A Utah Massacre and Mormon Memory
By SALLY DENTON

SANTA FE, N.M.
As families tramp all over the country this summer,
visiting historic sites, there's one spot — Mountain
Meadows in southwestern Utah — that won't be on many
itineraries.

Mountain Meadows, a two-hour drive from one of the
state's popular tourist destinations, Zion National
Park, is the site of what the historian Geoffrey Ward
has called "the most hideous example of the human cost
exacted by religious fanaticism in American history
until 9/11." And while it might not be a major tourist
destination, for a century and a half the massacre at
Mountain Meadows has been the focus of passionate
debate among Mormons and the people of Utah. It is a
debate that cuts to the core of the basic tenets of
Mormonism. This, the darkest stain on the history of
the religion, is a bitter reality and challenging
predicament for a modern Mormon Church struggling to
shed its extremist history.

On Sept. 11, 1857, in a meadow in southwestern Utah, a
militia of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints, or Mormons, attacked a wagon train of Arkansas
families bound for California. After a five-day siege,
the militia persuaded the families to surrender under
a flag of truce and a pledge of safe passage. Then, in
the worst butchery of white pioneers by other white
pioneers in the entire colonization of America,
approximately 140 men, women and children were
slaughtered. Only 17 children under the age of 8 — the
age of innocence in the Mormon faith — were spared.

After the massacre, the church first claimed that
local Paiute Indians were responsible, but as evidence
of Mormon involvement mounted, it placed the sole
blame for the killings on John D. Lee, a militia
member and a Mormon zealot who was also the adopted
son of the prophet Brigham Young. After nearly two
decades, as part of a deal for statehood, Lee was
executed by a firing squad in 1877. The church has
been reluctant to assume responsibility — labelling
Lee a renegade — but several historians, including
some who are Mormon, believe that church leaders,
though never prosecuted, ordered the massacre.

Now, 146 years later, Lee's descendants and the
victims' relatives have been pressing the Mormon
Church for an apology. The move for some official
church acknowledgment began in the late 1980's, when a
group of Lee descendants, including a former United
States secretary of the interior, Stewart Udall, began
working to clear their ancestor's name. In 1990,
descendants of victims and perpetrators began urging
the Mormon Church to accept responsibility for the
massacre and to rebuild a crumbling landmark
established at the site by United States Army troops
in 1859.

The current church president, Gordon B. Hinckley —
himself a prophet who says he receives divine
revelations — took a personal interest in the episode,
and in 1998 he agreed to restore the landmark where at
least some of the bodies were buried. But even that
concession turned controversial when, in August 1999,
a church contractor's backhoe accidentally unearthed
the bones of 29 victims. After a debate between Utah
state officials and church leaders — what has been
called Utah's "unique church-state tango" — about
state laws requiring unearthed bones to be
forensically examined for cause of death, the church
had the remains quickly reburied without any extensive
examination that might have drawn new attention to the
brutality of the murders.

A month later, on Sept. 10, 1999, when descendants of
the perpetrators and the victims gathered to dedicate
a church-financed monument in what they hoped would be
a "healing" service, both sides were disappointed by
Mr. Hinckley's remarks. He continued to hedge on the
issue of church responsibility, even adding a legal
disclaimer many found offensive. "That which we have
done here must never be construed as an acknowledgment
of the part of the church of any complicity in the
occurrences of that fateful day," he said. This was
thought by many to be an effort to avoid
wrongful-death lawsuits. But the church's reluctance
to apologize is more complicated.

At a time when religions around the world are
acknowledging and atoning for past sins, the massacre
has left the Mormon Church in a quandary. Roman
Catholics have apologized for their silence during the
Holocaust, United Methodists for their massacre of
American Indians during the Civil War, Southern
Baptists for their support of slavery, and Lutherans
for Martin Luther's anti-Jewish remarks. But unlike
the leaders of other religions, who are believed to be
guided by the hand of God, Mormon prophets are
considered extensions of him.

To acknowledge complicity on the part of church
leaders runs the risk of calling into question Brigham
Young's divinity and the Mormon belief that they are
God's chosen people. "If good Mormons committed the
massacre," wrote a Mormon writer, Levi Peterson, "if
prayerful leaders ordered it, if apostles and a
prophet knew about it and later sacrificed John D.
Lee, then the sainthood of even the modern church
seems tainted."

Believing they were doing God's work in ridding the
world of "infidels," evangelical Mormon zealots
committed one of the greatest civilian atrocities on
American soil. Without a sustained attempt at
accountability and atonement, the church will not
escape the hovering shadow of that horrible crime.

Sally Denton is the author of the forthcoming
"American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadow,
September 1857."