Utah Lighthouse Ministry

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Review: Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Tragedy

By Dr. Ronald Huggins

Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley and Glen M. Leonard
(Oxford University Press, 2008)

This year saw the long-awaited publication of the new LDS Church sponsored Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Tragedy, by three Mormon historians, Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley and Glen Leonard. The book appeared after many hopes and great expectations, and many years of delay, so that as I began reading through its slim 231 pages of actual narrative, bristling with detail of only peripheral importance to the story, the old adage sprung uninvited to my mind: “The mountain hath labored and then brought forth a mouse.” Desiderius Erasmus, the great sixteenth-century humanist scholar, describes that adage as:

A proverbial iambic line, customarily used of boastful characters who are all display, and rouse wonderful expectations by their munificent promises and the magisterial air of their expression and costume, but when it comes to the point they contribute mere rubbish.1

High hopes were raised in 2002 for the new book after the appearance of Will Bagley’s much awaited Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows from the University of Oklahoma Press. In the October 12, 2002, New York Times,2 the Church-sponsored book was presented as if it would provide a definitive answer to Bagley as well as the then-forthcoming American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857 by Sally Denton. Both books had pointed to Brigham Young as the guilty party behind that massacre, but as the article went on to say, “That conclusion is vigorously disputed by three LDS Church historians, who vow their own history of the massacre, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2004, will exonerate Young.” Earlier on May 18, 2002, an article appeared in the Salt Lake Tribune entitled “Church to Produce Book on Massacre: Authors Vow to Deliver Unbiased View of Killings.” In it one of the authors, Richard E. Turley, was quoted as saying:

If women can write women’s history and Jews can write Jewish history, then we should be able to write fair accurate Mormon history . . . we are not concerned about protecting the image of the church’s image. The events are far enough away, it’s time to let the chips fall where they may.3

But Turley’s analogy to women and Jews rings hollow, because he writes as a functionary of an authoritarian organization with a long history of suppression and censoring those who do not make sure their history turns out “right.” When I recently quoted the phrase about the three historians letting the chips fall where they will, a dubious listener said yes, but in quotations: “Letting the chips fall where ‘they’ will,” namely, where the church authorities will them to fall. There are simply too many excommunicated Mormon historians around to buy into Turley’s attempt to liken himself to women and Jews. Fawn Brodie, LaMar Petersen, Lavina Fielding Anderson, Stan Larson, D. Michael Quinn, all Mormon historians, were excommunicated. Indeed one can say that the best Mormon history, the most accurate Mormon history, is written by those who are on the outs with the LDS Church or on its margins. Now to be sure some issues are less controversial than others, leaving plenty of room for Mormons to write good credible history so long as it is in subjects where there is no potential of the LDS Church’s image being tarnished. The Mountain Meadows massacre is not one of those subjects.

Arrington Papers

But for me the real test of the credibility of Turley’s claims was his key role in the LDS Church’s move in 2001 to seize the papers of one time LDS Church historian Leonard Arrington from the archives of the public institution to which Arrington had deeded them.

Arrington died in 1999 and 658 boxes of the papers he had given to Utah State University became open to the public on October 11, 2001. Four days later a band of eight employees arrived from the LDS Church to rifle through the collection. After Kermit Hall, President of Utah State University refused to turn over a large portion of the Arrington papers to the LDS Church, Richard Turley arrived with a lawyer to threaten him with legal action. Hall described the behavior of Turley and the other LDS Church historians involved as “very aggressive” and full of “bluff, bluster, threats, and near total disdain for the academic mission of the university.”4 Not only did the LDS historians reflect total disdain toward the mission of the university, but also toward the will of Arrington himself, who wanted his diary to remain sealed until several years in the future. In a session at the 2002 Sunstone Symposium, however, Stan Larson, archivist at the University of Utah’s Marriot Library, revealed that the historians involved in this debacle had ignored Arrington’s wishes and plundered the diary for information as to what was in his papers.5

In any case having started out claiming ownership of up to 60% of the Arrington collection, Turley and the LDS Church finally walked away with only three items: (1) Book of Anointings, (2) Heber C. Kimball’s diary, and (3) copies of the minutes of the LDS Church’s Council of Twelve allegedly covering meetings between 1877 and 1950.6 One may perhaps assume that it was only the third item that interested the LDS Church, and that the other two items were thrown in to give verisimilitude to their claim of only being concerned to keep sacred matters secret. In fact, however, the Kimball diary had already been published,7 and the Book of Anointings was already available in the University of Utah Marriot Library.8

So then what was it that made the LDS Church so desperate to have the copies of the Council of Twelve Meetings? That was not revealed, at least not intentionally. Yet it was revealed that “Arrington’s copies of some minutes of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles were for use in ‘an internal private study of a particular issue for the first Presidency.’”9

If that is correct, then we know what the subject of the internal study was probably about—the Mountain Meadows massacre. The reason we know this is something Arrington himself said in his 1998 autobiography Adventures of a Church Historian. “In August,” Arrington wrote, “I spent a weekend doing a background study on John D. Lee and the Mountain Meadows massacre for the First Presidency, alternately frustrated because they wanted the report in four days and flattered, pleased, honored, and delighted that they had asked me to prepare it. It was the first—and only—time I received a direct request to be a resource to the First Presidency.”10 Now to be sure, we can scarcely be expected to believe anything that Turley had to say about writing “fair accurate Mormon history,” after his participation in the Arrington Papers scandal. How likely is it that a person who rushes to suppress documents one minute will be entirely open and honest about them in the next?

Faith-Promoting Historians

From the beginning it was clear that a book on the Mountain Meadows massacre written by historians as beholden to the LDS Church as the three authors, could not be trusted no matter who published it. Why would Oxford want to publish the work of historians who, while claiming to cherish the ideal of historical impartiality, can be found in the next instance running around with lawyers threatening people seeking to defend that very same ideal?

But to return to the quotation from Erasmus cited earlier, is the Massacre at Mountain Meadows “mere rubbish?” I haven’t decided. Certainly some of it is, as to how much: Tempus omnia relevant! What is clearly rubbish, and that of the most conspicuous kind, are the blurbs of Robert V. Remini and Richard L. Bushman on the dust jacket. Remini speaks of the account as “insightful and balanced.” But would Remini be familiar enough with the story of the event to make that kind of evaluation, since apart from very small portions, it is clearly neither? Bushman calls the book “the best researched, most complete, and most even-handed account of Mountain Meadows incident we are likely to have for a long time.” Now to be sure it is generally taken for granted that all blurb writers are liars and flatterers, but even among such a company, Bushman is telling a whopper. The entire book is told with a strong Us vs. Them mentality. Mormon violence and abusing language are not highlighted while the same on the part of non-Mormons is highlighted. Despite the occasional comment with regard to the massacred wagon train not deserving what they got, one is still often left with the feeling that they got what other non-Mormons deserved.

The frame of the story is set up in such a way as to give a false impression of the entire event and to evade the most pressing question of all, why were the Mormons so violent in 1857. It is not that the authors don’t have an answer to the question, only that the answer is entirely artificial, and appears to be one they were determined to have no matter what the evidence was. Thus when they finally propose the supposed spark that set the event in motion—that the Cedar City residents were so frightened by the idle threats made by some in the wagon train—they decided after the train left town to go rouse the Indians and attack it. The suggestion is so patently implausible that even the authors seem to feel that they have to try and prop it up with an appeal to violence theory: “The final spark that ignites violence may be small but seem large in the eyes of the perpetrators.”11 The falsification of the story by framing becomes clear at the outset. The reader is given the impression that the whole spiral of violence began after the arrival of Abraham O. Smoot at the July 24, 1857, Pioneer Day celebration, with news that the U.S. Army was coming to attack Utah. Throughout the book this becomes the reference point in explaining why violence was regularly done against non-Mormons in the months that followed, violence which is regularly justified by appeals to the wickedness of the victims. The attentive reader, however, will note that the dates of Mormon violence and indications of broader violent tendencies often predated July 24, 1857.

The same kind of false impression is clearly given in relation to the 1838 founding of the retributive Mormon Danites: “a riot broke out at a Davies County polling place. Several Mormons, including recent convert John D. Lee, used sticks, boards, or whatever else they could get their hands on, to fight off Missourians who attacked them when they tried to exercise their right to vote.”12 And then, in the next paragraph, we read:

Exaggerated reports of the riot and other skirmishes led to virtual civil war. Some of the Saints, including Lee, responded to Missouri vigilantes by forming bands called “Danites,” that made preemptive strikes against vigilante targets, answering violence with violence.

This telling, however, is seriously distorted in two ways. The first is by giving the impression the Danites were formed in response to the election-day riot. Otherwise the reader might have felt less sympathy for the innocent Mormons who simply wanted to “exercise their right to vote.” In fact, however, the Danites had been formed already as is evidenced by the reference in Mormon accounts of their using the “Danite sign of distress” on that occasion.13

The second and far more troubling distortion is the reference to preemptive strikes against “vigilante targets,” a chilling, demonizing euphemism being used to hide the fact that Mormons attacked and burned the homes and stole the property of innocent Missourian men, women, and children. That our Mormon authors would resort even once to using such sinister euphemisms to downplay past Mormon violence, makes Oxford’s involvement with the book an absolute disgrace.

The evasive falsification of the story by the inaccurate framing which incorrectly identified the starting points of Mormon violence was further facilitated by a sentiment that is expressed various times in the book, namely that in acting violently in 1857 the Mormons, “did not match their behavior to their ideals.”14 However, there is good evidence to believe that the Mormons of the period had reacted to early persecution by adopting a violent ideology that not only provided a religious excuse for Mormons to engage in acts of violence but also resulted in a good many actual occurrences of it. Hence the statement in the preface to Massacre, “Except for their experiences during a single, nightmarish week in September 1857, most of them were ordinary humans with little to distinguish them from other nineteenth-century frontiersmen.”15 That they were ordinary humans there’s no doubt, but the issue had to do more with a violent religious ideology that Mormons at the time had embraced. In other words, the Mountain Meadows massacre was not the mysterious anomaly that the authors want us to believe. To illustrate this, I will simply present the following questions.

Something to Consider

After reading our authors’ account of the Mountain Meadows massacre as a fluke, an aberration in which Mormons out of a sense of fear and personal endangerment lashed out in a way that went totally against what they had been taught and believed, would you be surprised to know:

• That Brigham Young approved of the Mountain Meadows massacre after the fact and he opposed having the culprits brought to justice. We see this for example in John D. Lee’s Diary for May 31 [30], 1861, which reports how Brigham said that the victims “Merritd their fate, & that the only thing that ever troubled him was the lives of the Women & children, but that under the circumstances [this] could not be avoided. Although there had been [some?] that wantd to betreyed the Brethrn into the hands of their Enimies, for that thing [they] will be Damned & go down to Hell.”16

• That later in the same month as the Mountain Meadows massacre, we find another incident of a wagon train, the Dukes Train, being robbed of everything they had except their wagons and the animals pulling them.17 And as is reflective of the contradictions of Utah history, Will Bagley sees the Mormons as complicit with the Indians while Edward Leo Lyman casts the Mormons as saviors from the Indians. For Lyman’s thesis to stand however, he would need to counter more of the evidence brought forth by Bagley than he does.18 In Lyman’s defense, however, he is writing a comprehensive trail history, and can therefore only give a certain amount of space to each thing he describes.19

• That in June of 1862 a force of 500 men were sent from Salt Lake City to attack the entirely peaceful community of prophet Joseph Morris who had gathered in the abandoned Kingston Fort. After the community raised the white flag, piled their weapons in the courtyard, and surrendered, Robert T. Burton, the leader of the Mormon forces, rode in and murdered Morris, along with two women, in cold blood. He also shot Morris’s second counselor John Banks, who died either then, or else was finished off that night by Salt Lake councilman, Jeter Clinton. The bodies of Morris and Banks were then dressed in their full religious regalia and put on display at City Hall in Salt Lake City.20

• That on December 31, 1861, John D. Dawson, the third Governor of Utah was beaten so badly while trying to escape Utah that he never recovered from his wounds, which some say included castration.21 That when the Cowderys, Whitmers and Lyman Johnson left the Church in 1838, they did not simply decide to leave, they had to flee for their lives after Sidney Rigdon preached his infamous Salt Sermon against them on June 17, 1838. In it he argued that when salt (i.e., the people in question) had lost its savour (i.e., dissenters to Rigdon’s and Joseph Smith’s will) it was the duty of the Mormons to trample it (them) under their feet. The form Rigdon suggested that this should take was hanging, which would be “an act at which the angels would smile in approbation.”22 Joseph Smith then publicly approved of Rigdon’s message by noting that “Judas was a traitor and instead of hanging himself was hung by Peter.”23

• That even prior to the time when “a riot broke out at a Davies County polling place,” where the Mormons had “to fight off Missourians who attacked them when they tried to exercise their right to vote,”24 gangs of Mormon men were running Missourian settlers off their land. On July 31, 1838, “Twenty of the Mormons drove off some of the Missourians from their improvements [their lands] with cow-hides.”25 The election took place in early August. A day or two after the election a gang of about one hundred Mormons threatened the life of Missourian Adam Black if he would not sell out to them.26

• That the oft-mentioned reason that the Mormons hated Governor Boggs was his infamous “extermination order” issued October 27, 1838, in which he wrote: “The Mormons must be treated as enemies and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace—their outrages are beyond all description.”27 He probably used the term “extermination” as an intentional allusion to the July 4, 1838, speech of Mormon leader Sidney Rigdon, which Joseph Smith had afterward printed up as a pamphlet, in which Rigdon said:

And that mob that comes on us to disturb us; it shall be between us and them a war of extermination, for we will follow them, till the last drop of their blood is spilled, or else they will have to exterminate us: for we will carry the seal of war to their own houses, and their own families, and one party or the other shall be utterly destroyed—Remember it then all MEN.28

Brigham Young later said that: “Elder Rigdon was the prime cause of trouble in Missouri, by his fourth of July oration.”29

• That in 1842 Joseph Smith very probably did send Orrin Porter Rockwell to assassinate Governor Lilburn W. Boggs of Missouri. John Whitmer, one of the eight Book of Mormon witnesses, reported that “it is a well known fact that he was hired by Smith to kill Boggs.”30 William Law, one-time member of the First Presidency, says that Joseph told him “I sent Rockwell to kill Boggs,”31 and General Patrick E. Connor relates Rockwell telling him: “I shot through the window and thought I had killed him, but I had only wounded him; I was damned sorry I had not killed the Son of a bitch!”32 Bushman simply asserts that Rockwell’s “innocence was proven.”33 I would be very interested to hear Bushman make a case for that.

• That other perverse interpretations of the Bible were also used at this time to justify violence. When the leadership demanded everybody to turn over property to the Church, Samson Avard was heard to say that “all persons who attempt to deceive and retain property that should be given up would meet with the fate of Ananias and Saphira who were Killed by Peter.” Another was an oath on the part of the Danites, a violent Mormon paramilitary organization founded in June of 1838, to rescue a fellow Danite who had been arrested by non-Mormon authorities for legitimate crimes, even if it meant murdering a non-Mormon officer. Moses’ murder of the Egyptian was appealed to as justification: “you shall extricate him even if in the wrong if you have to do with his adversary as Moses did with the Egyptian put him under the sand. . . .”34

• That as to the Danites: “When any thing is to be performed no member shall have the privilege of judging whether it be right or wrong but shall engage in its accomplishment and trust God for the result.”35 Little wonder Reed Peck could report hearing A. McRae say: “If Joseph should tell me to kill Vanburen in his presidential chair I would immediately start and do my best to assassinate him.”36

In view of all this is it really that surprising that the Utah Mormons did what they did? From the perspective of an outsider, the violence toward outsiders in 1857 seems quite easily explained by the fact that from 1838 on, the Mormons (or some Mormons) had embraced violence as part of their religion.

Three Voices

For the most part Massacre represents history without the Why? The reason I say “for the most part,” is that there are three voices that emerge at different points throughout the book, whether they represent the different voices of the three authors, or the kind of material being dealt with, or both, is impossible to say without actually inquiring into who wrote what part of the book.

Voice 1 gives us Sunday School History, which rattles inanely on throughout most of the first part of the book and then more sporadically through the rest of it. This voice has no curiosity about what really happened or why, nor any real empathy for “those bad people who aren’t us.” It is this voice, I suspect, that gives us the silly descriptions likening Brigham Young to “a retired New England farmer or London Alderman,” Daniel H. Wells to “fellow Illinoisian Abraham Lincoln,” and quotes a description of George A. Smith as “a huge, burly man, with a Friar Tuck joviality of paunch and visage, and a roll in his bright eye which, in some odd, undefined sort of way, suggested cakes and ale.”37 When reading this voice, we are always clear on who we are to consider the White Hats (Salt Lake Mormon leaders), Black Hats (non-Mormons generally), and the Grey Hats (Southern Utah Mormon leaders). The overall sense given by this voice is that we are being patronized.

Voice 2 gives us Dumping Ground History, which is honest enough to dump all the evidence out on the table, but without evidencing any historical curiosity on its own part, or extending any effort to help the reader make sense of the pieces, or distinguish between those that are credible and relevant and those which are not. Instead Voice 2 contents itself occasionally to remind the reader what its predetermined thesis was, lest they be distracted from it by the evidence. Voice 2 dominates, and adds a very helpful sense of confusion (from the Mormon apologetic point of view) to the latter part of the book.

Voice 3 gives us Real History. Occasionally throughout the course of the book—very occasionally—one suddenly finds oneself startled to discover that one is reading good history, that attempts to wrestle and interact with the evidence with credibility, honesty, and intelligence. But usually one no sooner notices it than it slips away again to give place to Voice 1 or 2. Voice 3 is very much in the minority in the book. If you added up every example of its occurrence it would probably amount to less than 20 out of the 231 pages, perhaps less than 10. If Voices 1, 2 and 3 represent the voices of the actual three authors, then Oxford would have been well served to have dumped Voices 1and 2 and given the project over to Voice 3 to write. One may doubt, however, that the LDS Church would have found such an arrangement desirable. Looking at the final product it would seem clear that it was respectability and public-image enhancement that the LDS Church hoped for in getting the work published with Oxford.

Conclusion

Following the massacre, the cover-up by Brigham Young and other LDS Church leaders is an equally complex and controversial story. The authors of Massacre plan a second volume to deal with these issues. Brian Cannon, in his favorable review of the book in BYU Studies, observes:

The aftermath of the massacre is as choked with controversy as the actual killing. It includes a tangled web of subterfuge, sparring between Church and federal officials, and attempts to bring those responsible for the massacre to justice. As the authors obliquely observe, Brigham Young largely “held his tongue on the subject [of the massacre], for policy and personal peace” (229). Brooks and Bagley devoted half of their narratives to these matters. Regrettably, aside from a five-page epilogue recounting the execution of John D. Lee, the authors leave the “second half [of the story] to another day” (xii).38

One can only hope that the second volume will be more candid than the first.

It is, I think, significant that Massacre at Mountain Meadows appears 150 years after the murders because it shows that even now the possibility of good Mormon historical treatments of controversial issues by LDS historians appears to be something for the future. Hopefully the LDS Church will someday come to a place psychologically where they are willing to take a look at their own past honestly and without having to boost themselves up by trying to recast motives and personae to fit a modern Mormon ideal. Until then the greatest enemy to good Mormon history will continue to be the LDS institution itself. Mormon individuals who are having difficulty understanding or sympathizing with what I am saying, would be greatly helped by reading Ron Enroth’s book, Churches that Abuse,39 which, although I doubt it ever mentions the LDS Church, still deals with churches with similar mindsets.

In the meantime historians such as Juanita Brooks, David Bigler and Will Bagley were right in simply going for the truth and ignoring the promises down the years that the LDS Church was finally going to begin doing history in a more honest and less self-serving manner.

Footnotes:

  1. Adages of Erasmus (selected by William Barker; Toronto, CA: University of Toronto Press, 2001) p. 124 (Adage 1 ix 14). ↩︎
  2. Emily Eakin, “Reopening a Mormon Murder Mystery; New Accusations That Brigham Young Himself Ordered an 1857 Massacre of Pioneers,” New York Times (Oct. 12, 2002), http://tinyurl.com/6hecxs ↩︎
  3. Peggy Fletcher Stack, “Church to Produce Book on Massacre: Authors Vow to Deliver Unbiased View of Killings,” Salt Lake Tribune (May 18, 2002) p. A6. ↩︎
  4. Peggy Fletcher Stack and Kirsten Stewart, “USU Gives LDS Church Some of Historian’s Papers,” Salt Lake Tribune (Nov. 25, 2001) p. A15. I rely on this article as the basis of my description. ↩︎
  5. Stan Larson spoke on a panel session entitled, “Reflections on Who Owns The People’s History: The Controversy over the Leonard Arrington Collection,” (Sat., Aug. 10, 2002). More recently another prominent Mormon historian has confirmed that this was the case. ↩︎
  6. Stack & Stewart, “USU Gives Historian Papers,” p. A1. ↩︎
  7. On the Potter’s Wheel: The Diaries of Heber C. Kimball (ed., Stanley B. Kimball; Salt Lake City, Signature Books, 1987). ↩︎
  8. “LDS Church Suppresses Documents.” Handout accompanying Aug. 10, 2002, Sunstone panel “Who Owns The People’s History.” ↩︎
  9. Stack & Stewart, “USU Gives Historian Papers,” p. A15. ↩︎
  10. Leonard J. Arrington, Adventures of a Church Historian (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998) p. 155. I first learned of this in a conversation with Will Bagley. ↩︎
  11. Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley, and Glen M. Leonard, Massacre at Mountain Meadows (Oxford University Press, 2008) p. 137. ↩︎
  12. Walker, Turley, and Leonard, Massacre, p. 11. ↩︎
  13. John D. Lee, Mormonism Unveiled; or the Life and Confessions of the Late Mormon Bishop, John D. Lee; (Written by Himself) (St. Louis, Mo.: Bryan, Brand & Co./ New York: W. H. Stelle, 1877) p. 59. (Reprinted by Utah Lighthouse Ministry); See also the comment of John L. Butler, quoted in Stephen C. LeSueur, The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1987) p. 62. ↩︎
  14. Walker, Turley, and Leonard, Massacre, p. 115. ↩︎
  15. Ibid. ↩︎
  16. A Mormon Chronicle: The Diaries of John D. Lee: 1848-1876: Vol. I (ed. and annot. by Robert Glass Cleland and Juanita Brooks: Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press, 1983) p. 314. ↩︎
  17. Will Bagley, The Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Mountain Meadows Massacre (Norman, Ok.: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002) p. 168. ↩︎
  18. Edward Leo Lyman, The Overland Journey from Utah to California: Wagon Trails from Salt Lake City to the City of Angels (Reno & Las Vegas: University of Nevada, 2004) pp. 140-41. ↩︎
  19. Walker, Turley, and Leonard, Massacre deals with part of the story (esp. pp. 175-76). ↩︎
  20. David Bigler, Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon Theocracy in the American West 1847-1896 (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1998) pp. 208-15. See also C. LeRoy Anderson, Joseph Morris and the Saga of the Morrisites (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1988). ↩︎
  21. Bigler, Forgotten Kingdom, pp. 201-204; Hope A. Hilton, “Wild Bill” Hickman and the Mormon Frontier (Salt Lake City, Utah: 1988) pp. 99-100; Will Bagley, “Third Governor Was Run Out of Utah After 3 Weeks,” History Matters Column, Salt Lake Tribune (Dec. 30, 2001) p. B1. ↩︎
  22. Reed Peck Manuscript, pp. 24-25 (Utah Lighthouse Ministry Typescript, pp. 6-7). Reed Peck was a Mormon leader who was present at many of the events he describes. ↩︎
  23. Ibid., p. 26 (Utah Lighthouse typescript p. 7). ↩︎
  24. Walker, Turley, and Leonard, Massacre, p. 11. ↩︎
  25. William Swartzell, Mormonism Exposed, Being a Journal of a Resident in Missouri from the 28th of May to the 20th of August, 1838 (Pekin, Ohio: By the Author, 1840) p. 27. ↩︎
  26. Ibid., pp. 29-30, 42-43. ↩︎
  27. LeSeuer, 1838 Mormon War, p. 152. ↩︎
  28. Oration Delivered by Mr. S. Rigdon on the 4th of July, 1838, at Far West, Caldwell County, Missouri, by Sidney Rigdon (Far West: Printed at the Journal Office, 1838) (New Mormon Studies CD Rom). ↩︎
  29. Times & Seasons 5:667 (Oct. 1, 1844) ↩︎
  30. John Whitmer’s History, p. XXI. ↩︎
  31. Interview with William Law (March 30, 1887) The Daily Tribune, Salt Lake City (July 31, 1887) p. 6. ↩︎
  32. Quoted in Harold Schindler, Orrin Porter Rockwell, Man of God / Son of Thunder (Salt Lake City Utah, University of Utah Press, 1966) p. 73, from Wilhelm W. Wyl [Wymetal], Mormon Portraits, Joseph Smith the Prophet, His Family and His Friends (Salt Lake City, Utah, 1986) 255. ↩︎
  33. Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005) p. 468 ↩︎
  34. Reed Peck Manuscript, p. 40 (Utah Lighthouse typescript, p. 10). Swartzell also writes about this oath but does not mention the story of Moses and the Egyptian (July 21, 1838, p. 22). ↩︎
  35. Ibid., p. 39 (Utah Lighthouse typescript, p. 10). ↩︎
  36. Ibid., p. 42 (Utah Lighthouse typescript, p. 10). ↩︎
  37. Walker, Turley, and Leonard, Massacre, p. xiii. ↩︎
  38. Brian Q. Cannon, “Review of Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Tragedy, by Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley, Jr. and Glen M. Leonard,” BYU Studies 47:3 (2008) pp. 169-74. ↩︎
  39. Ronald M. Enroth, Churches that Abuse (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Publishing House, 1992). ↩︎

Originally appeared in:

Ron Huggins, “Review: Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Tragedy,” Salt Lake City Messenger, no. 111, November 2008, 17-21.

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