Josiah Gibbs, author of the 1909 book Lights and Shadows of Mormonism, recalled that “a prominent Salt Lake editor” said, “The Mountain Meadows massacre is an incident that should be forgotten,” for the sake of peace in Utah. Yet events surrounding the upcoming sesquicentennial appear primed to bring more attention to the massacre than it has had since the death of Brigham Young.

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A surprising number of books, both fiction and nonfiction, have dealt with the massacre during the last five years. They form part of a long tradition: Writers as renowned as Mark Twain and Jack London told the story, and Buffalo Bill Cody rescued his sister May from the massacre in a play that helped launch his career. Amanda Bean’s The Fancher Train won the Western Writers of America’s Spur Award for best novel of the West in 1958, and Danièle Desgranges published Autopsie D’un Massacre: Mountain Meadows in Paris in 1990.

My personal favorite among all the recent books on the massacre is Judith Freeman’s Red Water, which brilliantly reconstructs the lives of three of the wives of John D. Lee. Freeman’s novel transports the reader to a very different time and place: the ragged edge of the Mormon frontier in southern Utah. Unlike historical novelists who simply dress up contemporary characters in funny clothes and put them in quaint places where they encounter famous dead people, Freeman re-creates the alien world of Deseret, where men like Major/Judge/President John Lee held simultaneous power as military officers and legal and religious authorities. Historians operate by strict and often restricting rules, but Freeman’s use of imagination to re-create the past offers perceptions that I often found jarring—and enlightening.

Mountain Meadows fiction keeps appearing, and though most of it is awful, Elizabeth Crook’s The Night Journal, in which the main character’s father is an orphan of the massacre, won the Western Writers of America Spur Award this year for best long novel. Mainstream publishers released two nonfiction works in 2003 that dealt with the atrocity. Alfred A. Knopf published Sally Denton’s study of the killings in American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857. Denton is a talented writer, but Mormon historians found her book an easy target. Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith was more successful. His study of modern polygamy and violence provoked such a strong denunciation from Richard Turley, the managing director of the LDS Church’s Family and Church History Department, that Mormon outrage helped propel the book onto bestseller lists for months. (Insiders speculate that Doubleday’s publicity department tore up their promotion plans when the attack appeared on the church’s Web site two weeks before its release: Their work was done.)

Burying the Past: Movies

A surprising hero of the Mountain Meadows wars of the last two decades is Gordon B. Hinckley, who became president, prophet, seer and revelator of the LDS Church in 1995 after effectively running the organization since the early 1980s. When descendants began to lobby to build a monument to the victims of the massacre in the late 1980s, their efforts went nowhere until they enlisted President Hinckley’s support. Once he was on board, powerful southern Utah politicians co-opted the project and eventually claimed credit for the whole idea. The descendants, however, knew the truth and were grateful for Hinckley’s help. At a meeting in 1989, they asked how they could reward his good efforts. Hinckley asked only one favor: “No movies.”

It was a typically astute request from a man who had spent his life working on public relations for the LDS Church. The institution had successfully kept the story off screens both big and little for decades. After The Mountain Meadows Massacre hit the silent silver screen in 1912, almost a century passed before another major film appeared. The church itself shot down several attempts to make a movie about the massacre. Warner Brothers (and later, rumor has it, Paramount) optioned the rights to turn Juanita Brooks’ The Mountain Meadows Massacre into a movie—despite historian Dale L. Morgan qualifying it as “the least likely candidate for a movie among the books published in 1950.” Powerful Mormon political and financial figures put an end to the project. Following the success of Roots, the 1977 ABC television miniseries, David Susskind hoped to create a similar phenomenon with a series on the massacre. The epic had scheduled production when CBS cancelled it.

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