A territory preparing to be attacked
In the winter of 1856 and through 1857 the Latter-day Saint settlements of Utah passed through what they called the Reformation: a revival built on confession, catechism and rebaptism, in which whole communities went into the water again to renew their covenants. Lucy Parry, fourteen years old in Cedar City, remembered being catechized and then baptized in February with chunks of ice running in the mill race, and called them “very inthuseastick times.” Patty Sessions, rebaptized the same season, wrote that she “never felt so weel in my life.”1
The preaching that drove it was severe. In September 1856 Brigham Young told a congregation that there are sins for which men cannot receive forgiveness in this world or the next, and that a man who saw his true condition “would be perfectly willing to have their blood spilt upon the ground, that the smoke thereof might ascend to heaven as an offering for their sins.”2 In February 1857 he asked whether his hearers would love a sinning brother or sister well enough to shed their blood. Jedediah M. Grant, the Reformation’s chief voice, put it as a proposition about authority: if the people of God have the right to baptize a sinner to save him, “it is also their right to kill a sinner to save him, when he commits those crimes that can only be atoned for by shedding his blood.”3
What that language meant is one of the oldest arguments in Mormon history. The Church’s own essay quotes the historian Paul Peterson’s judgment that the sermons were hyperbole designed to frighten members into repentance and to hasten the departure of those who would not conform. Critics from the Tanners to Bagley read them as doctrine with consequences, and note that Young himself said he had never preached a sermon the people could not call scripture.4 Both readings sit in the same volumes of the Journal of Discourses; neither can be got rid of by quoting the other.
An army on the road and a murder in Arkansas
In May 1857 President Buchanan ordered troops to Utah to install a new governor. News reached the Saints on 24 July at a celebration in Big Cottonwood Canyon. Brigham Young, harrowed by the memory of Missouri and Illinois, declared that before he would suffer what he had suffered before there would not be “one building, nor one foot of lumber, nor a stick, nor a tree, nor a particle of grass and hay that will burn left in reach of our enemies.” On 1 August Daniel H. Wells put every settlement on a war footing and forbade the sale of grain and goods to passing wagon trains. Apostle George A. Smith carried the instructions south; reporting the trip in September he acknowledged that in spite of himself he had preached a military discourse, and that at Harmony his sermon “partook of the military more than the religious.”5
Into that summer came a second piece of news. On 13 May, near Van Buren, Arkansas, Hector McLean had shot and stabbed the apostle Parley P. Pratt, the estranged legal husband of Pratt’s plural wife Eleanor. Pratt had been arrested on McLean’s complaint and released by a federal commissioner who offered him a knife and a pistol; Pratt declined them and rode away, and McLean tracked him down. He lived about two hours.6 The news reached Utah in late June, together with eastern newspaper reports celebrating the crime.
The Baker–Fancher company was not connected to any of this. It was a prosperous Arkansas train of roughly 120 to 140 people with a large cattle herd, led by John T. Baker and Alexander Fancher, that reached Salt Lake City in early August and, advised to go north, turned back at the Bear River and took the southern road instead.7
Cedar City
The southern route had been open grazing when Fancher last used it; by 1857 the settlements had claimed the ground, and a company that could not buy or trade was in real difficulty with the desert ahead.8
At Cedar City on 4 September the emigrants found a store with little to sell and Bishop Philip Klingensmith’s mill charging a whole cow to grind a few dozen bushels of wheat. Words followed; the town marshal tried to arrest some of the men for intoxication and blasphemy and was dared to try, and the company left after about an hour.9 What exactly was said is unrecoverable. Half a dozen settlers, interviewed by Andrew Jenson thirty-five years later, remembered threats and a loud man on a grey horse; Mary S. Campbell’s field notes say only that the company threatened the people of Cedar, while the written-up report expanded that into profanity and bad language “something terrible.”
The Walker–Turley–Leonard volume, which is less indulgent toward the emigrants than Bagley, still concludes that most of what they did was taunting words or at worst small vandalism, and that they did nothing warranting the death penalty. The Church’s own account puts it more bluntly: nothing they purportedly did or said, even if all of it were true, came close to justifying their deaths. The old story that they poisoned a spring and an ox carcass near Fillmore has been set aside — the cattle were dying of a disease that ran along the overland trails, and Indian deaths from eating the meat are now attributed to anthrax rather than arsenic — though the rumour was believed at the time and did its work.10
Haight sent an express to William Dame at Parowan asking leave to call out the militia. Dame’s council judged the company harmless and Dame wrote back: “Do not notice their threats. Words are but wind—they injure no one.”11 Haight then sent for John D. Lee.
The council, the rider, and the attack
The Cedar City leaders met on 6 September. Laban Morrill of the stake high council objected to what was proposed. The meeting resolved to put the question to Brigham Young and send a fast rider. But Lee was already gone. Nephi Johnson, riding with Haight to an Indian camp that same week, was told by Haight himself that Lee had come up from Harmony the day before and had proposed gathering the Indians to destroy the train; Lee’s own later account describes meeting a band under Moquetas and Big Bill on the road, painted for battle, who said they had had a big talk with Haight, Higbee and Klingensmith and had orders to follow the emigrants and kill them all.12
At dawn on 7 September the camp at Mountain Meadows was fired on. Nancy Huff, four years old, remembered waking to gunfire, the men digging a ditch around the camp, the women and children in the ditch, and the fighting going on at intervals for days. Martha Elizabeth Baker, who lived to be interviewed in 1938, said she distinctly remembered the group disguised as Indians: “There was not a real Indian in the group, for they went to the creek and washed the paint from their faces.”13 James Haslam left Cedar City that evening between five and six with Haight’s dispatch.14
On 9 September Haight rode to Parowan. Dame’s council still believed the emigrants were victims of an Indian attack and wanted to send the militia to protect them. In private, Haight told Dame that settlers were involved and that the emigrants knew it, and that the only remaining option was to kill anyone old enough to testify. Dame set his council’s decision aside.15
The letter
Haslam reached Salt Lake City on 10 September and interrupted Brigham Young in a meeting with Jacob Hamblin. Young wrote back the same day. The letter is short, and it is the only surviving instruction from Salt Lake City about this particular company:
“In regard to the emigration trains passing through our settlements, we must not interfere with them until they are first notified to keep away. You must not meddle with them. The Indians we expect will do as they please but you should try and preserve good feelings with them. There are no other trains going south that I know of. If those that are there will leave, let them go in peace.”16
Haslam started back within the hour and reached Cedar City about eleven on Sunday morning, 13 September. He had ridden roughly 600 miles in six days, and he was two days late.17 Every camp reads this letter differently, and each reading is a whole account of the massacre. The Church reads it as an unambiguous instruction that did not arrive in time; FAIR adds that the letter sits where it should in the letterbooks and shows no sign of being composed after the fact. Brooks, who did not think Young ordered the massacre, still found the phrasing so characteristic and so evasive that it “sounds as though he might not condemn an Indian massacre” — the clause “The Indians we expect will do as they please” recurs almost as a formula in Young’s correspondence and conversation that same week.18 Bagley’s reading is harder: whatever the letter’s intent, it carried a clear message that whatever happened could be laid to the Paiutes, and the men in the south did not wait for it because they already had their orders.
11 September
On the morning of the fifth day William Bateman carried a white flag toward the corral. Lee entered and offered terms: leave the possessions, give up the weapons, load the wounded into wagons, and walk out under militia escort past the hostile Indians to safety at Cedar City. The emigrants had been pinned down for days with little water and their wounded were dying. They debated and accepted.19
The wagons went first with the smallest children and the wounded, then the women and children on foot, then the men and older boys in single file, each with an armed militiaman walking beside him. About a mile out a prearranged signal was given and each militiaman turned and shot the person next to him, while others rushed from cover at the women and children. The men with the front wagons murdered the wounded. It took, by one apologetic reckoning, three to five minutes. Roughly 120 people were killed. Seventeen children, all six or under and judged too young to tell what they had seen, were spared.20
Lee’s confession describes the wagons stopping at the sound of the first volley and Samuel McMurdy raising his rifle over the wounded and saying, “O Lord, my God, receive their spirits, it is for thy Kingdom that I do this.”21 Whether the killing was mostly Paiute or mostly militia was argued for the rest of the century by the men who were there. Nephi Johnson, who gave the word to fire at the final killing, said white men did most of it; Francis M. Lyman recorded two irreconcilable participant accounts in the same week of 1895.
Blaming the Indians
Orders were given on the field to keep it secret and to lay it to the Indians, and by Lee’s account the penalty for telling was death. The story held for years. In early October 1857 Lee stayed the night with Anson and Mary Call at Bountiful and told them the massacre had been perpetrated by Indians exclusively and that no white man took part — and that he had told Brigham Young the same thing in the same words. George A. Smith’s account for T. B. H. Stenhouse has interpreters unable to intervene and a relief party arriving “too late to afford any other assistance than to rescue a few children that had been preserved by the Indians in accordance with their usual custom for the purpose of trade or slavery.”22
It was federal officers who broke it. Jacob Forney, ordered to recover the children, began — by his own admission — hoping to exonerate all white men and saddle the guilt on the Indians, and could not. He established that none of the seventeen had lived among Indians at all: they had been carried from the field the same evening in a wagon driven by Lee and Daniel Tullis to Jacob Hamblin’s house, and distributed the next day among Mormon families at Cedar City, Harmony and Santa Clara.23 In May 1859 an army surgeon buried what was left of the dead, finding skulls, bones and matted hair scattered unburied over a mile and a half of ground, and Carleton’s men raised a cairn with a cross reading “Vengeance is mine and I will repay saith the Lord.”
In May 1861 Brigham Young came past it. Wilford Woodruff wrote in his journal that the pile of stone was about twelve feet high and beginning to tumble down, that the cross bore those words, and that “President Young said it should be Vengence is mine and I have taken a little.” Whether he then ordered the cairn pulled down is disputed: Brooks’s grandfather said Young raised his arm to the square and in five minutes there was not one stone left on another; Woodruff records no order at all, and a diarist saw a monument standing there three years later.24
One man punished
In 1859 the Church released Haight and other Cedar City leaders from their callings. In October 1870 Lee, Haight and George Wood were excommunicated; Lee went to St. George in December to ask why now, thirteen years on — “If it was wrong now, it certainly was wrong then.” A territorial grand jury indicted nine men in 1874. Most were eventually arrested, one turned state’s evidence, Dame’s case was severed and never tried, and others spent years running.25
Lee’s first trial, at Beaver in 1875 before Judge Jacob Boreman with Robert N. Baskin prosecuting, ended in a hung jury: the Latter-day Saint jurors and one other for acquittal, three non-Mormons for conviction. Briggs argues that this was in every sense a political trial, a pawn in the struggle between Mormons and Liberals over Utah’s future, and that both sides read it through their own interests.26 The second trial, in September 1876 under U.S. Attorney Sumner Howard, convicted Lee of murder in the first degree. Howard wrote to the Attorney General that this time “the case of John D. Lee, and that alone was tried”; that it became apparent early there was no evidence connecting the chief authorities of the church with the massacre; and that those authorities had produced documents showing the orders issuing from Salt Lake City were “directly and positively contrary to all shedding of blood.” He also complained that his predecessors had publicly boasted the first trial was not meant to convict the prisoner but to fix the crime on the Church.27
Lee was taken to the Meadows on 23 March 1877, seated on his coffin, and shot; James Fennemore photographed the execution and the body afterward.28 He had refused offers of his life in exchange for charging Brigham Young. To a reporter beforehand he said he had studied for thirty years to make Brigham Young’s will his pleasure, that he had been “sacrificed in a cowardly and dastardly manner,” and that he still believed the gospel as Joseph Smith had taught it. His confession, edited by his attorney and published that year as Mormonism Unveiled, was a bestseller — and is unreliable in a specific, documented way: its most quotable indictments of George A. Smith and Brigham Young are absent from earlier versions of the same statement and appear only in the book, which one contemporary editor called “a Little Lee and a Little Lawyer.” In 1961 the First Presidency and Twelve restored Lee’s membership and blessings.29
What the institution has said since
For most of a century the massacre was, in Levi Peterson’s phrase, easy for Latter-day Saints to recognize as a tragedy for those slaughtered and hard to accept as a Mormon tragedy — imputed to renegades from whom the church could be dissociated. Juanita Brooks made that untenable in 1950 and paid for it in her own community; she also recorded that other Mormon scholars had been counselled off the subject with enough vigour that they believed continuing would cost them their positions and their membership.30
The turn came in stages. Descendants of victims and of perpetrators began meeting in the 1980s and dedicated a memorial together in 1990, where Rex E. Lee, a descendant of John D. Lee and president of BYU, joined hands with descendants of the Arkansas emigrants and of the militia. Hinckley dedicated a grave-site memorial on 11 September 1999: “Let the book of the past be closed. Let peace come into our hearts.”31 In 2002 Richard Turley announced from a Mormon History Association podium that he, Ronald Walker and Glen Leonard were writing a book with full access to the Church’s archives, and that they would make the new sources public. On the 150th anniversary Henry B. Eyring read the First Presidency’s statement at the site, calling the massacre a terrible and inexcusable departure from Christian teaching and conduct, expressing profound regret, and adding a separate expression of regret to the Paiute people who had unjustly borne the principal blame for too long.32
The statement does not contain the word apology and does not ask forgiveness. Turley told the Salt Lake Tribune it was meant as one; the newspapers reported it as one; Sunstone noted precisely what it omitted.33 The book followed in 2008, the Jenson and Morris documents in BYU Studies and then in a volume of their own, the legal papers in 2017, and a sequel on the aftermath in 2023; in 2011 the Secretary of the Interior designated the site a National Historic Landmark, with the Church and three descendant organizations supporting it. Forest Cuch of the Utah Division of Indian Affairs, on the eve of the anniversary, told the descendants what still had not been done: someone should write the book about the cover-up.34