On the third day of the siege, desperate for water and “hoping to appeal to the humanity of their enemies, the emigrants dressed two little girls in ‘spotless white’ and sent them with a bucket toward the spring,” Denton wrote. A bullet tore through the earlobe of a 3-year-old girl. But snipers began picking off settlers one by one, wounding 46 others that day. The others quickly moved the wagons into a barricade. Seven men were killed in the first volley. 7, 1857, the emigrants were basking in the early morning sun when gunfire rained down upon them. Local Mormons, angry over the recent killing of one of their “apostles” near Arkansas and by the approach of Army troops, viewed the wagon train as a hostile force and refused to sell food to the travelers. They passed through Cedar City, Utah, and made camp 35 miles beyond, at Mountain Meadows. Young responded by placing Utah under martial law and preparing to go to war.Īgainst this backdrop, about 200 prosperous and optimistic emigrants left Arkansas for California by wagon train. President Buchanan declared Utah in open rebellion and sent troops to replace Young with a non-Mormon territorial governor. The town was incorporated a year later.īy early 1857, almost a decade after the Mexican-American War had allowed the United States to expand its territory to include Utah, Mormons in Salt Lake were under pressure from the federal government, whose authority they defied. In 1853, San Bernardino broke away from Los Angeles County, becoming a county in its own right. The town’s population soon swelled to 3,000. It served as a major link in the church’s supply line between San Pedro’s harbor and Salt Lake City, and as a way station for missionaries and converts heading to Salt Lake. The pioneers built a boom town free of liquor and gambling. She fought her Mormon owner to win her freedom. Within a year, the Mormons had agreed to buy the 40,000-acre Rancho San Bernardino.Īmong the pioneers was Biddy Mason, a slave who would become one of California’s richest women and founder of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles. In 1851, Young sent 437 pioneers from Salt Lake City on an arduous 800-mile trek across harsh desert to settle at the base of the Cajon Pass.
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