On the Trail...

In 1999 when Candy Moulton traveled with the California National Historic Trail Wagon Train from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Coloma, California, she began writing “On the Trail” for The Fence Post, published in Windsor, Colorado. Initially appearing weekly as a chronicle of the wagon train journey, the column now runs bi-weekly and includes not only Candy’s wagon train trips on Western overland trails, but her journeys all across the country.

Watch this space and travel with Candy and learn history of the American West ranging from the trails to gold camps, and from Indian sites to frontier forts. You’ll meet people ranging from exotic animal breeders and buckskinners to cowboy poets and Pony Express riders.

An isolated, sagebrush-covered landscape with a spring that ran all summer creating a green, meadow-like valley became a film site for a History Channel production near Encampment, Wyoming, in August of 2004.

Back in May of 2004 Paul Andrew Hutton, professor of history at the University of New Mexico, told me a proposal he had written to film a documentaryabout the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857 had been approved by Bill Kurtis Productions and the History Channel. “We will need a wagon train,” Hutton told me.

He knew of my background in traveling Western emigrant trails and work on “Footsteps to the West,” the film at the National Historic Trails Interpretive Center in Casper.

In June, I visited the actual site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre in southern Utah with Hutton, author Will Bagley, whose book “Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Mountain Meadows Massacre,” is a primary resource, and reenactor Terry Del Bene of Green River. We walked portions of the site and took photographs. As we prepared to leave the area Hutton turned to me and said, “Can we replicate this site in Wyoming?”

I began looking and by the time we needed to film, had located a site in southern Wyoming. Del Bene and I also lined up reenactors for the actual filming. He contacted reenactors who could portray the military and Mormon militia involved in the story and I arranged for wagons, teams, Indians, and the “Alexander Fancher Emigrant Party.” The military reenactors came from Colorado, and are members of the Army of the West Military History Association. Darrell LoneBear, Sr., Harvey Spoonhunter and Layha Spoonhunter came from the Wind River Reservation to portray Paiute Indians. Emigrants came from throughout Wyoming.

After the first few minutes of filming, Bill Kurtis, owner of Kurtis Productions, and host of three television series including “Investigating History,” told us his style of film production differs from many documentary filmmakers. “You can expect that there is a camera on you at all times,” he told us in our first evening meeting. As members of the emigrant party, we were told to “get in the period” of 1857 and stay there throughout the two full days of filming. We were told to talk and act as though we were actually on the trail and camped at Mountain Meadows.

Throughout the two full days of filming the Kurtis production team-which included Paul Hutton and Jamie Schenk as co-producers, and with Will Bagley as historical consultant--recreated the story of Mountain Meadows.

In that incident in September of 1857, the Fancher emigrant wagon train en route to California from Arkansas was attacked in Southern Utah by Paiutes organized by Mormons. After a five-day siege, the Mormons persuaded the emigrant party to surrender after which all members of the party were killed with the exception of 17 children under the age of six, who were then adopted into Mormon families.

This is a dark story in American Western history, and one of the most violent incidents ever to occur on the overland route to California. Military Dragoons placed a cross at the site in 1859, but it was later torn down by Mormon Church President Brigham Young. In 1999, when a new monument was being installed at the site, bodies were inadvertently unearthed and studied for a brief time by forensic scientists. At that time LDS Church President Gordon Hinckley acknowledged the Mormon actions of 1857, placing a new monument at the site.

“Investigating History: Mountain Meadows Massacre, Who’s to Blame” aired on the History Channel on February 8, 2005.

Finding Candy On the Trail
Candy will be at Festival of the West at Rawhide in Scottsdale, Arizona, March 17 and March 19 at the Western Writers of America Booth.

June 3-5 she is a featured speaker at Wyoming Writers Inc., annual Convention in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

June 14-18 she will be at the Western Writers of America Convention in
Spokane, Washington

July 15-17 she will be at the Grand Encampment Cowboy Gathering in
Encampment, Wyoming

August 15-20 she will be at the Oregon-California Trails Association in Salt Lake City, Utah

Her books will be available at all venues.