William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 1

[195] Mountain Meadow massacre, and the alleged murders by Rockwell and his Danite band, the Red and White Indians have been very closely mixed. Four or five commissions have sat on the Mountain Meadow massacre, yet no one can say whether Kanosh, the Ute chief, or Colonel Dame, the Mormon bishop, was the man most to blame. All witnesses in the case describe the slayers as “Indians,” or as “painted like Indians,” or as “ dressed like Indians.” Kanosh was a Mormon elder; and there is something of the Ute in Colonel Dame.

Nine years ago I wrote of these saints:

“ Hints for their system of government may have been found nearer home than Hauran, in less respectable quarters than the Bible; the Shoshone wigwam could have supplied the Saints with a nearer model of a plural household than the patriarch's tent. . . . The saints go much beyond Abram; and I for one am inclined to think that they have found their type of domestic life in the Indian wigwam rather than in the patriarch's tent. Like the Ute, a Mormon may have as many wives as he can feed, like the Mandan he may marry ”