| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows. By Will Bagley. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. xxiv, 493 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8061-3426-7.)

Conflict in the Quorum: Orson Pratt, Brigham Young, Joseph Smith. By Gary James Bergera. (Salt Lake City: Signature, 2002. xiv, 312 pp. $24.95, ISBN 1-56085-164-3.)

Will Bagley justifies his book Blood of the Prophets because historians have unearthed sources that were either locked in the archives of the Mormon Church or were otherwise unavailable to Juanita Brooks when she wrote her monumental study in 1950. Rather than revise Brooks's account, Bagley insists that he intended to extend her contributions by including more recent scholarship and combining it with his own research from libraries, archives, and special collections.

Drawing upon his literary skills as an investigative news reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune and as editor of Arthur C. Clark's series entitled Kingdom in the West: The Mormons and the American Frontier, Bagley not only writes a very readable, compelling, passionate story about the massacre that occurred in southern Utah in 1857, but he goes beyond Brooks's account and presents a very controversial interpretation. He asks two questions: "What did Brigham Young know" about the massacre? and "When did he know it?" (p. xiv). Bagley insists that Young initiated the events that led to the death of the people on that wagon train. Bagley draws upon circumstantial evidence that includes the fiery speeches of Brigham Young to avenge the blood of the prophets, religious ceremonies conducted in the Endowment House, minutes of prayer meetings, patriarchal blessings, diary entries, trial records, and other sources. Bagley argues that the religious fanaticism of Brigham Young and other Mormons was the principle cause for the murder of 120 men, women, and children.

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