Mountain Meadows Massacre Grave Site Memorial

View from Dan Sill Hill.
This is the historic campsite at the south end of the valley. This was a traditional stopping place for pack mule trains traversing the Old Spanish Trail. At this site, the Baker-Fancher Train camped in 1857 and on September 7 the initial siege of the Mountain Meadows massacre took place. Stone monuments with plaques were erected in 1859 and 1932 and a new plaque in 1990.

This rock cairn is patterned after one that was built in May 1859, almost two years after the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The original was 50 feet around and 12 feet high. It was topped by a cedar Cross extending another 12 feet hight. Soldiers in the United States Army erected teh original cairn to mark the place where they had buried bones of 34 members of the Arkansas wagon train. they used a trench-dug by wagon train members during the attack-as the mass grave. They also buried bones in at least two other mass graves in the valley. Over the next several decades, the original memboiral was damaged by vandalism, floods, and erosion. In September 1932, the Utah Trails and Landmarks Association built a stone wall around the site. In 1999, after years of neglect, the memorial received renewed attention. Volunteers from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints prepared the site for the memorial that stands here today. The current memorial contains stones from the original cairn. In the process of construction the current memorial, workers found bones of 29 persons. Those bones were reinterred in a crypt, now marked by an engraved granite paver inside the northeast corner of the stone wall surrounding the cairn. Relative of the victims wrapped the bones in beautiful hand-woven shrounds and encased then in oak ossuaries. The ossuaries were respectfully placed on a thin layer of Arkansas soil. On September 9, 2017, relatives of the victims buried a child's skull that had been removed from the site by U.S. Army personnel in 1859. For more information about the history of memorials at this site and in Arkansas, see the engraved sign on the back of the cairn's stone wall.