A Senator's Recollection

A Senator's Recollection. . On September 16, 1859, 17-year-old James H. Berry witnessed an event that he would never forget. He saw 15 children return to relatives and friends in Carrollton, Arkansas. Those children were survivors of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. They were escorted by a group of their relatives, led by Arkansas Senator William C. Mitchell. Two other children would return in January 1860. , On February 11, 1907, James H. Berry stood before the United States Senate in Washington, D.C. By that time, he was a senator himself, and he had also served as governor of Arkansas. He was a veteran of military battles, including one in which he had lost his leg. His fellow senators listened as he shared his personal connection to the victims of the Mountain Meadows Massacre:, "In 1857 I lived in the county of Carroll, in the State of Arkansas. In the spring of that year there left that county and two adjoining counties between a hundred and forty and a hundred and fifty, including men, women, and children, emigrants for California. They consisted of the best citizens in that country. It was a large train. It excited large interest throughout the section of the country from which they went. They had about 600 head of cattle, several mule teams, a number of wagons, and each head of a family had more or less money. ... Late in the fall or the early winter the news came back that the train had been assaulted... far out West, and every soul had perished., "Later on there came news that some of the children, how many we did not know at that time, were saved, and that they were in the hands of the Mormons in Utah. Our Senators and Representatives here called upon the Interior Department. An agent... was sent there by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. He gathered those children together... who had been preserved from the massacre...., "I was a boy 17 years old on that day when they were brought to the village court-house. I saw them as they were lined up on the benches, and [Senator] Mitchell told the people whose children they were, at least whose he thought they were.... One little girl, I distinctly remember, had had an arm broken by a gunshot wound. It had not united, and the arm hung dangling by her side. I have seen much of life since that day; I have seen war along the lines of the border States in all its horrors; but no scene in my life was ever so impressed upon my mind as that which I saw there that day presented by those little children, their fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters dead on the far-off plains of Utah and they, absolutely without means.", Congressional Record, United States Senate, Feb. 11, 1907, 40:2685-86