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WINTER 2013 UHQ pp 4-90_UHQ Stories/pp.4-68 12/5/12 9:38 AM Page 6 uTAH HISTORICAL QuARTERLy The September 1870 exploratory trip had an all-star cast, even apart from Major Powell. Sixty-nine-year-old Brigham Young stood at the head, as he did in nearly all things concerning The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in early Utah. His principal guide and interpreter was Jacob Hamblin, who by then had decades of experience scouting the high desert canyons and mesas of the Colorado Plateau. In response to Powell’s inquiry, Young had recommended Hamblin to assist the major in the effort to resupply the second expedition. Also included in the expedition—as “road commissioner” and “commissary,” respectively—were two of Mountain Meadows Massacre infamy: John D. Lee and William Dame. Lee was charged “with instruction to take Guard, locate & work New Roads,” while Dame ran the “Traveling Tavorn” with responsibility for the group’s “sumpteous table.”7 Powell’s midday meal with Lee on September 5, 1870, proved to be the first of many contacts in the coming months between the major (and other members of his survey party) and men with a connection to the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Both groups found themselves traversing the identical blank spaces on the map, though on decidedly divergent trajectories with equally divergent purposes. The aging perpetrators of the massacre lived on the margins because they felt the heat of the law and the disapprobation of even their fellow Mormons; they were on the run, seeking isolation. Powell’s youthful corps of scientists and explorers simultaneously sought adventure and aspired to account for one of the least known places on the continent by bringing the tools of science and careful observation to bear on the tumbled drainage of the Colorado. Thrown together in these fringes, the groups met and interacted. Powell’s men relied on the massacre participants for assistance in finding their way, moving supplies, and working with native peoples. The 1870 Young party, having concluded the midday meal, made its way off the plateau to the former site of Panguitch, now abandoned as the result of the Black Hawk War. Powell, Hamblin, and Lee selected the second night’s encampment at “Bishop Roundy’s old Station”—present-day Alton. When Brigham Young decided to bypass the settlement of Kanab on the journey out, Powell loaned Lee a horse so he could ride to Kanab to direct supplies eastward for the exploring party.8 Lee rejoined the party at a point well beyond the mouth of Johnson Canyon along the base of the Vermilion Cliffs. By 6:00 p.m. on September 8, the group had negotiated the Chinle hills west of the Paria and the wide, silty bottomlands of the Paria River; then they pushed through the high cliff of the “Box,” where the river cuts through the upthrust of Navajo and Wingate sandstone west of the Cockscomb, and pressed six miles south to the “noted Fortification built by Peter Shirt[s],” Lee’s old neighbor at Fort Harmony.9 7 8 9 6 Mormon Chronicle, 2:135; Worster, River Running West, 210–11. Mormon Chronicle, 2:135–37. Ibid., 2:137.