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Reminiscences of Family, Yozlth, and Em/y Mmhood My father has said that the victims of that gang were mostly shot in the back, which may be a point of interest to many. Porter Rockwell alwavs wore his hair braided and it was said that Joseph Smith, the prophet, had told him that he would be immune to bullets if he kept it so. It is said that he was never touched by a bullet, the reason given that all his victims were shot in the back. This intimated that he was too cowardly to face a man, which is not true from what I have heard. The year that the railroad reached Lehi, and when I was twelve years old, Porter Rockwell met a man whom he had quarreled with in a saloon near my father's harness shop. This man emptied every chamber of his six shooter at Porter, and the balls splattered all around him, but not one touched him. This can be accounted for in some ways, perhaps, but not to one's entire satisfaction. Porter was unarmed at the time or there would have been but one gun shot heard. I have heard my father-in-law tell another story. There was a dispute between Hickman and Rockwell about a horse. Horse stealing was very prevalent at that time and there was only the one remedy. Hickman, with a bunch of his men, undertook to dispossess Porter of this horse, on Main Street in view of my father-in-law and many other bystanders. Hickman and his men rode up to where Rockwell had dismounted to go into a saloon, Beiq the Life, Confession, nnd Stnding Disclosures of the Notorious Bill Hick- mnn, the Dnnite Chief of Utnh (New York, 1872). This sobriquet, however, was entirely the invention of J. H. Beadle, under whose guiding hand the manuscript was printed. Nowhere in his confession does Hickman call himself the Danite chief . . . . Beadles' preoccupation with Danites was due in great measure to the unquestioning acceptance in the East of blood-curdling stories about Mormon assassins." William Hickman died in Lander City, Wyoming, August 21, 1883. Orrin Porter Rockwell died in Salt Lake City on June 8, 1878. Schindler, Rock- well, 43, 43 n. 22, 355 n. 15, 360-62. The Dani tes' "activities created a legend of `Mormon Destroying Angels' that is still alive in the literature of the `Wild West' . . . . Most historians now suppose that the actions once attributed to the Danites were probably those of individuals or of Mormon security forces - deputy sheriffs, territorial militia, minutemen." Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormo~z Experience - A History of the Lrltter-&zy Snints (New York City: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979, 54, 353 n. 45. See also Part Four, note 4. 10s |
