Members of the Arkansas wagon train camped here on Sunday, September 5, 1857, likely resting and gathering for a Christian worship service as they had throughout their journey. The next morning they were attacked without warning. They drew their wagons into a circle, chained the wheels together, and dug beneath each wheel to lower the wagon beds to the ground as protection from gunfire. They also dug a long defensive trench that served as a rifle pit. About 140 men, women, and children took shelter in the wagon circle, many huddling in the trench. At least seven emigrants were killed in the first attack, but the emigrants repulsed the attackers, killing one and wounding two. During the five-day siege that followed, three or more other emigrants died there. As firing resumed on the camp, women and children screamed in fear, and the emigrants continued a brave and determined defense. Not all the defenders were men: survivor Milum Tackitt recalled his aunt Eloah Angeline Tackitt Jones joining the fight with a gun that had belonged to one of the fallen men. Throughout the siege, the emigrants were cut off from their water supply, and men ran from the wagon circle to a nearby spring for water, sometimes returning under heavy gunfire with filled buckets. Two men also left to gather firewood and returned unharmed. Other men left the camp as well, though accounts differ: some say three or four young men went northeast, most likely toward Cedar City for help, and only one returned alive; another account says three other men, including one with the last name Baker, escaped to the southwest carrying a document about the emigrants and their ordeal, but all three were tracked down and murdered in the desert, and the document disappeared. On the fifth day of the siege, attackers came to the camp under a white flag and deceived the emigrants with a false promise of safe passage to Cedar City. Nearly out of ammunition, in need of water, and caring for the wounded, the emigrants surrendered. Grieving, they wrapped their dead in buffalo robes, buried them reverently, and walked away from the campsite, with the men leaving last as they relied on their captors' promise to protect them and their families.