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Book Review
House of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. By Shannon A. Novak. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008. xx, 226 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-87480-919-0.)
Innocent Blood: Essential Narratives of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Ed. by David L. Bigler and Will Bagley. (Norman: Arthur H. Clark, 2008. 508 pp. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-87062-362-2.)
Massacre at Mountain Meadows. By Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr., and Glen M. Leonard. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. xvi, 430 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-19-516034-5.)
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| On September 11, 1857, there occurred the cold-blooded massacre of at least 120 men, women, and children traveling in a wagon train from Arkansas via Salt Lake City southward along the "Mormon corridor" to California. At a mountain oasis in southern Utah on September 7, 1857, the travelers had come under attack by what they believed to be Indians and fended them off for five days. When, on the morning of September 11, Mormon militia appeared carrying a white flag, the exhausted but wary travelers, lacking water and gunpowder, took a chance on leaving their redoubt. They were brutally murdered by the militia, with the help of some Paiute Indians. Only seventeen children under the age of eight were spared. |
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The participants, having been sworn to secrecy by their local leaders, evaded justice until the establishment of effective federal authority in the area. In 1875 nine of the chief suspects were indicted, though only one, John D. Lee, was brought to trial and convicted (after a second trial), and executed. Some critics allege that Lee was a scapegoat, shielding the prime suspect, Brigham Young. Lee's execution failed to provide closure. Conflicting rumors and stories continued to percolate. |
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In 1950 a schoolteacher from southern Utah, Juanita Brooks, published the first scholarly account of the massacre, The Mountain Meadows Massacre. It remained the standard version for half a century, until the publication in 2002 of Will Bagley's Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows, which indicted Young as the prime suspect in the massacre. It is generally assumed that Bagley's work was the catalyst for mobilizing the immense resources of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that led to the publication of Massacre at Mountain Meadows (2008). The authors, Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr., and Glen M. Leonard, are respected scholars trained in history and law and were assured a free hand. Massacre at Mountain Meadows is arguably the most professional, transparent account of a controversial event in Mormon history produced under church auspices. The work may well mark a major turning point in Latter-day Saint historiography. |
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The authors emphasize narration, largely leaving interpretation to 127 pages of endnotes. The deftly and tightly written story is constructed like a Greek tragedy, the timeline contracting as the narrative expands in detail—breaking at the climax. Avoiding for the most part argumentation, the authors respond directly to Bagley's interpretation of evidence in Blood of the Prophets that attempts to nail Young as chief instigator of the massacre. Their plausible alternative reconstruction presents a significant challenge to Bagley's charge. |
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Bigler and Will Bagley's documentary collection, Innocent Blood, builds on Blood of the Prophets and challenges Massacre at Mountain Meadows, published months earlier. Subtitled Essential Narratives of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Innocent Blood puts nineteenth-century theocratic Mormonism on trial. (Bigler's work on the book gave it the expertise of a respected authority on the Mormon kingdom.) Although Massacre at Mountain Meadows acknowledges the powerful role of the theocracy, it gives room to the argument that fallible men acting on their own succumbed to circumstantial pressures and committed unspeakable crimes they would have thought unimaginable in normal times. Walker, Turley, and Leonard's interpretation is informed by field notes and transcripts of interviews of some of these men and informed bystanders conducted by Andrew Jenson and David H. Morris (see Richard E. Turley Jr. and Ronald W. Walker, Mountain Meadows Massacre: The Andrew Jenson and David H. Morris Collection [2009]). |
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