Searching Out the Truth about the Mountain Meadows Massacre
To read more from Daniel, visit his blog: Sic Et Non.
Cover image via ChurchofJesusChrist.org.
On 11 September 1857, accompanied by a few Native Americans that they had recruited, a group of territorial militiamen in southern Utah—all of them Latter-day Saints—deliberately massacred a wagon train of emigrants who were traveling from Arkansas to California. I apologize, but there is no pleasant or faith-promoting way to tell this story: Approximately 120 men, women, and children were murdered at a place called Mountain Meadows. Only seventeen small children were spared, having been judged too young to be able to tell what had happened.
The Mountain Meadows Massacre is perhaps the single ugliest episode in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—especially if one shares the view of the Greek philosopher Plato that “It is better to suffer injustice than to commit it.”
The event has tarnished our reputation for well over a century and a half. It even seems to have led to the murders of several Latter-day Saints in the American South during Reconstruction. And I myself offer two trivial but recent personal illustrations: Some years ago, as my flight began its descent into Salt Lake City, I overheard a man seated behind me mention to his wife that he had just read an article about Latter-day Saints killing emigrants who were passing through Utah. He would be relieved, he said, when they had boarded their next flight. And, within just the past few days, I have seen two or three online opponents of the construction of a proposed temple cite the Mountain Meadows Massacre. It illustrates, they say, the evil nature of Latter-day Saints and of the Church.
For generations, we have scarcely known how to handle the issue. Horrified and embarrassed by it, we’ve pretended that the Massacre was carried out by Indians. Sometimes, we’ve even tried to excuse it—although, whatever the provocation, it simply cannot be defended or justified. And when Juanita Brooks, a faithful Latter-day Saint living in southern Utah, began her pioneering research into the tragedy—research that resulted in such notable books as “The Mountain Meadows Massacre” (1950) and “John D. Lee: Zealot, Pioneer Builder, Scapegoat” (1961)—it strained her relationships with her neighbors and even with Church leaders. She persisted, though, because she believed (correctly, in my judgment) that, however it might have seemed at the time, she was actually serving the Kingdom. She famously explained that “nothing but the truth can be good enough for the church to which I belong.”
Sister Brooks’ commitment to honest, impartial pursuit of the truth has long since been vindicated. Indeed, her frank willingness to assign blame for the Massacre to the Latter-day Saints who ordered and carried it out has served us well. It granted her strong moral authority and academic standing when, contrary to the claims of many, she persuasively argued that neither Brigham Young nor anybody else at Church headquarters had decreed the deaths of those innocent emigrants. Quite the contrary: Brigham had ordered that the wagon train be permitted to pass unmolested. But his message arrived too late.
Conditions have changed markedly since the days of Juanita Brooks. Notably, Oxford University Press published a landmark work in 2008 entitled “Massacre at Mountain Meadows” that pretty much set the gold standard for treatments of the subject. It was written by three Latter-day Saint scholars—the late Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr., and Glenn M. Leonard—who were granted full access to all Church archives and records and who enjoyed the complete support (including financial support) of the Church itself.
Now, the long-anticipated follow-up volume to “Massacre at Mountain Meadows” has appeared, bearing the title of “Vengeance Is Mine: The Mountain Meadows Massacre and Its Aftermath.” Written by Richard E. Turley Jr. and Barbara Jones Brown, it too has been published by Oxford University Press. And, also focused mostly on the aftermath of the Massacre itself, Janiece Johnson has just published “Convicting the Mormons: The Mountain Meadows Massacre in American Culture.”
Together, these three books represent invaluable scholarly treatments of the crime itself and, in the two most recent volumes, of what ensued thereafter. No serious discussion of the Mountain Meadows Massacre can ignore the evidence and analysis that they provide.
I will focus here particularly on “Vengeance is Mine” and “Convicting the Mormons,” which detail the reaction of others—leaders and members of the Church itself, as well as outsiders—to what happened on that terrible day in September 1857. This is important, because the accusation is still commonly made that Brigham Young and the Church orchestrated a cover-up to conceal their involvement in the Massacre and deny justice to its victims.
I will try to summarize some of the points made in the two books that most caught my interest.
First of all, both clearly establish to the point of virtual certainty that Brigham Young didn’t learn about the Mountain Meadows Massacre until afterwards, that he deeply regretted it, and that he passionately condemned it. Nor, although (sadly) some local leaders of the Church in southern Utah—notably John D. Lee and two or three others—were deeply involved, was any other General Authority of the Church responsible for the crime.
However—and here we need to remember how Juanita Brooks’s forthright evenhandedness established her overall credibility—they do suggest that militant rhetoric from some high-ranking Church leaders, most notably Brigham Young himself and George Albert Smith, may have contributed to a tense atmosphere and thus, indirectly and quite unintentionally, to what occurred at Mountain Meadows. The “Utah War” was looming. “Johnson’s Army” was on its way, sent by President James Buchanan, and the Saints, already driven far into the Great Basin West, feared that they would be made refugees yet again.
Almost immediately after the Massacre, some began to blame it on the Latter-day Saint community as a whole. Major James Carleton, for example, fantasized about what might be done if his commander could just be “sent with an adequate force, and with his hands unfettered by red tape,” and “could have the management of those damned Mormons just one summer.” “It is no use to talk or split hairs about that accursed race,” he said. “All fine spun nonsense about their rights as citizens, and all knotty questions about Constitutional Rights should be solved with the sword.”
Beginning in at least 1859, Brigham Young repeatedly offered to assist federal officials in locating witnesses and suspects. For decades, though, his offers were rebuffed since, all too often, he and the Church were the actual targets of those officials. He believed that, by leaving the matter unsettled, his critics could “reflect evil on me no matter how unjustly,” and he “anxiously desired the matter thoroughly cleared up and investigated,” adding that “if there were Mormons guilty in that act it was one of the most dastardly things that ever occurred, and let them be brought to justice.”
Elder John Taylor, a member of the Twelve who would eventually succeed Brigham Young as the third president of the Church, shared Brigham’s revulsion. On one occasion, he posed questions to himself about the Massacre: “Do you deny it? No. Do you excuse it? No. There is no excuse for such a relentless, diabolical, sanguinary deed. That outrageous infamy is looked upon with as much abhorrence by our people as by any other parties in this nation or the world.” It was “a disgrace to humanity.” Although he wished that it had never occurred, he understood that it “cannot be undone.” However, he asked the general public to “blame the perpetrators,” not the entire Latter-day Saint community.
On the whole, though, he asked in vain.
Brigham Young was “the real criminal” in the Massacre, said the “Virginia Enterprise.” “Even if he is beyond the reach of a legal indictment, he ought to be arraigned and condemned to death in every honest heart in the world.” National newspapers branded him “a coarse brutal tyrant,” “a soulless dictator.” Since absolutely nothing happened in Utah without his authorization, the reasoning went, no evidence was necessary to prove him guilty.
That didn’t mean, however, that evidence couldn’t be manufactured to do the job. Consider, for example, this gem from C. V. Waite, an anti-Mormon novelist who happened to be married to Utah territorial Supreme Court judge Charles Waite: “A revelation from Brigham Young, as Great Grand Archee, or God, was despatched to President J. C. Haight, Bishop Higbee, and J.D. Lee, commanding them to raise all the forces they could muster and trust, follow those cursed gentiles (so read the revelation)” and wipe them out. She even invented a council meeting in Cedar City in which “the revelation was read, and the destiny of the unsuspecting emigrants sealed.”
Nevada’s “Gold Hill News” said that the leaders of the Church should be “arrested by the military and hanged in rows upon the public streets of Salt Lake.” “If civil law will not reach these blood thirsty fanatics,” screamed the “Daily Nevada State Journal, “let martial law or lynch law be invoked, not alone to execute justice upon the man actually engaged in the massacre, but upon the arch fiend who inspired them.”
Not content with reprinting such articles, the “Salt Lake Tribune” called for genocide: “We should deal with these Mormon savages as we would with the Indians, their allies and tools in the work of butchery. No Mormon should be left in the United States.” “Extermination is necessary,” agreed one Nevada newspaper, “and justifiable by the facts of the case.”
Some claimed to regard Latter-day Saints as an actually distinct and subhuman “race.” U.S. Army surgeon Roberts Bartholow, for instance, listed some of the features characteristic of members of the Church, which included “The yellow, sunken, cadaverous visage; the greenish-colored eyes; the thick, protuberant lips; the low forehead.” And the idea persisted: “They ain’t whites,” says one of the characters in Jack London’s 1915 novel “The Star Rover. “They’re Mormons.”
At John D. Lee’s first trial, in 1874, many of those assigned to investigate the Massacre showed far more interest in somehow convicting Brigham Young and the Saints than the actual perpetrators. They were trying the Church, not Lee; their audience was reporters and the nation, not the jury. Lee was even commonly called a “bishop,” although he never held that office. Presumably, this was done in order to make him seem one of the Church’s highest leaders—newspaper audiences generally knew little or nothing of the Church’s organization—and to link Latter-day Saints with Catholics in a nineteenth-century America that still commonly feared the “foreignness” and supposed political ambitions of the Catholic Church.
Even the anti-Mormon “Pioche Daily Record” noticed the focus of the first trial, commenting that “The prosecution is anxious to convict the Mormon Church if no one else.” “Mormonism will be considered as a felony,” said a hopeful “Salt Lake Tribune,” “and not a religion.”
Some plainly hoped and perhaps planned for a hung jury. That way, they would be able to claim that military rule should be imposed upon Utah since justice was unobtainable in the territory.
Eight of the jurors were Latter-day Saints, but chief prosecutor R. N. Baskin chose to attack Brigham Young and their Church rather than try to win them over. He described the Saints as “nothing but dumb cattle,” for example, declaring them “imposter Americans” who didn’t belong in civilization and attacking the rituals of their temple. Essentially, Latter-day Saint jurors were being asked to choose between rejecting their faith and acquitting Lee, who sat “all but forgotten” in the courtroom. The result was indeed a hung jury. Even one of the non-Latter-day Saint jurors voted for acquittal, since the prosecution had scarcely bothered to make a case against Lee.
Commenting from a geographical and ideological distance, the “London Times” observed that “The question of responsibility for the Mountain Meadow massacre has been a source of long contention in the territory of Utah. It was at one time supposed that Brigham Young would be implicated in the affair, but the evidence on this trial has shown that he had no connexion with it.”
Fortunately, a new United States district attorney, Sumner Howard, took charge of John D. Lee’s second trial. He accepted Brigham Young’s longstanding offer of assistance and, for the first time, concentrated on prosecuting an actual perpetrator. And, even with a jury made up entirely of Latter-day Saints, he obtained a conviction—for which he was heavily criticized by those who wanted Brigham Young and Church leadership to be punished, instead.
Right up to the day of his execution, some hoped that John D. Lee would implicate Church leaders, offering him clemency even at the last hour if he would but incriminate Brigham Young.
As always, though, Lee refused. “In justice to Brigham Young,” his 1875 confession recounted, “I must say that when he heard my story he wept like a child, walked the floor and wrung his hands in bitter anguish and said it was the most unfortunate affair, the most unwarranted event that had ever happened to the Mormon people. He said this transaction will bring sorrow and trouble upon us in Utah. I would to God it had never happened.”
After the deaths of George A. Smith, in 1875, and Brigham Young, in 1877, put them beyond the reach of zealous anti-Mormons, enthusiasm for further prosecutions waned, and none of the other central participants in the Mountain Meadows Massacre were ever brought to justice.
However, says Janiece Johnson, despite the complete lack of any real evidence justifying it “the narrative of Young’s guilt became fixed. Once fixed, it would stay.” And, “Though a mostly Latter-day Saint grand jury had originally indicted Lee and a wholly Latter-day Saint jury had finally convicted him, it was not enough to rid Latter-day Saints of the Mountain Meadows stain.”
We continue to live with that stain. It is, for instance, a major factor in Jon Krakauer’s “Under the Banner of Heaven” and the television miniseries based upon it. (“Mormonism,” says one of the miniseries’ signature lines, “breeds dangerous men.”) The Mountain Meadows Massacre even appears sometimes in local debates about contemporary temple construction. But the best current scholarship shows that, while some southern Utah Latter-day Saints were indeed guilty, the stain upon Brigham Young and upon the Church as a whole is quite unmerited.