Pinto

Above: Pinto, Washington County, UT. 27 June 2023.

Pinto. Twelve miles north of Pine Valley by dirt road. Nestled within rugged, pygmy forest clad hills, Pinto is an unincorporated grassy valley, with a dozen or so visible homes, bisected by a small stream. Mormon pioneers colonized the area in 1856. Pinto is still actively ranched today.

Pinto cannot escape its brush with a sordid historical event which occurred from 7 to 11 September 1857, only a year after settlers first moved to Pinto. The Mountain Meadows Massacre. Mountain Meadows is eight miles east of Pinto by dirt road.

Was Pinto in any way directly connected to the Mountain Meadows Massacre? I am three quarters finished reading the newly published book "Vengeance is Mine, The Mountain Meadows Massacre and its Aftermath " by Richard E. Turley and Barbara Jones Brown published by Oxford University Press. I met Turley, former LDS Church Assistant Historian and previous LDS Church Public Affairs Head, at a bibliophile event at Salt Lake City's Alta Club two weeks ago and learned of his and Brown's new publication. I have read two other books on the Mountain Meadows Massacre: "Mountain Meadows Massacre," by Juanita Brooks and "Blood of the Prophets," by Will Bagley. So, I'm relatively familiar with and interested in the topic. In my reading of the Turley/Brown book, I found references to nearby (to our home in Ivins) Pinto in the narrative. Considering my inveterate curiosity about obscure Utah historical locations, and considering Pinto was so close to our beloved Pine Valley, TIMDT, Freddie, and I, back country maps in hand, set out in the Sprinter to find the obscure locale.

Here are the quotes from the book that piqued my interest:

Amos Thornton from nearby Pinto helped bury the dead but 'wished he had not,' recounted his stepson, 'as the memory of that terrible sight he could not forget.'

Sometime before March (1862), a group of Union Army volunteers at San Bernardino took into custody two Utah men, one from Santa Clara and one from Pinto, where the traveling duo tried to sell the soldiers butter and cheese. Four days later, the two learned the reason for the arrest when James H. Carleton, now a colonel and the army volunteers' leader, was finally able to cross the engorged Santa Ana to reach the camp. "Who pulled down the monument at Mountain Meadows?' Carlton interrogated the prisoners. One of them answered "he didn't think it was anybody" in southern Utah because people already "had too much work of their own to do, and [even] if they hadn't, they did not like work well enough to do that." "I guess that brother Brigham and John D. Lee, Isaac C. Haight, John M. Higbee and Prime Coleman had a hand in it," Carleton shot back. We are coming to learn them to leave dead folks' bones alone."

The above book excerpts describe situations peripheral to the actual massacre. I'm aware of no actual massacre perpetrator who was a Pinto resident.

But let me posit a musing on the horrific Mountain Meadows Massacre itself. Consider the tenor of the times. Mormons in southern Utah, were isolated, three hundred miles away from their leaders at Church Headquarters in Salt Lake City, only ten years from first arriving in Utah after having experienced persecution in Illinois, Missouri and Ohio. They were on a war footing, steeped in fear of being routed by (they thought nearby) federal troops on their way to affirm US government primacy in Utah Territory. In a climate of war hysteria, absent clear direction from their Salt Lake City based leaders, the southern Utah LDS settlers conflated the Fancher wagon train's presence in "their territory" with the enemy, the US government. One can observe, if not excuse, how ordinary, otherwise decent, people in existential crisis might lose their moral moorings under such circumstances. Harvard psychologist Robert M. Yerkes' "The Dancing Mouse" experiments in 1907 concluded that overloaded brains become dysfunctional. Methinks brain dysfunctionality more than unadulterated malevolence was, if not an underlying cause of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a contributing factor. Notwithstanding, the heinous act cannot be excused, nor punishment withheld from the beleaguered perpetrators. Just sayin'.

The example of the Mountain Meadows Massacre highlights the need for all citizens to be able to think critically... to hold fast, even if it requires questioning authority, to timeworn moral principles during times of duress. The recent coronavirus scandal where government information to citizens was mostly wrong, but where a majority of Americans unthinkingly complied with misguided government directives, is another example how people who don't think critically can be caught up in wrongdoing. https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid02zAFVZLh8Y72eKSWoddi4SwcP5JWy2EmWQkuoyp5eUCKoxxGRH1S2iQHbCQjvtQurl&id=1165667380&sfnsn=mo&mibextid=RUbZ1f Our current civilization is not wholly insulated from more tough times to come. We must be prepared to do the right thing, notwithstanding the hysteria arising from the fog of war. Easy to say, hard to do.

Pinto, today, looked to be a remote, idyllic place far removed from the growing threats to public order extant in other parts of the US. The worm turns.