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Show 502 WESTERN WILDS. neighborhood; nobody lost caste. Lee remained a bishop for fourteen years afterward. Dame is a bishop yet; Higbee is a prominent citizen, and Haight was still a bishop when I last saw him in 1872. The dead were buried; peace was made by - Commissioners Powell and McCulloch with King Brigham; a new emigrant road was laid off, lest Gentiles might discover something in passing through the mead-ows, and no mention of the affair was made in Mormon society or in the Mormon organ, the Deseret News. And so all was done, and the dread secret was safe. The last adult emigrant had fed the wolves ; the only child old enough to remember any thing about it had " disappeared," and the rest, distributed in various settlements, soon looked upon the Mormons as their people, and forgot that they ever had Gentile parents. Even the women, obeying Brigham implicitly, " quit talking about it." Lee called a meeting of all who were at the former council, and swore them to eternal secrecy, under penalty of the punishment invoked in their endowment oaths. Brigham preached in the neighborhood, was the guest of Lee, and urged the brethren " to be united and not tale- bear-ers, one against another." All avenues of discovery were apparently shut up. The job was a complete one. The secret was safe. " Ah gentlemen!" said Webster, of a similar case; " that was a terrible mistake. Such a secret is safe nowhere. The universe of God has no corner where the guilty can bestow it and say it is safe. The human heart was not made to be the depository of such a secret. There is no refuge from confession but suicide ; and suicide is con-fession." Even the banded murderers of Mormondom could not keep it. There were too many concerned. There were men with human blood in their hearts; there were women wr ith mothers' milk in their breasts. They could not carry so oppressive a secret. The madness of 1856 and ' 57 wore itself out. Dazed and bewildered, men slowly emerged from the state of excitement, and asked themselves what had been done. Strange rumors spread northward from settle-ment to settlement. Some of the boys from Washington County came north after the peace, and met their friends who had served against Johnston's army ; and often muttered over their cups that they did not like " the business they had been engaged in down south." A lad in Beaver began to act very strangely he drank deep of native whisky, and never staggered under it; but told of very strange things that he saw. Young Spencer wasted to a skeleton, and wrote imploring letters to his bishop and to Brigham Young, begging for some word to re- |
