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Show 293 band of three wives and the father of twenty-seven children. Johnson died in Mesquite, Nevada in 1919 • He was eighty-five. Asahel Bennett, Dame's guide of 1858, did not stay long in Utah, and he quickly left the Mormon faith as well. According to Martineau, "Mr. Bennett was an educated man, and at the time (jot the White Mountain Expedition] a MOr-mon, but subsequently he apostatized from what little Mormonism he possessed." William Lewis Manly, a friend of Bennett's from their Death Valley ordeal, suggested that Bennett was "smarting under the terrible taxation Ctithing] of one tenth of everything." Said to be growing "poorer and poorer," Bennett decided to leave the Territory. His Mormon wife remained behind, unable to leave her people. It is also possible that Bennett's disgust over the Mountain Meadows massacre affected his decision. On his way to Utah in the fall of I857 ne had witnessed the aftermath of tbe butchery and was appalled by what he saw. In i860 he met Manly in Los Angeles and confided his disgust with the Mormons over this and other incidents. In any event, Bennett left Utah soon after the completion of the White Mountain Expedition and returned to California. Little is known about his later career. He may have worked in the mining camps for a time. One report had him living in the mining town of Belmont, Nevada.11 In I875 Bennett returned to Utah, briefly, to testify in the trial of John D. Lee, accused of murder in the Mountain Meadows affair. He had seen 12 the bodies lying on the meadows shortly after the massacre. Asahel Bennett died in Idaho about I89I. He was said to be in his eighty* forth year. ^ Jesse N. Smith was one of the men who preferred charges against William H. Dame for complicity in the Mountain Meadows massacre. With the investigation of Dame completed, George A. Smith called bis cousin, Jesse, to head up an expedition to the Virgin River to locate a place for a cotton farm. After exploring |
