Ellott Willden
Ellott Willden, his personal and family background, and his involvement in and statements about the Mountain Meadows Massacre
Ellott Willden/Wilden
1833-1920
Biographical Sketch
Early Life in the English West Midlands
Ellott Willden/Wilden descended from northern British borderers. Born in 1833 to Charles and Eleanor Turner Willden, Elliott Willden and other family members were baptized in the Mormon Church in 1845 and attended the Mormons' Derbyshire conference.
Immigration to America and onto Utah
His family immigrated to the United States in 1849 and arrived in Utah in 1851 when Ellot Willden was around 18 years-old. Charles Willden, Ellott's father, had worked in the iron mills in Sheffield, England and as soon as his ironwork experience was recognized, it was determined to send him and his family to the "Iron Mission" in southern Utah with headquarters in Cedar City. There the founding of the Deseret Iron Company was underway.
Moving to Cedar City and the Ironworks
In late October 1852, these working class immigrants from the West Midlands of England had joined other Englishmen as well as Scots, Welsh, Irish and others in the Iron Mission in southern Utah. On arrival, they lived in their wagons and a dugout. Ellott and his brothers tended the community livestock herd. They also tended ten head of sheep that they had brought with them. However, they passed a miserable winter, being short on both food and clothing. They subsisted largely on bran bread. By early spring 1853, they were digging roots and eating grass to survive. Ellott Willden's experience was probably similar to that of his brother Feargus O'Conner Willden (named after the Irish radical Feargus O'Connor) who feed sheep, milked cows, cut wood, and carried water.
However, things improved somewhat in the next few years. By 1854, the inhabitants of Cedar City and left the confines of the original fort for Plat A, a new larger fort. Charles Willden had a lot and abobe-walled home next door to the ironworks chief engineer Thomas Bladen and two lots away from Cedar City bishop Philip Klingensmith. He also had an allotment in the community garden plot. In 1855, when it was determined to relocate the settlement again, Charles Willden had a lot in Plat B, which was located southeast of Plat A, and occupied the area where the modern town of Cedar City now stands. By 1856, Charles had purchased a second lot and 22-year-old Ellott Willden had purchased a lot of his own.
In the Iron Military District: Private Ellott Willden, Company F, John M. Higbee's 3rd Battalion
In September 1857, 23-year-old Ellott Willden was a private in Company F in Cedar City. Probably on Saturday, September 5, he and Josiah Reeves entered the Arkansas emigrants camp at Mountain Meadows to ascertain their plans. On Monday the 7th at the time of the first attack, Willden may have be present or in the vicinity but there is no corroborated report of Willden's whereabouts or role that day. Nor is there for Willden's actions at the massacre on Friday the 11th, other than that he was present at the Meadows.
In the 1859 arrest warrant, Willden was listed as "E. Welean."
For years, little was known of Willden's role. However, as discussed below, in the early 1890s, Ellott Willden made some particularly revealing statements about many aspects of the massacre. The publication of his statements in Turley and Walker's Mountain Meadows Massacre: The Jenson and Morris Collections makes available some of the most important new source material from a primary witness to the massacre.
Married Life
In his family life, Willden married serially two English immigrants to Utah, both from Staffordshire near his own homeland. In 1856, he married Joseph Clews's sister, Emma Jane Clews (1839-1890) and she bore him nine children. After Emma died in 1890, he remarried.
Leaving Cedar City and Establishing Willden's Fort on Cove Creek
In 1860, Ellott Willden and his father, Charles, visited Cove Creek, near the boundary line between Millard and Beaver counties and midway between Fillmore and Beaver. They made plans to establish a fort there. In 1861, the Willden family moved to Cove Creek and soon had built two houses, a dugout and a corral and had planted grain. Over time, they established Willden's Fort, a log-pole fort that became a convenient resting place for travelers when traveling between Salt Lake City and southern Utah.
For several years, Willden and his wife along with his parents and other family members lived at the fort. In 1862, following cultural patterns familiar to them in northern England, the Willden family brought sheep to the area after which sheep raising expanded rapidly in the region.
Resettling in Beaver, Utah
In 1865, however, the outbreak of the Black Hawk War forced the Willdens to abandon their fort and retreat to the relative safety of the settlement at Beaver. Two years later, others returned to Fort Willden and built a larger fort nearby, Cove Fort, that still stands today, an artifact from pioneer-era Utah.
In 1866, during the Black Hawk War, John Percival Lee and his family occupied a diary farm some miles outside of Beaver. One evening that fall, hostile Indians besieged their isolated ranch house and they narrowly escaped tragedy. Ellott Willden had been present at the Lee homestead shortly before the attack and noted the wolf calls which he suspected were being made by hostile Indians.
Willden established his home in Beaver where he lived for more than fifty years. He raised livestock and pursued farming. He also had some renown in his community as a fiddler. For years he played fiddle for the Beaver choir, brass band, and dance orchestra.
Indictment for Murder
In 1874, Willden was among nine militiamen indicted for their involvement in the 1857 massacre. Besides such principal figures as Col. William H. Dame, Major Isaac C. Haight, Major John M. Higbee, Major John D. Lee, Cedar City bishop Phillip Klingensmith, and William C. Stewart, all of whom played prominent and well-attested roles, the indictment also included three militia privates, George Washington Adair, Samuel Jewkes, and Ellott Willden. It has never been entirely clear why these three militiamen from the lowest echelon of the Iron Military District were included in the indictment. At any rate, Willden was arrested but eventually released on bail. He did not testify in the Lee trials and the charges against him were ultimately dismissed.
His Later Statements Relative to the Massacre
In the 1890s, when Andrew Jenson of the LDS Church's historical office travelled to southern Utah to gather information and interview aging Iron County militiamen with knowledge of the massacre, Ellott Willden played an important role. Based on personal knowledge of the massacre, Willden made corrections to Hubert Howe Bancroft's massacre account in his History of Utah: 1540-1886. He helped Jenson gain access to men who had participated in the massacre. He provided his own personal account with many details not contained elsewhere. In 2009, Turley and Walker published Ellott Willden's statements for the first time in their documentary collection, Mountain Meadows Massacre: The Jenson and Morris Collections. Willden's statements can now be evaluated along with other sources known since the 19th century.
According to Ellott Willden, Major Isaac Haight ordered Major John M. Higbee to have Willden and Josiah Reeves shadow the Arkansas company to ascertain their intentions. It was probably Saturday, September 5, when Willden and Reeves entered the emigrant camp at Mountain Meadows. Significantly, Willden noted that the emigrants treated them civilly. Willden also credibly shows that the original plan to attack the emigrants was not at Mountain Meadows but in a narrow canyon on the Santa Clara River some miles to the south.
Willden described a key event that occurred either in the afternoon or evening of Monday, the 7th or, more probably, Tuesday, the 8th: the killing of William Aden. Willden identified William Stewart and Joel White as the Mormon sentries who killed Aden and fired on his Arkansas company companion. But Aden's companion successfully retreated to the safety of the emigrant camp. Willden also described how Joseph Clews and he raced past the emigrant camp in mid-week, dressed in Indian garb.
The Importance of the New Source Material from Ellott Willden
There are limitations in the new materials from Ellott Willden. He does not describe his own role in the massacre and his various accounts probably contain some errors in chronology, but he does provide many significant and unique details. His account may be the most important new source material on the massacre since the mid-20th century when Juanita Brooks's published her groundbreaking history of the massacre and included several key militia accounts and government documents in the appendix to the volume. In Turley and Walker's new documentary volume, Mountain Meadows Massacre: Jenson and Morris Collections, Willden is the largest contributor of new source material -- 90 pages -- which constitutes more than one-quarter of the total.
Final Years
After the death of his first wife Emma in 1890, Willden married Christiana Brown (1859-1936) in 1892 and she bore him three more children, the last when he was sixty-four years old. Around 1910, Willden applied for Indian Wars veterans benefits for his service in 1866 during Utah's Black Hawk War.
In 1920, Willden died at the age of eighty-seven and was buried in Beaver. He was survived by his second wife, Christiana, and numerous children. By then, he was one of the oldest surviving militiamen of the catastrophe at Mountain Meadows.
Our special thanks to Gary D. Young for generously sharing his research on Ellott Willden.
References
Bagley, Blood of the Prophets,128; Bigler and Bagley, Innocent Blood: Essential Narratives, 344, 393; Bradley, A History of Beaver County, 71; Carter, ed., Heart Throbs of the West, 4:135; Fielding, ed., The Tribune Reports of the Trial of John D. Lee; Gottfredson, Indian Depredations in Utah, 231; Jenson, Encyclopedic History of the Church . . . , 162; Lee, Mormonism Unveiled, 380; Lee Trial transcripts; Lyman and Newell, A History of Millard County, 105-106; Merkley, ed., Monuments to Courage: A History of Beaver County, 2nd ed., 33, 37, 52, 134-35; Olsen, "The History of Charles and Eleanor Turner Willden" (accessed at http://handfamily.org/02360004.htm); Palmer, “The Early Sheep Industry in Southern Utah, Utah Historical Quarterly, 42/2 (Spring 1974), 179; Seegmiller, A History of Iron County, 374, fn 7; Shirts and Shirts, A Trial Furnace: Southern Utah's Iron Mission, 62 fn. 69, 175, 288, 293, 297-98, 329, 331, 474, 484, 487, 496; Turley and Walker, Mountain Meadows Massacre: The Jenson and Morris Collections; 133-223; Utah State Archive and Records and Service, Commissioner of Indian War Records, Indian War Service Affidavits, affidavit of Ellott Willden, accessed at http://archives.utah.gov/research/inventories/2217.html; Walker, et al, Massacre at Mountain Meadows, 140-41, 149, 151-52, 157, 159, 163, 171-72, 179, 230, Appendix C, 264; Charles Willden, "Biography of Charles Willden, 1806-1883" (accessed at http://handfamily.org/02360002.htm); and Gary Young, family history records of Ellott Willden. See Bibliography.
(Special thanks to Gary Young for providing his family histories of Ellott Willden.)
External Links
For further information on Ellott/Elliot Wilden/Willden see:
- http://mountainmeadowsmassacre.org/appendices/appendix-c-the-militiamen
- http://contentdm.li.suu.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/beaver_murdock_academy&CISOPTR=479&CISOBOX=1&REC=17 (Charles Willden family photographs)
- Deseret Iron Company Account Book, 1854-1867: http://www.footnote.com/document/241905844/
For further information of the family of Charles and Eleanor Turner Willden, see:
- History of Charles and Eleanor Turner Willden" at http://www.handfamily.org/02360004.htm
- Biography of Charles Willden at http://www.handfamily.org/02360002.htm
- Fort Willden at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willden_Fort
- Charles Willden, Sr., Pioneer 1852, (following Our Pioneer Heritage) at: http://heritage.uen.org/companies/Wc463efbdb2289.htm
- Charles Willden (diary and family history) at: http://keithwyoung.com/CharlesWillden.pdf
Further information and confirmation needed. Please contact editor@1857ironcountymilitia.com.
