Official LDSThe Church's own account
The Church now says plainly that the massacre was planned and carried out by Latter-day Saints. Its Gospel Topics essay names Isaac C. Haight, a stake president and militia leader, as the man who sent John D. Lee to lead an attack, and says the militiamen lured the emigrants out under a false flag of truce and then tried to cover the crime by blaming the Paiutes. It holds that while intemperate preaching by Brigham Young, George A. Smith and others contributed to a climate of hostility, President Young did not order the massacre, and that his express reply telling the settlers not to meddle with the train arrived two days too late. The 2007 statement read by Henry B. Eyring called the massacre 'a terrible and inexcusable departure from Christian teaching and conduct,' expressed 'profound regret,' and offered a separate expression of regret to the Paiute people. The Church also stresses that nothing the emigrants are alleged to have said or done came close to justifying their deaths, and that most of the perpetrators lived otherwise unviolent lives.
Faithful / apologeticThe apologetic defence
FAIR frames the massacre as a locally planned and locally executed crime, not an action directed from church headquarters. It stresses that Brigham Young's 10 September letter sits in its proper place and chronology in his letterbooks with no sign of forgery, that its instruction was unambiguous — 'You must not meddle with them' — and that the 300-mile distance, not any design, made it arrive late. On the trials, FAIR argues that the 1875 mistrial resulted from prosecutorial 'utter neglect of the business' rather than church obstruction, that no witness there tied Lee to a criminal act, and that at the second trial U.S. Attorney Sumner Howard concluded there was no evidence connecting church authorities to the crime. It also offers cultural explanation without excuse — a southern 'culture of honour,' war hysteria, obedience to military and ecclesiastical superiors — while insisting that nothing excuses what was done.
Neutral academicThe historians
Juanita Brooks set the terms in 1950: leaders did not specifically order the massacre but preached sermons and set up social conditions that made it possible, and Brigham Young was an accessory after the fact — knowing what had happened, how and why, and understanding that the killers had acted out of loyalty to him and his cause. She also noted that Young's letter to Haight was so typical and enigmatic in its phrasing that it 'sounds as though he might not condemn an Indian massacre.' Walker, Turley and Leonard, working with archival access no one had had before, place primary responsibility on Haight and Lee, and their reviewers in the Journal of Mormon History and BYU Studies largely accept that reading while noting the book's institutional origins. Robert H. Briggs argues that the 1875 Lee trial has to be read as a political trial in the Mormon–Liberal struggle over Utah's future, which shaped what evidence was and was not put before the jury.
Critical / secularThe critical case
Will Bagley's argument, as reported in reviews and in a long interview, is that early Mormonism's obsession with blood and vengeance created the society that made the massacre possible if not inevitable; that George A. Smith carried orders south; that Haight and Dame had their orders before the train arrived, which is why they did not wait for Salt Lake City's answer they had themselves requested; and that the crime was organized, orchestrated and executed by Mormons, with the Paiutes made the scapegoats of Lee's blame-shifting confession. Critics point to what is missing from the record — Lee's 1857 and 1859 journals, pages torn from settlers' diaries, letters between Young and both Haight and Dame — and argue with Andrew Hamilton that the suppressing of evidence ought to be taken for the strongest evidence. MormonThink presses the specific objection that a stake president and several bishops would not have thought to ask Brigham Young whether to slaughter a passing wagon train unless they had reason to think he might say yes.
Secondary sourceThe descendants and the Paiutes
Descendant organizations have pushed for candour and for federal stewardship of the ground. Ron Loving of the Mountain Meadows Association, a Fancher relative, worked with Verne Lee and other descendants of the Iron County militia toward the 1990 and 1999 memorials; Phil Bolinger of the Mountain Meadows Monument Foundation described landmark status as 'some higher order of protection for our lost loved ones.' Roger V. Logan's complaint — that until the Church showed more candour about what its historians actually knew, reconciliation would be elusive — is credited by Turley as one of the spurs to the 2008 book. Not everyone reads the reconciliation the same way: the Arkansas memorial's plaque objects that the Church owns the Utah grave and controls the interpretation, and in 2007 Forest Cuch of the Utah Division of Indian Affairs called the association of the Paiutes with the massacre a myth and asked when someone would write the book about the cover-up.
What it cost people
About 120 people who had done nothing to deserve it were killed by their neighbours' neighbours after being promised safe conduct. Seventeen children watched their parents die, were parcelled out among the families of the killers, and were carried back to Arkansas two years later to relatives who could barely feed them. Sarah Frances Baker remembered calling every woman she saw 'Mother,' and that every time she did it the woman would break down crying. On the other side, fifty or sixty ordinary farmers and millers went home and lived out their lives under an oath of silence, and their families were ostracized by neighbours who said a curse had fallen on them. The Southern Paiutes, who had trusted the settlers sent to befriend them, carried the public blame for a century and a half.
The moral question the record poses
The men who did this were not criminals or fanatics by the ordinary measure; the Church's own account observes that most of them led decent, nonviolent lives before and after. They were frightened, they had been preached at in extreme language for a year, they had been told an army was coming to do to them what Missouri had done, and they were embedded in a structure where the same man was their bishop, their mayor and their major. The record poses the question of what it takes to turn that combination into a mile-long walk with an armed man beside each unarmed one — and whether the answer lies in the men, in the sermons, in the chain of command, or in the fact that once the first shot was fired on 7 September, everyone involved had an interest in leaving no one alive to say so.
What it asks of an institution — and of you
For an institution, the question is what candour costs and when it is owed. The Church blamed Indians for decades, excommunicated three men thirteen years late, let one man be shot for what dozens did, and did not say publicly that its own local leaders had ordered the killings until 2007 — then chose the word 'regret' over the word 'apology.' It has since opened its archives, funded the standard account, published the documents, and supported federal protection of the ground. For a person, the question is narrower and harder: what to do when the people you trust for your salvation also command your militia, and what obedience is worth when its object is other people's children.
Questions to carry away
- If Brigham Young did not order the massacre, what did his subordinates in Cedar City believe he would say — and what had taught them to believe it?
- Why did men who thought the question serious enough to send a rider 300 miles attack before the answer could possibly return?
- Does an institution that supplies the archives, funds the historians and owns the ground thereby earn credibility, or exercise control over the interpretation?
- What is the difference between an apology and 'profound regret,' and who gets to decide when the difference stops mattering?
- How much of the blame borne by the Paiutes for a century and a half is repaired by one sentence in a statement read at the site in 2007?
