We’ll find out more about the backgrounds of murder victims Gus Gibbons & Steve LeSueur. Were they Nauvoo pioneers? We’ll also find out that Butch Cassidy grew up in a small Utah town (Circleville), although it seems that Mormonism didn’t really take with him. Check out our conversation…
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Gospel Tangents
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Butch Cassidy’s Mormon Background
We’ll find out more about the backgrounds of murder victims Gus Gibbons & Steve LeSueur. Were they Nauvoo pioneers? We’ll also find out that Butch Cassidy grew up in a small Utah town (Circleville), although it seems that Mormonism didn’t really take with him. Check out our conversation…
Interview
Steve 00:33 Among the interesting characters that we meet along the way, besides the interesting outlaws, is the sheriff, Edward Beeler. He was born in 1864. So, he was 36 at this time, and he was married to Mary Hamblin, who was a daughter of Jacob Hamblin, the famed…
GT 01:01 I recognize that name.
Steve 01:03 [Hamblin is] the famed Mormon apostle to the Lamanites. Ed Beeler was not a Mormon. He was a tall, handsome man and people said she [his wife] was very good looking, herself. Anyway, he was tall, and he was a hard-as-nails kind of Sheriff. He got along well with the Mormons and [he was] very well-liked as a sheriff, up to this point. But after the murders, many townspeople blamed him for the young men having been left alone on the trail. And by all accounts, what I can read and by his actions, he blamed himself, as well. [He] felt really bad[ly] about it and so after the boys were found, he organized another posse and he went on an obsessive two-and-a-half-month chase for the outlaws, which is in the book. This chase, it’s covered in newspapers. Of course, he had other posse members with him, and he chased them back into New Mexico, down into Mexico, up through New Mexico again. They killed another lawman in New Mexico.
GT 02:13 I’m surprised Pancho Villa is not in this. {chuckling}
Steve 02:15 Yeah, he’s in another story of another side of my family.
GT 02:20 Oh really? That’s your next book.
Steve 02:22 Yes, yeah, the Skousens.
GT 02:24 Oh, like Cleon Skousen?
Steve 02:28 Cleon Skousen.
GT 02:29 His ancestors.
Steve 02:31 My grandfather Carl, the younger brother of Frank, he married a Skousen, Merle Skousen, who was a daughter of Peter Skousen, who went into the colonies with the Romneys and others. And so, they were down there with Pancho Villa. My grandmother was born in the year 1900, in those colonies. Anyway, they didn’t get to Pancho Villa, because this is just 1900. So, backup. [The outlaws] killed another lawman in New Mexico. They chased them up through Colorado into Utah, where they killed the sheriff and his deputy from Moab, Utah, which called out more posses. It was the largest manhunt in Utah, up to that point, in Utah history. And so, it’s two and a half months of chasing these outlaws. Let’s see. [I’m] looking for a quote from Ed Beeler. Let’s see oh, yeah. So Ed Beeler, during his chase, he was interviewed at various times by newspaper men from Utah, about what he was doing, what he hoped to do. And what he said about this quest, he said, “The boys that these cowardly villains shot to pieces in the south, were my friends. They sacrificed their lives to assist me and I will even up the score. These fellows may as well fight me in one place as another as the time when we meet is bound to come. I know them all, and I am as positive of their identity as though they were behind prison bars.”
Steve 04:14 So, he was determined to get them. He didn’t. But that’s because there’s another thing of reading about outlaws. It was very hard to actually capture outlaws, especially after, say, a robbery or something or even this incident. The posses are traveling hours, even days behind, the outlaws have a head start. The outlaws either have horses, if it’s a robbery, they have horses positioned along the getaway trail, fresh horses. So they just race their horses, get on fresh mounts and go, and the posses can’t catch them. In this case, they had extra horses with them, the five outlaws, they were trailing twelve extra horses when they went through St. John’s. So, Sheriff Beeler said that when they were chasing them, and they had a running gun battle with them for a while near St. John’s. He said, “Well, we’d shoot one horse…” If you get the horse, “and one horse would get shot, and they’d just jump onto a fresh one.” And so, they got away that first day from Sheriff Beeler when he was chasing them for cattle rustling because the sheriff’s horses gave out. And, in fact, that’s what happened to all of the posse men, except for Frank and Gus, is their horses gave out.
Steve 05:09 Anyway, back to how hard it was to chase the outlaws, the outlaws also had much better weapons, typically, than those chasing them. Posse members, as you said when we talked about it, these were just regular people. They weren’t gunmen. They weren’t necessarily trained for tracking or any of that kind of stuff. And so, there was always the threat of ambush and so posses had to go slow. And then you’re talking the West, [there were] vast mountain expanses, and forest places to hide. And then, finally, the outlaws often had associates and confederates in different places, who were quite willing to hide them. They got paid well for it. And they would even lead the posses in the wrong direction. “I saw him go that way.” And so it was very hard to track down and actually capture people after a robbery or after a murder.
Steve 06:34 Though there’s a flip side to that, too, which is this. It was no picnic for the outlaws to be on the run. I mean, they were out in the elements. It was cold or hot and [they were] lacking water, often food, even almost starving to death sometimes. And so, it wasn’t great being on the run. And, in fact, just a couple of things: One is there was one of the outlaws in my book, it wasn’t one of the five, but an outlaw who comes into the picture later. He was in Montana, being chased. And it was during the winter. And so he at night, to avoid being seen, he would dig in snow banks and hide in snow banks. He nearly froze to death doing so. But it did work. He finally escaped [and] made it to Phoenix.
GT 05:38 He lost three fingers. No, I’m just kidding. {Rick laughing}.
Steve 07:26 Yeah, he made it to Phoenix, Arizona. But he was only there a brief time, because his prostitute girlfriend turned him in for the $1,000 reward. {both laughing} And then one other thing, another fellow by the name of Matt Warner, who was another Mormon outlaw, and an outlaw pal of Butch Cassidy, he went to prison for a number of years, came out, went straight. In talking about what was it like on the run? He said it was just terrible. He said, “You didn’t get any sleep. When you tried to sleep, you had to have one ear and one eye open when you tried to sleep.” What else did he say? Oh, he said that, it’s just, after a while you go crazy. He says that even when you know you’re perfectly safe, you’re just always nervous. And what he said was really funny. He said, “Eventually, every pissant under your pillow sounds like a posse, like a posse of sheriffs coming to get you.” {both laughing} And so it was no picnic for them. I also mentioned Matt Warner was another Mormon outlaw. Butch Cassidy, and some people know, but it isn’t always known, he came from a Mormon family. His real name was Robert Leroy Parker, and he was the oldest of 13 children. His parents Maxi and Annie Parker came across the plains with their families. They were children in the 1850s, about the same time that the LeSueur family came. Anyway, the Parkers…
GT 08:55 Does the LeSueur family go back to Nauvoo and everything?
Steve 09:13 Oh, no. They were from the Jersey Islands. And so they came over…
GT 09:18 Like Jersey, England?
Steve 09:19 Oh, yeah. Jersey, England, off the coast, in the English Channel. And so, they came over in 1852, or 1854 or 56, somewhere in that timeframe.
GT 09:35 The Perpetual Emigration Fund, was that part of them?
Steve 09:38 They were not. They had a well-off relative who paid for them to come over.
GT 09:47 Okay.
Steve 09:47 So, not with that. Butch Cassidy grew up in Circleville. But it appears that Mormonism never really took in him. And he had a younger brother, Dan, who was also abandoned it, as well.
GT 10:06 Was he the most famous Mormon outlaw?
Steve 10:10 I think so, You know that…
GT 10:14 I mean, next to Mark Hofmann, I guess. {both laughing}
Steve 10:16 Yes. And there were at least a couple in Arizona that I found. There was a Red Pipkin, who was well known in Apache County, itself. In any case, yeah, Butch was probably the best known of them.
GT 10:35 I’d like to keep going, but I know I need to let you go. Do you have any last thoughts before I let you run?
Steve 10:42 Yes. Yes, I do. Just a couple of things.
GT 10:46 Sure.
Steve 10:46 A couple of things. First of all, I’ll end with an anecdote, before I do a little conclusion. The anecdote is this. Heber J. Grant, he was an apostle in the year 1900. And in January of 1900, so just a couple of months before this event occurred, he and Apostle Rudger Clawson, and J. Golden Kimball, were visiting for a conference in St. John’s. So, Apostle Grant had been in this Little Colorado River quarter in St. John’s many times, he knew what it was like there. Elder Clawson had never been there before. So while they were in…
GT 10:55 Rudger Clawson is that who this is?
Steve 11:05 Yeah.
GT 11:05 He was an apostle, too.
Steve 11:07 He was an apostle, too, yeah. And so they were there for conference. They were visiting, and they were in Holbrook waiting. The train had taken him to Holbrook. And from there, they were going to take a carriage to St. John. So while they were waiting, Elder Clawson was sort of marveling at what he was seeing in these places. And he said, he turned to Elder Grant, he said, “I wonder how the saints ever found all these nooks and corners to settle.” And Elder Grant turned to him and said, “Well, when you see them, you will wonder how they lived there.” {Rick chuckling} And so the title of my book, is Life and Death on the Mormon Frontier.
GT 12:30 Right.
Steve 12:31 And so it’s about the murders and the circumstances surrounding it, and the chase and the outlaws. But it’s ultimately– it’s more than just murders. It’s a story of faith and hardship and perseverance and also greed and violence and death. But also, this community, finding joy in community and comfort and faith. And then ultimately, the people trying to find meaning in these deaths, as well as meaning in life. And so that would be my final word on the book. And you know, I hope people find the same meaning in my book as I did in researching and writing it.
GT 13:13 It’s good, because I know, the Mormons, we lived in the wild west, but I haven’t really had any wild west stories on here. So this is going to be new. And I’m glad to hear, even though it’s kind of a terrible story with the murders, that’s what the wild west was all about.
Steve 13:30 Yes, and, I didn’t touch on it, but one of the aspects about this book, and the reason why we in the LeSueur family always knew about these murders is that James LeSueur, Frank’s older brother, when he came back from his mission, shortly after he got back, he reported that he had a vision of Frank in the spirit world, preaching the gospel to the spirits there. He said he saw a young woman standing next to Frank, and the guardian angel who was showing him around the spirit world let James know that this young woman was to be Frank’s wife.
GT 14:20 Oh, wow.
Steve 14:21 And so then, when he awoke from his vision, he told his parents, [and] it was readily believed. And then a few days later, and James wrote this account in church magazines and private accounts. He said that a few days later, a woman from Concho, a nearby town about 50 miles away, her name was Olina Kemp. She came and told the LeSueur family, or the parents. She said, “My daughter Jenny just died. And on her deathbed she told me that Frank LeSueur had come to her in a vision and said that they were to be sealed together.”
GT 14:24 Wow!
Steve 14:28 And so she asked the LeSueur’s that they be sealed together. So JT, (the parents,) JT and Geneva called in James just to see what he thought. He said, “Well show me a photo.” The woman had a photo. And he said, “That’s the woman I saw in my vision.”
GT 15:13 Wow.
Steve 15:13 And so they were, subsequently, sealed together in a temple ceremony. So for us, and well, for that family and for all of us subsequently, that was the story. That’s why we knew this story was– the outlaws, for us, were the bit players. They were the extras in this story of faith, and God’s goodness, and saving power. And, of course, it reinforced Mormon beliefs about the spirit world and truthfulness of the Church. In my research for this book, as it turns out, the story wasn’t quite like James told it.
GT 15:53 What? {Rick chuckling}
Steve 15:54 And, in fact, some of the Kemp family didn’t like the way he told it. For example, I found– I was just looking for, oh, who was this Jenny Kemp? Well, as it turned out, she was not dead. She didn’t die until more than two years later, after Frank died, and her mother did not come to the LeSueurs. They came to her. And she, at first, declined and said, “No, Jenny died mine, and I’m going to keep her mine.” So, in any case, that story is in here as well.
GT 15:56 So there was no sealing?,
Steve 16:32 There was a sealing, but it didn’t quite happen like James said.
GT 16:36 Oh, okay.
Steve 16:37 And so if you want to know how it happened, you have to read my book. {Rick laughing} In any case, and not surprisingly, at the funeral, and we have the minutes of the funeral for these boys…
GT 16:49 For Frank and Gus?
Steve 16:49 For Frank and Gus, it was a dual funeral. The speakers were already saying, “They were called to another mission ,”and Gus’ own family, Gus’ father, in their family, they say that he had a vision where, or not a vision, he said that Gus appeared to their father and explained to him, he was killed, so he could be a missionary to the Gibbons family in the spirit world. And so I take a chapter to discuss this issue, as well as, Mormon theology and theology that precedes this, because, in fact, the Mormons weren’t the first to talk about preaching in the spirit world, the Universalists and the Shakers, prior to the Mormons, also had very similar beliefs, as it turns out. Anyway, I will take a chapter to explore that. But that’s also why the book is about finding meaning in death, as well as finding meaning in life.
GT 17:46 Very good. All right. Well, Steve LeSueur, I appreciate you coming here all the way from Virginia. And thanks for being here on Gospel Tangents.
Steve 17:56 Oh, you’re very welcome. I enjoyed it. I hope your audience enjoys it as well.
GT 17:59 Yes. Get your wild west book.
Steve 18:02 Yes.
GT 18:03 Thanks.
Steve 18:03 Sure.
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