Of course...once it got out widely about how the Baker-Fancher parties were treated by the Mormons, how many wagon trains do you think made it their point to traverse West thru Utah?
#2...we know that the one-armed John Wesley Powell Civil War vet who became the first white man to ride the Colorado River thru the Grand Canyon had a few companions who ventured North into Utah Territory...not thinking they would be able to continue the river journey thru alive with the limited rations they had left...
Stories later emerged that Mormons had killed them...as journal entries were later found among Lds about some terrible deed they had done.
#3 And then stories also emerged in the 1850s that the land surveyor Gunnison and his party was targeted by Mormons when he returned to Utah Territory...because his 1852 book was THE FIRST that widely revealed Utah Mormon polygamy, causing Brigham Young to finally have to publicly acknowledge its practice. Sally Denton writes about that in her book on the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
I read the book DOWN THE GREAT UNKNOWN: JOHN WESLEY POWELL'S 1869 JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY & TRAGEDY by Edward Dolnick (Perennial Books), 2001. Powell, of course, was the one-armed Civil War vet who became the first known white man/white party to venture down the Green/Colorado River thru the Grand Canyon.
Shortly before finishing the trip, three of his party ventured out on foot into Utah Territory...never to be heard from again other than the Mormon leaders trying to pin the deaths of the three men on Indians. [a common pattern by Mormons]
On pp. 283-285, Dolnick cites an amateur historian & former dean of the college of science @ So. Utah Univ. (Wesley Larsen) re: a letter Larsen found in 1980 in a trunk belonging to the John Steele family.
Steele was a judge and a militia officer & father of the first white child born in Utah territory. The letter was written to Steele from William Leany. Both were devout Mormons.
Book mentions Leany had run afoul of the Mormon church by giving an emigrant a meal & roof & veggies.
Book excerpt: "Leany's fellow Mormons charged him with giving 'aid and comfort to the enemy.' To teach him a lesson, someone clubbed him over the head, fracturing his skull and leaving him for dead. Leany survived. By 1883, he and Steele were old men. Steele evidently suggested to his good friend Leany that the time had come for them both to repent of their sins. Leany wanted no part of it. The church had blood on its hands, but he had nothing to repent. Like an Old Testament preacher, Leany thundered that 'thieving whoredom murder & Suicide & like abominations' reigned in the land. Then came the sentence that, a century later, electrified Wes Larsen: 'You are far from ignorant of those deeds of blood from the day the picket fence was broken on my head to the day those three were murdered in our ward & the murderer killed to stop the shedding of more blood.'...Larsen...embarked on a frenzied round of detective work. The reference to 'our ward,' a local Mormon district run by a bishop, was the first clue. Leany and Steele had lived in the same ward only once through the years, in 1869. And in that same fateful year, Larsen found, only one trio of men...had been reported missing or killed in southern Utah."
"Further, Larsen learned, only weeks before the Powell expedition reached Separation Rapid, Brigham Young had traveled throughout the region warning the faithful that the long-threatened invasion of Utah by Gentiles was imminent. When 'war' came, Young warned his listeners, blood would rise 'to their knees and even to their waist and to their horses' bridle bits.' The Mormon leader ordered sentries posted at all the passes leading into southern Utah. Then, at the worst possible moment, three white strangers wandered into no-man's-land spouting a cock-and-bull story about their trip down a river that everyone knew was impassable. The three men were dragged off and executed as spies, Larsen speculates, and the news of the unsanctioned executions triumphantly telegraphed to Salt Lake City..."
"In Larsen's scenario, the next step was an exact replay of the Mormon response to the 120 killings at Mountain Meadows. First came cover-up...then a vow of silence on the part of those who knew the truth, and finally a finger of blame pinning the crime on the nearest Indians."
Yup...that indeed was the Mormon M.O. of the period -- pinning crimes on Native Americans...some of whom worked with Lds in engaging in murder in other cases (like the MMM and the Gunnison party massacres)
Per Chicago Judge William Drummond: “...'at the same court a favorite Indian warrior of Gov. [Brigham] Young, by the name of Eneis,' was also tried for the murders of the Gunnison party. 'Upon his trial I became convinced beyond the possibility of a doubt,' Drummond wrote, 'that the whole affair was a deep and maturely laid plan to murder the whole party of engineers, or surveyors, and charge the murders upon the Indians.' Trial evidence revealed that Eneis was 'the property of Governor [Brigham] Young, and that he could speak English quite fluently, and that when he left the city of Salt Lake, he went under the order of Governor Young and the church.' Further much testimony indicated that Eneis was in the company of 'several white men on the day before the murder, and that they were all on their way toward the engineers' camp.'” (Denton, pp. 88-89)
“'The white men [the murderers] were so accurately described,' Drummond continued, that he felt certain in identifying them. 'This I do for the benefit of those men who may go to Utah as apointees under the present administration, viz: William A. Hickman, Anson Call, Alexander McRay, Ephraim Hanks, James W. Cummings, Edward D. Wolley, George Peacock, Levi Abrams, and ___________ Bronson, all of whom are in good standing to this day in the [Mormon] church.” (p. 89)
”After the surveyors had been shot, their arms and legs had been cut off. Most brutal of all was Eneis' final act. He 'cut Capt. Gunnison's body open and took out his heart while he was yet alive, and the heart so full of blood that it bounded on the ground after being taken out; and not content with this, but cut out his tongue.'” (p. 89)
“...'unsaintly saints,' as they have been described, plagued Gunnison'scamp, stealing their cattle. By early October the operation was stymied...Gunnison depicted Mormon hospitality as leaving much to be desired. 'Wood can scarcely be had an any price,' he wrote.” (p. 65) The Mormons, or Latter-Day Saints, in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. (1852)
“But for all the shocking revelations in Gunnison's treatise, none had a greater impact than the expose' of polygamy. Gunnison's confirmation of the widespread practice of plural marriage in Utah – vehemently, repeatedly denied by Young and his apostles throughout the world—made his book a best-seller in the nation and abroad.” (Sally Denton, p. 69)
Per Denton in book Sally Denton's 2003 book entitled: American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857 (Vintage Books, division from Random House), in Sept. 1857 -- the same month the MMM occurred:
“...small guerilla forces on swift horses and under the direction of Danite chiefs William Hickman and Porter Rockwell began harassing the army. Setting fire to the government's wagons and stampeding its cattle herds, the Avenging Angels created havoc for the already demoralized American troops. On October 3 the Danites burned Fort Bridger, then set fire to the grass surrounding the army post, threatening the survival of the government's grazing lifestock. On October 5, fourty-four Danites raided an army supply train, burning the seventy-five wagons loaded with three thousand pounds of desperately needed bacon, coffee, flour, ham, and other foodstuffs, and running off fourteen hundred head of the army's cattle. The army troops moved two miles away and from the smoldering Fort Bridger established a new camp, which they named for the army's commanding general, Winfield Scott.” (Sally Denton, p. 168)
--MormoDude(Using FACTS to back up your claim!)