With American Primeval, Netflix has once again put Mormonism in its sights as the subject in a drama, this time including the Mountain Meadows Massacre (the latest in a long line of portrayals of that event). While that event casts a long shadow over nineteenth century Mormonism’s experience in the western United States, there are a lot of more interesting events and figures that could be discussed. For example, in a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, Todd Compton discussed the legendary explorer and Native American missionary Jacob Hamblin. What follows here is a copost to the full interview, highlighting a couple aspects of what Compton shared.
Who was Jacob Hamblin, and why are his adventures so noteworthy? Todd Compton offered some insight into those questions:
Jacob Hamblin was widely known as a Latter-day Saint missionary to Indians in southern Utah (mostly the Paiutes) and Arizona (mostly the Hopis and Navajos). He was also an explorer, mainly because he and his companions were sent to visit the Hopi Indians, in modern Arizona, south of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River, in 1858. Traveling from Santa Clara (near St. George) to the Hopi mesas was an adventure, to say the least. Just crossing the Colorado, before ferries and bridges, was extremely dangerous.
After making his first trip to the Hopis in November-December 1858, Jacob and his companions crossed the Colorado every year for many years, as they continued to visit the Hopis and later the Navajos. In these trips Jacob combined proselyting, exploring, and trading.
After helping to found Santa Clara, Jacob and his family (he had four well-documented wives and three less-well-documented Paiute wives) were sent east to Kanab, and he was another early founder there.
In Kanab he worked with Grand Canyon explorer John Wesley Powell, as an Indian interpreter and guide, and he and Powell were able to travel to Fort Defiance in eastern Arizona to bring a Mormon-Navajo conflict to an end in 1870.
Later, Hamblin was sent to be part of the Little Colorado Mission in Arizona, and he and his family ended up in the far eastern part of that mission, at Pleasanton, New Mexico.
In his early days in Utah, he had a spiritual experience that led him to avoid bloodshed when dealing with Indians, and so he tried to work with them through friendship and negotiation. He sincerely liked to spend time with Indians. Hamblin always worked as a counter-balance to Latter-day Saints who wanted to use war and quick violence in dealing with Indians. Letters he wrote to Brigham Young and John Wesley Powell show that he mourned how Paiutes lost much of their land to Latter-day Saint ranchers and farmers.
As a devout Latter-day Saint, Jacob Hamblin was obedient to Brigham Young and other church leaders, but he also saw the tragedy of Latter-day Saint colonization in southern Utah from the viewpoint of Native Americans.
Jacob Hamblin was a complex figure who led a life that made an impact on the American southwest.
Hamblin is perhaps best known as an explorer who helped facilitate the American and Mormon expansion into southern Utah and Arizona:
In 1858, Jacob Hamblin was the first white (that we know of) to cross the Colorado at the “Crossing of the Fathers,” after Dominguez and Escalante crossed it in 1776. Later, in 1864, he was the leader of the first group to navigate across the Colorado at Lee’s Ferry, which became the main crossing point between Utah and Arizona for many years. Because he was crossing the Colorado every year, he came to know the Grand Canyon area quite well.
He also crossed the Colorado south of St. George at the Grand Wash in 1862, so he also knew the western Grand Canyon/Colorado River. In that same 1862 trip, he traveled east to visit the Hopis, then returned to Santa Clara via the Crossing of the Fathers. He thus circled the Grand Canyon, a remarkable first. When Joseph Christmas Ives steamed up the lower Colorado in March 1858, guess who he met? Thales Haskell, in a group led by Jacob Hamblin.
In 1870, when John Wesley Powell was preparing for his second trip down the Colorado, Jacob Hamblin worked with him and acted as his guide and Indian interpreter. Jacob led him to the Hopi mesas and then to Fort Defiance.
I should mention that Hamblin was an explorer only in the sense of being someone going places that whites didn’t know about. He had Indian guides, and they knew the area well. The Crossing of the Fathers was known to Jacob and Indians as “the Ute Crossing.” Indians had been using it long before Escalante in 1776. Indian trails led to the crossing. Paiutes helped Jacob learn how to cross the Colorado.
These journeys were difficult, and his groups often made it through by the skin of their teeth. Honestly, they would make for some exciting television in their own right.
Jacob Hamblin’s story did cross with the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and while he was not present for the massacre itself, he lived nearby and participated in the later coverup:
On the date of the massacre, Jacob Hamblin was in Salt Lake City, getting married to his third wife, Priscilla Leavitt. He lived at the Santa Clara Fort, but he had a ranch just north of the site of the massacre. His second wife, Rachel Judd, was there at the time of the massacre, and the massacre perpetrators brought her the children survivors to take care of. Jacob had an adopted Gosiute son, Albert, a teenager at the time, and he witnessed the massacre.
When Jacob returned, the unburied bodies still lay there on the massacre site. So he knew early on from his family what had happened and that Latter-day Saints had been involved. He also would have known that local Paiutes did not have the firepower or the temperament to carry out a massacre like this all by themselves.
Naturally, it became widely known that whites were involved in the massacre.
When relatives of the massacred people in Arkansas found out that there were children survivors, they asked the Utah Indian agent, Jacob Forney, a non-Mormon, to find them and return them to their relatives. Jacob Hamblin, as the Mormon sub-agent, was asked to help, so he helped gather as many children as he could find among the Latter-day Saints of southern Utah and turned them over to Forney. Of course, neither Forney nor Hamblin should have been involved, technically, as no Paiute Indians had any of the children survivors.
Hamblin took part in the general Latter-day Saint cover-up of the massacre, at times. However, in 1859, he told two non-Mormons, Forney and his assistant, William Rogers, that there was white Latter-day Saints involvement in the massacre, and whites even planned it. Forney listed Jacob and Rachel Hamblin as his sources for a generally correct account of the massacre in a formal letter to a non-Mormon Utah official, attorney Alexander Wilson. The letter listed eight guilty parties, including Stake President Isaac Haight and John D. Lee.
Jacob once told Frederick Dellenbaugh, a member of the second Powell company, that “if he had been at home the Mountain Meadows Massacre would not have occurred.”
It’s one of those unknowable historical enigmas: Could Jacob have stood up to Stake Presidents Haight and Dame?
It is an interesting question, and while he generally obeyed the requests of his religious leaders to not speak of the massacre, Hamblin did participate in discussions that helped the truth of the events become known and a group of sisters that survived the massacre that his family took in were kept together at the Hanblin family’s insistence.
For more on Jacob Hamblin and his contributions to the history of the Southwestern United States, head on over to From the Desk to read the full interview with Todd Compton. It’s well worth the time, and has a lot of interesting discussion that was only touched on here.
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