With unheard-of temerity Judge Cradlebaugh opened his court and proceeded to make Mormondom answer for the massacre.  And what a spectacle it must have been to see this grim veteran, solitary and alone in his pride and his pluck, glowering down on his Mormon jury and Mormon auditory, deriding them by turns, and by turns “breathing threatenings and slaughter!”

An editorial in the Territorial Enterprise of that day says of him and of the occasion: 

“He spoke and acted with the fearlessness and resolution of a Jackson; but the jury failed to indict, or even report on the charges, while threats of violence were heard in every quarter, and an attack on the U.S. troops intimated, if he persisted in his course.

“Finding that nothing could be done with the juries, they were discharged with a scathing rebuke from the judge.  And then, sitting as a committing magistrate, he commenced his task alone.  He examined witnesses, made arrests in every quarter, and created a consternation in the camps of the saints greater than any they had ever witnessed before, since Mormondom was born.  At last accounts terrified elders and bishops were decamping to save their necks; and developments of the most starling character were being made, implicating the highest Church dignitaries in the many murders and robberies committed upon the Gentiles during the past eight years.”

Had Harney been Governor, Cradlebaugh would have been supported in his work, and the absolute proofs adduced by him of Mormon guilt in this massacre and in a number of previous murders, would have conferred gratuitous coffins upon certain citizens, together with occasion to use them.  But Cumming was the Federal Governor, and he, under a curious pretense of impartiality, sought to screen the Mormons from the demands of justice.  On one occasion he even went so far as to publish his protest against the use of the U.S. troops in aid of Cradlebaugh’s proceedings.

Mrs. C. V. Waite closes her interesting detail of the great massacre with the following remark and accompanying summary of the testimony—­and the summary is concise, accurate and reliable: 

“For the benefit of those who may still be disposed to doubt the guilt of Young and his Mormons in this transaction, the testimony is here collated and circumstances given which go not merely to implicate but to fasten conviction upon them by ‘confirmations strong as proofs of Holy Writ:’ 

“1.  The evidence of Mormons themselves, engaged in the affair, as shown by the statements of Judge Cradlebaugh and Deputy U.S.  Marshall Rodgers.

“2.  The failure of Brigham Young to embody any account of it in his Report as Superintendent of Indian Affairs.  Also his failure to make any allusion to it whatever from the pulpit, until several years after the occurrence

“3.  The flight to the mountains of men high in authority in the Mormon Church and State, when this affair was brought to the ordeal of a judicial investigation.