A bullet-pierced skull, along with a curious note, found on the shelves of a pawnshop is now being studied to attempt to determine if it may that of a Mountain Meadows Massacre victim. Following is an excerpt from an interesting AP article by Jennifer Dobner. The article itself is extensive.
SALT LAKE CITY – For decades it sat on a shelf in a brown cardboard box – a skull pierced in the back with an apparent bullet hole and linked by a typewritten note to a dark and violent chapter in Mormon church history.
Found in a pawnshop 27 years ago, the specimen is now in the hands of the Idaho state archaeologist. Ken Reid is supervising tests to determine whether the skull belongs to a victim of the Mountain Meadows massacre of 1857, when 120 men, women and children from an Arkansas-based wagon train were killed by Mormon settlers in southern Utah.
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“I was a little bit shocked when I first heard about it,” said Patty Norris of Omaha, president of Mountain Meadows Descendants, one of three descendant organizations. “At this point we’re working on the assumption that it is a victim of the massacre, but all we really know is that they haven’t disproven it yet.”
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Reid is getting a second opinion from a Boise State University scientist. Margaret Streeter is working to determine the skull’s possible origins, race, sex and age. Other tests look for damage from weather and animals, in addition to things like gunshot wounds or other signs of trauma.
Depending on Streeter’s findings, DNA testing – including samples taken from remaining teeth – could be recommended as the next step, Reid said.
Members of Norris’s descendant group are willing to give DNA samples for comparison, as are members of two other descendant organizations, the Mountain Meadows Association and the Mountain Meadows Massacre Foundation.
Read the full article in the May 21, 2009 edition of nwanews.com.
Isaac Chauncey Haight, a man who was born in my hometown of Windham, Greene County, NY, was involved in this horrific event as one of the coconspirators. Obviously he’s not one of the town’s famous sons or daughters that we like to brag about.