3 
PROMISED LAND
Latter-Day Saints are not always so saintly.
No one understood that better in 1866 than the Indians around Circleville, Utah, who, by then, had been dealing with Mormon settlers for nearly two decades. So when a gaggle of white men, wearing their best poker faces, rode into a community of about twenty impoverished Paiutes on the morning of April 23 and announced that the local bishop wanted the residents to come to town to hear a letter he had written to them, the adults in the camp reacted warily. Was this an order or an invitation? Were they out of favor with the Mormon holy man, who had already shown his disdain for Indians? The Paiutes had seen more than once how easily these pale newcomers could turn purple with rage.
To go or not to go? Even in that dry and crushingly desolate environment—historian and novelist Wallace Stegner would later describe the southern Utah landscape as “the geography of despair”—listening to a sermon, or whatever it was, did not seem to the Paiutes like an agreeable way to spend an evening. Clearly, the prudent choice would be to stay at home in their tumbledown wickiups, eat a bit of lizard or deer, and fall asleep as usual. But still they were torn.
The Paiutes, after all, were the “good Indians,” known for doing what they were told. They liked to emphasize to the white men, who sometimes didn’t seem to grasp the distinctions between tribes, that they were not the more prosperous but also more warlike Utes, who kept the Saints in a constant state of anxiety. The Utes liked to ride out of the hills without notice, screaming and swinging blankets, to drive off the settlers’ cattle. They also had a knack for materializing six or so inches outside the windows of the white people’s cabins, painted for battle and staring fiercely.
The Paiutes, in contrast, came to town smiling and bearing fresh antelope meat to trade for the Mormon ladies’ breads and cakes. They, too, endured raids by the Utes, who kidnapped their women and children and sold them into slavery in Mexico; in another world, they might have bonded with the settlers over their common enemy. But the Paiutes sensed that the white men tended to see all Indians as trouble—the only good one was a dead one, some of the Saints liked to say—especially when they were angry about something, and they were angry about something now. One week before, at nearby Fort Sanford, a Mormon militia base, two settlers had argued with two Utes about some matter now lost to history, and one of the settlers had wound up injured and one of the Indians had wound up dead. Even though the white men had come out better in the clash, their exasperation was palpable. They seemed sick to death of the fear they lived with constantly on account of their conflicts with the Utes.
Despite the sour mood that hung over the valley, four or five Paiutes decided to heed the summons to Circleville and walked the several miles into town (they were too poor to own horses), arriving in midafternoon. The Mormons weren’t satisfied with a partial turnout, though, and so they rode back and rounded up the rest—except for one Paiute man who panicked and bolted into the brush and was shot dead in his tracks. Not a good omen.
Life was difficult in Utah’s Circle Valley—whether you were an Indian, a Mormon, a flower, or an antelope—but just then it was a lot harder than it had to be because of the white men’s failure to get along with the red.
Poor treatment of Indians was not supposed to be the Mormon way. Joseph Smith, who’d founded the religion in upstate New York some forty years earlier, taught, incorrectly but ardently, that the Indians were a people set apart—Israelites who had come to North America by boat around 600 BC. Converting the “Lamanites,” as he called them, to Christianity was the number one priority of the Angel Moroni, provider of the mystical golden plates that Smith claimed were the source material for the foundational Book of Mormon.
But no such missionary work was then in progress. While Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders advised their followers to respect the area’s tribes, and to remember that they had preceded them to Utah and had first rights to the land, rank-and-file Saints treated Indians with the same callous disregard as the gentiles, or non-Mormons, did.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Mormons were aggrieved aliens. R. Laurence Moore, in his Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans, wrote: “Mormons followed a lesson, already by their time well established in American experience, that one way of becoming American was to invent oneself out of a sense of opposition.” Although they could be strikingly cheerful at times when interacting with one another, the early Saints made no pretense of being a gentle, settled sect. “The whole nation will soon be at the feet of the Mormons,” one LDS settler wrote in 1850, “suing for mercy and protection!” Their colony, which they called Deseret, was supposed to be the staging ground for a holy but likely bloody revolution that would upend the government in Washington and replace it with a Mormon theocracy in time for Christ’s return in 1890 or, at the latest, 1891.
Brigham Young, who became the second LDS president in 1844, after Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were murdered by a mob in Carthage, Illinois, wanted a place, Stegner tells us, where his followers could live “without interference from politicians, mobocrats, and all that the United States stood for in the Mormon mind.” When he arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847 and saw a land where “distances were terrifying, cloudbursts catastrophic, heat withering, and beauty flamboyant and bizarre and allied with death”—a land, in other words, where very few settlers in their right mind would put down stakes—he stopped his wagon and said, “This is the place!” A few years later, when he needed people to stock his off-putting paradise, a stream of Saints began to pour in from Iowa and Missouri, pushing and pulling rickety wooden handcarts, a method that Young thought would spare them (and his Church) the hassles associated with horses, even if that meant the faithful had to walk as much as 1,400 miles, often in extreme weather, to reach their promised land.
Maps of North America looked considerably different in those days. What we now call Utah was part of Mexico, a country then at war with the United States. Several months after the fighting ceased and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo reconfigured the continent in a way that we would recognize today, Mormons started settling there. The Saints, without having to pack so much as a bindle, found themselves back within the borders of the nation they were trying to escape.
It was a wrenching nonjourney: for a community of polygamists and insurgents, being inside America meant being outside the law. But rather than trying to fit in with the majority, the Mormons in 1849 cheekily asked the federal government to create a bespoke state, Deseret, where they could plant their signature Lombardy trees, plan and build their standardized towns, plot their revolution, and define marriage however they pleased. Congress responded by signing off instead on a conventional secular territory to be called Utah. This was no cold bureaucratic rebuff: by affixing a name redolent of the Mormon-hating Utes, the government was showing the Saints a Washington Monument–size middle finger.
Ultimately, though, the squabbling didn’t really matter; no declaration from DC would have kept the Mormons isolated, not when their New Jerusalem sat squarely in the path of western migration. Oregon-bound gentiles were already traipsing through, and, as one historian has written, “shiny material reflected in the wash of California’s American River in January 1848 soon made Great Salt Lake City an indispensable way station for those westering ‘with golden visions bright before them.’ ”
The Saints profited from the gold rush by selling supplies to “the Americans,” as they called the travelers, at exorbitant prices, but, in the process, they gave travelers a peek at their controversial ways. What the LDS Church called “plural marriage” titillated and frightened mainstream Americans to a degree that’s hard to fathom if you’ve seen the photographic saltpeter that is the Saints’ old bonnet- and beard-heavy family portraiture. The Republican Party, in its defining first platform of 1854, singled out Mormon polygamy and Southern slavery as “twin relics of barbarism,” and three years later, President James Buchanan sent 2,500 army troops into the territory to enforce monogamy laws. It was an odd job for soldiers, arresting men for “cohabitation” with two or more wives. The yearlong Utah War turned out to be an almost bloodless affair in which the Saints pushed back against the federals in an indirect, possibly Indian-inspired way—by stealing their rations and stampeding their mules. According to the New York Times, they also “ridiculed the effeminacy and credulity of President Buchanan.” But we shouldn’t infer from their tactics in this instance that the Saints of those days always stopped short of killing. In September of that same year, at a place in the southern part of the territory called Mountain Meadows, the Mormon militia—provoked, it seems, by a wave of radical local leaders who exhorted them to gain “blood vengeance” for the humiliations they had suffered in the East and the Midwest—tried to goad Indians into attacking a wagon train on its way from Arkansas to California. When that didn’t work out, they did the dirty work themselves and slaughtered about 120 gentile men, women, and children who they felt had insulted them by scoffing at their overt religiosity.
What would happen in Circleville was different from the Mountain Meadows Massacre—smaller in scale, not so extensively covered in the press or in history books, and a crime against Indians instead of white men—but it is no less instructive about the Mormon mind-set as it existed in those days on the Western frontier. By the time the settlers returned with the remainder of the Paiute Indians, all pretenses of friendliness had vanished. The ten or so captive men who were herded into the meeting room in Circleville with their hands tied behind their backs, probably were not surprised to discover that no “bishop’s letter” existed—or that the Saints, while nervous and perhaps still undecided about their endgame, were eager to punish Indians of any tribe.
The denouement was both swift and pathetic. As anxiety mounted in the meeting room, the Paiutes started slipping out of their ropes. They must have signaled or whispered in their language, because, for a time, they stayed in place, hoping to make one big concerted rush and overwhelm their captors. But the gambit fell short. When the moment came and they surged desperately toward the doors and windows, none made it out. The militiamen shot every one of them at close range.
As the men lay on the floor dead or dying, the Mormons went into the basement of the house, where they had locked the Paiute women and children. One by one, those panicky people were taken upstairs and led outside, where a militiaman slit their throats. Only a few infants who could not serve as witnesses were spared.
The Saints by then had about twenty bodies to dispose of. The militiamen brought them to another house nearby, where they buried them in the basement. Then for several hours, the town stood still in a kind of shocked silence.
As night fell in Circleville, a lone traveler arrived. He was carrying a message from the regimental commander of the Mormon militia, in Salt Lake City. It said, “Be sure to see that your prisoners are treated kindly.”
It was into this welter of hatred, violence, fear, and stupidity that the outlaw known to history as Butch Cassidy was born. Robert LeRoy Parker arrived exactly ten days before the Circleville Massacre, on Friday the thirteenth of April 1866, and about twenty-five miles to the west.
Little is known about the circumstances of his birth, starting with its precise location within the town of Beaver, Utah. Was it the modest and still-occupied house built of pink granite and red brick on what today is forlorn, semirural South 200 West Street? (When I visited the site in 2016, a pickup truck rolled slowly by, leading a bedraggled horse. Then nothing happened for quite a while.) That is the conventional wisdom among those historians who have addressed the subject, even though, as the researcher Bob Goodwin has shown, the building didn’t exist until 1870. Census records indicate that little Bobby Parker did indeed live in the house between the ages of four and ten, however, so it’s possible he was born somewhere else on the property, in a structure no longer standing—or in North Creek, a sort of suburb just outside the town proper, in a house owned by his paternal grandfather, Robert, or at an unknown location elsewhere in town, in a house owned by his maternal grandmother, Jane Sinclair Gillies, as some say. Does it matter? Not to the tourist trade, which, in Beaver’s case, comes down to a trickle of Patagonia-clad trekkers who justify the town’s bumper sticker boast: “Gateway to the Tushar Mountains!” For forty-something dollars a night, you can stay at Beaver’s Butch Cassidy Inn, but don’t expect to find any pamphlets in the reception area directing you to a museum or even a statue erected in memory of the town’s most famous native. The sole statue in Beaver honors the inventor Philo T. Farnsworth, who was born nearby in a log cabin in 1906 and who for his work with electronic imaging technology has become known, somewhat misleadingly, as “the Father of Television.” The receptionist at my (different) motel had never heard of Butch Cassidy.
What we can say with some certainty about the future outlaw’s entrance into the world is that it came amidst relative peace and quiet. His parents, Maximilian and Ann Parker, married nine months and one day earlier, did not have other children yet, nor did they practice polygamy, so their household, in contrast with those of many nearby Saints, would not have been crowded with crying babies and redundant wives trying to outdo one another in the hierarchy.
Probably not even the new father was present. Maxi, as he was called, then twenty-two, had enlisted in the Mormon militia a few weeks earlier, and its records indicate he was stationed elsewhere on that day and for about three months thereafter. It was his second hitch in the semiofficial army of Saints, not because he was so devout—he wasn’t—but because service in the militia was a paying job he needed badly: for his four-month 1866 tour of duty and the use of his horse, he received $85.50. Maxi does not appear to have participated in either the Mountain Meadows or Circleville Massacres, but he said in an affidavit filed forty-four years after Robert’s birth that he was involved in a battle with Indians on April 22, 1866, which was almost certainly the scuffle at Fort Sanford.
What voices Bob Parker did hear in his first few years would have tended to be tinged with the accents of working-class Britain. Nearly 20 percent of the people in Utah at that time had been born in England, and plenty of Irish-, Scots- and Welshmen were also digging irrigation ditches, attending dances at the ward house, and doing all the communal things that good Saints did. Their robust presence in the American West was a testament to both the persuasive powers of Mormon missionaries and the extreme difficulty of life in the polluted factory towns back home.
Butch Cassidy’s paternal grandfather, Robert, was baptized into the LDS church on November 7, 1840, the same day, by no coincidence, that his Church of England parents threw him out of their house in Lancashire County, England. The Mormons saw leadership potential in the well-built, bright-eyed Lanky though, and in exchange for his singing at their street-corner revivals, they let him live at their mission house. On May 25, 1843, he married Ann Hartley, a pretty Lancashire girl who worked in the same textile mill, and soon the newlyweds moved from Burnley to Accrington. It was there, in 1844, that Maxi, the future father of a famous cowboy outlaw, was born.
Accrington provided a front-row seat for the changes then roiling European society. A year before the Parkers arrived, protests against low pay and dangerous conditions in the mills turned violent. Despite this, the family did manage to eke out a living, with Ann fitting her six-in-the-morning-to-seven-at-night shifts around the birth of five additional children, two of whom died in their first year.
If the Parkers’ life sounds Dickensian, it almost literally was: no sooner had they relocated to bustling Preston in 1853, than Charles Dickens himself came through town doing research for his novel-in-progress Hard Times. Karl Marx also paid a visit to observe the English version of the class struggle. If the philosopher had peeked inside the Parkers’ cottage, he might have seen nine-year-old Maxi striking a blow for the proletariat by refusing to polish the boots of visiting Mormon missionaries, as his father had requested.
Maxi was clearly a headstrong lad, as his firstborn son would be. When his father apprenticed him to the mill a short time later, he ran away, then refused to go back even after Robert found him and administered a beating. Rather than continue to whip his son, though, the elder Parker experienced an epiphany: not only would he not send Maxi back there, but also he and Ann wouldn’t return, either. Instead, the Parker family would go… well, if not to America, exactly, then to the Mormon colony deep within it: to Deseret. In her memoir Butch Cassidy, My Brother, Lula Betenson says her grandfather sold his cottage, cow, and furniture at a loss and joined a band of 534 Mormons on a seventy-four-foot clipper ship called the Enoch Train. They sailed from Liverpool on March 23, 1856.
The crossing took five weeks and was followed by a seriously bumpy eleven-day train trip to Iowa City. After a month spent hammering out handcarts, the five Parkers and about 220 other newly minted Mormons set out for their long walk west, with Robert pulling and twelve-year old Maxi pushing their crude vehicle. The carts, crafted from unseasoned wood by amateurs, did not have rubber tires, just leather strips around the wheels, and the axles had no lubrication; breakdowns came early and often. In terms of provisions, the Parkers had only cornbread and salt pork. By the time they’d reached Fort Laramie, Wyoming, they’d run out of that and had to sell their wedding silver to buy more food.
After that they had to contend with broiling heat as well as migrating buffalo herds that occasionally overwhelmed their ranks and swept away their few scraggily heads of cattle. At some point, Robert suffered a foot infection, and Ann had to pull the handcart. After she collapsed a week or so later, the family was taken the final fifty miles to Salt Lake City in the buckboard of a kindly gentile stranger, arriving on September 27, 1856.
The new life may have been vastly different from the old, but it was no easier. In early 1852, Robert was “called” by the church to Beaver, where the Mormons had built a mill to process wool. With cold weather moving in and no time to build a house, the Parkers spent their first Deseret winter in a dugout—essentially a cave with a wooden door and poles holding up a ceiling of pounded earth. “Be thankful we have a roof over our head!” Robert supposedly announced one rainy evening, just before a large slab of mud came crashing down on his family and everything they owned.
Despite the hardships in Deseret, the Mormons kept coming. Ann Campbell Gillies, Maxi’s future wife, was part of a group of about 850 converts who made the Liverpool-to-Boston trip on a ship called the Horizon two months after the Parkers. She was a native of Newcastle upon Tyne and the daughter of a cabinetmaker named Robert Gillies and his wife, Jane, “a peppery little Scotswoman” known for her sense of humor, Lula Betenson tells us.
The Civil War had little effect on life in Utah. Sheer distance from the battlefields was one reason, but as the historian John Gary Maxwell writes, Mormon leaders, and the newspapers that reflected their thinking, went out of their way to ignore the conflict. The reelection of President Abraham Lincoln and the treaty signing at Appomattox ending the war in 1865 received no acknowledgment from the pulpit or in the Mormon press. Joseph Smith had predicted in 1832 that a great war would begin in South Carolina and that the two sides would annihilate each other, creating a vacuum that would be filled by the LDS theocracy. While the Saints waited for this prophecy to play out, they stayed on the sidelines, privately leaning toward the Confederacy (which they felt would be easier for them to beat when the time for the revolution came) but mostly living their prewar lives, oblivious to the nation’s existential crisis.
Maxi and Ann met in Beaver in 1864 while performing together in a church-sponsored theater group that routinely presented light musical entertainment. Maxi was said to be a natural comedian; Ann, a good singer. As such, they were in the right religion. The Saints loved wholesome playacting and felt they could pursue their personal interests while the Americans did the spadework for the coming revolution by slaughtering one another over the issue of slavery.
For all his love of tuneful Mormon theatricals, though, Maxi Parker wasn’t exactly fully committed to his faith. Although he and Ann had a church wedding in 1865, and he liked the idea of his father blessing the newborn they’d decided to call Robert in honor of both his and Ann fathers, he was known to be among the nonobservant. This was no small thing in southern Utah, and his absence from the pew did not go unnoticed, or unpunished. Some years later, when he was on a trip to Saint Louis, where he went to sell his services as a guide for newcomers to Deseret, a slick-talking saloon keeper swindled Ann out of fifty acres of land. Upon Maxi’s return, he sought justice from the local “church court” that settled such disputes—but the bishop found for the gentile, favoring him over a “Jack Mormon” who never attended services. Although Maxi was normally an even-tempered sort, the decision was said to have left him seething and cursing the Church. By then, though, he had more immediate family worries: in the form of a firstborn son who was eager to explore the wider world but seemed almost from the outset to have difficulty playing by its rules.