LDS church official discusses Mountain Meadows Massacre
The 1857 massacre of 120 wagon train members by Mormon settlers is “the worst event in Mormon and Utah history,” a historian and author said Thursday during a lecture in the Merrill-Cazier Library.
The Mountain Meadows Massacre demonstrates that normal people can commit atrocities when they begin to view someone as their enemy, said Richard Turley, managing director of the Family and Church History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“Once you’ve called the other side the enemy, then the other side becomes subject to the horrors of war,” said Turley, who has co-authored a forthcoming book about the massacre.
Turley said it is important to learn about the Mountain Meadows Massacre because it shows that not only deranged criminals are capable of evil. Most of those who participated in the massacre were average people who you would never expect to commit murder, he said.
“My hope is that when people read this book, they’ll examine their own hearts and ask, ‘What would we have done in that situation? Would we have taken part?'” Turley said.
Massacre participants were willing to label the passing Baker-Fancher party as enemies because of a sense of fear that existed in the Utah territory at the time, Turley said. President James Buchanan had sent an army to the territory to control what he believed was a Mormon rebellion, causing many Mormons to fear more of the persecution they had fled to Utah to escape. This contributed to a general feeling of mistrust of outsiders, Turley said.
Fearing a possible war when the army arrived, church leaders in Salt Lake had directed all settlers in the territory to stockpile food, which meant everyone in Utah refused to sell needed supplies to the passing immigrants. This led to altercations between immigrants and non-Mormons, which escalated until several Mormon leaders decided the wagon train members should be killed, Turley said.
Hoping to pass off blame for the massacre, they enlisted members of the Piute Indian tribe to help with the killings and attacked the wagon train at Mountain Meadows, near Cedar City. After a siege lasting several days, the attackers approached the immigrants under a white flag and offered them protection if they gave up their weapons. The immigrants were nearly out of ammunition and water, so they agreed to the terms. After the immigrants had surrendered their weapons, the Mormons and Indians killed every member of the party except 17 young children, Turley said.
Turley said many excuses were made during the aftermath of the massacre, but most of these excuses are untrue. For example, it is untrue that the Baker-Fancher party provoked the attack by poisoning a well and trying to fight Mormon settlers, he said. Also, stories about Mormons who resisted the orders to participate in the massacre are fables, he said.
Turley said it is “time to look this event square in the face,” rather than ignoring or trying to excuse it. He said he has “lost a lot of sleep” over the disturbing things he has learned, but those things should not be ignored.
Turley’s book, “Tragedy at Mountain Meadows,” which he co-authored with Glen Leonard and Ronald W. Walker, will be published either later this year or early next year, he said.
-dfelix@cc.usu.edu