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"1. Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman.
"2. Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. ...
"7. For I would that all men were even as I myself. But every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that.
"8. I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, It is good for them if they abide even as I.
"9. But if they cannot contain, let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn."
1 Corinthians 7:1-2, 7-9
Mountain Meadows Massacre Sept. 30
By Mary Migliore
2006
Almost 150 years after the Mountain Meadows Massacre,
A call for Responsibility, Restitution and Remorse
From the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Abstract
As the 150th anniversary looms for the Mountain Meadows Massacre, my paper will describe why it is time for a $25 billion church to atone for the slaughter of 120 unarmed men, women and children on its watch in southwest Utah in 1857.
On the nation’s first 9-11, Mormon militiamen used a white truce flag to trick Arkansas pioneers under siege on a wagon train into putting down their weapons in return for safe passage out of the meadows. Raiders then murdered every person over the age of 6 on Sept. 11, 1857.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has refused responsibility, restitution and official remorse for the mass murder, which they blame on a rogue band of Mormon raiders.
Since the prophet Brigham Young could control who got married in Utah territory, my paper uses common sense and writings from prominent historians to suggest the church leader and territory governor could likely keep track of massacres as well as matrimony.
I contend the LDS Church was responsible as an institution in 1857, and it is responsible as an institution today. And I am calling for federal stewardship at Mountain Meadows because the tragic story of murdered Arkansas pioneers cannot be told by the descendants of the killers.
The 150th anniversary of the nation's first 9‑11 is approaching in 2007.
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On Sept. 11, 1857, every man, woman and child over the age of 6 on a wagon train from Arkansas was murdered by Mormon raiders in southwest Utah in the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
After a four‑day siege, Mormon militiaman John D. Lee had come into the camp carrying a white flag of truce and persuaded the trapped pioneers to put down their arms in return for safe passage from attacking “Indians.” With the wounded and children in wagons, the families were taken about a mile up the valley and on signal, raiders shot every man in the head, then chased down helpless women and children with the help of a few Indian allies. Only 17 small children were spared. Victims were stripped of their clothing, robbed of their valuables and left unburied for the wolves.
Now, 149 years later, most of them are still lying under the desolate landscape and relatives are still waiting for an official apology for a crime that was almost as cowardly as it was brutal.
Historians ranging from Mark Twain to Utah author Will Bagley and Pulitzer‑Prize winner Larry McMurtry have detailed Mormon complicity in the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‑day Saints has refused responsibility, restitution and remorse for the worst civilian atrocity in Frontier America and the mass murder remains in the backwaters of American history.
As a relative of two Arkansas victims, I am calling for the state of Utah and the LDS Church to clear the conscience of the church and take the only action that will finally allow the souls of the innocent to rest in peace: Support federal stewardship for the massacre site and surrounding valley.
I recently made such a request in a letter to the Utah Historic Preservation Officer. The official state representative on such matters sent me maps and information, including an unsigned summary of the atrocity:
"Many sources report the belligerent conduct of the party as it made its way through Utah. Oxen were named Brigham Young or Heber C. Kimball and cursed as they passed the Mormon settlements. .... Some boasted of participating in the execution of Joseph Smith and threatened to lead an army back from California to put the Mormons in their place. It was also reported that they poisoned a spring and a number of cattle died from drinking the poisoned water. The Indians ate some of the meat and several Indians died from the effects."
Oh really. Bagley, author of the award‑winning "Blood of the Prophets," says the "preposterous and discredited" reports came from church members playing damage control. He quotes historian David A. White as saying: "Every one of the many charges of bad conduct by the Fancher train comes directly or indirectly from Mormon sources whose motives must be questioned." (Bagley, 2002, p.115)
The allegations are still hauled out today by church apologists.
That unsigned "Blame the Victims Defense" that I received demonstrates how far Utah and the LDS Church have advanced in 149 years in coming to terms with the crime. On reflection, church founder Joseph Smith was killed in Illinois in 1844. In 1857, 13 years after the murder, it's doubtful teenagers and small children from Arkansas were responsible for the death of the prophet, in a caravan where women and children were in the majority of a group of staid Protestant farmers likely not given to traveling with strychnine at the ready.
McMurtry, in his new book “Oh What a Slaughter” on massacres of the Old West, sums it up: “There was no poisoned cow and the spring ran as pure as ever.” (McMurtry, 2005, p.82).
Whatever the reason, a church that purports to offer spiritual guidance to the world has to face the truth in its own backyard. It must confront its dark past to find reconciliation with the Christian community and relatives of massacre victims who have waited 149 years for justice.
Even the prophet Brigham Young, McMurtry writes, had an uncomfortable intuition the "massacre would haunt the Mormon church forever ‑‑ which, so far, it has. He had this intuition, and then, for eighteen years, did his best to stonewall ‑‑ and his best, considering his lofty position, was pretty good."
The author goes on to say, "It is clear that he used the power of his position as church leader to keep the truth from coming out, a practice that has been followed by many church leaders since." (McMurtry, p.72)
Today, there are thousands of relatives of massacre victims across the United States who are haunted by the thought of the remains of their ancestors forever lost in a valley 1,500 miles from home under the control of the descendants of the killers.
LDS officials have always maintained the prophet had no role in the mass murder at Mountain Meadows. But since one couldn't get married in Utah without the Young’s permission, skeptics might conclude he could keep track of massacres as well as matrimony.
Historical records from that time have disappeared from a religious institution that McMurtry says is among the “world’s most efficient record‑keepers.” And the fig leaf for mass murder ‑‑ a letter allegedly sent by the prophet to southwest Utah by a horseman to the militiamen instructing them to leave the wagon train alone ‑‑ turned up 27 years later as a copy in a church letter book. (McMurtry, p. 70).
The original is missing, as is the church's best hope for escaping responsibility for a bloody massacre that occurred, at the very least, on the prophet's watch by church members under his complete control and authority. (Young was introduced at a Pioneer Day celebration in July of 1857 as "prophet, seer and revelator, priest, governor and king" ‑‑ which should put to rest any questions about who was in charge in Utah territory. (Bagley, p. 79)
"The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‑day Saints (the Mormons) has hoped from the first day to the present that if they just stuck together, hunkered down, and kept quiet, time would pass and people would forget," McMurtry writes. "Time did pass, but people have not even begun to forget." (McMurtry, p. 65).
Meanwhile, historians report Young was seen after the bloodbath driving an expensive carriage that had belonged to a massacre victim. In today's justice system, when a suspect is seen driving the victim's wheels, it’s considered Clue No. 1. And McMurtry quotes Young as saying:
“I am told that there are Brethren who are willing to swear against the Brethren who were engaged in this affair. I hope there is no truth to that report ¼ But if there is I will tell you my opinion of you ¼ as your fate is concerned. Unless you repent at once of that unholy intention, and will keep the secret of all you know, you will die a dog’s death and be damned, and go to hell. I do not want to hear anymore treachery among my people.” (McMurtry, p. 85).
That sounds an awful lot like a cover‑up.
So where do we stand today as the 150th anniversary approaches? In a 1999 ceremony at Mountain Meadows, LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley presided over the dedication of a new rock cairn with the remains of 34 victims to replace the one built by Army Maj. James Carleton, who was sent to Utah to investigate the crime and bury the victims in 1859.
Hinckley expressed regret, in general, that innocent people lost their lives, but inserted, on the advice of his attorneys, a disclaimer absolving the church of all guilt, according to media reports. And he said: "Let the book of the past be closed."
There was no sign at Mountain Meadows that day of the 19‑foot cross put up by Major Carleton's soldiers with the inscription:
“Vengeance is Mine. I Will Repay, Saith the Lord.”
The Mountain Meadows Monument Foundation, a nonprofit group of family members and historians dedicated to justice and federal stewardship, erected a replica of that cross last year in the hamlet of Carrollton, Arkansas, where the Army returned the 17 tiny children who survived the massacre to their families in 1859.
The historical marker at the new cross in Arkansas reads, in part: "In 1861, Brigham Young and his entourage visited the Utah gravesite. He saw the words on the cross and said, 'Vengeance is mine and I have taken a little.' Then Young raised his arm in the Danite sign of the square and within minutes his followers completely destroyed the monument." (Some consider the prophet’s remark a confession at the scene of the crime.)
As for the bones of victims reburied at the 1999 ceremonies, if the cairn holds the remains of 34 on the 2.5‑acre site owned by the church, it follows that the bones of 86 people are still out there below the landscape of the five‑mile valley.
If private landowners had demurred, would Little Bighorn today still be under private ownership and the bones of General Custer and his men still be scattered across the killing field in Montana?
The remains in the remote Utah valley likely include my great‑great uncles John Prewit, 20, and William Prewit, 18, the young brothers of my great‑grandmother Lucinda Prewit Keeling. The young men set out for a great adventure in California and ended up lost forever in a grim meadow under the control of the descendants of the killers.
The Prewit brothers from rural Marion County, Arkansas, were likely poorish, but they were on a wagon train that has been called the most lucrative to ever head West. Historians report the pioneers had up to 1,000 head of cattle, $100,000 in gold coins, tens of thousands in cash, expensive carriages and fine Kentucky racehorses. If the Mormon militia had to take revenge for Joseph Smith, it must have been cost‑effective to hit a wealthy wagon train to avenge the blood of the prophets. (And McMurtry writes church members subscribed "to a doctrine of blood atonement, which instructed them to shed the blood of gentiles." He notes the victims were, in Mormon terms, enemies of the faith and perfect candidates for the spilling of blood.) (McMurtry, p. 73)
The timeline of the atrocity is of interest. The prosperous wagon train had earlier spent weeks camped around Salt Lake City, under the eye of the brethren and Mormon officialdom in Temple Square, who might have taken notice of the huge herd of cattle intended for gold miners in California. And perhaps interested observers that summer got wind that the pioneers were carrying a lot of cash to buy ranches in the West.
So when the Arkansans were resting later at Mountain Meadows near the Nevada border, preparing to leave Utah, why would militiamen in the south suddenly need the prophet's counsel and send a horseman galloping north to Salt Lake City? And then Young sends his messenger racing south with instructions to leave the wagon train alone (word that arrived after the slaughter)?
Why would a decision have been left to the last minute on the fate of a wagon train that had been in Utah for weeks? Maybe it wasn’t.
Bagley commented on Brigham Young's so‑called instructions in Brian Patrick’s acclaimed 2003 documentary on the massacre called “Burying the Past.” The prophet's letter (in reference to Paiutes recruited for the raid) concludes:
"The Indians we expect will do as they please ..."
Bagley explained:
“What that meant was ‑‑ make damn sure you can blame whatever happens down there on the Indians.”
McMurtry writes: "Of course it's possible that this famous letter might not have been the only message he dispatched to the south. The nice letter may have been intended as cover in case things went wrong."
He goes on to say that Maj. Carleton's report on the slaughter stated "Paiute chiefs claimed that letters ordering the destruction of the emigrant train came from Brigham Young. The copious and meticulous Mormon archives are absent any such letters." (McMurtry, p. 71)
There will likely never be a smoking gun on the atrocity, because key records on meetings Young had with southern Utah firebrands and Indian leaders just before the slaughter have vanished. Could any evidence remain on who ordered the deed?
“Oh, I think they did an Enron a long time ago,” said Ron Wright, a West Coast relative of the murdered Prewit brothers, on the disappearance of incriminating evidence.
The late Juanita Brooks, author of the landmark 1950 book "Mountain Meadows Massacre," seems to have confirmed as much before her death. In an October, 2001, American Heritage magazine article, author Sally Denton said Brooks, a descendant of one of the 1857 killers, had "admitted to burning crucial historical documents because 'they were just too incriminating' of the church."
Meanwhile, as relatives of massacre victims step up their fight for justice, the ACLU reached a settlement in 2006 with the LDS Church regarding the Martin’s Cove National Historic Site in Wyoming.
I see that 100,000 visitors a year will have unfettered access to the land where 150 British Mormons were killed in a blizzard as they headed to Utah in 1856.
The LDS Church has spent millions on Martin’s Cove, which has a visitors’ center, a 500‑seat amphitheater, an RV park and campgrounds.
Keeper of the flame standards are lower at the Utah killing ground where Mormons murdered 120 Arkansas Protestants in 1857 in a crime far more heinous than a blizzard. There's a grassy lawn, the rock cairn, concrete blocks with graffiti for a restroom and a simple granite memorial on a hill high above the meadows on Dixie National Forest land.
"It's a pretty sad advertisement for LDS stewardship," said Scott Fancher, a Harrison, Arkansas, attorney and descendant of leaders of the Fancher wagon train, after a periodic visit.
A powerful church spends millions to honor British Mormons while the bones of my ancestors are still scattered over hundreds of acres under the de facto control of the church.
But today, at least in Wyoming, history lovers have a developed historical site to visit, unlikely the few who manage to find their way to the bleak scene at Mountain Meadows in Utah where my great‑great uncles ended up with nothing but their names carved on a granite wall.
So, who can best be the stewards today of this tragic piece of American history? The descendants of the killers? Representatives of a church that prominent historians say helped plan the act of religious terrorism on the nation’s first 9‑11 and have worked ever since to cover it up?
Indeed, the level of remorse in Utah today is such that officials in Washington City, Utah, hoped in 2004 to adorn the town square with a $35,000, 7‑foot statue of John D. Lee ‑‑ the man who walked into the Arkansas encampment in 1857 with the white flag and persuaded the doomed pioneers to put down their arms. (To be fair, the city intended to honor Lee for his contributions as a frontiersman, notwithstanding an untimely slaughter in his past. But the statue idea had to be dropped after a storm of protest, and perhaps to avoid further embarrassment to Utah, not to mention the LDS Church.) (Associated Press, May 2, 2004)
The only man among dozens of raiders ever brought to justice for the crime, Lee was executed 20 years later in 1877 by a firing squad at Mountain Meadows after two trials and a deal between Mormons and the federal government. In his final testimony, Lee said he was just following orders.
McMurtry writes that Young himself was deposed at Lee's trial and admitted that he was an accessory after the fact after "the always shaky edifice of the Mormon cover‑up began to crumble." (McMurtry, p. 86)
As the 150th anniversary of the crime nears, real justice cannot be denied at Mountain Meadows, and American history must be controlled by the federal government, not descendants of killers with a massive conflict of interest.
Would Gettysburg, Martin’s Cove and Little Bighorn, for example, still be run today by private entities whose interests do not coincide with those of the American people to have their history accurately portrayed and to bestow appropriate remembrance and honor to victims of a crime of truly historic proportions?
What happens when those rights collide with the vested parochial interests of a state, a church and some of the most powerful politicians in the United States who have reason to keep a monstrous atrocity hidden from public attention?
Will Bagley has stated that no other site of this magnitude in American history is not under the control of the federal government. Cynical observers and potential legal advocates might presume a state theocracy has conspired, or otherwise labored for 150 years, to bury the crime and any prospect of justice.
At the very least, I expect a church that uses the name of Jesus Christ to have a higher standard of responsibility and morality than, say, Enron. And since the LDS Church invested millions and fought years of legislative battles to be keeper of the flame for dead British Mormons in Wyoming, the church should be the first to support the same principle for relatives of murdered Arkansas residents who want their federal government to control the legacy of an atrocity in Utah.
Consider the shocking testimony from travelers who came upon Mountain Meadows after the slaughter.
"Saw two piles of bodies, one composed of women and children, the other of men. The bodies were entirely nude, and seemed to have been thrown promiscuously together. They appeared to have been massacred. Should judge there were sixty or seventy bodies of women and children; saw one man on that pile; the children were from one and two months up to 12 years; the small children were cut, others stabbed with knives: had bullets through them. All the bodies were more or less torn to pieces." (McMurtry, p. 81.)
The horrific scene comes to mind when one drives by the new 17,000‑square‑foot LDS Temple in my hometown of San Antonio, where posthumous ceremonies are held for the dead, while the bones of my great‑grandmother's beloved brothers are still likely scattered by wind and predators across the bleak meadows in Utah.
Proxy Mormon baptisms for people murdered by Mormons are another point of contention for some relatives of the Arkansans.
The victims at Mountain Meadows are the same people that LDS church members later inducted into the Mormon faith in the hereafter. Rites were conducted in 1993 by none other than the descendants of John D. Lee in the Mormon temple in St. George, Utah, according to the Daily Spectrum in St. George.
Burr Fancher, the outgoing president of the Mountain Meadows Monument Foundation, says he has searched the LDS Church genealogical index for names of massacre victims and has found dozens.
"Descendants of mass murderers should not be allowed to impose a religious faith on those killed by their own ancestors," said the retired Ph.D. educational consultant from Oregon. "Closure will never occur on the Mountain Meadows murders until the final resting places of the victims have been removed from the ownership of the church."
He also said: "Mountain Meadows will continue to be a problem for the LDS Church until they bite the bullet and apologize for involvement of church officials in the planning and execution of the biggest act of terrorism prior to the Oklahoma City bombing."
Not only do Mormons control the massacre site, in 2002 they maintained their right to the ownership of buttons and trinkets from our dead ancestors that were found in the meadows. When the Harrison, Ark., foundation asked for the items to be returned to families, the $25 billion church said no.
So in 1857, church members kept the cattle, the jewelry, the gold coins, carriages, the horses, and tens of thousands in cash.
Today, relatives of Mountain Meadows victims can't get any buttons back.
Utahns should support federal stewardship at Mountain Meadows to erase any perception that the state and the church have something to hide. And the LDS Church should take the lead no matter what the cost or the consequences. It's the kind of example one expects from an influential religious institution that wants to be considered a member of the Christian community. Or, will the cover‑up continue? Will Mormons attempt to block a commemorative MMMF wagon train trip in Utah to cover the last five miles into Mountain Meadows to mark the 150th anniversary of the massacre on Sept. 11, 2007?
Insiders say the church PR machine is already at work to keep the Utah stage to the Mormons on the grim 2007 anniversary. Mormon officials are reportedly planning a pre‑emptive strike to steal the atrocity spotlight by announcing that the church, after 150 years, has built a restroom at Mountain Meadows and purchased unmarked mass gravesites in the valley.
In what some fear is a Neville Chamberlain moment, there are reports that a group of more forgiving (or gullible) relatives of massacre victims has been wooed by the church. It's anticipated they will be flown into Utah and trotted out in a show of unity and healing in a 9‑11 photo op in 2007 to demonstrate the benevolent determination of the LDS Church to “do the right thing” – throw in a toilet -- and maintain control of the massacre site and the legacy of the crime.
As for what Mormon landowners at the site really think of healing and reconciliation, two relatives of massacre victims drove up to a field in the valley on the 148th anniversary of the bloodbath. They report they asked the landowner if they could visit a portion of his property where it is said remains are to be found. One visitor discreetly filmed the owner's response on a small, hand‑held camera at his side. The Mormon landowner launched into a tirade of curse words, all caught on film. (The visitors took that as a "no.")
Meanwhile, the church has powerful allies in Washington in a position to block any move to federal stewardship. U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Bush Cabinet member Mike Leavitt are direct descendants of the 1857 Mormon killers.
Leavitt stepped up to the plate in 1999 when he was governor of Utah and bones of massacre victims were accidentally dug up by a backhoe during the rebuilding of the rock cairn at Mountain Meadows.
Bones and skulls were briefly examined by forensic anthropologist Dr. Shannon Novak, but the University of Utah expert selected to head the investigation had little time for her work. Gov. Leavitt quickly ordered the bones of victims reburied without the extensive forensic analysis required by state law at a crime scene, according to media reports.
In 1857, Dudley Leavitt rode picket duty to keep Arkansans from escaping. In 1999, Mike Leavitt took action to contain ugly revelations that could embarrass him, and his church.
Later, at an MMMF annual meeting in Arkansas, Novak produced photographs of skulls showing that women and children were executed with bullets to the front of the head. She also found no evidence that knives or arrows were used in the killings, casting further doubt on "The Indians did it" theory floated by the church for decades.
As for Sen. Hatch, he was quoted in 2002 as saying of Martin’s Cove: “The ground is particularly sacred. We (the Mormons) had a lot of people die there.”
Hatch, a direct descendant of Mormon killer Ira Hatch, should be the first to appreciate that Mountain Meadows is “particularly sacred” to relatives of Arkansas victims, and should support federal stewardship to help, if nothing else, atone for the great crime committed by his ancestor.
Another politician with connections to Mountain Meadows is a likely candidate for the presidency in 2008. Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney is a descendant of Mormon missionary Parley Pratt, whose murder in western Arkansas in the spring of 1857 was another excuse given for the 9-11 massacre in Utah. Never mind that the wagon train left before Pratt was slain by a jealous husband whose wife had been acquired as Mrs. Pratt No. 12. That kind of lurid, polygamist family history might not play well in a family values campaign in 2008 and Romney might also have cause to hope the atrocity at Mountain Meadows remains in the dark.
But the brutal bloodbath has certainly not been a career‑ender for the Utah elite. Descendants of the Mormon raiders also include a former president of Brigham Young University. Retired NFL quarterback Steve Young is a relative of the man whose name is atop BYU ‑‑ the largest university in Utah. (If the prophet's name were tarnished in a massacre scandal, it would be problematic to rename the institution: Accessory After the Fact University.) As for Romney and his career opportunities, the Wall Street Journal ran a lengthy op‑ed interview with him last year under the headline: "Latter‑day President?" (WSJ, Dec. 31, 2005)
Would an LDS president today take orders from Temple Square, just like the brethren in 1857? A prominent Mormon's actions provide insight into the unquestioned authority of the church. When Harvard Business School dean Kim Clark got a call last year from President Hinckley to abandon his prestigious post and become the president of BYU‑Idaho, he jumped.
"You have to appreciate what this is like," Clark told the Associated Press. "We behold him (Hinckley) to be a prophet. Imagine yourself getting a call from Moses?" (AP, Aug. 20, 2005).
Paul Pugmire, a city official in the college town of Rexburg, Idaho, was quoted by AP in the same story as saying: "If Gordon Hinckley called and said, 'What I need you to do is go work on the grounds crew at BYU‑Idaho,' I would say, 'Yes'."
Dr. R. Henry Migliore, a Prewit family member from Oklahoma and a former business school dean himself, said:
"This is the culture that created Mountain Meadows."
Clearly no one puts a prophet on hold and some doubt anyone did in 1857 when a massacre was going down.
Meanwhile, Hinckley did make it to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in 2004 when he got the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bush. (Apparently a mass murder on the books was no impediment to receiving the nation’s highest award for civilians.)
The stakes are high, and if Romney could win the U.S. presidency, Mormons with connections to Mountain Meadows can run the table ‑‑ from the White House to the U.S. Cabinet, the U.S. Senate and the NFL Hall of Fame.
Being a $25 billion church means never having to say you’re sorry, particularly when there are powerful allies in Washington.
Lois Cunning, a Prewit family member from South Texas, says, "All the money that the church has cannot buy them a clean slate. They lost that when the first shot was fired."
Denial started early at the top. McMurtry writes that Brigham Young seemed shocked by the killing of women and children and is credited with this statement:
"I have made that matter a subject of prayer. I went right to God with it, and asked him to take the horrid vision from my sight, if it was a righteous thing that my people have done in killing those people at Mountain Meadows.
"God answered me, and at once the vision was removed. I had evidence from God that he had over‑ruled it all for good, and the action was a righteous one, and well intended."
Barbara Fina, an Oklahoma City‑area resident on scene for the terrorism in 1995, remarked on the prophet's long‑ago cosmic transmission. "I wonder if Brigham misread the caller ID?" she said.
In McMurtry's view "the Mormon God was certainly a most forgiving deity to so easily cleanse the record of all those women and children, hacked and bashed to death in that remote valley. Enough gentile blood soaked into the ground that day to atone for a hundred Parley Pratts." (McMurtry, p. 80).
And the prophet caught a huge break from history. In the late 1850s, the Civil War was looming and the nation would soon be torn apart as the horrors in a killing field in Utah faded into the background.
Meanwhile, the national media have been distracted since the Civil War, if not intimidated by a powerful church that plays hardball, but public opinion in America could be ignited in 2007 with the release of a PBS series on the Mormon faith and a new movie based on the massacre on the 150th anniversary. (If nothing else, the media love an anniversary).
Public television has announced the first‑ever "Frontline" and "American Experience" collaboration on the Mormons, including a segment on the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
Two 90‑minute episodes are slated in April, exploring the Mormon story "as told through interviews with leaders and members of the church, with leading writers and historians, and with supporters and critics of the Mormon faith," PBS said. (A film crew was at the 2004 meeting of the MMMF in Arkansas to get members' views on the Utah slaughter and LDS involvement.)
More problematical for Mormons might be the massacre movie "September Dawn" coming in late February or early March with Academy‑Award winner Jon Voight as a Mormon elder. Other stars are former Superman Dean Cain, with Lolita Davidovich on the wagon train and veteran British actor Terence Stamp as Brigham Young. It's been billed as a "Romeo and Juliet" saga, and one’s first thought is that for the movie to be historically accurate in the 1857 version, Romeo would have to shoot Juliet dead at the end of the movie and leave her stripped of her clothes for the wolves.
But director Christopher Cain has a much larger design and point to make.
“I came up with the Romeo and Juliet idea, to personalize the event,” he says.
In production notes on his research for the movie, Cain said he noted the 9-11 coincidence, and began to draw on “the many parallels and similarities between what is happening in today’s world of religious fanaticism with the attitudes that led to the grisly events of that September morning 150 years ago …
“You ask yourself, what makes a kid strap a bomb to himself, go to a public place and blow it up. And then you read Brigham Young’s speeches and what he’s saying and you see his ability to fire people up to do things. This flashes back to the days of Hitler and Jim Jones and the Kool-Aid party and you think that world of religious fanaticism can be a very scary thing,” Cain said.
“The story is so pertinent today because people look at recent events worldwide that are born of religious fanaticism as if it is something new. They should know that 150 years ago, it happened right here on American soil,” the director said.
It is possible 2007 will be the year the Mountain Meadows Massacre doesn't go straight to video. But LDS historians have not been shy in the past about sanitizing the record and using the powerful church's considerable muscle to keep the massacre under wraps. An "Investigating History" documentary on the atrocity was scheduled in December of 2004 on the History Channel under the direction of former CBS newsman Bill Kurtis. An insider involved in the program told me it had to be postponed for two months for extensive rewriting demanded by church apologists to put a better face on the program, which included a re‑enactment of the gruesome bloodbath.
To some viewers, the rewrite failed: Mormon raiders are shown shooting men point‑blank and chasing down and killing screaming women and children running for their lives through the meadows. And it is impossible to whitewash the scene where a raider drags a terrified 12-year-old girl out of a wagon and shoots her as she huddles on the ground. There aren't enough talking heads in all of Temple Square to spin that one.
But the 150th anniversary of the massacre could be the year of epiphany, as a church that considers itself a world spiritual leader comes out on the side of truth and justice no matter what the cost to the reputation of the great prophet Brigham Young ‑‑ or stands for stonewalling and breathtaking hypocrisy as it spends millions on Martin’s Cove, and belatedly installs a restroom at Mountain Meadows to placate critics of LDS stewardship.
Actually, the money stolen from the murdered Arkansans would be enough to finance the entire development of the Mountain Meadows Massacre site today.
For the $100,000 in gold coins stolen from the pioneers, a Ph.D. statistician in San Antonio and former Oral Roberts University student did a spreadsheet for me and put the value of the loot today, adjusted for inflation, in the neighborhood of $130 million. (He works for one of the most prominent companies in the United States and has asked to remain under the radar.)
After the massacre a southern Utah benefactor donated thousands in gold coins, according to Bagley, for the construction of the great Mormon temple in Salt Lake City ‑‑‑ the post card for church supremacy. (There's no proof that the donor's card should have credited murdered Arkansas pioneers, but reasonable people may presume that kind of money didn't come from under a mattress in impoverished southern Utah.)
If stolen money from a mass murder helped enrich the church, why would LDS leaders today want to keep proceeds that fit the literal definition of "blood money?" How about restitution, perhaps, in the form of scholarships at Arkansas colleges and universities in the names of the victims?
Otherwise, it appears that if the church does not condone mass murder, it can at least handle the reaping of the riches from the largest slaughter of U.S. citizens by U.S. citizens until Timothy McVeigh showed up in Oklahoma City to extract his revenge.
So today, based on the preponderance of evidence and the church's responsibility, at the very least, for the bloody and ruthless conduct of its own militiamen, I call on the LDS Church to purchase Mountain Meadows property from private landowners to turn over to the federal government, bankroll an archaeological excavation of the five‑mile valley, pay for DNA tests to identify victims left unburied for 150 years, construct a burial ground at least good enough for General Custer, and get out of the keeper of the flame business for people murdered by Mormons.
Mormons can also pay for a visitors center and museum at Mountain Meadows with the same level of generosity they've demonstrated taking care of their own at Martin's Cove, Wyoming.
Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Muslims and Lutherans have apologized for old sins. And the state of Illinois sent a delegation to Utah in recent years to apologize for the murder of Joseph Smith there in 1844. The LDS Church can do no less. Mormons must step up and atone for the great crime at Mountain Meadows and find a reconciliation that comes from humility and repentance, not a token toilet and photo ops.
As for statues, there are imposing ones of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young at Temple Square and a gold likeness of the angel Moroni stands atop a 100‑foot tower above the magnificent LDS Temple in San Antonio.
There are no statues anywhere of murdered Arkansas children like America Jane Dunlap, 7; Larkin Cameron, 8; Martha Fancher, 10; Mary Levina Baker, 7; James William Miller, 9, or of my family’s lost boys, John and William Prewit.
There is also no justice.
And so, President Hinckley, the book of the past remains open as the stain of mass murder cannot be removed from the pages of time. The LDS Church can only move out of the shadows of the ugliest event in church history by offering responsibility, restitution and remorse.
References
Bagley, Will. (2002). Blood of the Prophets. University of Oklahoma Press.
McMurtry, Larry. (2005). Oh What a Slaughter. Simon & Schuster.
Author’s Note
Mary Migliore is a lifelong journalist and relative of victims of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. It was only in recent years that she became familiar with the details of the nation's first 9-11 in 1857 in southwest Utah, when Mormon raiders killed 120 unarmed Arkansas pioneers on a wagon train, including the two young brothers of her great-grandmother, Lucinda Prewit Keeling.
Mary's grandmother, Flora Keeling Moore, rarely talked about the atrocity and it was considered a subject too upsetting to be mentioned in her northwest Arkansas home. Flora Moore, born in 1877, never knew her uncles, but as an old woman in the 1950s, she wept for the family’s lost boys and the justice that was never to be found in her lifetime.
Today, Mary and other relatives of the murdered Prewit brothers are determined to see that justice as the 150th anniversary of the slaughter approaches in 2007. Correspondence concerning this article may be sent to Mary Migliore at mmigliore@ev1.net.
For more information on this subject, go to http://www.1857massacre.com
NOTE: All correspondence to Dr. Dean or to Mary Migliori is made with the understanding that it may be used in part or in whole on this website or elsewhere.
Dr. Helland's Articles in English
- My Visit With Two Mormon Missionaries
- Islam, Mormonism and Freemasonry (See its Power Point presentation)
- My Personal Testimony
- When a Mormon Meets Jesus (See its Power Point Presentation)
- What Every Christian Should Know about Mormonism
- Book of Mormon Problems
Other items of interest
- Photos of Dean Helland's recent visit to Arkansas Descendants' Conference SLIDE SHOW
- Free on-line 11- minute Video of "Momma, The Book of Mormon and Me"
Guest Articles
- Counterfeit Currency-- by Eric Johnson