American Massacre
The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857
by Sally Denton
Knopf, 302 pp., $26.95 IN SEPTEMBER 1857, a wagon train bound for California was attacked in southern Utah and 140 people were slaughtered, a few children the only–and purposely spared–survivors. This was the Fancher-Baker party, and their destruction is known in the American West as the “Mountain Meadows Massacre.” Originally blamed on Paiute Indians, the atrocity is now understood to have been the work of a group of white Mormon settlers called “Danites.” After many years of denial, the modern Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has accepted the fact that some of its members were involved. But the church still pins the blame on one renegade–John Doyle Lee–and vigorously rejects the culpability of the church itself and its president, Brigham Young.
In “American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857,” Sally Denton differs. The Mormon church came into being with the inspiration of Joseph Smith, a fourteen-year-old farmboy from Palmyra, New York, who in 1820 had a vision of an angel named Moroni who told him of the whereabouts of sacred golden plates buried in the ground. Smith transcribed these plates into the text of the “Book of Mormon,” a sort of version of the Old Testament.
From the start, the fast-growing sect suffered serious persecution and moved steadily west–from New York, to Ohio, to Illinois, to Missouri, and finally to Utah–to escape it. The Mormons also tried to counter the persecution by creating the Danites or Avenging Angels, Smith’s personal bodyguard. Unfortunately, the Danites quickly grew into a quasi-secret police, numbering in the hundreds, who enforced theological dogma among the faithful and, argues Denton, practiced the doctrine of “blood atonement” (the ritual murder of apostates and “gentile” enemies by throat-slitting and beheading).
Smith was a controversial figure deeply involved in the manipulation of regional politics (the Mormons’ numbers made them a demographic factor wherever they were), going so far as to threaten the federal government. When he was murdered by a mob in Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1844, the new prophet, Brigham Young, led the “Saints” west to the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. What followed is best described as “the most successful socialist experiment in American history.”
It was initially based on polygamy, which was mostly seen in the church’s hierarchy. At the time of his death, Smith was the husband of forty-eight wives. Brigham Young at one point had twenty-seven wives. In the East, polygamy had been the main stimulus for persecution, with newspapers publishing lurid exposés of the graying husbands of multiple teenaged wives. Utah’s admission as a state was delayed for many years primarily because of the polygamy question. The church itself outlawed it in 1890 and has since excommunicated anyone who practices it, though it is still seen in small fundamentalist Mormon sects in the Southwest.
From the beginning, there was concern that Brigham Young was intent on establishing a theocracy in the West. In 1857, President James Buchanan, tiring of the mostly nonviolent though constant abuse of federal officials in Utah, sent an army of 2,500 commanded by General Albert Sidney Johnston to install a new territorial governor and to institute martial law if necessary to subjugate the restive Mormons. The army failed to make it to Utah that year and went into winter quarters at nearby Fort Bridger in Wyoming. This caused much anti-federal hysteria in Utah, and the Mormons fortified the canyons leading to Salt Lake City. The Danites enforced “an LDS version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution” to keep the population loyal to Young.
Meanwhile, through the summer of 1857, the Fancher-Baker party was making its way west. Being dedicated entrepreneurs, the Mormons were usually enthusiastic resuppliers of gentile wagon trains in transit. But the volatile political climate kept the Fancher-Baker group shunned as it made its way from Salt Lake City south through isolated Mormon settlements, and the travelers faced the bleak prospect of crossing the deserts to California short of rations.
There has been much speculation as to why the wagon train was actually attacked. It may simply have been greed on Young’s part, as the church was in desperate financial difficulties and the train was transporting a large quantity of gold bullion in strongboxes. In “American Massacre” Denton describes the scene after the massacre: “Wagons were now dismantled and featherbeds ripped open in search of gold; utensils, tools, and home furnishings that had been strewn about were collected. The plunder proceeded with a strange quiet.”
Though scores were guilty, the entire blame for the Mountain Meadows Massacre eventually fell on John D. Lee, who was executed by a firing squad twenty years later, at the conclusion of a federal investigation and trial. Lee’s defense in 1877 was that he was only following orders emanating from “the highest authority.”
This much is known for certain: One of Young’s subordinates, George A. Smith, passed on orders instructing Lee “to prepare the people for the bloody work.” Denton posits that because of “Brigham Young’s complete authoritarian control over his domain and his followers, it is inconceivable that a crime of this magnitude could have occurred without direct orders from him.” A spiritually disillusioned Lee chose the firing squad as a repudiation of blood atonement. Brigham Young outlived him by only six months.
Lee’s execution legally absolved Young and the Mormon church. In September 1999, the current president, Gordon B. Hinckley, presided over a memorial ceremony at the massacre site. He reiterated the church’s official line of the last century and a half: “That which we have done here must never be construed as an acknowledgment on the part of the church of any complicity in the occurrences of that fateful day.” After reading Sally Denton’s “American Massacre,” you’ll think the opposite.
Bill Croke is a writer in Cody, Wyoming.
