ricardo a gonzalez

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Posted on Sun, Jul. 13, 2003


AMERICAN MASSACRE: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows. September 1857.
Sally Denton. Knopf. 306 pages. $26.95.
A slaughter, courtesy of the Mormon militia

BY MICHAEL KENNEY


In early September 1857, in a lush meadow in Utah, a wagon train of
emigrants from Arkansas bound for California was surrounded, besieged over
five days and finally massacred. The perpetrators were Mormon militia posing
as Indians. The atrocity was so bewildering that it demands the careful
investigation and eloquent recounting that it receives in Sally Denton's
book.

As is the case with other incidents that will too readily come to
mind, what happened at Mountain Meadows was the result of a religious
fanaticism feeding on political paranoia. Mountain Meadows was not the
action of one or two twisted minds but involved the complicity of
established authority. How high up in the Mormon establishment that
complicity went is the subject of Denton's investigative reporting. While
her recounting of the massacre itself leaves little to the imagination, what
is likely to remain in the reader's mind are the survivors: 17 children
under the age of 8, spared because of Mormon belief that they were
considered ``innocent blood.''

They were taken to a nearby Mormon's ranch. ''The blood of their
parents, sisters, and brothers still wet on their skin and clothes, they are
hysterical from what they have just seen,'' Denton writes.

Initially, the perpetrators -- who included leaders of several Mormon
communities -- blamed the massacre on the peaceful Paiute Indian tribe.

Even as the emigrants were entering the Utah territory in early August
1857, Mormon leader Brigham Young was declaring it the independent state of
Deseret, proclaiming, at a mountaintop ceremony near Salt Lake City, that
''this American Continent will be Zion, for it is so spoken of by the
Prophets.'' Already, in response to the murder of a surveying party,
Congress had declared Utah to be in a state of insurrection and one-sixth of
the entire U.S. Army was being mobilized.

Denton describes the Mormon view: ``The godless American government's
moving against them signaled the beginning of their Armageddon scenario,
which they believed would end, happily and unfailingly, with the ascendancy
of Young and the Mormon priesthood to rule the Kingdom of God on Earth.''

Reports of witnesses, including some participants, soon implicated a
number of Mormon leaders, including John D. Lee, a militia leader who was an
adopted son of Brigham Young. But, writes Denton, ``efforts were under way
to conceal any role Brigham Young or the church hierarchy might have had in
the episode.''

And as soldiers approached Utah, Mormon intermediaries in Washington
persuaded President James Buchanan to promise ''a full pardon to the Mormons
in exchange for allowing the army to set up camp near Salt Lake City and
install'' newly appointed federal officials for the territory.

Denton, the child of Mormons, has made an issue of Mormon leadership
complicity, writing in The New York Times that ``without a sustained attempt
at accountability and atonement, the church will not escape the hovering
shadow of that horrible crime.''

A letter to The Times, identified as a reply ''on behalf of'' the
Mormon Church, says that research in which the church has cooperated and
which is to be published next year ``will shed light and understanding on
the event.''

Readers of American Massacre will be waiting.

Michael Kenney reviewed this book for The Boston Globe.

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