Massacre Site. On March 29, 1857, some 40 wagons carrying approximately 50 men, 40 women, and 50 children left Arkansas to start a new life in California. Leading the train was 45 year old Captain Alexander Fancher, with wife, Eliza, and their nine children, ranging in age from 18 months to 19 years. Joining them was John T. Baker, the 52-year-old patriarch of a clan of around 25, Jesse and Mary Dunlop and their six children, Lorenzo and Nancy Dunlap and their five children, and William Eaton. Most of the train consisted of large families but some were newly married young couples; several had infants and toddlers. There were also several unmarried men and women in their twenties, and at least twenty hired riflemen. On August 3, 1857, the train made camp outside of Salt Lake City where the locals refused to sell non-believers supplies. The train split up, four wagons took the one route, and the Fancher's group took the another. Unbeknownst to the train, Brigham Young declared martial law throughout the entire territory on September 4, 1857. On that same evening, the Fancher train entered Mountain Meadows where they made camp. On Sunday September 6, they were surrounded by the local Mormons who opened fire on the train with the dawn. About seven men from the wagon train were killed, 15 more were wounded. The pioneers barricaded themselves and dug in. On the fifth day of the siege, September 11, the Mormon militia entered the embattled camp under a white flag and informed the train they had been attacked by Piutes. They were told should they surrender they would be led to safety. The pioneers agreed. Most of the children under eight were placed in one wagon. The wounded were placed in a second wagon, and both pulled out of camp. All the women and all the children over eight followed on foot. They were in turn followed by the men, each of whom was accompanied by an armed Mormon. After a few hundred feet, on command, each Mormon shot the man beside him. Others, including Piute allies, who had been in hiding, emerged to slaughter the women and children. No effort was made to give the bodies a decent burial and scavengers would scatter bones over a wide area. Eighteen children under eight were spared. They were distributed to local families. Federal authorities rescued 17 of them in 1859 and returned them to relatives in Arkansas. A detachment of United States Cavalry then gathered what bones of the massacre victims they could find and placed them in a single grave. A rock cairn was erected over the remains. As many as 120 men, women, and children, had been attacked, besieged for five days, persuaded to surrender under a flag of truce and a pledge of safe passage, and then murdered. Despite the fact that Mormon leaders tried for years to perpetuate the myth that Piutes alone had murdered the Fancher Party in Southern Utah, the Mormon writer William E. Berrett affirmed: "It was a deliberately planned massacre, treacherously carried into execution." The site was declared a National Historic Landmark in 2011.