1856–57
The Mormon Reformationhinge
A territory-wide revival of confession, catechism and rebaptism swept Utah. Jedediah M. Grant of the First Presidency was its chief spokesman. Sermons of the period urged members to renew covenants and warned covenant-breakers in extreme terms, and the whole population, in most settlements, was rebaptized.
Why this is a hingeIt set the emotional register in which the southern settlements would read a wagon train's insults a year later.
Disputed Whether Reformation preaching was hyperbole meant to frighten members into repentance or licence that a few took literally.
21 September 1856
Brigham Young preaches on sins beyond forgiveness
In a Reformation sermon Young said there are sins for which men 'cannot receive forgiveness in this world, or that which is to come,' and that such a person, seeing his 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.' In February 1857 he pressed the point again, asking whether a listener would love a sinning brother 'well enough to shed their blood.' Jedediah M. Grant, at the October 1856 conference and after, argued that the people of God had a right 'to kill a sinner to save him.'
Disputed Critics read these sermons as doctrine with consequences; the Church and FAIR read them as rhetoric that was never institutionally enacted.
13 May 1857
Parley P. Pratt is killed in Arkansashinge
Apostle Parley P. Pratt was shot and stabbed near Van Buren, Crawford County, Arkansas, by Hector McLean, the estranged legal husband of Pratt's plural wife Eleanor McComb McLean. Pratt had been arrested on McLean's complaint, discharged by a federal commissioner, and pursued on the road. He lived about two hours. News reached Utah in late June, along with eastern newspaper reports celebrating the killing.
Why this is a hingeIt made 'Arkansas' a word with a wound in it for Utah Latter-day Saints three months before an Arkansas company came through.
Disputed How much weight Pratt's murder actually carried as a motive: Bagley calls vengeance for Pratt undoubted, the Church's account lists it as one of several contributing pressures.
1 August 1857
The territory goes on a war footing
With a federal army on the march to Utah, Daniel H. Wells, commander of the Nauvoo Legion, ordered every community readied for war: stockpile provisions, waste nothing, and sell no grain or goods to wagon trains bound for California. Brigham Young recalled missionaries and outlying colonists. The instruction not to sell to outsiders was general and was obeyed in most settlements.
from 4 August 1857
George A. Smith carries the instructions south
Apostle George A. Smith began a tour of the southern settlements carrying Young's orders. Reporting on the trip from the Salt Lake Bowery on 13 September, he said that at one settlement 'in spite of all I could do, I found myself preaching a military discourse,' and that at Harmony his discourse 'partook of the military more than the religious.' He also camped near the Arkansas company on his return.
Disputed Lee later said he believed Smith came to prepare the people to exterminate the Fancher train; Turley shows that this sentence appears in the later versions of Lee's confession and not in the earliest, and the Church denies any such errand.
early August 1857
The Baker–Fancher company reaches Salt Lake City
The Arkansas company, roughly 120 to 140 people led by John T. Baker and Alexander Fancher and travelling with a large cattle herd, camped near Salt Lake City. Advised to go north around the Great Salt Lake, they turned back at the Bear River and took the southern road instead, through Provo, Springville, Payson and Fillmore.
Disputed Reports of the company's behaviour on the road south are contradictory; the Church's account calls the alleged offences at worst taunts and small vandalism, and says nothing they did came close to justifying their deaths.
4 September 1857
Cedar City refuses to supply the company
The company reached Cedar City, the last settlement on the road where grain could be ground and supplies bought. The store had little to sell; Bishop Philip Klingensmith's mill charged an extreme price to grind their wheat. Angry words followed; the town marshal tried to arrest some of the men for intoxication and blasphemy and was faced down. The company left after about an hour.
Disputed Southern Utah settlers later remembered threats and a loud man on a grey horse; whether those memories were accurate or reconstructed after the fact cannot be settled.
5 September 1857
Dame refuses the militia: 'Words are but wind'
Haight sent an express to William Dame at Parowan asking permission to call out the militia against the emigrants. Dame convened a council, which judged the company probably harmless, and wrote back: 'Do not notice their threats. Words are but wind—they injure no one; but if they commit acts of violence against citizens inform me by express.' Dissatisfied, Haight sent for John D. Lee.
6 September 1857
The Cedar City council and the express to Salt Lake
Local leaders met at Cedar City. Laban Morrill, a member of the stake high council, objected to the plan. The meeting resolved to put the question to Brigham Young and dispatch a fast rider. By then Lee was already on his way to the Meadows with orders to gather Paiutes, and other couriers had been sent to the outlying settlements.
Disputed Critics ask why men who thought the question needed Brigham Young's answer attacked before the answer could come; the Church's account says the attack was already in motion and then had to be finished to hide it.
7 September 1857
The first attack and the siege beginhinge
At dawn the emigrants were fired on in their camp at Mountain Meadows. Several were killed and others wounded; the company circled and dug in, banking earth against the wagon wheels, and held out for days with no access to the spring. Attackers had painted themselves; survivors later said they saw the paint washed off in the creek. James Haslam left Cedar City for Salt Lake City between five and six that evening.
Why this is a hingeFrom this morning on, everyone who had participated had a reason to want no witnesses left alive.
Disputed How many of the first attackers were Paiutes and how many were disguised militiamen is disputed; Bagley and some survivors say there were no real Indians in the party.
9 September 1857
Dame authorizes an attack
Haight rode to Parowan. Dame and his council, still believing the emigrants were victims of an Indian attack, wanted to send the militia to protect them. In a private meeting Haight told Dame that settlers were involved and that the emigrants knew it. Dame set aside his council's decision and authorized the militia to act.
Disputed Dame's exact words and the sequence of his authorizations were fought over at the time and are still argued; letters between Young, Haight and Dame are missing from the record.
10 September 1857
Brigham Young writes back: 'let them go in peace'hinge
Haslam reached Salt Lake City and interrupted Young in a meeting with Jacob Hamblin. Young replied the same day to Haight: 'In regard to 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.' Haslam started back within the hour.
Why this is a hingeIt is the only surviving instruction from Salt Lake City about this specific company, and every camp's account of the massacre turns on how it is read.
Disputed Brooks noted the phrasing 'The Indians we expect will do as they please' was so typical and so enigmatic that it 'sounds as though he might not condemn an Indian massacre'; Bagley reads it as coded permission; FAIR notes the letter sits in its proper place in the letterbooks with no sign of forgery.
11 September 1857
The massacrehinge
William Bateman carried a white flag to the corral. Lee entered and offered terms: give up the weapons, load the wounded into wagons, and walk out under militia escort. The emigrants, out of water and low on ammunition, accepted. The youngest children and wounded went first in two wagons, then the women and children on foot, then the men, each walking beside an armed militiaman. At a prearranged signal the militiamen turned and fired. Roughly 120 people were killed. Seventeen children, all six or under, were spared.
Why this is a hingeThe white flag is what makes this a massacre rather than a battle, and it is the fact no camp disputes.
Disputed How much of the killing was done by militiamen and how much by Paiutes: Nephi Johnson maintained his fellow militiamen did most of it.
12 September 1857
The children at the Hamblin ranch
Klingensmith gathered seventeen small children and carried them to Jacob Hamblin's house at the north end of the valley, where Rachel Hamblin took them in; one one-year-old girl had been shot through the arm. Lee wanted to separate the wounded Dunlap girl from her sisters and Rachel persuaded him not to. The next morning Haight and Dame came to the ranch and, at the massacre site, quarrelled over who had ordered what.
13 September 1857
Haslam returns with the letter
Haslam reached Cedar City about eleven on Sunday morning, having ridden roughly 600 miles in six days. The letter he carried told the settlers not to meddle with the train. The massacre was two days old.
Disputed Whether the delay was simple distance or, as critics argue, a schedule the planners counted on.
15 September 1857
Martial law declared in Utah Territory
Governor Brigham Young issued a proclamation declaring martial law and forbidding armed forces to enter the territory, after Captain Stewart Van Vliet's visit to Salt Lake City. The Nauvoo Legion went on to burn federal supply trains and Forts Bridger and Supply. The Utah War produced no pitched battle between the armies.
autumn 1857
The Indian-blame story is put in place
Lee reported the massacre to Brigham Young as the work of Indians. Anson and Mary Call swore that Lee stayed at their house in early October 1857 and told them the massacre was perpetrated by Indians exclusively, and that he had told Young the same. George A. Smith's later account to T. B. H. Stenhouse describes Indians attacking, interpreters failing to intervene, and a relief party arriving 'too late to afford any other assistance than to rescue a few children.'
Disputed Lee's confession says Young instructed him to write a letter charging the massacre to the Indians so it could be used to deflect inquiry; Young's deposition and the Church's account deny any such direction.
May 1859
The army buries the dead and raises a cairn
Assistant army surgeon Charles Brewer reported burying remains scattered over the site: skulls, bones and hair unburied at the trench of the first attack, and further concentrations of remains in a ravine and on open ground north of the road. Brevet Major James Henry Carleton's party raised a stone cairn topped with a cedar cross reading 'Vengeance is mine and I will repay saith the Lord.'
Disputed BYU Studies argues that parts of Carleton's widely quoted report rest on shaky identifications and have been repeated uncritically ever since.
1859
Jacob Forney recovers the seventeen children
Acting on instructions from Washington, Forney collected sixteen surviving children in July 1858 and the seventeenth in April 1859. He reported that none of them had lived among Indians at all: they had been taken from the field the evening of the massacre, driven in a wagon to Hamblin's house by Lee and Daniel Tullis, and distributed the next day among Mormon families at Cedar City, Harmony and Santa Clara.
Disputed Witnesses disagreed sharply on how the children had been treated: Forney found them well cared for, James Lynch and Rebecca Dunlap described neglect.
late 1859
The children are returned to Arkansas
Congress appropriated funds to locate the survivors and carry them home. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs reported in November 1859 that fifteen of the seventeen had been brought back and restored to relatives in Arkansas, with the remaining two on their way. They reached home shortly before the Civil War began.
Disputed Efforts to recover the emigrants' looted property and to obtain compensation for the survivors never produced anything.
25 May 1861
Brigham Young at the monument
Travelling south, Young's party stopped at the cairn. Wilford Woodruff recorded it in his journal: the pile of stone about twelve feet high and beginning to tumble down, the wooden cross reading 'Vengence is mine and I will repay saith the Lord,' and then — 'President Young said it should be Vengence is mine and I have taken a little.'
Disputed Brooks's grandfather Dudley Leavitt said Young raised his arm and the monument was down in five minutes; Woodruff records no order, and FAIR notes a diarist saw a monument still standing in 1864.
8 October 1870
Lee, Haight and Wood are excommunicated
Thirteen years after the massacre, John D. Lee, Isaac Haight and George Wood were cut off from the Church for the murders. Lee travelled to St. George in December to ask Young why now — 'If it was wrong now, it certainly was wrong then.' Haight was rebaptized in 1874. The Church had already, in 1859, released Haight and other Cedar City leaders from their callings.
Disputed Whether the 1870 action was conscience or damage control; a later account has Haight excommunicated not for the killings but 'for not preventing John D. Lee from committing' them.
1874
A territorial grand jury indicts nine men
Nine men were indicted for the massacre. Most were eventually arrested. Only Lee was tried, convicted and executed; one indicted man turned state's evidence and others spent years as fugitives. William Dame's case was severed and postponed and never came to trial.
July–September 1875
First trial: hung jury
Lee was tried at Beaver before Judge Jacob Boreman, with Robert N. Baskin among the prosecutors. Philip Klingensmith testified for the prosecution. The jury deadlocked: the Latter-day Saint jurors and one other voted to acquit, three non-Mormons to convict. The prosecution had used the trial to attack Brigham Young.
Disputed FAIR reads the mistrial as prosecutorial incompetence and grandstanding; critics read it as Latter-day Saint jurors protecting the institution.
September 1876
Second trial: conviction
Retried under U.S. Attorney Sumner Howard, Lee was convicted of murder in the first degree. Howard wrote to Attorney General Alphonso Taft that the case of John D. Lee 'and that alone was tried,' that it became apparent early on there was no evidence connecting the chief authorities of the church with the massacre, and that documents produced by those authorities showed the orders issuing from Salt Lake City were 'directly and positively contrary to all shedding of blood.'
Disputed Critics read the second trial as a bargain: a Latter-day Saint jury and church cooperation in exchange for confining the case to Lee. Howard himself complained that his predecessors had tried the first case to fix the crime on the Church rather than to convict the prisoner.
23 March 1877
John D. Lee is executed at Mountain Meadowshinge
Lee was taken to the massacre site, seated on his coffin, and shot by a firing squad. James Fennemore photographed the execution and the body on the ground afterward. Lee had refused offers to save his life by charging Brigham Young with ordering the massacre. His confession, edited by his attorney William W. Bishop, was published later that year as Mormonism Unveiled and became a bestseller.
Why this is a hingeOne man was punished for a crime that between fifty and sixty men carried out and several more ordered.
Disputed Whether Lee was a scapegoat. Lee said he had been 'sacrificed in a cowardly and dastardly manner'; his own confession also shifted blame onto the Paiutes, and Turley documents that its most damning lines about George A. Smith and Brigham Young appear only in its later versions.
1950
Juanita Brooks publishes The Mountain Meadows Massacre
Brooks, a southern Utah writer descended from a participant, published the first documented account by a Latter-day Saint. She concluded that Brigham Young and George A. Smith did not order the massacre but preached the sermons and set the conditions that made it possible, and that Young was an accessory after the fact. She also recorded that other Mormon scholars had been counselled off the subject with enough force that they feared for their positions and membership.
20 April 1961
Lee's membership and blessings restored
The First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve met in joint session and authorized the reinstatement of John D. Lee to membership and former blessings; the ordinances were performed in the Salt Lake Temple on 8 and 9 May.
1990 and 1999
Two memorials at the site
In September 1990 descendants of victims and of perpetrators, with representatives of the Church and the Paiute Nation, dedicated a memorial modelled on the Carleton cairn; Gordon B. Hinckley spoke of a bridge built across a chasm of bitterness. On 11 September 1999 Hinckley dedicated a grave-site memorial on Church-owned land: 'All who knew firsthand about what occurred here are long since gone. Let the book of the past be closed. Let peace come into our hearts.'
Disputed A rival memorial in Carrollton, Arkansas carries a plaque objecting that the Church owns the grave in Utah and controls the interpretation of the massacre.
11 September 2007
The sesquicentennial statementhinge
At the site, Henry B. Eyring read a statement prepared by Marlin K. Jensen and authorized by the First Presidency: 'What was done here long ago by members of our Church represents a terrible and inexcusable departure from Christian teaching and conduct... We express profound regret for the massacre carried out in this valley 150 years ago today and for the undue and untold suffering experienced by the victims then and by their relatives to the present time. A separate expression of regret is owed to the Paiute people who have unjustly borne for too long the principal blame for what occurred during the massacre.'
Why this is a hingeIt is the first time the institution publicly located the blame with its own local leaders and members rather than with Indians.
Disputed The statement does not use the word 'apology' or ask forgiveness; Turley told the Salt Lake Tribune it was meant as one, and press accounts described it as a long-awaited apology.
2008–2011
Documents, a book, and a landmark
Walker, Turley and Leonard published Massacre at Mountain Meadows with Oxford in 2008, written with what the authors describe as unrestricted access to Church archives including the First Presidency's. Turley and Walker published the Andrew Jenson and David H. Morris document collections in BYU Studies 47:3 and then as a volume in 2009; a two-volume edition of the massacre's legal papers followed in 2017. In 2011 the Secretary of the Interior designated Mountain Meadows a National Historic Landmark, an outcome three descendant organizations and the Church had agreed to support.
Disputed Reviewers split on whether the 2008 volume is a decisive scholarly account or one that drives too carefully toward its thesis; Bagley's camp holds that the surviving record is a purged record and the book's conclusions rest on it.
