This Red-Handed Wretch: Bill Hickman and The Murder of Richard Yates
by Ben
Boulden
In the dying minutes of
October 18, 1857, the notorious lawman, lawyer, and admitted murderer, William
Adams Hickman – labeled, “this red-handed wretch,” by the New York World
and popularly known as Wild Bill – “used up” the mountaineer Richard E.
Yates. The Mormon militia, called the Nauvoo Legion, had arrested Yates on a
charge of spying for the approaching U.S. Army during the Utah War. Hickman
claimed Yates’s killing had been ordered by Mormon prophet Brigham Young. A
claim contradicted by the men Hickman implicated in Yates’s murder, and by
Mormon historians ever since, but the conditions in Utah at the time gives a
ring of possibility to Hickman’s claim anyway.
The Yates murder took
place in a time of great turmoil and escalating violence in Utah Territory.
Brigham Young and the Mormon Church were in full revolt against the United
States government. Young, who preached a violent millennialist
fire-and-brimstone Christianity and controlled the territory with the
iron-grasp of hierarchical theocracy, had refused an order to step down as the
territorial governor. In response, President James Buchanan sent an Army, known
as the Utah Expedition, to remove Young, install a federal presence, and bring
law and order to the territory, which covered most of modern-day Nevada, Utah,
and southwest Wyoming.
The Mormons believed this
federal action was intended to crush them. A fear deepened by their expulsions
from New York, Ohio, Missouri – where the governor issued Missouri Executive
Order 44, which read in part, “the Mormons…must be exterminated or driven from
the State” – and Illinois, where Mormonism’s founder, Joseph Smith, had been
murdered by a mob while he was jailed at Carthage.
As Buchanan’s Army
marched westward across the plains toward Utah, Brigham Young ordered the
Nauvoo Legion to harass the troops without “shedding of blood” so long as the soldiers
didn’t venture west of Fort Bridger.[i]
The Legion stampeded livestock, stole horses, and burned wagons, but a clear
pattern of murderous vengeance arose, too. On September 11, 1857, members of
the Nauvoo Legion killed 120 members of an Arkansas wagon train – every man,
woman, and child over the age of six – emigrating to California in Southern
Utah. An army deserter, Private George W. Clark, was lynched near “Smiths Fork
of the Green River” and five
Californians were arrested and ultimately executed in Central Utah.
In August 1857, Yates
arrived at his Green River trading shack. Isaac Bullock, quartermaster of Fort
Supply situated some ten miles south and west of Fort Bridger, notified Brigham
Young by letter that Yates had “arrived on Green River with 4 wagons loaded
with… Powder Lead & caps sugar & coffee”[ii]
to trade with Native tribes and emigrants moving west on the Oregon Trail. The powder
was an enticing target for Young since the Mormons were unable to manufacture
gunpowder and their strategy, according to historian James MacKinnon, was to
purchase “privately held supplies before the Utah Expedition seized them.”
An offer, which was documented
by Mormon apostle George A. Smith who had had a significant role in the murders
of the Arkansas emigrants a month earlier, was made to Yates in early-October,
while he was visiting Ft. Bridger, for his “lead, powder and blankets.” Yates
refused since the sale would make it harder to sell his remaining stock. A few
days later, Yates’s gunpowder was seized by Captain Randolph B. Macy of the
Fifth U.S. Infantry. The seizure, which was portrayed as a voluntary sale by
the Mormon leadership in their letters, played on Brigham Young’s longtime
distrust of the mountaineers. A distrust that is easily seen in this August 18,
1857, letter from Isaac Bullock to Brigham Young: “most of the Mountain Men are
after money and are not for us and will be on hand to render the soldiers all
the aid they can.”[iii]
The Nauvoo Legion
arrested Yates as a spy – “[for] having been passing to and from the enemy’s
camp” – on October 15.[iv]
A report from Legion commanders to Brigham Young mentioned, “according to
[Yates’s] own statement,” the Army had his “ammunition.”[v]
On the morning of October 18, Yates was sent as Lt. Bill Hickman’s “prisoner”
to Salt Lake City.[vi]
The men’s “10 am” departure was noted in the diary of William C. Staines.
According to Hickman,
Young’s oldest son, Joseph A. Young, intercepted him and Yates later that same
day in Echo Canyon, which is the main artery connecting Green River with Salt
Lake City, with the message: “[Brigham Young] wanted that man Yates killed.”
And when they arrived at the Legion’s Echo Canyon headquarters that same
evening, Colonel Nathaniel V. Jones told Hickman “he had orders” to have Yates
“used up.” Jones sent Hickman and Yates some distance away from the Legion’s Echo
Canyon headquarters to camp. Near midnight, according to Hickman, with Yates
manacled and sleeping “on his blankets” by the campfire, “Col. Jones and two
others, Hosea Stout and another man whose name I do not recollect came…and
asked if Yates was asleep. I told them he was, upon which his brains were
knocked out with an ax.”
The men dug a grave “some
three feet deep” and Yates’s “body was put in and the dirt well packed on it,
after which our camp-fire…was moved onto the grave in order to prevent notice
of a change of ground.”
Hickman’s casual
retelling of Yates’s murder is made more grotesque by his admission of having
been friendly with the mountaineer for years before murdering him. As he told
the New York World in an 1871 interview: “Yates was a man whom I had
known in Missouri” – Hickman was a Missourian until he joined the Mormon Church
and followed the Saints first to Illinois and then to Utah – and he “was at
[Yates’s] place frequently, and travelled with him some.”[vii]
Hickman
emptied the mountaineer’s pockets of either $600 or $900 – the amount changes
between Hickman’s memoirs and an 1871 newspaper interview – and a gold watch.[viii]
An elderly Mormon woman told U.S. Army Captain Albert Tracy in 1858 that she’d
seen Hickman in Springville, Utah “riding his [Yates’s] bay pony” and “wearing
[Yates’s] overcoat.”[ix]
The next
morning Hickman started towards Salt Lake City, Yates’s body rotting in a
shallow grave behind him, to report the events to Brigham Young. In an
interview published by the New York World on November 25, 1871, Hickman
said:[x]
“I and one of my men brought the spoils to
Brigham and laid them on his table with the remark that we had had a pretty
hard night of it and would like a little of the money to have a little spree
with. [Brigham] replied that the money must go to pay the expenses of the war,
and that after such deeds we must keep our heads clear.”
No records have been
uncovered to corroborate Hickman’s meeting with Brigham Young after Yates’s
murder. Nor has a record of the money entering the Church’s coffers surfaced,
but Young’s reaction to Yates’s murder is interesting. His concern, which is
seen in a letter dated October 26, 1857 (a full week after Hickman bludgeoned
Yates to death), is about directing his men on how the mountaineer’s property
should be distributed – “take and keep what you can find belonging [to Yates
and his partner].” – rather than with the murder of a civilian by one his
Legion officers. This cavalier order is revealing because if Young didn’t order
Yates’s death, and there is no known direct evidence of this, he was certainly
more than willing to capture the spoils of Yates’s brutal death.
It is also important to understand
Bill Hickman’s status in Brigham Young’s Mormon Kingdom. Young had appointed Hickman
as the “sheriff, tax collector, tax assessor, assistant federal marshal, and
the first legislator to represent” Green River County, which covered the
southwestern corner of modern-day Wyoming and is also where Yates was murdered.
He was nominated as an alternate – “if there should be any objections” to Young’s
“first selections” – for the territorial District Attorney in 1857, and Young
selected Hickman as the Independence, Missouri to Ft. Laramie leg of the short-lived
Brigham Young Express and Carrying Company, also known as the X.Y. Company, in
1856 and 1857. And Hickman had Young’s ear, as their correspondence attests,
well into the mid-1860s when the two men had a falling out.
In October 1871, a federal grand jury indicted Brigham Young, Bill Hickman, and three other members of the Nauvoo Legion for Yates’s murder, but none of the men were ever brought to trial because of an 1872 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to dismiss hundreds of indictments and verdicts in the territory as procedurally flawed, including the grand jury indictments for Yates’s murder. So, it is unlikely we’ll ever know if Brigham Young ordered Richard Yates’s murder, whether
Bill Hickman acted alone or if there were accomplices, but Young’s careless attitude
about Yates’s death and the lack of consequences for Hickman are telling.
|
In December 1857 a federal court
indicted Brigham Young and other prominent Mormons, including Bill Hickman, for
treason for their actions during the Utah War; however, the men were pardoned
by President Buchanan before the U.S. Army marched into Salt Lake City on June
16, 1858.   |
[i] Wells, Taylor, and Smith to Brigham Young,
15-October-1857, LDS Archives [per MacKinnon’s Kingdom of the West]
[ii] Bullock to Young, 18 August 1857, LDS
Archives [per MacKinnon’s Kingdom of the West]
[iii] Ibid
[iv] Wells, Taylor and Smith to Young, 15
October 1857, LDS Archives [per MacKinnon’s Kingdom of the West]
[v] Ibid
[vi] Wells, Taylor and Smith to Young, 18
October 1857, LDS Archives [per MacKinnon’s Kingdom of the West]
[vii] New York World, “Brigham Young’s Janissary. Interview
with Bill Hickman…”, 25 November 1871 [per MacKinnon’s Kingdom of the West]
[viii]
Hickman claimed in Brigham’s
Destroying Angel the sum he stole from Yates was $900, but in an interview
published in the November 25, 1871 edition of the New York World he
stated the amount was $600.
[ix] Alter and Dwyer, eds., entry for 14
October 1858, “Journal of Captain Albert Tracy, 1858-1860”
[x] New York World, “Brigham Young’s Janissary. Interview
with Bill Hickman…”, 25 November 1871 [per MacKinnon’s Kingdom of the West]
Sources
Alter, J. Cecil &
Dwyer, Robert J., eds, “Journal of Captain Albert Yates, 1858-1860,” Utah
Historical Quarterly, 1945 (Nos. 1-4);
Bigler, David L., & Bagley,
Will, The Mormon Rebellion, University of Oklahoma Press, 2011
Hilton, Hope A., “Wild
Bill” Hickman and the Mormon Frontier, Signature Books, 1988
Hilton, Lynne M. &
Hilton, Hope A., “Hickman, William Adams”
Hickman, William A
(edited by J. H. Beadle), Brigham’s Destroying Angel: Being the Life,
Confession, and Startling Disclosures of the Notorious Bill Hickman, the Danite
Chief of Utah, Shepard Publishing Co., 1904
MacKinnon, William P., Kingdom
of the West, Volume I, 299, The Arthur H. Clark Co., 2008
Copyright © 2022 by Ben Boulden / All Rights Reserved
Comments
Post a Comment