By Sandra Tanner

“Halt! Do your duty!”¹ With that command scores of zealous LDS priesthood leaders and followers, along with a few Indians, from the Cedar City, Utah, area fired on at least 140 unarmed, non-Mormon men, women and children. The killings were over in a matter of minutes, sparing only 17 or 18 children under the age of eight.² Earlier that morning several Mormons, led by John D. Lee, diabolically entered the emigrant wagon train under a white flag and convinced them to surrender their arms in exchange for an LDS escort of safe passage through Indian territory.

The gentile wagon train, composed mainly of Methodists and Presbyterians from Arkansas on their way to California, seemed doomed from the start. The news of the murder of beloved LDS Apostle Parley P. Pratt in Arkansas (by a jealous husband whose wife had left him to become Pratt’s 12th wife) seemed to be the final straw for the Mormons.³ This event, coupled with the tensions over federal troops then approaching the Utah Territory, President Brigham Young’s declaration of martial law, lingering bitterness about mistreatment of LDS in Missouri and Illinois, recent sermons by President Young about “blood atonement”⁴ and inflammatory sermons during the Mormon reformation period led to the slaughter known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre on September 11, 1857. As Will Bagley observed: “Mountain Meadows was a crime of true believers.”⁵

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the massacre and has been commemorated by various events. On September 11th a memorial service was conducted at the site of the massacre, now owned by the LDS Church. They provided a pavilion, pulpit, microphone, chairs, security guards, port-a-potties and a luncheon.

Besides various speakers from the families involved, LDS Apostle Henry Eyring offered his sincere “regret” to the descendants of those killed. The Salt Lake Tribune reported on the event:

A Mormon apostle, speaking Tuesday at the 150th anniversary memorial service for victims of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, apologized for the church’s role, expressing “profound regret for the massacre.” . . .

“What was done here long ago by members of our church represents a terrible and inexcusable departure from Christian teaching and conduct,” said Eyring, who choked up while reading a statement delivered on behalf of the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. . . . The words, “we’re sorry,” were not part of the statement, but Richard Turley Jr., the LDS Church’s managing director of family and church history and co-author of the forthcoming book, Massacre at Mountain Meadows, insisted after the ceremony that the statement was meant to be an apology.

“[The church] is deeply, deeply sorry,” he said. “What happened here was horrific.” . . .

The service, attended by about 400 people, began as an antique wagon, driven by Arkansas descendants and pulled by two Belgian work horses, wound its way down to the memorial grave site. Behind the wagon were descendants carrying flags bearing the names of the 29 families who were massacred in this valley that was a popular stop along the Old Spanish Trail.

Hanging from the fence surrounding the memorial about an hour’s drive southwest of Cedar City were 120 crosses representing those who died in the massacre, plus another 17 adorned with red ribbons to represent the children who survived. . . .

The bloodbath in this meadow has stood out as perhaps Utah’s, and the LDS Church’s, darkest and most disputed chapter. Descendants, in varying degrees, have cried out for apologies, recognition and protection of their ancestors’ stories. So while the people in the audience heard Eyring’s words and viewed them as progress, few seemed to hear an outright apology.

Historian Will Bagley . . . felt the church—as an institution—fell short in owning up to its culpability. (“LDS apostle voices ‘regret’ for massacre,” Salt Lake Tribune, Sept. 12, 2007, p. A12)

[Note: The online archive version of this Tribune article (accessed July 2025) now bears an apparently revised title: “LDS Church apologizes for Mountain Meadows Massacre,” and, strangely, also shows a revised publication date: “September 11, 2007,” (the same date as the memorial service itself).]

The LDS Church made a point of the fact that they did not issue an apology. Paul Foy of the Associated Press reported:

Church leaders were adamant that the statement should not be construed as an apology. “We don’t use the word ‘apology.’ We used ‘profound regret,’” church spokesman Mark Tuttle told The Associated Press. (Chicago Tribune, Sept. 11, 2007)

The families of the victims are also petitioning for the burial site to be designated as a national historic landmark.⁶

The massacre was discussed this spring in the new four-hour PBS program “The Mormons.”⁷ This year also saw the release of the full-length motion picture “September Dawn,” a fictionalized account of the murders.⁸ While the movie was not all that we had hoped for we were glad to see Brigham Young’s “blood atonement” sermons and the massacre brought to the public’s attention. Even the LDS Church seems to have realized it couldn’t avoid talking about the massacre this year.

In an unprecedented move, the church posted on its official web site as early as June an article on the massacre scheduled to appear in the September Ensign. In it LDS historian Richard Turley acknowledges that many of the Mormon charges against the emigrants were false. He writes:

Some traditional Utah histories of what occurred at Mountain Meadows have accepted the claim that poisoning also contributed to conflict—that the Arkansas emigrants deliberately poisoned a spring and an ox carcass near the central Utah town of Fillmore, causing illness and death among local Indians. According to this story, the Indians became enraged and followed the emigrants to the Mountain Meadows, where they either committed the atrocities on their own or forced fearful Latter-day Saint settlers to join them in the attack. Historical research shows that these stories are not accurate.⁹

While the article repeats the charge that someone in the wagon train had boasted he helped kill LDS founding prophet Joseph Smith and that other members of the wagon train were threatening to join the federal troops in fighting the Mormons, it must be remembered that these accounts were given by LDS men involved in the massacre. One is left to wonder if these charges were simply invented to give an excuse for the attack. Juanita Brooks observed:

Whatever the details, the fact remains that the entire company was betrayed and murdered, an ugly fact that will not be downed. Certainly, when the facts are marshaled, there is not justification enough for the death of a single individual.¹⁰

Mormons will often try to shift the blame to the Paiute Indians of Southern Utah, that the attack was their idea and they coerced the Mormons to participate. However, Turley explains that it was the other way around:

The generally peaceful Paiutes were reluctant when first told of the plan. Although the Paiutes occasionally picked off emigrants’ stock for food, they did not have a tradition of large-scale attacks. But Cedar City’s leaders promised them plunder and convinced them that the emigrants were aligned with “enemy” troops who would kill Indians along with Mormon settlers.¹¹

Brigham Young

While there is insufficient evidence to prove Brigham Young directly ordered the massacre, he certainly set the stage for the event and aided in its cover-up.¹² That Young was not upset with those who perpetrated the massacre is demonstrated by the following points. First, Brigham Young granted John D. Lee, the only man to later be tried and executed for the massacre, three additional plural wives after the event.¹³ The second example is Brigham Young’s treatment of the 1859 rock memorial topped with a large wooden cross erected by U.S. Army Major J. L. Carleton. While visiting the site in 1861, Brigham Young orchestrated the destruction of the monument. Bagley comments:

The monument was beginning to tumble down, but the wooden cross and its inscription, “Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord,” still stood above the rock cairn.

Brigham Young read the verse aloud, altering the text to fit his mood: “Vengeance is mine saith the Lord; I have repaid.” Dudley Leavitt recalled how Young directed the destruction of the monument so that all present could deny that he had ordered it. “He didn’t say another word. He didn’t give an order. He just lifted his right arm to the square, and in five minutes there wasn’t one stone left upon another. He didn’t have to tell us what he wanted done. We understood.”¹⁴

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For further perspective on the historical context in which these events occurred, see Will Bagley’s article, “Will You Love that Man or Woman Well Enough to Shed Their Blood?”, and the Salt Lake City Messenger No. 98

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Footnotes:

1. Will Bagley, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows, University of Oklahoma Press, 2002, p. 146. ↩︎
2. Juanita Brooks, The Mountain Meadows Massacre, University of Oklahoma Press, 1970, pp. 101-108. ↩︎
3. Bagley, pp. 9, 68. ↩︎
4. Jerald and Sandra Tanner, Mormonism—Shadow or Reality? Utah Lighthouse Ministry, 1987, pp. 398-404-B. ↩︎
5. Bagley, p. 378. ↩︎
6. “Groups want church to back historic landmark,” Deseret Morning News, Sept. 12, 2007. ↩︎
7. PBS, “The Mormons,” http://www.pbs.org/mormons/ ↩︎
8. For more on the movie see: https://mrm.org/september-dawn ↩︎
9. Richard E. Turley, Jr., “The Mountain Meadows Massacre,” Ensign, Sept. 2007. (emphasis added) ↩︎
10. Brooks, p. 108. ↩︎
11. Turley, “The Mountain Meadows Massacre,” Ensign, Sept. 2007. ↩︎
12. Bagley, pp. 242-247. ↩︎
13. Juanita Brooks, John Doyle Lee: Zealot, Pioneer Builder, Scapegoat, p. 230 and Appendix. ↩︎
14. Bagley, p. 247; also given as “Vengeance is mine and I have taken a little” by Wilford Woodruff. See Brooks, p. 182. ↩︎

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