Wild West: The Legacy of Mountain Meadows

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For today’s Latter-day Saints, Mountain Meadows is the most troubling event in their religion’s complicated history. There is nothing like it in the faith’s history of suffering, sacrifice and devotion. For 150 years, leaders and official historians of the LDS Church have worked hard to justify or explain away the crime, and a large part of the legacy of the murders is a tangled web of lies and deception.

On Tuesday, September 11, 2007, another wagon train from Arkansas will arrive at Mountain Meadows to commemorate the sesquicentennial of one of the grimmest anniversaries in American history. After a long forgetfulness, the last five years have seen a flurry of histories, biographies, novels, plays, films and articles about the massacre. Academic presses are primed to release at least three serious nonfiction studies of the event over the next year, including one by the forensic anthropologist who analyzed the bones of 28 men, women and children the U.S. Army buried in 1859. Despite the passage of 150 years, it appears that Latter-day Saints, survivors of the Southern Paiute Nation, descendants of the victims and their murderers, and a scattering of historians and the curious will gather at the meadows. They will wrestle with the complicated legacy of what all agree was an atrocity and some view as America’s first act of religious terrorism.

I’ll be there, too, as I have been for about every other September 11 over the last 20 years. During that time, I’ve witnessed the dedication of two monuments—one near the highway on Dan’s Hill overlooking the killing ground, where a 1990 granite monument financed by descendants and the state of Utah honors the victims; and a second that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints raised in 1999 over the grave of the victims, whose remains were inadvertently unearthed by a backhoe during the monument’s hurried construction. Ironically, the cairn standing at the center of the second memorial is modeled after the “rude monument, conical in form and 50 feet in circumference at the base and 12 feet in height,” that Brevet Major James Henry Carlton’s 1st Dragoons raised in 1859 and Brigham Young directed his minions to destroy two years later. I’ve met grandsons and great-great-great-great grandsons of the men who committed the crime—members of the Lee, Klingensmith, Johnson, Knight, Adair, Pearce, Haight, Higbee, Wilden and Bateman families—all of whom still live under the shadow cast by their ancestors’ act 150 years ago. I’ve encountered even more descendants of the Baker, Cameron, Dunlap, Fancher, Jones, Miller, Mitchell, Prewit and Tackitt families who lost loved ones at the meadows. I admire and respect almost every one, and I have come to love more than a few of them.

I’m also the author of Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows, which took five years to write; and editor (with David L. Bigler) of Innocent Blood: Essential Narratives of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which took another five years to assemble and should appear next year from the Arthur H. Clark Company. I have a dog in this fight and make no pretensions to being a disinterested party: I happily admit I’ll be fascinated to witness whatever drama plays out at Mountain Meadows late this summer. I am also intrigued by the massacre’s strange legacy and a little astonished to find myself as enmeshed in the awful tale and its ongoing story as was its greatest chronicler, southern Utah historian Juanita Brooks. Like Brooks, I am amazed to find myself slandered, libeled, reviled, hated and even feared for simply following the evidence to its obvious conclusions.

An Incident That Should Be Forgotten: Books

At first glance, it seems incredible that the largest massacre of American citizens in the history of the Oregon and California trails is practically forgotten. Again and again, I’ve had people ask, “Why haven’t I ever heard about this?” Upon consideration, the atrocity’s obscurity is easier to understand: After all, such a tale of blood and sorrow had little to recommend it to those who created the legend of the West. It involved white people killing white people in an act of treachery that does nothing to support our pride in what makes us Westerners. Since the story involved a persecuted religion, historians liked to navigate around it. Latter-day Saints, the people with the biggest stake in the story, long tried to blame it on someone else, anyone else—the victims, the Indians, a single evil fanatic and now, it appears, a whole bunch of fanatics. The bloody tale gave them no comfort whatsoever, and they were happy to see it disappear into the mists of time.

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