the local justice of the peace, and his death is highlighted in almost every narrative. James McBride, in particular, vividly recalled how his father was killed: “He had been shot with his own gun, after having given it into the mobs possession. Was cut down and badly disfigured with a corn cutter, and left lying in the creek.… One of his ears was almost cut from his head—deep gashes were cut in his shoulders; and some of his fingers cut till they would almost drop from his hand.”

Amanda Smith, a young mother who was only passing through Haun’s Mill with her family when they were caught up in the slaughter, elaborated in an affidavit how McBride’s fingers came to be severed: “His hands had been split down when he raised them in supplication for mercy.”

Smith lost her husband at Haun’s Mill, and the fate of her children is another story that, like McBride’s, seared itself into the memories of survivors. No one was more traumatized by what happened to them than Smith herself, and in her affidavit she wrote:

In a reminiscence for family members, Smith added:

Out of approximately eighty Haun’s Mill residents, eighteen men and boys were killed, and the number almost certainly would have been higher had the remaining villagers not fled deep into the woods. The militia simply ran out of people to shoot.

Most of the survivors moved to Illinois, followed by Joseph Smith, who’d been arrested by Missouri authorities but then “broke free” from custody while being transferred from one district court to another. Smith was purportedly allowed to escape in order to spare Missouri a prolonged and disruptive trial.

Fighting between Mormons and state militias throughout the West escalated into a kind of eye-for-an-eye vicious cycle, culminating in the
Utah War of 1857–58 and one of America’s worst massacres, where the hunted became the hunters.

In early September 1857, an estimated 150 emigrants from Arkansas who were traveling by wagon train through Mountain Meadows in the Utah Territory found themselves pinned down for days by local Mormon militia originally disguised as Paiute Indians. In exchange for safe passage out of the valley, the Arkansans agreed to give up their weapons and leave the territory immediately, never to return. Considering that they hadn’t wanted to stay in the first place, but only to rest for a few days en route to California, they readily consented.

On September 11, as the Arkansans were being escorted out of the valley by militia members, the commanding officers yelled to their men, “Do your duty!” Hearing the prearranged signal, the Mormons suddenly raised their rifles and began shooting the unarmed Arkansans where they stood, sparing only eighteen infants and children considered too young to be witnesses. (After leaving the parents’ bodies to rot, the Mormons took the children home to raise as their own. When the Arkansans’ remains were found two years later by U.S. Army investigators, most of the children were located and returned to relatives.) None of the Mormon militia members were punished except Colonel John Lee, who was excommunicated from the church, tried by an all-Mormon jury, and sentenced to death. Under Utah territorial law, Lee could choose whether he wanted to be hanged, beheaded, or shot, and he chose the last. Authorities brought him back to Mountain Meadows, where he was placed before a firing squad and executed.

According to my contact at the Caldwell County sheriff’s office, a historical marker once stood at Haun’s Mill describing in detail what had occurred here, but it was repeatedly defaced and then stolen. And that one was the replacement for another sign that had also been vandalized. “Ancestors of the militiamen still live around there,” I was told. “It’s not a proud moment in local history, and the signs kept getting torn down.”