The Mountain Meadows Massacre (1857)

On September 11, 1857, in a high valley of southern Utah called the Mountain Meadows, local militiamen who were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aided by Paiute Indians they had recruited, killed about 120 men, women and children from a wagon train bound for California. Only seventeen young children were spared. One publisher calls it "the single most violent attack on a wagon train in the thirty-year history of the Oregon and California trails."¹

Who planned it? Did Brigham Young, then both church president and territorial governor, order it, permit it, or try to stop it? This article sets out what the sources show, where historians disagree, and how an Orthodox Christian should judge it, accusing no one beyond the evidence and excusing no one from it.

In brief

In 1857 the Latter-day Saints in Utah expected an invading U.S. army. LDS Church leaders preached against outsiders in fiery terms, told settlers to hoard grain and ammunition, and sought Indian allies. Emigrants of the Baker-Fancher party, mostly from Arkansas, quarreled with settlers along the road. In Cedar City, local church and militia leaders, chiefly Isaac Haight and John D. Lee, planned an attack and enlisted Paiutes to carry it out. After a five-day siege they lured the emigrants out under a white flag and killed them. A letter from Brigham Young saying "You must not meddle with them" arrived two days too late. The killers blamed the Paiutes; only Lee was ever executed, in 1877. Historians disagree about Young's share: Juanita Brooks called him an "accessory after the fact," Will Bagley held him deeply implicated, and the church-sponsored history of 2008 concluded that he did not order it. In 2007 the church expressed "profound regret."

Thesis: The Mountain Meadows Massacre was planned and committed by local Latter-day Saint leaders in a climate their own church leadership had inflamed; Brigham Young's exact share of responsibility remains debated, but the event exposes the danger of a religion that fused prophet, governor and militia, and that taught a man's own blood could atone for his sins.

The setting: the Utah War and the "Reformation"

In 1857 President James Buchanan, persuaded that Utah was in rebellion, moved to replace Brigham Young as governor and sent roughly 1,500 troops west. The Saints, violently driven from Missouri and Illinois in the previous two decades, feared that history would repeat itself.² In May the apostle Parley P. Pratt was murdered in Arkansas, and news of the killing reached Utah in late June. Young declared martial law and prepared to resist.³

This came at the end of what the church calls the "Reformation" of 1856 and 1857, when Young, his counselor Jedediah M. Grant and others "preached with fiery rhetoric, warning against the evils of those who dissented from or opposed the Church." The church's essay adds that leaders "taught that some sins were so serious that the perpetrator's blood would have to be shed in order to receive forgiveness."⁴ Young said in a sermon of September 21, 1856, that some sinners, if they saw their 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."⁵ The essay judges that most members heard such sermons as hyperbole meant to frighten them into repentance.

War policy added to the strain. Settlers were told to save their grain and not sell it to passing emigrants. Young, the apostle George A. Smith and other leaders "preached with fiery rhetoric against the enemy they perceived in the approaching army and sought the alliance of Indians in resisting the troops."⁶ On September 1, 1857, Dimick B. Huntington recorded a meeting between Young and Indian leaders at which they were given "all the cattle that had gone to Cal[.] the southa rout." The chiefs answered that they had been told not to steal and "was afraid to fight the Americans & so would raise grain & we might fight."⁷ What that entry means is disputed, as discussed below.

The emigrants

The emigrants, mostly families from northwest Arkansas led by Alexander Fancher, could not buy the grain they needed in Utah, and their large herds competed with local cattle for grass. Older Utah histories claimed that they had poisoned a spring and an ox carcass near Fillmore. The church's own historians now say that "Historical research shows that these stories are not accurate."⁸ Jacob Forney, the federal Superintendent of Indian Affairs, had already called the poisoning tale "too improbable to be true" and concluded that "the company conducted themselves with propriety."⁹ Some emigrant men made angry threats at Cedar City, but as the church's account says, "nothing that any of the emigrants purportedly did or said, even if all of it were true, came close to justifying their deaths."¹⁰

Five days in September

Isaac Haight, at once Cedar City's mayor, militia major and stake president, asked the district militia commander, William Dame of Parowan, for permission to call out the militia against the emigrants. Dame refused. Haight and Lee then planned to have Paiutes attack the train and to blame the Indians. On September 6 Haight laid the plan before a council of local leaders, who resisted it and asked whether he had consulted Brigham Young. He agreed to send an express rider to Salt Lake City.¹¹

The next morning, before the letter left, Lee and the Paiutes attacked the emigrants' camp at the Meadows. The emigrants circled their wagons and held out. When militiamen shot at two emigrant riders, one escaped back to camp knowing that white men were among the attackers. Fearing exposure, Haight won Dame over in private on September 9, after a Parowan council had again decided that the emigrants should be helped on their way.¹²

On September 11 Lee entered the wagon fort under a white flag and promised a safe escort if the emigrants gave up their weapons. Short of water and ammunition, they accepted. The wounded and youngest children went first in wagons, then the women and children on foot, then the men, each beside an armed militiaman. At a signal, each militiaman shot the man beside him, and Paiutes and militiamen attacked the women and children. One militiaman, Nephi Johnson, later said that his fellow militiamen did most of the killing.¹³ {{very-strong: The massacre was planned and carried out by local Latter-day Saint church and militia leaders in southern Utah, with Paiutes they had recruited.}}

Two days later the rider returned with Young's reply, dated September 10: "In regard to emigration trains passing through our settlements we must not interfere with them untill 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." According to a later account, Haight wept and said, "Too late, too late."¹⁴

Cover-up and the long road to justice

The spared children, judged "too young to tell tales," were taken into local homes. The perpetrators agreed to blame the Paiutes. Wilford Woodruff later certified that when Lee reported to Young on September 29, 1857, "He did not at the time implicate himself or any white Men but said it was Done by the Indians," and that Young rebuked Lee for saying there was no innocent blood in the camp. Woodruff wrote this in 1882, long afterward, in Young's defense.¹⁵

Federal officials were not deceived for long. Forney wrote that he had hoped "to exculpate all white men" but that "every step in my inquiries satisfied me that the Indians acted only a secondary part."¹⁶ Army troops under Major James H. Carleton buried remains at the site in 1859 and raised a cairn and a cross inscribed, "Vengeance is mine. I will repay, saith the Lord."¹⁷ The surviving children were returned to relatives in Arkansas.

The Utah War ended in 1858 by negotiation, and the Civil War delayed investigation. LDS Church leaders released Haight and other Cedar City leaders from their callings in 1859 and excommunicated Haight and Lee in 1870. In 1874 a grand jury indicted nine men, but only Lee was tried.¹⁸ After a first trial failed, a second jury convicted him, and on March 23, 1877, he was executed by firing squad at the Mountain Meadows.¹⁹ Before he died he said, "I have been sacrificed in a cowardly, dastardly manner," and that he did not believe "everything that is now being taught and practiced by Brigham Young."²⁰ In 1961 church leaders authorized "reinstatement to membership and former blessings to John D. Lee."²¹

The Paiute question

For generations the Paiutes bore the main blame. The church's 2007 statement said: "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. Although the extent of their involvement is disputed, it is believed they would not have participated without the direction and stimulus provided by local Church leaders and members."²² The church's magazine account describes the Paiutes as reluctant at first, persuaded by promises of plunder and by the claim that the emigrants were allied with the coming army.²³ Some Paiutes took part; how many, and how much of the killing they did, cannot be settled. What is settled is that the plan to use them, and to blame them, came from white settlers.

How much was Brigham Young responsible?

Juanita Brooks (1950)

Brooks wrote what the church's own essay calls "a classic study."²⁴ She concluded that Young and George A. Smith "did not specifically order the massacre" but "did preach sermons and set up social conditions which made it possible," and that Young, though he "would have prevented it if he could," was "accessory after the fact, in that he knew what had happened, and how and why it happened."²⁵

Will Bagley (2002)

Bagley's Blood of the Prophets argued for deeper involvement; his publisher says the book reveals "the involvement of territorial governor Brigham Young" and the later "suppression and distortion of events."²⁶ At his death in 2021 the Salt Lake Tribune summarized his argument as being that Young "likely orchestrated the slaughter from Salt Lake City"; Bagley "didn't explicitly say Young ordered the attack," but insisted that "claiming that Brigham Young had nothing to do with Mountain Meadows is akin to arguing that Abraham Lincoln had nothing to do with the Civil War."²⁷ The book won major prizes; Latter-day Saint reviewers, for example in the FARMS Review in 2003, disputed several of his readings of the sources.²⁸

Walker, Turley and Leonard (2008)

Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr. and Glen M. Leonard, Latter-day Saint historians given access to all church records, published Massacre at Mountain Meadows (Oxford University Press). The church summarizes their conclusion: "while intemperate preaching about outsiders by Brigham Young, George A. Smith, and other leaders contributed to a climate of hostility, President Young did not order the massacre."²⁹ A sequel by Turley and Barbara Jones Brown, Vengeance Is Mine (2023), traces the aftermath; a reviewer writes that it rejects both the story that Paiutes devised the massacre and the claim that Young ordered it.³⁰

Weighing the evidence

Against a direct order stand the local council's request for Young's guidance and his September 10 letter. For greater responsibility stand his policy of courting Indian allies, the Huntington entry, the incendiary preaching of the Reformation, and the long years before anyone was punished. Lee's posthumously published confessions say he believed George A. Smith came south "by the direct command of Brigham Young" to prepare the people for the killing, but that is the word of a condemned man who felt betrayed and who at first had said Young knew nothing beforehand.³¹³² The Huntington entry can be read as incitement against emigrant trains or as war policy aimed at the army.

{{strong: Brigham Young's preaching and war policies helped create the climate in which the massacre happened; his own church's essay concedes this.}} {{debated: Whether Young bore responsibility beyond that, by encouraging attacks on emigrants beforehand or by shielding the perpetrators afterward, remains disputed among historians.}} On the evidence now public, the claim that he directly ordered the massacre is not proved, and the claim that he bore no responsibility at all is not credible.

The church's 2007 statement

On the 150th anniversary, Henry B. Eyring, then an apostle, spoke at the site for the First Presidency: "The gospel of Jesus Christ that we espouse, abhors the cold-blooded killing of men, women, and children ... What was done here long ago by members of our Church represents a terrible and inexcusable departure from Christian teaching and conduct." It continued: "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." It placed responsibility on "local leaders" of the church "who also held civic and military positions and with members of the Church acting under their direction."³³ The Deseret News headlined it as an apology, though the statement's word was "regret."³⁴ In 2011, when the site became a National Historic Landmark, church historian Marlin K. Jensen said, "It compels me to say today just how sorry I am for what happened here so long ago, a feeling shared by all the leaders of our church."³⁵ Opening the archives and sponsoring serious history is to the church's credit.

Objections and replies

"The emigrants provoked it."

The poisoning stories are false, Forney found the company well behaved, and the women and children who were killed had threatened no one.

"If Young did not order it, the massacre says nothing about Latter-day Saint truth claims."

Partly true. Sinners are found in every church, and Orthodox Christians would not accept an argument against the Church from the crimes of some of her members. But this was not only a story of bad men. It grew in a system where one man was prophet, governor and superintendent of Indian affairs, where the local stake president was also mayor and militia officer, and where leaders preached that some sins required the sinner's own blood. Those are questions about the religion's teaching and structure.

"Orthodox Christians have their own history of violence."

They do. Orthodox rulers and churchmen have at times persecuted dissenters and blessed coercion, and the site says so elsewhere (see The Inquisition: Myths and Records). The Gospel judges all of us.

An Orthodox assessment

The Church has always treated killing as grave even in a just cause. St Basil the Great noted that the Fathers did not count killing in war as murder, yet counseled that "those whose hands are not clean only abstain from communion for three years."³⁶ If even soldiers in lawful battle were sent to repentance, the killing of disarmed families under a flag of truce is plain murder, and no appeal to war, fear or provocation lessens it. Christ told Peter, "all who take the sword will perish by the sword" (Matthew 26:52), and the Apostle wrote, "'Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,' says the Lord" (Romans 12:19).³⁷

The teaching that a man's own blood must be shed to atone for some sins is false. It contradicts the Gospel at its center: "the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin" (1 John 1:7), and "by one offering He has perfected forever those who are being sanctified" (Hebrews 10:14).³⁸ In the Orthodox Church a murderer, like every sinner, is called to repentance and the healing of penance, and forgiveness comes through Christ's self-offering, not through the sinner's death. The church essay is right that most members did not act on this preaching; but a teacher sent by God would not have taught it at all.

This is one reason the Orthodox Church does not regard Brigham Young as a prophet of God, or the movement he led as Christian in the historic, Nicene sense. The deeper reasons concern its doctrine of God, of Christ and of salvation, set out in our comparison of Mormonism and Nicene Christianity and the article on exaltation. Mountain Meadows does not create those differences. It shows, in blood, what can follow when people believe that a living man's word is the word of God, and that man also commands the state and the militia. On Young's era see also Who Was Supposed to Succeed Joseph Smith? and Brigham Young's 1852 Defense of Slavery.

Courtesy to persons remains binding. The church's leaders today condemn the massacre, and some descendants of the victims are themselves Latter-day Saints.³⁹ The verdict on the teaching is firm; the judgment of souls belongs to God.

What we can say confidently

• About 120 emigrants of the Baker-Fancher party, mostly from Arkansas, were killed at the Mountain Meadows in September 1857; seventeen young children were spared.
• Local Latter-day Saint church and militia leaders, including Isaac Haight, John D. Lee and, in the end, William Dame, planned and carried out the attack, using Paiutes they had recruited and then blaming them.
• Brigham Young's letter of September 10 told local leaders not to "meddle" with the emigrants; it arrived two days after the massacre.
• Leaders' fiery preaching, including blood-atonement rhetoric, and the war policy of 1857 contributed to the climate of hostility, as the church's own essay acknowledges.
• Only John D. Lee was tried and executed, on March 23, 1877; the church reinstated him posthumously in 1961.
• The church expressed "profound regret" in 2007, including to the Paiute people.

What remains disputed

• How far Brigham Young bore responsibility beyond his rhetoric and war policy: whether he encouraged attacks on emigrant trains beforehand, and how much he knew and concealed afterward.
• The meaning of Dimick Huntington's September 1, 1857, journal entry about the cattle on the southern route.
• How many Paiutes took part and how much of the killing they did.
• The exact number of victims: Forney gave "one hundred and fifteen to one hundred and twenty," and modern accounts say about 120.

Conclusion

The Mountain Meadows Massacre was not the work of a few outlaws on the fringe. It was planned in church and militia councils by men who held high local office, and it was covered with a lie that wronged the Paiutes for generations. Historians will go on weighing Brigham Young's part. What can be said firmly is that the God who revealed Himself in Jesus Christ never asked for such blood, and never taught that a sinner's own blood could atone for him.

The cross the soldiers raised over the bones in 1859 carried the right words. Vengeance belongs to the Lord, and so does mercy. Christ, put to death unjustly, trampled down death by death and offers forgiveness to every repentant sinner. Orthodox Christians remember the victims of Mountain Meadows in that hope, and pray for all who still carry the memory of that September.

Notes

1. University of Oklahoma Press, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows, by Will Bagley (2002), https://www.oupress.com/9780806136394/blood-of-the-prophets.
2. Richard E. Turley Jr., "The Mountain Meadows Massacre," Ensign, September 2007, 14-21, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2007/09/the-mountain-meadows-massacre (Brigham Young to Isaac C. Haight, September 10, 1857, is quoted there from Letterpress Copybook 3:827-28).
3. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, "Peace and Violence among 19th-Century Latter-day Saints," Gospel Topics Essays, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/peace-and-violence-among-19th-century-latter-day-saints.
4. "Peace and Violence among 19th-Century Latter-day Saints" (see note 3).
5. Brigham Young, discourse of September 21, 1856, Journal of Discourses 4:53, text at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Journal_of_Discourses/Volume_4/The_People_of_God_Disciplined_by_Trials,_etc.
6. Turley, "The Mountain Meadows Massacre," Ensign (2007) (see note 2).
7. Dimick B. Huntington, Journal, September 1, 1857, MS 1419, Church History Library, as transcribed by the B. H. Roberts Foundation, https://bhroberts.org/records/0Bjthi-1Y2lEc/dimick_b_huntington_records_a_meeting_between_the_pahvants_and_brigham_young_re_wartime_policy_against_soldiers.
8. Turley, "The Mountain Meadows Massacre," Ensign (2007) (see note 2).
9. Jacob Forney, "Utah Superintendency," in Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs ... for the year 1859 (Washington, 1860), 369-372, text at https://mountainmeadows.unl.edu/archive/mmm.doc.forney.1860.html.
10. Turley, "The Mountain Meadows Massacre," Ensign (2007) (see note 2).
11. Turley, "The Mountain Meadows Massacre," Ensign (2007) (see note 2).
12. Turley, "The Mountain Meadows Massacre," Ensign (2007) (see note 2).
13. Turley, "The Mountain Meadows Massacre," Ensign (2007) (see note 2).
14. Turley, "The Mountain Meadows Massacre," Ensign (2007) (see note 2).
15. Wilford Woodruff, "Statement on the Mountain Meadows Massacre," February 1882, Wilford Woodruff Papers, https://wilfordwoodruffpapers.org/documents/0802c731-33af-4da0-bff8-8a8974a5be9a/transcript.
16. Forney, "Utah Superintendency" (see note 9).
17. Gilbert King, "The Aftermath of Mountain Meadows," Smithsonian, February 29, 2012, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-aftermath-of-mountain-meadows-110735627/.
18. Turley, "The Mountain Meadows Massacre," Ensign (2007) (see note 2).
19. National Park Service, "John Doyle Lee," https://www.nps.gov/articles/featured_stories_lee.htm.
20. John D. Lee, Mormonism Unveiled; or, The Life and Confessions of the Late Mormon Bishop, John D. Lee (St. Louis, 1877), last words at 387-388, scan at https://archive.org/details/mormonismunveile00leejrich.
21. King, "The Aftermath of Mountain Meadows" (see note 17).
22. Henry B. Eyring, remarks at the Mountain Meadows Massacre sesquicentennial, September 11, 2007, Church Newsroom, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/150th-anniversary-of-mountain-meadows-massacre.
23. Turley, "The Mountain Meadows Massacre," Ensign (2007) (see note 2).
24. "Peace and Violence among 19th-Century Latter-day Saints" (see note 3).
25. Juanita Brooks, The Mountain Meadows Massacre (Stanford University Press, 1950), concluding summary as transcribed by the B. H. Roberts Foundation, https://bhroberts.org/records/0Bjthi-WVknYc/juanita_brooks_summarizes_her_conclusions_from_her_1950_study_of_the_massacre.
26. University of Oklahoma Press, Blood of the Prophets (see note 1).
27. "Will Bagley, Utah historian who chronicled Mountain Meadows Massacre, dies at 71," Salt Lake Tribune, September 29, 2021, https://sltrib.com/news/2021/09/29/will-bagley-utah.
28. Robert D. Crockett, "A Trial Lawyer Reviews Will Bagley's Blood of the Prophets," FARMS Review 15, no. 2 (2003), https://scripturecentral.org/archive/periodicals/journal-article/trial-lawyer-reviews-will-bagleys-blood-prophets.
29. "Peace and Violence among 19th-Century Latter-day Saints" (see note 3).
30. Kent P. Jackson, review of Vengeance Is Mine: The Mountain Meadows Massacre and Its Aftermath, by Richard E. Turley Jr. and Barbara Jones Brown (Oxford University Press, 2023), BYU Studies, https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/vengeance-is-mine.
31. Lee, Mormonism Unveiled (see note 20).
32. King, "The Aftermath of Mountain Meadows" (see note 17).
33. Eyring, remarks of September 11, 2007 (see note 22).
34. "LDS Church issues apology over Mountain Meadows," Deseret News, September 12, 2007, https://www.deseret.com/2007/9/12/20040883/lds-church-issues-apology-over-mountain-meadows/.
35. "Mountain Meadows officially becomes National Historic Landmark," Deseret News, September 12, 2011, https://www.deseret.com/2011/9/12/20215439/mountain-meadows-officially-becomes-national-historic-landmark.
36. Basil the Great, Letter 188, canon 13, trans. Blomfield Jackson, NPNF2 8, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3202188.htm.
37. Matthew 26:52; Romans 12:19; 1 John 1:7; Hebrews 10:14 (NKJV).
38. NKJV (see note 37).
39. Turley, "The Mountain Meadows Massacre," Ensign (2007) (see note 2).

Bibliography

Primary sources

• Forney, Jacob. "Utah Superintendency." In Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, for the Year 1859. Washington: George W. Bowman, 1860.
• Huntington, Dimick B. Journal, September 1, 1857. MS 1419, Church History Library, Salt Lake City.
• Lee, John D. Mormonism Unveiled; or, The Life and Confessions of the Late Mormon Bishop, John D. Lee. St. Louis: Bryan, Brand, 1877.
• Woodruff, Wilford. Statement on the Mountain Meadows Massacre, February 1882. Wilford Woodruff Papers.
• Young, Brigham. Discourse of September 21, 1856. Journal of Discourses 4:51-57.
• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Basil the Great. Letter 188 (First Canonical Letter). Trans. Blomfield Jackson. NPNF2 8. 1895.

Other scholarship

• Bagley, Will. Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.
• Crockett, Robert D. "A Trial Lawyer Reviews Will Bagley's Blood of the Prophets." FARMS Review 15, no. 2 (2003).
• Brooks, Juanita. The Mountain Meadows Massacre. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1950.
• King, Gilbert. "The Aftermath of Mountain Meadows." Smithsonian, 2012.
• National Park Service. "John Doyle Lee."
• Deseret News, September 12, 2007, and September 12, 2011; Salt Lake Tribune, September 29, 2021.

Latter-day Saint sources

• The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "Peace and Violence among 19th-Century Latter-day Saints." Gospel Topics Essays.
• Eyring, Henry B. Remarks at the Mountain Meadows Massacre Sesquicentennial, September 11, 2007.
• Jackson, Kent P. Review of Vengeance Is Mine. BYU Studies.
• Turley, Richard E., Jr. "The Mountain Meadows Massacre." Ensign, September 2007.
• Turley, Richard E., Jr., and Barbara Jones Brown. Vengeance Is Mine: The Mountain Meadows Massacre and Its Aftermath. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.
• Walker, Ronald W., Richard E. Turley Jr., and Glen M. Leonard. Massacre at Mountain Meadows. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.