Massacre at Mountain Meadows | 
 enlarge | Authors: Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley, Glen M. Leonard
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
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Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 5514
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 448
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.4
ISBN: 0195160347
Dewey Decimal Number: 979.202
EAN: 9780195160345
ASIN: 0195160347
Publication Date: August 19, 2008
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Product Description
On September 11, 1857, a band of Mormon militia, under a flag of truce, lured unarmed members of a party of emigrants from their fortified encampment and, with their Paiute allies, killed them. More than 120 men, women, and children perished in the slaughter.
Massacre at Mountain Meadows offers the most thoroughly researched account of the massacre ever written. Drawn from documents previously not available to scholars and a careful re-reading of traditional sources, this gripping narrative offers fascinating new insight into why Mormons settlers in isolated southern Utah deceived the emigrant party with a promise of safety and then killed the adults and all but seventeen of the youngest children. The book sheds light on factors contributing to the tragic event, including the war hysteria that overcame the Mormons after President James Buchanan dispatched federal troops to Utah Territory to put down a supposed rebellion, the suspicion and conflicts that polarized the perpetrators and victims, and the reminders of attacks on Mormons in earlier settlements in Missouri and Illinois. It also analyzes the influence of Brigham Young's rhetoric and military strategy during the infamous "Utah War" and the role of local Mormon militia leaders in enticing Paiute Indians to join in the attack. Throughout the book, the authors paint finely drawn portraits of the key players in the drama, their backgrounds, personalities, and roles in the unfolding story of misunderstanding, misinformation, indecision, and personal vendettas.
The Mountain Meadows Massacre stands as one of the darkest events in Mormon history. Neither a whitewash nor an expose, Massacre at Mountain Meadows provides the clearest and most accurate account of a key event in American religious history.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 20 more reviews...
 It's done. Anything else on the subject can be, at most, an appendix to this book. November 26, 2008
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
It's easy to read and it's hard to read. But most of all, it's worth the read.
By nature, I'm not very interested in history. I'm a Mormon, a technologist, and the great-great-great grandson of John D. Lee. I was also privileged to contribute in some tiny measure to the production of this book.
I just finished reading the final result this morning, and I must say that I am in awe at the paragon of dedication, effort and frank truthfulness that the book epitomizes. You want sources and details? A massive swath of endnotes and appendices takes up almost half of the book!
Yet without becoming a tome or even a volume, it gives enough background to set the stage. You learn who these people were and the world that they lived in. You see how the cascade of events and seemingly small choices early on culminated in a disaster that still echoes loudly around the world. Finally, in graphic detail, you must bear mute witness to the grisly deaths of more than a hundred souls.
I don't cry easily, but I am not ashamed of my tears as I read and pondered. If humanity has any hope of learning from its mistakes, Massacre at Mountain Meadows has a lesson for us.
An engaging and compelling history of a terrible crime and tragedy November 25, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
If you want to understand what happened on those awful days at Mountain Meadows in September 1857, I recommend this book above all others. Juanita Brooks' books are still very good and she should always be admired for the work she did in telling this story and this event and providing a biography of John D. Lee. But this book presents information she did not have access to and provides many helpful illustrations, maps, photos, and notes that help us as readers. The authors do not debate other versions of this event and if you want to believe that Brigham Young ordered this slaughter, you will not like the evidence presented here. However, neither John D. Lee, any of the contemporary participants, Juanita Brooks, or these authors implicates Brigham Young. The authors do show the extraordinary pressure put on John D. Lee by the non-Mormon judicial system that tried and executed him to point the finger at Young, but he did not do so.
What I think is especially helpful about this book is the way the authors never once try to make excuses for the horrors committed against the immigrants while also providing a context for this nightmare. Not to make excuses or to spread blame, but to show the full chain of events. We all know that horrible events such as plane crashes are rarely the result of one big failure, but the sum of many small things going wrong. If any one of them is caught and dealt with properly, the tragedy is averted. Nothing can excuse the massacre of the emigrants. Nothing can make it understandable in any rational way. But the context helps us see the chain of events that contributed to, used as an excuse, and exploited in order to justify the initial attack.
I was fascinated by the way the authors handled the charge of the emigrants poisoning a dead ox and thereby killing local people and Indians. If it was anthrax, as the authors posit, it explains a lot and since it was not understood at the time it would appear to be the work of the emigrants and seem to "justify" some kind of retribution or extraction of payment. However, the Indians did not cause the attack. They were also exploited and manipulated by the Cedar City leaders, especially Lee. Then there was the murder of several members of the party who were seeking assistance from nearby folks to save their party from the Indian attack. Once those murders occurred, the final slaughter was an attempt to cover up the original attack and murders. Reading this story is like being trapped in a nightmare you want to wake up from, but can't.
While we can't undo this tragic horror, we can learn from it. Here is an example of people committing wrongs and then seeking to cover them up with more crime. Here are events that burden us more than a century and a half after they happened. The final butchery took only a few minutes and yet will never end. I also appreciate the way the authors undermine the pride of those who say they did not participate in the crimes; however, the authors note, which of them stood up to Dame, Haight, Lee, and others in any attempt to stop the killing? That is our requirement. We must stand up to wrong and not merely stand apart and feel innocent.
This book covers the context and the crime, but not much of the aftermath (except for what happened to the children not murdered and the execution of Lee at the Meadows in 1877) , which the authors say should be its own book. I hope they write that book. While this book is 430 page long, the actual telling of the story is only 231 pages. The rest contains appendices listing all the emigrants, their property (that the killers coveted), the names of those involved in the murders, the Indians involved, sources, 127 pages of footnotes (very helpful reading, by the way), and an index.
Frankly, I wept more than a few times in working my way through this book. I do not see how anyone could read this history without becoming deeply engaged as these terrible events unfold.
Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI
The Best and Most Accurate Rendition of This Very Tragic Event!!!! November 9, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
In this new, more complete and accurate telling of a most misunderstood time in Mormon History, we get to get inside the researchers/authors heads to understand how this most horrific tragedy occurred and why. The authors take us back to the early days of The Church, when we were persecuted for our beliefs and driven from their homes, women even raped. In the mid 19th Century, times were rough on the trail for the Mormons, having to contend with Indians, the elements, disease, the Military and all they could think of was getting to the Salt Lake Valley. This horrible tragedy took the lives of 120 men, women and children as they were gunned down execution style. For the Mormon people, they were afraid for their lives when emigrants came through their setlements on their way to California. These emigrants would taunt and threaten the Mormons and were worried about the soldiers coming to stir up things. It wasn't until I was reading the names of the Militiamen, that I found that two of my ancestors were involved. Luckily, they were not involved in any of the murders. This is the third book on this subject and feel this current rendition is the best by far, as it doesn't try to sugarcoat what happened or point fingers. If you haven't heard of this tragedy, I would recommend you read this book. It's a riveting story, one you couldn't imagine happening. It's interesting that the date this occured was 9/11, but in 1857.
Better Than I Anticipated October 21, 2008
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
To be honest, I read this book anticipating a good deal of "spin", believing the church would look for ways to convincingly distance themselves from any responsibility for the massacre at Mountain Meadows. It was vastly better than I expected.
Some of the reviews have already covered adequately the criticisms, namely that it appears the authors--although exhaustive in their research--were still motivated to demonstrate a lack of complicity on the part of Brigham Young et al. The authors do not appologize (much) for the actions of either the men who perpetrated the crime, or the local leaders (most notably Haight) who ordered it, nor do they jump on the "it was just John D. Lee" bandwagon. They couch the event in terms of war-time hysteria, and good people who got caught up in a bad situation.
I agree with all of that, and I am HARDLY a church apologist.
However, as has been noted, the authors leave the reader with the clear impression that Brigham Young is ONLY responsible to the degree to which he was engaged in excitable rhetoric in the face of the US military marching on Utah. They reproduce the letter he sent by courier to the local leaders in Cedar City that demonstrates that Young advised them to let the emigrants go in peace--which unfortunately arrived too late. In the end, I have never personally believed that evidence would ever be produced that would tie Young directly to an order to massacre the emmigrants and take control of their wealth--he was smarter than that, and could see the long-term consequences of such a decision.
But that's not enough. The culture of any institution is created first at the highest levels of the organization, and it flows down from there. Young's Utah was a direct reflection of Young himself, and the responsibility for what happened in Utah is his, in the same manner that what happens in the national economy, the military, education, and so on are ultimately the responsibility of the President. Not that he orders (necessarily) illeagal or unethical acts on the part of lower level personnel, but that culture is established at the top, and the responsibility for what happens in that culture is borne by those who occupy that top seat.
In that way, the buck stops with Brigham Young, regardless of what he may or may not have ordered.
And the authors of this book are reluctant to accept it. There are hints here and there, but at the end of the day, they are more than happy to lay the blame at the feet of Dame, Haight, Higbee, Klingensmith and Lee. Personally, I don't think that's necessary. History is by its very nature a colorful thing, and Brigham Young was one of the American West's most colorful figures. The modern church is quite comfortable distancing itself from Young's theory that God is Adam, or his extreme racist policies, his teachings on blood atonement, or most famously, his adoration of the doctrine of polygamy, all of which were taught from the pulpit as points of doctrine. Why, then, are they so reluctant to consider the possibility that as a governmental leader, he may have been responsible for establishing the culture and context within which the West's most infamous crime could occur?
ONLY when the church steps up to the plate and acknowledges that role of Brigham Young will this issue ever be laid to rest.
That said, the book most certainly helps the reader gain a sense for the hysteria that was created in Southern Utah at the time, and they do a good job of entertaining the likelihood that many of the stories that have often been told justifying the Saint's anger toward the emigrants (poisoning of Corn Creek, claiming to have been at Carthage when Smith was murdered, threatening talk about Young, snapping the heads off chickens, harassing the Mormon women...) were likely a gross exageration or complete fabrication by men who would understandably like to distance themselves from the crime they committed. The authors make no appologies for any of the participants in the crime, and in fact, provide a complete list of all the Mormon men who were involved.
Furthermore, they do make an effort to humanize the emigrants, and try to establish who they were, the conditions under which they traveled, a glimpse at the conditions while they were under seige, and to help the reader appreciate that these were families with hopes and dreams of a good life in California, traveling with their wives and little children. In so doing, they help the reader appreciate the magnitude of the crime, and the last few chapters are hard to read.
No book is likely to ever satisfy us all on the topic of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, but among the services the authors of this particular book have rendered is a brutally honest account that Mormons can read without fear that it is "anti-Mormon" material, and yet force them to face a dark chapter in their history. I would recommend this book to anyone, but to really understand the complexity of the crime, you'll have to read MORE than this book.
 A little short on some background facts October 7, 2008
4 out of 9 found this review helpful
First of all, for the record, I am LDS, but the fact of being LDS does not necessarily makes me an apologist for this work of research, from which I expected much more, being a work that tries to clarify what really happened in Mountain Meadows and specially considering the fact that the authors had so much access, at least, as they state, to Church archives and other records.
This book is well researched, very well written, at the surface it appears to take an unbiased approach to the Mountain Meadows events, but when it comes to describe the responsability of the Church in the context that lead to this massacre, the authors are quite shallow.
In the begining of the book, the authors spend some time describing the persecutions suffered by the early
Latter-Day Saints, how they were driven out of NY, Pensilvannia, Missouri, Illinois, etc. He describes how the prophet Joseph Smith was covered in tar and feathered, and later killed in Carthage, Ill, etc. The authors use a discourse that seems to show the prophet Joseph Smith as an innocent marthyr, but is that completely true? Why was the prophet feathered? Why was he killed? The authors do not provide this detail and that makes them quite biased. they fail to describe that the Prophet was covered in tar and feathers because of his earlier rants on Poligamy, and although they explain that what took the prophet to jail in Carthage and ultimately to his death (I would not call it martyrdom because for that, he would need to be completely innocent and free of any responsability), was related to the shutdown and destruction of a newspaper in Nauvoo, what the authors fail to explain is that Joseph Smith did so because an article published in the previous issue of that newspaper denounced his Poligamyst practices, which apparently, didn't seat well with Joseph Smith.
This is not a book about the persecutions of the Saints, but these facts are quite important to understand the historical context of all this persecutions, killings, and hatred towards Latter-Day Saints.
Other authors do a better job in describing this background in an unbiased manner. In my personal opinion, the book looses it's credibility due to this fact.
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