Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows

by Will Bagley

A friend gave me this for Christmas last year and it's taken me 11 months now to get just over half way (I read at my own pace...). For those who don't know the story, in September, 1857 a group of immigrants from Arkansas, bound for California, were set upon and killed by Mormons outside Cedar City (in Southern Utah). Only a few children were spared. The incident is a tragic skeleton in the LDS closet about which few outside of the Western-US-Historians crowd know anything at all. The History Channel has done a good special on it and John Krakauer discusses it in his book "Under the Banner of Heaven," so the story has somewhat entered the mainstream but it is still mostly a niche.

During my undergraduate years at BYU I worked for a professor whose focus was LDS history from 1844 through 1890 (or so). He had me doing very intersting research on this period and it included some work on the Massacre. Because of him my interest in this period has never quite died, all these years later.

The subtitle is a reference to the most contested point of the story: how much did Brigham Young know and when did he know it. Ever since the event, Mormons have worked very hard to argue that it was the action of a few paranoid Mormons and Indians and had no ties with the official, inspired, leadership in Salt Lake City. Initially the LDS church tried to say that it was the action of Indians alone. But no one believed that except the fantasy people in the wishful thinking of the Mormons who said it. Eventually there was a trial and John D. Lee, a local LDS leader in Cedar City, was found guilty and executed for the murders. The U.S. Government tried to prove that the orders came from much higher, but the LDS members closed ranks and only Lee's testimony implicated others. 

I'm torn in my thoughts on Mr. Bagley's book. I don't think he quite worked out who his audience is and the book suffers for it. He doesn't tell the story in a way that the non-specialist can easily follow. Sometimes people are introduced in a haphazard way and then disappear without explanation. Others are given short coda's ("so-and-so went on to do such-and-such") that don't always seem relevant. Facts are well footnoted, but it is only in the footnote that you can find out how well he's using his evidence (and sometimes that's not very well). 

The Mormon apologist crowd gave the book their usual bashing. Attacking his use of evidence, nit-picking over trivialities in an effort to suggest that if he got the color of the scarf one guy was wearing that day wrong, then he must have gotten everything wrong. They offer their typically useless, self-serving, opinions about Mr. Bagley and his book and then go back to patting themselves on the back. 

On the upside, the book is well researched and if you can get through the disjointed narrative, he offers a treasure-trove of colorful information about these long-dead people and what they must have been like. He tries to get inside the head of the murderers, examine how they could have perceived their actions as justified. He discusses dissent among the killers and the guilt that many of them felt after the fact. More chilling is the lack of any guilty conscience evident in many of the murderers.

Particularly compelling is his description of the months leading up to the Massacre. When US troops were marching to Utah to put down an over-hyped "rebellion" of the Territory. While the army marched, the LDS leaders went on their usual preaching circuits to build morale. Mr. Bagley points out a central issue in LDS history: the skilled use of double-meanings. This is a well documented practice where leaders would say one thing but to the inner circle, the alternate meaning was quite another matter. As Mr. Bagely puts it:

If [LDS Apostle George Albert] Smith gave orders to kill the emigrants, they may have been no more explicit than to "use them up" or "give them a good drubbing." Mormon leaders often spoke in code words whose meaning was clear only to insiders. One of Young's favorite phrases, "A word to the wise is sufficient," meant, "Don't make me spell it out." This ambiguity had many advantages: it sheltered Mormon leaders from accountability and shifted responsibility from the top leaders to local authorities. But orders couched in such enigmatic terms were easily misinterpreted, a serous problem given the volatile atmosphere and the slow pace of communications in Utah Territory. (p. 87)

Mr. Bagely doesn't replace Juanita Brooks' seminal work on the massacre ("Mountain Meadows Massacre") but he's a good addition to it. It's not an easy read and I can't recommend it for everyone. But if you want a very human tale of group-delusions and peer-pressure, it's worth the effort.