SHIPLER COLLECTION, UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
“Unquestionably Authentic and Correct in Every Detail”: Probing John I. Ginn and His Remarkable Utah War Story By WILLIAM P. MACKINNON
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or the past seventy years a small band of Utah historians—Charles Kelly and Hoffman Birney, Juanita L. Brooks, and Harold Schindler —have tantalized students of the Utah War with vivid accounts of Porter Salt Lake City’s Main Street a few Rockwell in action, the Mountain Meadows years after John I. Ginn’s visit massacre and the fate of the Aiken party. 1 during the Utah War. William P. MacKinnon is an independent historian and management consultant from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. His articles, essays, and book reviews on the American West and Utah’s territorial period have appeared in Utah Historical Quarterly and more than twenty-five other journals since 1963. During 2004 MacKinnon’s articles won the Dale L. Morgan Award from the Utah State Historical Society and the J. Talmage Jones Award from the Mormon History Association. MacKinnon is editor of At Sword’s Point: A Documentary History of the Utah War of 1857-1858, a forthcoming title from The Arthur H. Clark Co. This article is an adaptation of a paper presented at the Mormon History Association’s May 2004 annual meeting in Provo. The author thanks Patricia H. MacKinnon for her encouragement, understanding, and support as well as Orem genealogist-historian Ardis E. Parshall for her administrative and research help. Copyright 2004 by William P. MacKinnon. 1 The Utah War of 1857-58 was the armed conflict between Mormon leaders and U.S. President James Buchanan over power and authority in Utah Territory. Ultimately the struggle pitted nearly one-third of the U.S. Army against Brigham Young’s Utah territorial militia in a guerrilla campaign until a non-violent settlement resolved the military aspects of the affair. Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict, 1850-1859 (New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 1960); my “Utah Expedition, or Utah War,” in New Encyclopedia of the American West, edited by Howard R. Lamar (New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 1998), 114951; my “Utah War (1857-1858),” in Ground Warfare: An International Encyclopedia, edited by Stanley L. Sandler (Santa Barbara:ABC-CLIO, 2002), 913-14.
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