In the fall of 1857, a party of emigrants from Arkansas camped in southern Utah Territory at Mountain Meadows, a lush alpine oasis on the Spanish Trail where wagon trains rested before crossing the Mojave Desert. The party was made up of about a dozen large, prosperous families and their hiredhands, driving about 18 wagons and several hundred cattle to Southern California.Of its 135 to 140 members, almost 100 were women and children.

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As the travelers brewed coffee not long after dawn on Monday, September 7, a volley of gunfire suddenly tore into them from nearby ravines and hilltops, immediately killing or wounding about a quarter of the able-bodied men. The survivors quickly pulled their scattered wagons into a corral and leveled their lethal long rifles at their hidden, painted attackers, stopping a brief frontal assault in its tracks. The Arkansans quickly built a wagon fort and dug a pit at its center to protect the women and children. Cut off from water and under continual gunfire,the emigrants fended off their assailants for five long, hellish days.

Finally, on Friday, September 11, hope appeared in the form of a white flag. The emigrants let the emissary, a Mormon from the nearby settlement of Cedar City, into their fort, and then the local Indian agent, John D. Lee, entered the camp. Lee told them the Indians had gone, and if the Arkansans would lay down their arms, he and his men would escort them to safety. The desperate emigrants, Deputy U.S. Marshal William Rogers reported two years later, trusted Lee’s honor and agreed to his unusual terms. They separated into three groups—the wounded and youngest children, who led the way in two wagons; the women and older children, who walked behind; and then the men, each escorted by an armed member of the Nauvoo Legion, the local militia. The surviving men cheered their rescuers when they fell in with their escort.

Lee led his charges three-quarters of a mile from the campground to a southern branch of the California Trail. As the odd parade approached the rim of the Great Basin, a single shot rang out, followed by an order: “Do your duty!” The escorts turned and shot down the men, painted “Indians” jumped out of oak brush and cut down the women and children, and Lee directed the murder of the wounded. Within five minutes, the most brutal act of religious terrorism in America history was over—and itwould not be surpassed until a bright September morning exactly 144 years later, as airplanes filled with passengers were flown into the Pentagon and New York City’s World Trade Center.

So ended the Mountain Meadows Massacre—but the story of this mass murder and its twisted legacy had only begun. Although “white men did most of the killing,” as participant Nephi Johnson later admitted, Utah Indian Superintendent Brigham Young informed Washington that “Capt. Fancher & Co. fell victims to the Indians’ wrath” and blamed the emigrants for “indiscriminately shooting and poisoning them”—essentially, Young argued, they got what they deserved. Young made no effort to investigate the crime or identify the perpetrators. The murderer—smany of whom stripped for battle and donned war paint to look like Indians—took a blood oath to blame the slaughter on the local Paiutes (see “Warriors and Chiefs” in this issue), and since they thought they had killed everyoneold enough to tell the emigrants’side of the story, whocould contradict them?

The killers, however, made a mistake: They spared 17 of the children, believing they would be too young to be credible witnesses. Mormon doctrine made shedding innocent blood an unforgivable sin, and anyone under the age of 8 was by definition “innocent blood.” Lee later claimed he was ordered to spare only children“who were so young theycould not talk.” The Mormonsactually killed at least half adozen children 8 years old oryounger, but in an atrocitynotably lacking in mercy, thatbelief in not shedding innocentblood saved the lives of 10 girls and sevenboys between infancy and age 6.

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