On September 16, 1859, 17-year-old James H. Berry watched 15 children who had survived the Mountain Meadows Massacre return to relatives and friends in Carrollton, Arkansas, escorted by relatives under the leadership of Arkansas Senator William C. Mitchell; two other children returned in January 1860. Speaking before the United States Senate in Washington, D.C., on February 11, 1907, Berry, by then a senator and former governor of Arkansas who had also fought in war and lost a leg in battle, recalled that in 1857 a large emigrant train of between 140 and 150 men, women, and children left Carroll County and two adjoining Arkansas counties for California with about 600 head of cattle, mule teams, wagons, and money, and that news later came that the train had been attacked far out West and that every soul had perished. He also remembered learning afterward that some children had survived and were in the hands of Mormons in Utah, after which Arkansas senators and representatives appealed to the Interior Department and an agent sent by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs gathered the children who had been preserved from the massacre. Berry recalled seeing the children lined up on benches at the village courthouse while Mitchell identified whose children they were believed to be, and he especially remembered one little girl whose arm, broken by a gunshot wound, had never healed and hung dangling by her side; despite all he had seen later in life, including the horrors of war along the border states, he said no scene remained more deeply impressed on his mind than those children left without means after the deaths of their families on the plains of Utah.