On this date 151 years ago today.
In 1857 a group of pioneers were taking cattle from Arkansas to California and made the mistake of stopping to let their herd graze in Utah, where the Mormons had settled after being forced from the East. A group of Mormons and Paiute Indians surrounded the party and, after offering to ferry them to safety in exchange for their guns, killed some 140 people—everyone except for a few children under the age of seven. Shortly before the massacre President James Buchanan sent the U.S. Army, because the sect was forming an independent government, and McMurtry surmises that this left the Mormons feeling particularly vulnerable. They were also probably eager to get their hands on the Arkansans’ valuable cattle. The victims’ bodies were left in a pile, stripped of their clothes and jewelry, and the cattle were divided. But as McMurtry’s writes, “the lesson, if it is a lesson, is that blood—in time, and, often, not that much time—will out. In case after case the dead have managed to assert a surprising potency.”
A group of men passing through the meadow a few weeks later found the bodies, and news quickly spread. The Mormons concocted a story to blame the carnage on the Indians, but an investigation by the superintendent of the Utah territory found that tale to be flimsy at best. The survivors, children now in the custody of Mormon families, began telling their version of events. Eventually the church offered up a scapegoat, John Doyle Lee, to deal with the mounting public pressure. Lee was sentenced to die, and he requested to be shot, by firing squad, on the site of the massacre.
The taint of the murders has remained on the Mormon church ever since. As recently as 1999 bones were uncovered at the site of a Mountain Meadows memorial, and forensic scientists were able to disprove the Mormons’ claim that the Paiutes alone were responsible for the deaths of women and children.
AmericanHeritage.com / Remembering the Massacres of the Great West
The above from a review of Larry McMurtry’s thin volume Oh What a Slaughter. The classic account remains Juanita Brooks’s The Mountain Meadows Massacre. Mark Twain wrote about it in Roughing It in 1872.
I’d never heard of the Mountain Meadows Massacre until I read Jon Krakauer’s book Under the Banner of Heaven. Coincidentally, I finished the book last week. He relies on Brooks’s account heavily throughout.
An interesting twist: John D. Lee’s descendants include the Udalls.