If you didn’t grow up in Utah, you’ve probably never heard of the Utah War. Federal troops came to Utah in 1857 creating great anxiety among the Mormons. This war footing led to the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the lowest point in Mormon history. Barbara Jones Brown tells about these events that led to the greatest atrocity in American history up to that point in 1857.
Barbara: A memorial from Utah’s legislature [was sent to Washington] saying, “Look, if you keep sending us federal officials that we don’t like, that we don’t agree with, we’re going to send them away. Please choose appointees that are from among us and represent our values.” Basically one legislator said it was practically a declaration of independence. So there’s these kinds of stories, these kind of rumors, some based in fact, some exaggerated that reach Washington. So the new president concludes that he needs to send a whole new set of territorial appointees to Utah, including one to replace Brigham Young as governor and that he’s going to send federal troops with them to ensure that they are placed successfully and with no resistance from local Utahns.
So Brigham Young and church leaders interpret this as a threat and they vowed that the army, the troops will never enter into their settlements. I’m really glossing over things quickly here, but you have what came to be called the Utah War erupt where the troops and the federal appointees, as they are nearing settlements of what was then Utah Territory. Young and other church leaders send out Mormon militia men to hamper their way. So they’re running off their cattle, they’re burning the grass in front of them. They are burning their supply wagons, doing everything they can to try and get the troops to be stopped on the plains that year. So that’s the environment and you’ve got this war hysteria going, on if you will, in Utah Territory.
These heightened tensions contributed to Mormons in Utah committing the worst war atrocity in U.S. history up to that time in 1857. Approximately 100 settlers from Arkansas were killed. Was the Mountain Meadows Massacre the result of previous persecution against Mormons?
20 years before the Mountain Meadows Massacre, 17 Mormons were killed in Haun’s Mill, Missouri. And just four months earlier, Parley P. Pratt, a beloved Mormon apostle was killed May 13, 1857 in Arkansas. Just a few months after Pratt’s death, around 100 immigrants from Arkansas were killed. Is it true that Mormons sought revenge for the Haun’s Mill and Pratt’s murder?
Barbara: So I looked at that theory and all I can find is proximate cause, meaning, so okay, this happened in Arkansas, therefore these people were from Arkansas, therefore that must be the reason. But when I looked at it, I don’t think that was the motive. I think these other things that I’ve been talking about were the motive. Here are my reasons. Quite a lot of the perpetrators eventually come out and say why this happened as well as local people. They give a whole slew of motives and reasons for why this happened. Not one of them ever said that Parley P. Pratt’s murder was a motive.
GT: Hmm. That’s among the principal people that were involved.
Barbara: Yeah. Anyone. Anyone. You can’t find a single Mormon that ever said that.
GT: So, do you think that’s overplayed then?
Barbara: I do.
Were you surprised to hear Brown downplay Pratt and Haun’s Mill in the Mountain Meadows Massacre?
To bring a modern note up that relates to mass killings, I am also saddened by the horrible mass killing in the New Zealand mosques. Unfortunately history repeats itself much too often.
I was also at the Utah Jazz game Saturday night, a few days after the racial epithets hurled by fans against Oklahoma City’s Russell Westbrook. It was sad to see Utahns react poorly to Westbrook. But I was heartened by Donovan Mitchell’s amazing gesture. The Utah Jazz guard purchased t-shirts for both the Jazz players and the Brooklyn Nets players who were in town. The shirts showed grasping hands between a black and white person with the words: “You don’t fight racism with racism. You fight racism with solidarity.” It was truly a classy gesture by the 2nd year player, and a wonderful lesson to all of us. See https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2826169-look-donovan-mitchell-jazz-and-nets-players-wear-t-shirts-denouncing-racism
What can we do to build solidarity in our communities? Clearly there are far too many massacres and mass shootings.
Wheat & Tares 
Thanks, Rick. 2 quibbles/curiosities: (1) I’m no historian, but I think there would be a number of Native Americans who would disagree that Mountain Meadows was ” the greatest atrocity in American history up to that point in 1857″ even if it were reduced to the “greatest war atrocity”. (2) “proximate cause” is a term of art in American legal jargon. In that context, it means something close to the opposite of what Brown means by it in the quotation above.
Not surprised as to Haun’s Mill and Pratt, but not seeking revenge for those events is a far cry from those events being a part (with many others) of the background of suspicion that led credence to then current rumors about the Arkansas travelers. I hope you’ll give us a brief report on the whole slew of reasons and motives proposed by participants.
I think there are at least two things in common between this atrocity, the Christchurch shootings, and just about every other massacre not committed by a state. First is the tendency to group people by shared characteristics, and then make every member of that group responsible or accountable for the actions of any other member of that group. Whether the connection is Arkansas or loyalty to the federal government, the perpetrators of the Mountain Meadows massacre saw the wagon train as worthy of retribution for things that they had no part of. It takes some twisted and evil thinking to get to that point, but it’s a common line of thinking that strongly ties one’s own identity with a group and similarly lumps others into a group. Likewise, the perpetrator of the Christchurch terrorist attack appears to have been obsessed with attacks by Islamist militants. Although it runs deeper than that (which I’ll get to), part of his thinking appears to be that “if they do this to us, then I’ll do the same thing to them”, ignoring the fact that the victims of his crime had nothing to do with the crimes he obsessed over.
Second, this obsession with group cohesiveness and purity contributes to irrational fears that any inflow of non-group members becomes a threat to the group as a whole. The Christchurch shooter believed that immigration threatened the purity of his race and the control of his own group. This thinking misunderstands both axes of the risk matrix. First is the actual probability of immigration by outside groups threatening the control of dominant groups. That is, even the shooter’s racist objective was not under any real threat. Second, the consequence of losing that objective was exaggerated. When you are so blinded by seeing power in terms of groups who have it and don’t have it, you can’t imagine a functioning pluralistic society. This thinking turns all immigration into an invasion, and when immigration is viewed as an invasion, the threat of extremist behavior looms large.
I don’t know any easy answers, but I do think that learning to see people as individuals instead of members of a group can help. I had a professor at BYU who often mentioned that we are kinder when we see the “truth” about people, tying the definition of truth to the way things really are, and the things they really will be. We can’t read people’s minds and know what is in their hearts, so the only thing we know for sure about a person is that they really are a child of God. The only group that we need to associate people with is as a member of the human family. Merely saying that, of course, doesn’t solve the problem of psychopaths who already believe it, but I think we can catch ourselves falling into these traps of bad thinking. I think we can also attempt to find what we have in common with each other by actually meeting people who you might tend to view as “other”. It’s hard to hate those you really know.
I thought this topic was pretty much worn out. Many books/articles/blogs discussed.
Enough digital electrons burned to power a small star.
A good start is the wiki article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Meadows_Massacre
And the general references in that article . Yawn, I’ve read them all.
The Mountain Meadows Massacre, by Juanita Brooks (1950)
Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows, by Will Bagley (2002)
American Massacre: The Tragedy At Mountain Meadows, September 1857, by Sally Denton (2003)
Burying The Past: Legacy of The Mountain Meadows Massacre”, a documentary film by Brian Patrick (2004)
September Dawn a film by Christopher Cain (2007)
Massacre at Mountain Meadows, by Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley, Glen M. Leonard (2008)
House of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, by Shannon A. Novak. (2008)
It gets to the point of telling the story of the story. More than almost any other event of Mormon history, this massacre has incited so much lying and exaggerating and denying on all sides to the point that it becomes larger than the original event. For example, Brooks was ostracized (but not axed) for her disturbing book which has now become near the line of defense for the church. Bagley is close to the truth (I think) but he is accused of speculation and has an edge. .Walker-Turley-Leonard are impossible for orthodox Mormons to ignore because of their role as semi-official advocates for the church. They shut down my old buddies, our defensive fanatics and they stake out common ground for thoughtful discussion to begin. But their bias is obvious.They end their book when the massacre ends and omit the next 20+ years of lying and investigation which paints a worse picture for higher leaders than the event.
September Dawn had the potential of blowing the lid off this event and making it a household word for the American public the year Mitt Romney first ran for POTUS and lost to Jon McCain. But the movie was poorly done and a complete flop. The church leaders didn’t know that. As preemptive damage control, they (Turley) published a short summary of the massacre in the Ensign, retreating back from so many hard fought positions over the years that had occupied my interest., it was an amazing article. https://www.lds.org/study/ensign/2007/09/the-mountain-meadows-massacre?lang=eng. If we could cause the sheeple of the church to read one article about the massacre, it should be this one. Some day a good movie about the massacre is going to be made.
The one point that Turley and the defenders are unwilling to concede is whether Brigham Young was largely responsible. He did preside over the development of the fanatical toxic atmosphere that made the massacre possible and he did lie about it extensively, becoming an accomplice after the fact. But the famous Pony Haslam letter, saves the day. (If you ignore that it is a coded response and we don’t know what it is responding to- because that letter was destroyed- “to save the reputation of the church.”) Don’t forget, the Paiutes played little if any role. I find this remarkable when a few years later we are perfectly willing to throw old Briggie under the wagon on racism.
We seem to never internalize the essential lessons of this chapter of our history. The comparison with current massacres seems to me to be shallow because the Mountain Meadows massacre happened in that grey space between war and crime, at a time and place where who was governing was not clear.
PS: I can’t stop without at least mentioning the many spin off ideas; my favorite is the question of whether the execution of John D. Lee was a sham and he escaped or not. There is some evidence for it.
JR is right about the Indians. One need go no further than the opposite end of the state of Utah (before accurate surveys moved the towns of Franklin and Preston from Utah to Idaho) and 6 years later to encounter the much less know Bear River massacre of hundreds of Shoshone Indians. This one we managed to blame on the Federal troops (California volunteers) even though Mormon settlers in Cache Valley created the “need’ for it, provided the scouts and intelligence, and other support.
I’m a little confused how, 150 years later, descendants “…still feel pain; I still feel anger and sadness that the massacre happened.” I mean, it was an horrible tragedy (regardless of how and why), but a great-grandson of one of the child survivors feels pain, anger and sadness 150 years after the event?
JR, (1) your point about Indian atrocities being ignored is well taken. Yes Indians have been massacred, and historians only seem to care about white Americans, and my wording does not include Indians killed by whites. (2) I’m no legal expert, so I’ll take your word for it. (3) I’m tempted to give motives, but that’s next week’s post! But the short answer is that the death of the many may have been to cover the death of one (which is a despicable justification, but may be the best explanation of why they were all killed.)
Mike, for being a worn-out topic, you left an awfully long comment! Not everyone has the same background as you, and this post is for people to whom the information is new.
Chompers, yes children of survivors do feel pain, anger and sadness. One can look not only at the question of reparations for slavery here in the USA to see that systemic racism not only bothers them, but has caused tremendous harm to their descendants. One can also look at the centuries-long Arab-Israeli conflict, or Northern-Ireland/Great Britain conflict, or Chinese-Japanese historic warring to see that lots of descendants feel their ancestors were wronged and feel pain for these injustices.
“) I’m no historian, but I think there would be a number of Native Americans who would disagree that Mountain Meadows was ” the greatest atrocity in American history up to that point in 1857″ even if it were reduced to the “greatest war atrocity”. ”
Yep. Pretty ethnocentric of host and interviewee.
I’ll take the blame for poor wording of the post, but Barbara made no such statement, so don’t put words in her mouth that she didn’t say.
I visited the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre a few years ago. I felt that my feelings would be incomplete without going there to see what there is to see and perhaps let any spiritual feeling impinge upon my soul.
Starting with the last; yes, what impinged upon my soul was sadness. It was, and remains, a tragedy.
I have wondered what I would have done in those days. While that’s in the past, new situations will arise that are similar, so it is worthy in my opinion to study this event carefully and decide in advance in what circumstances I would take up arms against other humans. I regret that I do not know for sure what I would have done. I like to think of virtue signals but I wasn’t there so I don’t know. What I *do* know is that the forces that led to the MMM are still active in that area and it wouldn’t take a very big spark to light a new flame of war.
When the US Army came there a few years later and saw all the bones, for no one had been buried (if I remember right), they were very angry and determined to kill ALL of the Mormons. Driving them out (as from Missouri) wasn’t sufficient. So you see, one atrocity leads to another, and to another, and to another, and it never ends until enough people say “enough” and the past is the past; just stop keeping score.
Spain took that approach with its Amnesty Law two years after Franco’s death. I think it was a wise step.
Yes Ji, we can choose to let go of the offense as grandchildren perhaps, but opportunist politicians often dog whistle the past to create a power base. It takes civilised behaviour from all sides for the ghosts of the past to be laid to rest, and they rest uneasy for many generations.
Much of the dis-ease that we see in the UK at present is about these uneasy ghosts, and indeed throughout Europe. It is a great act of civilisation to draw the line and decide that hatred ends with ourselves. All of Europe is haunted.
I have been very impressed with the way Jacinda Ardern, the PM of NZ is using the shooting there to unite the country. The shooter is Australian, and for 20 years the right of politics here has been using immigration, and particularly muslim immigration, as part of their strategy for success. Most members are on the extreme end of this. Being anti gay marriage has this consequence in Aus. This is the culture the shooter grew up in. We are complicit to this extent.
Our SP said in conference we should only put positive stuff on social media, which is very gentle, very subtle, and can be used against someone questioning muslim hate, as much as those spreading it. We will see how it works out.
Did not hear about MMM until the internet.
As a direct descendant of the Bakers and indirect descendant of the Fanchers, I am still mad it happened. It infuriates me that certain Mormans try to gloss over it as if it never happened. Or they try and make excuses of why they attacked the wagon train, like saying they poisoned a water hole, or yelled profanity or made remarks about Parley Pratt. Really? That makes it okay to massacre, lie, rape and steal?..then blame the injuns? Yes, Brigham Young directed it. He coveted what they had. Yes, It has been documented that a lot of the money(gold), wagons, oxen , horses and cattle ended up in his nest. Not to mention the jewelry, racehorses, buggies and clothes. Remember, this was the richest Wagon train to ever cross the plains. When people try to pin it on the Parley Pratt murder, I want to remind them that the wagon train had left long before Parley arrived in Arkansas. This wagon train was comprised of good people who were strong Christians and celebrated the Sabbath every week, even while on their trek to California. What no ones knows or has discovered is that Parley Pratt was befriended by men who were directly related to the wagon train through the Baker family. I found this recently through genealogy studies. One (Orme)offered him his gun, horse etc when he left town and the other one (steward) who was a childhood friend from New York Went and retrieved his body and gave him a Christian burial in a hand carved coffin he made. The men who killed Pratt were not even from that part of the country. Killing innocents will always make me mad, make me hurt whether I am related to them or not. When mentioning Native Americans, the Baker family were part Cherokee and already had experienced trials and tribulations. The sign on the cross the U.S. Army put up over the remains of the stripped corpses and bodies of those left in Mountain Meadows“Vengeance is Mine sayeth the Lord” was torn down by orders of Brigham Young. I have Morman friends that I love and do not blame them.